dovegreyreader scribbles

Trespass ~ Rose Tremain

Hot on the heels of my successful Booker long list reading entre this year with Andrea Levy's The Long Song, comes another success with Trespass by Rose Tremain.
Heave a big **sigh** of relief.
After a string of failures I was beginning to think I'd just have to bail out from the Bookerthon and declare this a gap year, but I do think this year's list might be suffering from my recollections of last year's stellar selection, coupled with my ongoing Big Sulk this year at the omission of Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor,  and so it was never going to match up.
But for all Francophiles out there Trespass is the book for you.
Successful garden designer and writer Veronica Verey and her less successful artist partner Kitty Meadows are settled in the Cevennes, an area of southern central France that looks remarkably like Dartmoor with added trees, which is of course how Dartmoor used to look.
There presence here somehow seems fragile, their relationship unbalanced,

'They both knew that it was borrowed: the view of the hills; even the sunsets and the clarity of the stars. Somewhere, they knew it didn't belong to them. Because if you left your own country, if you left it late, and made your home in someone else's country, there was always a feeling that you were breaking an invisible law, always the irrational fear that, one day, some 'rightful owner' would arrive to take it all away...'

A challenging environment not only for gardeners but for  the local population too faced with the temptation of moneyed Brits coming in and buying up their farmhouses to turn into second holiday homes.
This is the colour of money that has a £16,000 table in the downstairs lavatory

' ...decorated in apricot toile de jouy ...the brass-galleried top over a flower-painted frieze, the base with two snakewood inlaid doors and parcel gilt festoon apron.'

Unlike our £3 one... cheap B&Q kit affair bought in the Animal Sanctuary shop, poorly stained, draped in a piece of Liberty fabric (Ianthe) to give an air of exclusivity, laden with appropriate reading matter.
Cue Veronica's brother, internationally famous antique dealer Anthony...THE Anthony Verey who, with the sudden realisation that he is a spent force in the world of antiques, arrives at adoring sister Veronica's, and the considerably less impressed Kitty's home for the duration, as he searches for the property that will house his 'beloveds', not people as you might expect but his much-treasured possessions.
Amongst the properties Anthony considers is the Mas Lunel, an isolated farmhouse belonging to Aramon Lunel, a drunken n'er do well who has a significant past and a disturbed sister sitting it out in a shanty-built bungalow in the grounds. Audrun just biding her time for the right moment to serve that ice cold dish of revenge...and I had every sympathy with her cause.
The book has opened, and this is no spoiler, with little girl Melodie wandering off from a trip with some local school children and making a startling and scream-inducing discovery on the river bank.
So Rose Tremain has set up a glorious page-turner that constantly had me wondering just who was going to meet their maker, how and when and at the hands of who.
The book is rapidly and very successfully populated and located, and very clearly so too, leaving me in little doubt about character traits as the themes slowly emerged, obsession, guilt, abuse, jealousy, regret, collusion, and the torment is slowly eked out. The knife is twisted and much as Anthony finds a loose thread on his treasured Aubusson tapestry which you feel with one tug might unravel the whole lot, so the lives slowly and deliciously unravelled before my eyes.
Those I wanted to fall flat on their faces did, those I wanted to walk tall managed it but Rose Tremain also subverts expectations nicely too, I was particularly pleased to see the men rather than the women struggling with the embarrassment of stress incontinence, it's normally our province.
So just as the sale may be going through a gaping wide crack appears in the Mas Lunel's masonry, and how significant becomes the removal of the supporting wings of the house years previously that had buttressed it up, perhaps becoming a metaphor for the props in the lives of so many of Rose Tremain's characters, and thus do the cracks start to appear. No amount of deceitful filling in with mortar and painting over is going to cover up past sins or present dilemmas. The seepage in Trespass is inexorable and insidious and the significance of the title assumes multiple meanings as the book progresses.
Now is probably the right time to confess that I have not read anything by Rose Tremain through to the end before, I managed half of Colour and that's it, my loss and I will take Music and Silence off the shelf soon and give it my best attention.

A rare public sighting ...

"The publishing business is by nature a public activity. Reading and writing are essentially solitary.. when the reader recommends a book her or she has enjoyed to someone else, the act is the most powerful single factor in the book business: the word-of-mouth."

I was browsing John McGahern's book of essays Love of the World this weekend and that seemed like a good quote to use to tell you about a forthcoming dovegreyreader 'appearance' on the London bookish scene in September as a guest of English PEN and which might be of interest to readers and fellow litbloggers alike...

Everyone's a Critic?

Thursday 23 September, 6.30pm

Venue: Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3GA

In association with FLOW - the Free Word Festival

The book pages of UK newspapers are under threat. Literary editors are facing huge changes in the way that they review books, yet at the same time our choice of reading matter is bigger than ever before. Whose recommendations can readers trust? Is the blogosphere a shot in the arm for reviewing culture or does democracy mean dumbing down? Join Sam Leith, former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph, Lynne Hatwell, aka top books blogger (I didn't say that, they did)  dovegreyreader and Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times as they ask if there is there still a role for the professional literary critic. Chaired by Alex Clark.

Tickets: £6; £3 concessions and PEN members.
How to Book: Call the Free Word Centre on 0207 3242 570 or visit www.freewordonline.com

I'm very much looking forward to the event and it would be lovely to say hello to any of you who might be able to be there, but even better tell me what you think about the subject in comments, because though I know what I think, in this democracy that is book blogging I'd love to be able to share what you think too.

Bring me sunshine...

I hope everyone here in the UK is enjoying a relaxing Bank Holiday weekend and that wherever you may be you've at least got a good book on the go, if not the barbecue as well. We're having a good one here and loving the War & Peace prize draw entries (!) but I thought I'd just break off briefly to bring you some sunshine and wildlife from our one and only sunflower.

Tension mounts as next Saturday's Village Show approaches and as I'm on the organising committee this year, and fired up by recent successes, I'm preparing a few more entries than usual but have taken careful note because, unlike Port Eliot, rules apply.
'An "Arrangement" is a display with flowers and foliage, where as an "Exhibit" is a display of flowers/ foliage and accessories."
This year's theme celebrates the centenary of the Girl Guide movement, so I'm pondering Floral Art Class 4... Blue and Yellow Exhibit...or Class 8 Exhibit in a Cup & Saucer.
No flower or vegetable entries from chez dovegrey so I have been allocated the role of stewarding the vegetable judge as he goes about his assessment of the produce. He's a lovely chap so I'm expecting to learn a great deal and will return with news of what makes a good misshaped vegetable interesting (Class 33) or how long your runner bean (Class 36) needs to be to stand any chance of glory.
We think we can muster up some decent apples for the Fruit classes... "Apples may be shown either ripe or unripe and all other fruit must be ripe. Over-ripeness will be regarded as a defect in any fruit".
Bookhound, that international man of many talents, in brief wet-weather respite from his building site this week, has transformed our neighbour's glut...

... into some very delicious chutneys various. If we can just stop eating it long enough to have some to exhibit, he's in Cookery Class 57 Jar of Chutney whether he likes it or not... "All preserves to be displayed in plain glass jars. No manufacturers names are permitted" (there goes any thought of entering a jar of Sharwood's Mango)
Class 66 Set Recipe is Chocolate Brownies (as per Girl Guide centenary) so I might brave those in celebration of my brief reign as Sixer of the Gnomes for the 1st Mitcham Brownies circa 1963.
Handicrafts are coming along nicely and we must be grateful for last night's superb BBC Rodgers & Hammerstein Prom which saw me sailing around the heel of sock two, as well as offering a good limber up for the voice with a new Vocal Harem choir season and concerts in the offing.
We'll muster up some entries for Photography as usual. Rocky very upset to have been ousted by an ostrich (or was it an emu?) in last year's 'Animal' class, but it's 'Pets' this year so defeat to a Labrador seems more likely and he'll take it on the chin.
But setting aside the Village Show preparations, I am also deeply into three very good books, Theodora by Stella Duffy, Ghostlight by Joseph O'Connor and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, all confirming my faith in the existence out there of brilliant fiction no matter what anyone, or my own recent reading experiences, may have suggested.
So just in case it's in any way overcast, perhaps either in weather or in life wherever you are, here's some more sunshine.
I'll leave you with Photography Class 87 Close-Up ( Macro)...perhaps.

Team Tolstoy - battle strategy

Having rested up, recovered and caught up with the washing etc after Team Ulysses' magnificent year spent scaling that lofty peak, I've been doing some forward planning and battle strategy for Team Tolstoy's year of reading War and Peace and I'm wondering how many of you are thinking of reading along?
The rules are so very relaxed as to be almost non-existent, mainly open the book and read along with each other through from Tolstoy's birthday on September 9th 2010, when the first post will be up here and we say Ready, Steady, Tolstoy, to completion on September 9th 2011.
Though I'm planning a schedule that may suit some, it may not suit everyone and that's fine, you can read at your own pace, no pressure just enjoy and I will facilitate that space here each month for us to talk about it in comments with no promises of erudition on my part, just readerly thoughts.
The book does divide up nicely into approximately 100 to 120 pages a month, with each read taking us to the end of a part or a volume, so I guess Leo had us in mind as he wrote, while Sonia did all the shopping, cooking, washing and childbearing. There are in fact 366 chapters so War and Peace lends itself nicely to the chapter-a-day-year-long approach too, perhaps some may want to adopt that tactic.
Having read the Anthony Briggs translation last time around, but when I was horribly ill, just picking up that particular volume and looking at the cover is reminding me of pain, so I'm going to be using the forthcoming new edition of the much-loved Maude's translation from Oxford University Press. This is soon to be published in a special edition (with a gold ribbon bookmark) in recognition of the centenary of Tolstoy's death this November.
We couldn't have chosen a more auspicious year for our read and all suggestions welcome for our Team Tolstoy picture to see us through the year. I don't really want to be displaying a depressing picture of the Battle of Borodino with scatterings of dead bodies every month but can I find a decent picture of a nice snowy troika?
No I can't.
I've also been out begging on your behalf too, so if you plan to join Team Tolstoy scroll down for gifts to wave us off on our journey, and hopefully I'll see some of you here kitted up and ready to board the troika on September 9th, the samovar will be bubbling and I can promise you it'll be the most fantastic shared reading journey.

War & Peace ~ Leo Tolstoy

Count Rockyonsky here, hello me old muckers, chums and adoring public.

Long time no talk, it's been a busy summer sleeping here but am I looking forward to this one. I'm learning Russian and will be the furry figurehead on the troika for the year ...what's a troika?
Now I don't want to impose any rules about this prize draw but read on for slightly different and less random winner's criteria to the usual, so it would probably make sense that you are planning to join us on Team Tolstoy if you do decide to enter.

Five copies of the delectable (she told me to say that) new Oxford University Press hardback edition with ribbon, (always so easily pleased) of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in the much-revered (I was made to say that as well) translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude with the following updates

• The Maudes' translation of Tolstoy's epic masterpiece has long been considered the best English version, and now for the first time it has been revised to bring it fully into line with modern approaches to the text. French passages are restored, Anglicization of Russian names removed, and outmoded expressions updated.
• A new introduction by Any Mandelker considers the novel's literary and historical context, the nature of the work and Tolstoy's artistic and philosophical aims.
• New, expanded notes provide historical background and identifications, as well as insight into Russian life and society.
• Includes lists of historical characters and the fictional families, a chronology of Tolstoy and of historical events in the novel, five maps, and Tolstoy's essay 'Some Words about War and Peace' in an Appendix.

Actually, what's not to love, she says she can't wait to get her hands on a copy and heaven help us says she'll be theming the sitting room along Russian lines to cope with it.
Names in comments and add a word or two to impress me about why you'd like to win a copy, even make it rhyme if you want, I'm a sucker for a good ode.
No rush it's Bank Holiday weekend, you all have a good compose and I'll pop in next week and will be choosing the winners without the help of Mrs Glosser or that psychic chap's new fangled number machine ... don't tell her I said this but you could always try me with some best Beluga. I'm ever so partial to a bit of sturgeon, which rhymes with surgeon and burgeon, so I'm helping you out there.
OUP have very kindly agreed to post worldwide and will send the copies out to winners as soon as they arrive, which will be very soon and before publication date.
Heck I am so good to you lot.

Update:: OK, the judges are now locked in the room and will emerge with the names of the winners very soon so comments have closed on this post.

dovegreyreading trails...

Do I have a keen interest in aviation?
Not really.
Would I happily sit at an airport all day watching planes take off and land and deciding which is a Boeing Thingummy or an AirWhatsit?
Probably not but none of that stops me loving John Gillespie Magee Jr's poem, High Flight, (he was killed whilst flying a Spitfire in 1941)

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Designated the poem for December 11th in Poem for the Day Volume Two, the book I have resting on the shelf behind the kitchen sink so that if you've got to be there you can at least read something nice, and this page stayed open for months,
And apropos of the flying connection, sometimes a book arrives out of that big blue yonder and knits together several others that have been lurking on the 'always meant to read' pile and a new reading trail emerges; all making one of the pleasures of a good book its hidden capacity to get me interested in absolutely anything if it's well-written and accessible.
So it was The Flight of the Century Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation by Thomas Kessner (to be published by OUP on 2nd September) that started this most unexpected trail. Please note that I've tried hard to refrain from all the puns about the book 'landing' or the occurrence of a reading 'flight of fancy', it was tough but I've managed to stay grounded through this one.
Now I'll add to the list of doubts, what interest do I have in the rise of American aviation?
Not a jot, but I do have an interest in a life well portrayed. Charles Lindbergh of whom I know the minimal amount to be able to converse superficially and mostly gleaned from the film Spirit of St Louis starring good old James Stewart.
Well I opened it and that's been me done for over the last three days, unputdownable reading, a gripping and ultimately tragic and very poignant account of Charles Lindbergh's life, and my thoughts on the book on here soon.
But I have even more astonishment to share because it's now been confirmed and I want you to be the first to know ...at about 5.20pm local time, on May 21st 1927 Charles Lindbergh, piloting the Spirit of St Louis, flew over our house.
Yes really, and I'm some excited about all this.
Look, this very bit of sky and I've done a helpful little artist's impression to give you an idea.


'Well to the foot of our stairs I will go,' I exclaimed, 'He flew across Cornwall towards Plymouth, he must have flown over our house.'

Bookhound, by this time so beleaguered with 24/7 Lindberghia, knew exactly what I was talking about.

'Well, you'd need his charts to prove that.'

'They're in the book...I've got them here.'

Out came the magnifying glass followed by an agonisingly long perusing pause.

and here's the very delicately annotated version in case you want to verify.


'Weeeeell, I think that's quite possible, he'd certainly have followed the Tamar down to Plymouth, so he flew quite near.'

'Over...'

'Well at least past...'

'Over...'

'Oh alright then, Charles Lindbergh flew over our house.'

So, as I said, all confirmed and we might have a plaque made and put ourselves on the Lindbergh Trail
Meanwhile this aviation lark had me digging out a few more books that had been hovering (sorry).
With recent coverage of the anniversary of the Battle of Britain, The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary tells the author's story of his experiences as a fighter pilot, shot down in the Second World War and undergoing months of treatment for burns at Archibald McIndoe's pioneering plastic surgery unit at East Grinstead, hailed as one of the classic texts of World War Two, we'll see.
I'm inclined to weave in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery because I have never read it and I really should have done, and can I find a copy anywhere on the shelves here? No, but there's a new Collector's Library edition out very soon, lovely little editions and I assume unabridged.
Alongside that I'm dipping into a book I've been staring at as it awaits its slot, (sorry it couldn't last) Aloft by William Langewiesche, a reflection on the first century of flight and how flying has altered not only how we move about the earth but also our perception of the world and our place in it. Aloft as a title perhaps slightly misleading, this being more about planes that have failed to stay aloft, but it's equally riveting in this brave new aeronautical world I find myself in.
If I'm really feeling up to pursuing this vapour trail further I may add in Alain de Botton's A Week in the Airport, an account of his week as writer in residence at Heathrow, for which he moved into the Sofitel Hotel, the Terminal 5 outpost and to the sweet background rumble of a plane landing every minute.
He probably deserves a medal, as do all of you for reading through this very over-excitable mess of a blog post.
Chocks away and any more aviation reading to suggest?

The gift of a book...

After meeting up in London recently, it was lovely to catch up again with Fran H-B (and this time Mr Fran H-B too,) passing through Devon t'other day, and an excuse if one were needed for the tablecloth, the cups and saucers, the scones, the spoon in the jam etc and we all had a great time. Caught scone-less and with no time to make any I dashed up to Mavis, our new  village shop, where they do the Very Best Scones in Devon and hoped they'd save my life.
None in stock... *gasp* ...'But don't worry, I'll make you some' said my salvation behind the counter and she did. Only in Devon.
Fran and I did the customary book exchange and my thanks to her for this delectable copy of Bloomsbury in Sussex by Simon Watney, published by Snake River Press and purchased at Much Ado Books in Alfriston (I have bookmark) but wrapped in a Charleston bag... the bag now sits neatly in the Homage to Virginia corner. I've been reading The Waves, so very slowly this year that it's likely to take me the full year to finish it.
Bloomsbury in Sussex is a fresh and evocative account of all the houses lived in by both Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and I read it in short unputdownable order also embracing the frequently-mentioned fact that Vanessa's signature colours were salmon pink and dove grey. Whilst delineating the homes various, Simon Watney also elaborates on the relationship between the sisters, pointing out that neither ever felt at ease in the others area of expertise. Virginia seized the literary ground, Vanessa the artistic.
But the importance of their homes is undeniable as this quote from Leonard Woolf confirms

'The Leonard and Virginia Woolf who lived in Hogarth House, Richmond, from 1915-1924 were not the same people who lived in Tavistock Square from 1924 to 1929; the Leonard and Virginia Woolf who lived in Asheham House from 1912 to 1919 where not the same people who lived in Monk's House from 1919 to 1941. In each case the most powerful moulder of them and of their lives was the house in which they lived.'

Vanessa Bell, frequently treated as an understudy in any account of Bloomsbury life, and, with a vulnerability that seems rarely acknowledged, Simon Watney gives her fair and equal attention here for which I was grateful. I have long admired Vanessa's book Sketches in Pen and Ink for the other side of the story which it reflects so honestly.
I like Simon Watney's suggestion that

'Something of their mutual and complementary sense of humour may perhaps be lost on those of a more literal disposition in these over-literal times, but it is impossible not to respond to their seriousness about their work, which they communicated with the lightest of touches and the utmost modesty.'

If you can't visit the houses now open to the public, Monk's House at Rodmell, now owned by the National Trust and Charleston, (and I haven't been to either) this book is the next best thing with its guided tour around the rooms and the furnishings down to every last detail and I love the little snippets of information... Mrs Dalloway paid for one lavatory, The Common Reader paid for the other. Also included is the planting in the gardens. Charleston with its lilies, red hot pokers (ours seem to have suffered last winter) hellebores, aquilegia, asters, campanula, cranesbill, bleeding hearts, honeysuckle, lupins, poppies, phlox and so it goes on.
This all got me thinking about the whole concept of the book as a gift, when the post about Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety elicited the following comment from Linda Grant

'Gillian Slovo gave me this as a thank-you for something, a few years ago, someone having given it to her as a thank you. I hadn't heard of it, she hadn't heard of it (or him) but it's a total knock-out. I must give it to someone else.'

Understandably, despite living in a house full of books, there is nothing I love more than the gift of one. KevinFromCanada sent over a first edition of Surfacing by Margaret Atwood and a copy of The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, I sent back a copy of A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf with the original Vanessa Bell dust jacket and Living in the Maniototo by Janet Frame just to extend her readership around the territories and chose a book from my shelves for Mrs KFC (Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker ) and each of the Canadian visitors. To others I have recently passed on copies of Stoner by John Williams and Room For a Single Lady by Claire Boylan and received some wonderful books in return.
But it all got me thinking about perhaps the one book which I have loved so much that I would then always give as a gift to someone else, might there be just one?
I'm still undecided.
And I wondered... if you were giving someone the gift of a book, which favourite would you choose?

Boxer Beetle ~ Ned Beauman

Can you picture it... the ageing heavyweight boxers plodding around the ring, we've seen it all before, we know all the moves to the point where they now feel a bit contrived, know exactly when that upper cut's going to come. The footwork's leaden, slower than it used to be and it's not quite so interesting to watch, perhaps they're even trying a bit too hard, they've wowed us before and we love them, who knows perhaps they will wow us again one day, but we're ready for something a bit different, because this is all getting a bit monotonous and predictable to watch. The commentators do their best to dissect it all and liven things up because that's what we expect after all.
Then into the ring leaps a sprightly young bantam-weight.
Shock...horror, noooo, this is the heavyweights, he's not allowed in here, he's going to get mashed to a pulp.But look, he's nimble on his feet, he's not bothered by the rules, he's agile, dancing around, doing things a bit differently, smart but not smug, mixing it up because things are there to be mixed up surely, the jabs are coming from the most unexpected directions and the audience are on their feet and loving it. It's new and original and refreshing and the lad's packing punches way above his weight. 
Well with apologies to the esteemed ringside commentator, the late Harry Carpenter, I'm sorry about all that, but it was an analogy just begging to be made in the aftermath of my recent read of Ned Beauman's debut in the literary ring, Boxer Beetle.

Now at this point I have to declare a small interest because when I'm in London Ned's parents very kindly offer me a bed for the night, so I knew the book was coming and I was quite prepared to quietly pass it over and we'd just be very polite about it next time we met, because to be very honest I couldn't see how this was going to be a book for me.
Likewise, if you are of a delicate and tender disposition and find it hard to suspend those sensibilities when you read (and that's perfectly fine) and think you may be upset by some strong language and some equally strong behaviour, then it may not be the book for you.
I'm in a slightly different reading place after this year's Bookerthon, immune to it all so please just bring me on something contemporary that doesn't kiss the canvas after 150 pages, and I have to say Boxer Beetle would have held its corner in that company this year. I have lost about 600 pages of precious reading time to the Booker cause in recent weeks and have nothing to show for it here beyond irritation, because I won't write about books I can't finish.

Boxer Beetle as the publicity blurb suggests is bold, it is original and it was impossible to put down other than perhaps to go and get some oxygen and let my brain figure out some of Ned's footwork, because this is a book teeming with originality coupled with fast and intelligent thought as well as a wicked sense of humour. It's rough and excitable in places, but for the odd simile that didn't quite work for me there were many more of such startling originality that all I could think was 'blimey that's clever.'
A combination of dodgy characters, Kevin "Fishy" Broom, the Nazi memorabilia collector who suffers from the rare genetic condition trimethylaminuria (the clue is in his name) and is set to work uncovering the mystery that has laid dormant for decades and will unravel right back to the East End of London in the 1930s.
And it is the shenanigans of eugenicist Erskine and his first human subject Sean " Sinner" Roach, a nine-toed squat homosexual Jewish boxer that will be uncovered. Much of Erskine's early work carried out on beetles and the particular pride of the fleet, Anopthalamus hitleri with its distinctive and perfect clockwise tetraskelion markings, a swastika to you and me.
There's perhaps an assumption that I don't like swear words in fiction, or I only read 'nice' books. The truth is I can read it all as long as it's well-written and nothing feels gratuitous; well-written such a highly subjective notion and might mean something different for everyone.
Now for example, Ned has mastered the art of the use of the swear word very early in his writing career and for this we must be thankful. For maximum effect on the dovegreyreader brain it's about using it briefly and occasionally to let me know that it's part of the vernacular and the context for that character, and after that sparingly will do just fine, enough to remind me every so often, there's really no need to use it fifty times per page peppering every sentence.
I've got the message.
Ned's got the message too.
Plus let's be honest, chez dovegreyreader not immune to the use of the expletive.
Gamekeeper's are not famed for their gentility when their baby pheasants roost on the ground outside the pen instead of up a tree, all involving the wiring up of a radio playing Classic FM all night in the middle of the woods to scare away the badgers and the foxes (with apologies to Classic FM, it works) and me waking up at 4am worrying about a load of  pheasants.
And come to think of it nor did Bookhound say 'Oh dear' the day the pick axe handle broke and nearly took his eye out.
So we can cope with it, but sometimes I think it's the writers who can't.
I'll admit to a bit of naivety here as well, I don't move in these circles so I've ...er..learned a thing or two and emerged the other end feeling ever-so-slightly tousled and beetle-averse and grateful for my decision not to read the final fifty pages last thing at night. There are also now some very bizarre words typed into my Google history as a result...coprophagia a new one on me and I'm not going to tell you either, let Google suddenly  think it's the latest craze as you all go and look it up, but perhaps not if you are eating your breakfast.
But for all the Boxer Beetle fun and humour, and Ned has a wicked and playful sense of that, and the moments of pure farce, there is a real depth and maturity here, moments when I had to stop and read again

'Normally you can't get a proper look at your own conscience because it only ever comes out to gash you with its beak and you just want to do whatever you can to push it away; but put your conscience in the cage of this paradox, where it can slither and bark but it can't hurt you, and you can study it for as long as you wish.'

So, the suggestion of a book 'jam packed with Fascism, Darwinism, repressed (or unrepressed) homosexuality and beetles' would not normally tempt me into a read and may well not tempt many of you, but if you fancy an exhilarating challenge here's your book. I'm very glad I jumped into the fray and flexed my reading muscles with this one, and I shall be ringside for all Ned's bouts in the future.
He's still pulling his punches, there's a lot more to come I'm sure.
OK Harry....yes, yes, you did it much better than me ...I'll stop now.

How to Build an Extension to Your Home :: Part 3

Thank you for enquiries about progress on the West Wing. I am reliably informed it is the East Wing but currently perhaps resembling Cell Block H.
This was the week of the screed for the base, so more concrete lorries and pumps and it was odds-on that the weather would do this

and our sincere apologies to the unusually large number of cars that chose to travel along the lane that day. 

But happily for the travelers from Hotel Endsleigh,we were able to tell them they were definitely on the wrong road for Padstow so probably saved them miles.
Mr Think of Everything had thought of everything and proudly waved his home made floor leveler in our direction

before demonstrating its effectiveness,

and now he's onto the serious stuff like walls, and see that gap on the right?
That was a late onset door decision that has necessitated another four forms and £25 to the planning department, and we await the letter asking us if we object, but are hoping for what's called 'the nod'.

Oh yes, and he's managing one or two cups of builder's tea.

 

Vodka...shaken & sprayed not stirred

I'm quite taken with ironing now I've discovered the vodka trick.
Someone did once say if life gives you lemons make lemonade and then find someone's who's been blessed with vodka and have a party, and probably also meant to add forget all about the ironing.
But actually, I really don't mind a spot of ironing as long as the Aga's on with a pot of tea brewing, and there's something good on the radio, and I can find enough hangers for the clothes. There's something ultimately satisfying about creating order out of the ever-growing pile of chaos, almost calming and meditative I kid myself, plus there's that undeniable  bonus of clean wearable clothes, but the addition of the vodka has helped no end.
In fact it was a recipe for some spray-on linen water discovered in Selvedge magazine that has made the ironing experience complete, using lavender oil and I'd always wondered about this bit, it's the addition of vodka that helps the oil disperse. So today I ironed whilst inhaling a misty haze of relaxing lavender tinged with undertones of vodka and with something Bach-ish on Radio 3 and I think I even enjoyed myself.
For those who wish to emulate this heady but worthwhile experience first find an old plastic spray bottle a charming antique glass bottle and add than shake

:: 90mls high-proof vodka (what you do with the rest is up to you)
:: 750ml totally pure, distilled water (ours comes that way out of the tap)
:: I tsp of essential lavender oil

Dart ~ Alice Oswald :: Part Two

Come dabble your toes with me, we have that river to meet.
Jeanette Winterson calls this ' a new kind of poetry...not content to work only with what exists already.'
Jane Wheatley of The Times suggests ' If you never read poetry, make an exception for this.'
Oh alright then I thought, I will.
Dart, was first published in 2002 and I have known of its existence and seen it around from the off, so why I had never explored it will remain one of the unknown mysteries of blog-kind, but discovering its secrets and hidden beauty has been one of the pleasures of this summer. The Dart is a river we drive alongside and over every time we cross Dartmoor, so to think how little I had even considered its existence quite shames me. If poetry is, amongst other things, about opening my eyes to what is around me, then Dart has more than fulfilled that task.
This is a mesmerising collection, a combination of poetry and recorded conversations that Alice Oswald had with the people who live and work on the Dart, somehow the whole is seamlessly woven together to create something quite astonishing. Expect to meet all manner of people... foresters, water bailiffs, fishermen, kayakers, tin extractors, poachers, walkers, boat-builders, woollen mill workers and of course you will meet the river.
Perhaps that was one reason it all touched that chord with me...because of course we too have one of those kayakers who regularly paddles the Dart Loop when he's here.

'Like last November, the river rose three or four feet in two hours, right into the fields and I drove like mad to get to Newbridge. I could hear this roaring like some horrible revolving cylinder...'

and the river replies

'come falleth in my push-you where it hurts
and let me rough you under, be a laugh
and breathe me please in whole inhale

come warmeth, I can outcanoevre you
into the smallest small where it moils up
and masses under the sluice gates...

I'm sorry my Kayaker pictures are a bit muddled,this might actually be him on the Zambezi, but it's big white water so I think you get the drift.
The Dart has a webcam watched online hourly and the Kayaker's friends will set off from London just to take on this 'whole river-power of Dartmoor'  and yes, they are frequently outcanoevred by it... it can be fearsome and they know all too well that  'this jabber of pidgin river ' takes no prisoners as it lives its story and asks to be heard,

'will you rustle quietly and listen to what I have to say
    now.'

Then of course we have the fishermen too, and though the men in this house don't fish the Dart (and nor do they poach it ) but they do fish the Tamar, so I understood that language and atmosphere, the thrill of the chase and that compelling moment when the river must be fished.
For other reasons I understood something else too and I smiled, as the water bailiff, whose job is to police the river and ensure it is only fished by license, describes his job ...

'which is where the law comes in - I know all the articles, I hide in the bushes with my diploma and along come the Tavistock boys, they've only got to wet their arms and grab, it's like shoplifting. Names I won't mention. In broad daylight, in the holding pools. Run up and stone the water and the salmon dodges under a ledge. Copper snares, three-pronged forks - I know what goes on...'


I'm transported back about fifteen years or more because I think I might know some of their names too.
I'm furtively shown the salmon in the bath by the man of the house, when I've asked if I can wash my hands before and after examining the new baby.... I've seen their faces fall... she's going to see in the bathroom.
The same men who would regularly be in prison for a bit of petty burglary.
They'd  tell you with enormous pride how they wouldn't ever do it on their own doorstep, good grief no, that wouldn't be right. They'd take the van up  Axminster way and help themselves to the contents of those posh houses, which is why their own homes may have had old bits of blanket and cardboard stuffed in the broken windows, and rubbish piled high in the garden, but the carpets were lovely.
Their style so well-known to the police that they always got caught and banged to rights.
And I hate to say it but there was something entirely endearing about the families too, local characters, happy rogues the lot of them, though I know if it had been my house they'd burgled I wouldn't have been quite so enamored. The women used to love it when the men were doing their time, nice rest, no worries, concentrate on the children, and they still call out to me across the street if we meet in town.
'He's in again.' they say with a beaming smile.
'Jolly good' I reply and we do a thumbs up across Duke Street.
There are ferrymen on the Dart too,

'Dartmouth and Kingsweir -
two worlds, like two foxes in a wood,
and each one can hear the wind-fractured
closeness of the other.

I work the car ferry, nudge it over with a pilot boat,
backwards and forwards for twenty three years.'

and the whole idea of a ferryman lodges like a mythology in my mind, because I've been reading a book wherein there is mention of Dante's Divine Comedy (of which I know the requisite postage stamp amount) and the souls of the dead awaiting the Boatman to ferry them across to the Mountain of Purgatory.
And then I remember that Ralph McTell song The Ferryman which I seem to recall he wrote after reading Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, and Alice Oswald has sparked off another whole load of imagery and countless memories in my mind.
Books like this really do light the blue touch paper and take you to places you never expected to go and this one has transported me everywhere and I think will do so each time I pick it up.
I really do recommend listening to the audio version alongside if you can manage it.
To hear a poet read their own words is to become familiar with those words at their roots. I didn't 'get' The Wasteland until the day I heard a recording of T.S.Eliot reading it, that etched it in my memory for ever and Alice Oswald likewise. Alice has the most perfect reading voice, the timbre and the annunciation is pure and unfettered which gave me an undistracted and immediate access to the words, capturing the essence of this river. And don't worry if you can't nip up to the Dart when you've read this, I promise it will make you look at a river near you in a vibrantly new and refreshing way, and just as if you had dabbled your toes alongside me.

Dart ~ Alice Oswald :: Part One

I should probably issue a travel warning if anyone plans to listen to Dart as well as read it.
Having read it twice, I listened to Alice Oswald reading it in the car (well Alice wasn't actually in the car with me) on the way back from an Exeter airport trip with Offspringette.
It was a scorchio day and and I was left with little choice as to what should happen next as I travelled along past Okehampton, turned off at Sourton  and crossed the western edge of Dartmoor, past Lydford, through Mary Tavy, past Peter Tavy (are you following?) How normal those names sound to me now but how odd I thought them when we first moved here, blame the churches of course.

Then along the road past Tavistock's premier public school Kelly College and usually on into town, but not so this day; all I could think of was this river made oddly human and given a voice by Alice Oswald, a river that seemed to have trickled into my consciousness all the way home and it was right on my doorstep, how could I not?
It was a a quick left turn and up onto the Princetown road past Merrivale where the granite for the original London Bridge (now in Arizona) came from, and thence via Two Bridges and left across to Postbridge. By the time I arrived I had a job to stop myself running to the banks like a thing strangely possessed.
This map shows the rivers nicely.

I didn't because a coach load of Spanish tourists were all running to the banks and the Clapper Bridge, so I did my best to look nonchalant and local ...no I'm really pleased they were enjoying it, Devon needs its tourist industry.

"Everyone converges on bridges, bank holidays it fills up with cars, people set up tables in the reeds, but a mile either side you're back in the wilderness..."  Dart - Alice Oswald

"I know who I am, I
come from the little heap of stones up by Postbridge,
you'll have seen me feeding the stock, you can tell it's
    me
because of the wearing action of the bone..." Dart - Alice Oswald

The peaty-brown water was as clear as glass
and the cat dozed on over Reg's memorial seat outside the cafe.

Inflation has hit the cream tea...plain scones mind, nothing fancy and just an 1/8lb of cream now, not 1/4 and there's last year's £2.75 nestling under that newly-chalked £3.50

So I've used up all this post telling you how I got there, more about the actual book next time then.

and the winners are...

Phew! Well a staggering number of you entered the prize draw for one of three signed copies of Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill and I've put her to work.
Rocky has relinquished his usual role having made way for Higher Authority, thus my request to Susan, instead of Mrs Glosser's Number Generator for three numbers between 1 & 90 (and she hasn't looked) means that if the winners live in Uzbekistan she only has herself to blame when she tries to explain that in her local post office.
My thanks again to Susan for offering to do this and congratulations to the winners who should each have been notified by e mail, but just double check it's you against the numbered comments here and copies on their way as soon as you send e mail your address to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com

19 - bruessel
20 - Pam Kirschbaum
77 - Alison

Crossing to Safety ~ Wallace Stegner

I have quite a few of you to thank for my discovery of Wallace Stegner, unheard of here in my corner of Devon but well known and much-loved by plenty of you in comments.
So someone said I had to read Wallace Stegner, and someone else echoed that, and you kept saying it so I set too, and how serendipitous that author David Vann visited us here this summer, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford.
Crossing to Safety has been my first glorious introduction and may be single-handedly responsible for my ennui and lack of progress with this year's Bookerthon, because Wallace Stegner has written a quiet book that held my interest unfailingly over a period of about two months. In that time I read several other books, so a chapter of this here, a few pages there, a longer run and then a gap, but not once did I pick the book up and find my interest had waned, or that I couldn't pick up the thread, or that I'd lost the plot or the characters, and nor have I had to rush to my desk to write about it in case I forgot. The book has mellowed into a welcome permanence, all surely an indication of a very special sort of writing?
Wallace Stegner says this about his writing and now I see it

' In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner. They speak to the deaf, but it takes good ears to hear me, for I want to be part of the common sound, a not-too dominating element of the ambient noise.'

He made this statement in response to a comment from Flannery O'Connor to which he took exception

'Thus the admirable artist Flannery O'Connor said that she dealt in the grotesque because when speaking to the hard-of-hearing one must shout. That remark rather offends me as a reader. I don't think I am hard-of-hearing; and anyway, with the truly deaf, shouting doesn't help it only confuses and annoys.'

I have been in the mood for some quiet listening too.
To place him in the literary time line, Wallace Stegner just twelve years younger than Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald but Crossing to Safety his last novel published in 1987.
The novel follows the lives of two young couples living in New England, struggling would-be author and college lecturer Larry Morgan, who narrates the story, and his wife Sally, and the prosperous, domineering and extrovert Charity Lang and her husband, academic Sid Lang. The Langs meet and adopt the Morgans and create an unexpectedly rapid and strong bond of friendship with them, leaving Larry and Sally feeling honoured and chosen, but also slightly phased by the gush of help and support that comes their way. Both Sally and Charity are pregnant so a bond of female friendship develops between the two women that readily draws their men into the circle, and the book opens many years hence with a visit to Charity, now in the terminal stages of cancer and as always completely in charge of events.
What follows as the lives and the friendships are played out is a combination of flashback and reflection with moral boundaries established from the start.

'We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.'

Thus Wallace Stegner told me what to expect, I had quite thought there would be motive and mischief behind this, but this much is made clear; this was to be no gossip-fest but a loyal and honest account of a friendship with its trials and tribulations and with some clever devices too.
Where Larry the narrator cannot possibly have been present for events Wallace Stegner overtly declares his use of the imagined

'I realize that there is much about Sid and Charity Lang that I either invented or got secondhand. I didn't know them in college or when they met and married, and so I have neither memory nor documentation to draw on when I start to imagine what they were like when they first came together.'

I reveled in this narrative use of the imagined, 

'Who is this boy?' I can imagine her mother asking 'Do we know him? Do we know his family?' 

as Larry proceeded to construct his own fiction about Charity and Sid's courtship, it all struck me as clever and underused in fiction generally (but please correct me).
Wallace Stegner works some sort of magic with characterisation, something so unique that I had to stop reading Crossing to Safety last thing at night because I'd lie awake thinking about Larry and Sally, Sid and Charity as if they were real people that I knew and had just been talking to, it was most odd.
So of course I now have a growing Wallace Stegner collection and the Modern Library Classics edition Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs - Living and Writing in the West, which has just arrived, has started to slake my thirst, because now I'm at the 'Must Know More' stage.
Wallace Stegner writes about Crossing to Safety in some detail, it was his final book but also his most personal, deliberately close to to his own experience, opinions and feelings and based on a true friendship

'It's all very quiet, I intended it to be true. I wrote my guts out trying to make it as moving on the page as it was to me while I was living and reliving it.'

And, as he admits, a risky book for what it didn't contain,

' There is not a murder, a divorce, an illicit weekend, a gun, a liaison, a drug dream, a hot sex scene, even a wild party, in it. It deals with academics who by definition are said to be tepid and undramatic....nothing there to strain the acting powers of Clint Eastwood or Cher.'

Now then, no one wants literature to sit still but after all this Booker reading, screaming all manner of Look-At-Me frills and fancies, to the point where I have often felt deafened and dazzled by the clamour, perhaps small wonder that a quiet understatement of a book has had such an enormous impact on me.

Prize draw... signed copies of Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

I'm almost a-feared to mention this book given the explosive declamation of it around the blogosphere at the time, but Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill was a favourite read of mine last year for many reasons, not least as the catalyst it became for examining my own reading life. Plenty of moments when I didn't want Susan's choices on my list but opportunities abounded for finding my own equivalents and thinking about my own personal list of books I couldn't live without.
But it was a book that raised passions, everyone had an opinion, much judgement passed and intent chewed over out there none of which has detracted from my initial and lasting enthusiasm for the book.
So I know Susan, and we e mail and speak quite regularly, none of which makes me a poodle (with respect of course to all the poodle owners out there). Susan has written something which I read in its early stages recently which I haven't enjoyed and I've told her so, she's written something else, another ghost story, The Small Hand to be published in September which had me on the edge of my seat and there will be signed copies of that on here soon. We had an interesting exchange about my recent Woman in Black experience at the theatre and we have ongoing debates about books we've liked or loathed and why. Susan always very funny, very gracious and generous, quietly supports some amazing causes, takes it all on the chin and gets on with what she's good at which is writing and I regularly tell her I think she has promise if she sticks at it...we can't have her head the size of a planet after all and really 50 plus books published is no indication.
Much excitement about Daniel Radcliffe playing his first grown-up film role since Harry Potter in the forthcoming film adaptation of The Woman in Black, other even more exciting things in the pipeline which I'd be slaughtered if I mentioned... all will be revealed in good time I'm sure.
But meanwhile the paperback edition of Howards End is on the Landing has hit the shelves, mercifully retaining that hardback cover design and Susan has kindly offered three signed copies of the book for readers here which she is happy to post worldwide.
Your chance to make up your own mind about the book if you haven't done so already, so names in comments as usual and Rocky will rouse from his slumbers and choose.

It's show time

Well not in the London sense.
This being Devon and August usually means a combination of either rain or scorching heat but it all adds up to Okehampton Show, this year overcast but mild, just right.
There is so much to love about this rural agricultural show, centred as it is on our neighbouring market town, the town considered by many to be a bit down-market to Tavistock, even though it has a Waitrose and we have to put up with Morrisons and Lidl's. But Okehampton has its show and all Tavistock has to offer by comparison as a community event is the annual Goosey Fair which is no more community based than my Auntie Dot was the first woman to fly solo round the world. Much as we love Goosey Fair held on the second Wednesday in October, it's become a complete cash cow for the local council and a mecca for every cowboy and his goods from around the country.
Okehampton Show meanwhile has clung to its local agricultural heritage.
Men in white overalls lead bulls the size of Australia around the show ring, the judge strokes his chin (not the bull's in case of confusion)and ponders each one though heaven knows what he's looking for,

...how many rump steaks will you get out of that one versus that one?

...would that one kill you in five or would it take ten?

...what about the pedicure?
The winner is declared and everyone gets really excited but what is lovely is that these are local farming families, and even better it's the whole family. They all set up their gazebos along the cattle lines, tables and chairs and much feasting, grooming boxes on display with things for taking things out of hooves I presume, probably some bovine dental floss, you know the sort of thing you need to make your bull look his best.
The children take part too. Little people in white coats with their own animals to exhibit, doubtless the baton for the future of farming in this area will be passed onto them and slowly the festoons of rosettes gather around the eaves of the gazebos.
Then there's the sheep

and the pigs

and the goats...love the goats

and then the Fur & Feather tent, this chap knew he'd won first prize and was busy telling everyone who'd listen.

and the sheep shearing contest. This is Mike and he sheared seven in five minutes, that's going some. I got Shearer's Back just watching.

and the WI tent with installations redolent of ours, though slightly more refined talking of which ours made it into the pages of The Daily Telegraph (the site is down as I add that link, it'll be back eventually I hope)

and the rural craftsman, weaving bee skeps

Then we nipped back to see how our beefy lad had done, Champion.

The Long Song ~ Andrea Levy

I've got off to a terrible start with this year's Bookerthon, several false starts on books I felt sure I would enjoy and then suddenly 150 plus pages in I wasn't, books that wanted to take me to places I didn't want to go and by routes I didn't want to travel at this reading moment, and then I picked up The Long Song by Andrea Levy and the sun was shining again.
In fact how can the sun not shine when you pick up a book with such a glowingly deep buttercup-yellow cover embossed with copper, but I wasn't going to be fooled,  a sunny cover that surely belies the misery of slavery that awaits?
That had been my misguided reasoning for not picking up The Long Song sooner, it was on the Orange long list after all, but I just couldn't face another 'slavery' novel. I know it's important to bear witness to it all but sometimes, to be very honest, my stomach can't take the churning, the sickening violence, the whipping and the snatching of babies all defeats me, leaves me feeling wretched and so I decide not to go there.
In fact it was with an element of desperation that I finally did but only after several people had reassured me that Andrea Levy does slavery in her own inimitable style, whilst also wondering whether I was ever going to have anything good to say about any of this year's long list.
July (born in December) is Miss Kitty's pickney, the daughter of Tam Dewar the white overseer of the Amity plantation thus making her a mulatto, not quite a negro and therefore perhaps July may be blessed with more opportunities in life than her mother. Born into Jamaican slavery but a witness to the freeing of slaves and the life that followed, Miss July is writing her story, ' a story that lay so fat within her' at the behest of her son Thomas Kinsman a printer,  who has insisted that she record it for posterity rather than keep telling it to him.
Thomas immediately reveals that he is a skillful editor and will be able to make sense of the most scribbled texts, whilst it's clear that July may also be a less than fallible narrator, thus setting up uncertainties and questions as this oral history is cast with permanence into the print man's molten metal.
Andrea Levy elaborates on this printing process towards the end of the book and something resonated with me about the hot branding of slaves as a means of leaving a permanent mark, and how the printer does something similar with the casting of molten metal and the pressing of words on the paper, or perhaps I was getting a bit carried away.
So Miss July assumes a lilting cadence to her voice that quickly becomes familiar and a pleasure to read,  a constant reminder that this is oral storytelling, as she playfully darts around with the truth of her life and as always with any novel about slavery there is that juxtaposition between the sweetness of the sugar crop and the bitterness of the lives on the plantation.
Brutally separated from her mother to become Marguerite (because it sounds so much nicer when called out)  a maid at the big house and the trials and tribulations begin. The narrative allows, indeed almost insists that the reader questions the veracity of July's frequently corrected story, this 'flimsy remembrance',  thus skilfully exposing both the fictional process and the nature of an autobiographical tale in a way that chimed with my recent reading of The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. In fact perhaps that was a novel about slavery of a different form but July frequently writes herself into the third person as a means of detaching herself from some of the most painful moments in the book.
However I wouldn't want you to think this book was all pain, far from it and definitely don't be put off as I was with any notions that all books about slavery must be miserable. There are moments when Andrea Levy's wry sense of humour that we all know so well from Small Island shines through in a book that held its form throughout for me, no dips or moments of ennui, I loved every word.
Every reader will doubtless find their own defining moments in The Long Song, and it has been good to read a book that deals with notions of freedom from slavery, almost a prequel to Small Island in that case, but for me there was one moment of huge significance.
As one of the plantation workers watches an artist painting the family of the big house in their setting, a setting that included July but for reasons that I won't divulge and spoil. Overlooking the presence of the worker's hovels he paints in a lush island background to the complete confusion of the onlooker who states

'But they are there before you' said Dublin Hilton to he. At which the artist barked upon him, that no one wished to find squalid negroes within a rendering of a tropical idyll, before promising Dublin that he would set his dog upon him if he did not leave him alone.
'But you paint an untruth,' said Dublin Hilton.

Somehow that moment and its context exposed and encapsulated all the duplicity and folly of colonial rule. For all her wily and often scheming ways what's not to love about July, Andrea Levy's newest heroine, and that final delicious dish of revenge served up to her master, and in the end I think I'd been allowed as close to the truth of her story as I could and should be.
My thanks to Andrea Levy for being my Booker salvation when all was looking lost, definitely one for my short list and I'd be delighted to see The Long Song take the victor ludorum, but I fear it's up against some sparkly look-at-me bobby dazzlers that may just glisten and catch the eye of the judges instead.

A cuckoo in the nest...

...and then there were five

Fledging Day 2010

We have lift off.

Monday morning and a sudden invasion of swallows all performing a low fly past to show the babies how it's done, and they all looked on a bit mystified in that you-must-be-joking way.
By Tuesday they'd plucked up the courage, one by one, out they came, uncreased their wings, took flight and tried it all out for themselves.
What larks, it's been like Heathrow out there as they've got the hang of it and been in and out of the nest all day long.
It'll soon be time to scoop up this year's guano harvest, and I can't bear to think about Departure for Africa Day.

Meanwhile we sent the Tinker (father of dgr...just for anyone who doesn't know that yet) back to Tinker Towers on Sunday with Horatio Clare's book A Single Swallow.

'Read up on it all for us' we said, and with immediate and good effect, the facts are seeping through...
Did you know it takes them twenty-seven days to get here from Africa?
Did you know they have a three day window to leave Africa and miss the rain?

The Stone Diaries ~ Carol Shields

I think there is definitely something to be said for there being a right time in your life for certain books, and I've been giving a great deal of thought as to why now for The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. I've certainly picked the book up and started it several times since its publication 1993. I also knew it had been much-lauded, winning  both the American Pulitzer Prize and the Canadian Governor General's Award but had also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 because Carol Shields's dual US & Canadian nationality allowed that to happen.
1993 the year that Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha won but the judges agreed that The Stone Diaries had 'given us a new kind of heroine'
I'd started and set it aside after the first chapter several times, something didn't engage me, yet other books by Carol Shields have done so since, but not this one. It feels like a vindication of my decision not to dismiss a book as 'not for me', because given the right moment The Stone Diaries has stormed through to a place on my list of best-ever reads, and that has really surprised me.
I wonder if it's something about being a woman approaching ..eeek, the nearer 60 than 50 side of life, and now I feel really sick,(the Tinker reading this may feel even worse) it's the first time I've put that in writing, but perhaps my capacity as I get older is becoming greater to take in a book like this, with its cradle to grave span of Daisy Goodwill Flett's life.
Does a book like this become more meaningful with increasing age, even though despite evidence to the contrary I still seem to think there's been a mistake and I'm really only about 30, 35 at most:-)
For those out there who haven't read the book the opening chapter begins with the traumatic death of Mercy Goodwill immediately on giving birth to Daisy unexpectedly after an undiagnosed pregnancy. These always stretch credulity in my mind even though I have seen several, but this time round Mercy Goodwill's plump innocence and ignorance seemed entirely feasible, when perhaps it was that incredulity that had stopped my reading on those previous occasions, who can know.
Little newborn Daisy is seized on by her unhappy neighbour Clementine Flett who leaves her miserable Orkney immigrant husband Magnus and heads off to Winnipeg to raise the baby until Daisy's stone carver father feels ready to resume his role, which he eventually does. I don't want to recount any more details of Daisy's life in case the one person out there who hasn't read The Stone Diaries happens to be visiting today.
The book is a wonderful mix of biography, autobiography, letters and observations cataloguing Daisy's life and loves, her joys and sorrows through Birth, Childhood, Marriage, Love, Motherhood, Work, Ease, Illness and Decline and finally Death, and not a diary in sight because Daisy loses that at a crucial point in her life, but a mixture of narrative devices that challenge the more accepted pattern of story telling in the most beguiling way.

'At the edge of every experience is the refracted light of recollection, snagged there like an image in a bevelled mirror'

There's something about Carol Shields's use of the word 'snagged' there, not 'captured' or 'preserved' but 'snagged', as if this image is trapped unwillingly, slightly distorted, likely to leave some dangling threads that won't quite disappear or be woven back in.
Tell it slant as Emily Dickinson said and there were plenty of moments when the narrative tilted into a completely believable truth, as if I was reading of a real life, all given veracity with the inclusion of photos. Yet other moments when I was brought up sharp and forced to consider the very nature of that fiction and all peppered with real-life events.
The wedding of Elizabeth and Philip, a visit to the Dionne quintuplets.
As an aside reading up on the Quints, who I knew had been a tourist attraction but I was unaware of the detail, has all made my hair stand on end,  if you're interested there's more here and just see if your hair stands on end too
 
I sensed an undefinable moment after about 150 pages into The Stone Diaries when the book shifted slightly in my senses, suddenly it felt infused with a warmth that really drew me in, the moment coincidentally when Daisy finds a version of love in her life, and what had gone before becomes the bedrock for what follows...and the stone analogies jumped out every which way I turned. These are mixed in with flower metaphors and I suspect hidden and unplumbed depths to Carol Shield's writing that will be rewarded with repeated readings. The chapters in the book that recount deaths...there are several, are truly remarkable and I can only begin to imagine how hard those must be for any author to imagine and then recount. It must involve facing up to your own final moments in the most painful way.
Knowing almost by heart the contents of Penelope Fitzgerald's book of collected writing House of Air, because I've read it so much the pages are falling out of my copy, I knew that the book contained Penelope Fitzgerald's review of The Stone Diaries and once I had my own thoughts simmering away nicely I turned to that review and was quite surprised.
Penelope Fitzgerald has her reservations about the book, citing some failures in Daisy's post-modern ambition to stand back and report on her own life as an independent witness, and indeed there are ambiguous moments when the narrative voice switches from first to third person whilst remaining through Daisy's eyes that could be called into question, but to me this was one of the book's assets. Those moments that had me questioning the whole genre of autobiographical fiction and how interesting that at the same time (well alongside) The Stone Diaries, my other read has been The Long Song by Andrea Levy which seems to do something very similar.
But what do I know and what does it matter, it doesn't, I have loved The Stone Diaries for so much more than style and form, it's a book about the life of an ordinary and seemingly unremarkable woman, a life infused with detail (always relevant) wisdom (never overbearing) and humour (never cloying) sadness (never sentimental) and an intelligence (never patronising) and I knew as I read that I had found a treasure...and after some of this year's Booker long list reading, a treasure was just what the reading doctor prescribed.
Jay Parini suggests of Carol Shields and The Stone Diaries
' Her words ring like stones in a brook...the reader is caught in whirlpools and eddies, swirled, then launched further downstream.'
Yes, I jumped right into this book up to my neck and relished every word, and knowing that so many of you have done likewise, I'd love to know what made it special for you...

Baltimore Quilts & The Stone Diaries

 If I have a favourite quilt design based on degree of difficulty, and one that would take a truly enormous amount of effort for me to make, it has to be a Baltimore Album quilt. It would be a labour of love, no quick rotary cutting and machine piecing for instant results, this would be slow, methodical hand-stitched work over an extended period of time. This being me that would be very extended time given that the Millenium Quilt remains unfinished.

But there is something magical and romantic about the history of Baltimore quilts too.
Over a period of just seven years, between 1845 and 1852, a group of exceptional album quilts were created in Baltimore, many it now seems erroneously assigned to the hand of Mary Evans, a bricklayer's daughter who lived with her widowed mother and nine siblings. The now refuted claims had for years been attributable only by comparison to a single known quilt block made by Mary Evans, but there is ongoing debate to the contrary. Strong evidence now suggests that the Bavarian-born and very entrepreneurial  Mary Hergenroder Simon may have been designing and selling these blocks as good old kits in 1840's Baltimore.
These new revelations only came to light as I heaved the mighty and beauteous tome American Quilts and Coverlets in the Metropolitan Museum of Art off the shelf just to be sure as I could be about my facts for this post.
But no matter about origins, we have the quilts and the legacy of the designs, the intricately appliqued blocks containing myriad fabrics and patterns with Turkey red as a prominent colour binding the whole together and they are truly things of breathtaking beauty if you like quilts, and perhaps even if you don't.
Those designs now named and synonymous with a Baltimore Album quilt and though I've made several single ones thanks to Elly Sienkiewicz's treasure of a book Baltimore Beauties and Beyond, (published in 1989, just about the time my little quilt shop was thriving,)  those single blocks have all stopped short of laying the foundations for a masterpiece (because to my mind these quilts epitomize the pinnacle of quilting expertise)  ending up instead as individual pieces, small wall hangings, gifts for godmothers, or special anniversaries of friends down the years.
Divine Guidance a keeper and one of my favourites but still no quilt on the horizon.
So if I had ever thought I might even consider making a Baltimore Album quilt I would need one hefty bout of inspiration from somewhere and I now suspect there could be no better book to provide that than The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. This despite no connection to Baltimore in the novel that I can recall and very little mention, if any, of quilts either, in contrast to a book like Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace which overtly buys into the tradition and must have had thousands of quilting readers hightailing off to their fabric stashes.
Having read plenty of Carol Shield's books down the years please don't ask me why I had never read The Stone Diaries until now. I have absolutely no idea, a few half-hearted attempts and then set asides, but the gift of a copy from KevinFromCanada, (and, yes now I see the likeness between that cover and the Emily quilt) and the solemn assurance as of one voice of our Canadian visitors recently that I must read it and that I would love it, was all the prompt I needed to do so.
I doubt there is a new and original thought to be had about The Stone Diaries but I'll still share mine here soon, and meanwhile the quilt analogy gathered from a book that reads like an album of memories and recollections with its attention to fine detail, in a variety of forms and narrative voices all ranging across differing viewpoints and offering a variety of perspectives, somehow all chimes with that sense of the album quilt and many contributing their own piece to make the whole.
It's that old adage about stitching a life into a quilt that resonates again.
I have also been reading another book that had passed me by, Sister's Choice - Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing by Elaine Showalter and one chapter in particular, Common Threads, and the language of the quilt metaphor in literature.
Bless Carol Shields, she didn't even go there in The Stone Diaries, if anything her subversive use of the metaphors of stones and flowers are far more challenging, and open to a much wider interpretation than the overtly feminist agenda assigned to the presence of the quilt, but I couldn't help relating this quote from Elaine Showalter to my reading of Carol Shields's book

'Piecing is thus an art of making do and eking out, an art of ingenuity, and conservation. It reflects the fragmentation of women's time, the scrappiness and uncertainty of women's creative or solitary moments...as the art critic Lucy Lippard observes, 'the mixing and matching of fragments is the product of the interrupted life...What is popularly seen as "repetitive", "obsessive", and "compulsive" in women's art is in fact a necessity for those whose time comes in small squares.'

Now if someone gifts you a book you really want to like it but on previous form there were no guarantees about this one, but if we're talking about Baltimore quilts reaching the pinnacles of excellence then the same can be said about certain books and I am left in little doubt that The Stone Diaries is my literary equivalent. This is what I love about reading, it's not an exact science, I can go wherever it takes me, no rights or wrongs but so many analogies all touched a chord with me as I looked at the structure of the novel and the life portrayed therein. In my usual inquisitive fashion I have now ordered a whole slew of books about and by Carol Shields to fill in those shelf gaps because I want to discover much more about her, but if awarding stars how would I rate it?When I do my little piece on the surprise classic that I am sent from The Reader magazine each quarter I am given a star-rating to work from as follows

***** - one of the best books I've ever read
**** - one of the best books I've read this year
*** - highly recommended
** - not for me but worth trying
0 - don't bother

It's a good system, I might even start using it here again because it leaves me in no doubt where I place a book and as I recall only one book I have done for them so far has made that ***** rating (To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf ) and perhaps just a few books each year would make it into that elite category here, but let's make a start for 2010.
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields *****

War Horse gallops in...

It takes an awful lot to knock certain debates off the front page of the local paper so I even I did a double take when I saw this week's edition. Where was the rumbling bother about moving the war memorial away from it's ignominious resting place next to the public toilets, or the weekly news of vandals wrecking the slide in the Meadows.
Oh no we have bigger fish to fry this week.

War Horse has been on my list of 'Things to See' for ages and I will manage it when I'm up in London soon since Curzon very kindly sent me the books, both Michael Morpurgo's novel and the play, after she'd been to see it, and War Horse actor Will Rycroft pops in here occasionally.
But great excitement because Steven's in town and filming War Horse up on Dartmoor, no sightings yet but actually I'm not sure I'd know Steven Spielberg if I tripped over him.

Bookhound the Builder...

Can he fix it?
Yes he can... I wouldn't want you thinking Bookhound's perfect or anything, we do both have our moments, but not only can he cut the crusts off cucumber sandwiches, he can draw plans and build things too, and he hasn't actually done this whole building from scratch thing on his own before, but we decided it was surely only like making a quilt really, except out of blocks... sort of.
So our planning permission went through unopposed, because mysteriously we were the only people the planning department wrote to asking if we objected to this building going on in our vicinity.
This may have been because we are the only people living in our vicinity, and we decided not to be NIMBYs, we didn't mind at all... let us not stand in the way of these nice people building in our back yard we said. It's going to be a small extension at the far end of the house that will solve some damp issues, inevitable in an old stone built cottage and also make that end of the house more self-contained with a kitchen of its own and the potential for ...for lots of things.
It goes in the local paper too and you'd be utterly amazed at the number of people who obviously read the planning applications because it's been non-stop around town these last few weeks,
'What are you building now then?'
'Isn't that house big enough already?'
By some miracle Bookhound had the footings dug and ready for inspection within twenty-four hours, much to the planning officer's amazement, er... ahem... and then it was time for the concrete to fill them. Never knowingly under-dug here when it comes to something that's involved playing with a digger for a week, the trenches were just slightly deeper than required and thus could happily take the weight of a multi-story car park should the need ever arise.

Oh dear, concrete.
After a fairly lengthy debate when we weighed up costings and what would be involved in mixing up 3.6 cubic metres ourselves (that's the royal 'ourselves') versus getting a lorry load in, it was eventually a no contest.
I bought Bookhound a brand new shiny orange gift of a cement mixer and said get on with it. This perhaps akin to him buying me some cotton seed and saying make your own fabric.

So of course I didn't say that, I don't want him crocked half way through all this after all, who would do the shopping and cut the crusts off the sandwiches then?
But the logistics of getting this stuff around the back of the house were very unstraightforward and we've done this before so we know what happens. The rotating lorry arrives, dumps several tons of liquid cement with a penchant for setting rock solid quite fast, dumps it miles away from where you need it and you then run like things possessed with wheelbarrows full and against the clock.
So being older and four building extensions wiser, Bookhound rang around, had reps to visit and it was agreed that a man with a pumping lorry would also be required. This all has to be synchronised because they happened to be coming from opposite ends of the county and we're working to a tight budget, so you don't want to be paying the pump man £80 an hour to be pumping fresh air while your cement lorry ambles along four hours late thinking it'll come to you drekkly via a drop in Bideford.
So it was all set up and by yet another minor miracle and a few phone calls diverting the absent lorry from Bideford, it all worked like a dream after a complex manoeuvre and docking out in the lane akin to something going on with the Mir space station.

Except more like a very fast moving nightmare for poor Bookhound, as the pump man languidly pointed the spewing hose pipe and stood and watched him shovel, and the lorry man stayed right out of the way on the lane drinking our coffee and taking in the lovely view.

Just a few dodgy wellie-top moments when a minute longer and Bookhound would have had that real-life Pompeii experience.

And then the small problem of what to do with the spare 0.4 cu metres of concrete because they insisted on delivering 4 when we only needed 3.6. We toyed, only toyed mind you, with the idea of a greenhouse base somewhere, but a base it would have remained having waved goodbye to three greenhouses since we've lived here. I took pictures and cheered from the sidelines whilst glaring at the pump man...who didn't get a Kit Kat with his coffee despite hinting that he'd like one.
Anyway now Bookhound's onto the building and it has corners and little sides and things and I go out every day and utter words of encouragement along the lines of

'Oh that's nice'

or

' Doesn't it look lovely'

about a row of breeze blocks, because after all he has admired my quilts in the making for years, but that's all next week 's instalment.
Clever Bookhound.

Happy Birthday to...

Forgive the indulgence but I get three goes a year on here to embarrass a child and so I must just wish Offspringette a very Happy Birthday.
Isn't she sweet... and look at that thing called a nappy pin.
We had a bit of a traumatic time between us on this day back in 1981. I was a typical nurse and therefore a pregnancy disaster, with pre-eclampsia, an emergency full term delivery and my little 5lb 2oz firstborn bundled off for ten days of needles and tubes in intensive care, which almost broke my heart. I wasn't too well either but knew if I could only feed her myself she'd pick up fast, and eventually had a bit of a tantrum about it all, the sort of tantrum you're only capable of in those first early days of motherhood. Of course I was right, some things you just now, and thereafter if I couldn't get up to SCBU she was brought down to me on the ward day and night to feed, this back in the days when test-weighing before and after a feed was considered an accurate way of showing that you weren't feeding your baby enough and therefore a bottle was required. Please don't tell me off now for putting an extra cardigan on her before they took her back to weigh, because she and I had a little chat about it all and planned our escape from what was the old Freedom Fields Hospital in Plymouth.
This picture was taken when we got back to the peace and quiet of the now sadly defunct Tavistock Maternity Home, where ten day post-natal stays were the order of the day, and I was allowed to stay a bit longer to recover and get the feeding properly established without cheating. Having been the local health visitor they were very kind to me, failing at breast feeding didn't seem like an option if I ever wanted to hold my head up around this town again. For my sins this little scrap then fed 2hrly day and night for months afterwards to make up for all that lost growing in utero, but we managed.
Babies in towelling nappies, hobbles in dressing gowns around the beautiful gardens in the sunshine, lasting friendships made and compulsory afternoon sleeps on beds before being woken for tea and homemade cake were the order of the day in the Maternity Home; crying babies wheeled off to the nursery if they wouldn't settle, where the heat used to be turned up so that they would (shock...horror) and they did, and we all emerged whole and healed and ready to give this motherhood thing a bash, those really were the days
Happy Birthday little one x

dovegreyreader asks...Carol Drinkwater

I think Carol Drinkwater might not thank me for harping back to the old days and referring to her as Mrs Herriot when she is now such a successful author in her own right, but we were an All Creatures Great and Small - adoring family and with connections to Askrigg in Wensleydale where the series was filmed.
'Oh look' my mum used to say ' there's the Temperance Hotel, I expect Auntie Annie's in there.'
Carol's place in our hearts stems from that wonderful TV series, so I have to at least mention it in passing, and it was my complete pleasure to meet her during the recent book tour to promote the latest in her series about life on her olive farm in the South of France, Return to the Olive Farm.

Can you tell us about your writing, how the books came about...we love to know everything

The Olive Farm books are born of a real love story. A love story that now exists on many levels but began with a glass of wine in a hotel lobby in Sydney. I had been filming a children’s mini-series in Melbourne for the ABC and Central TV in Britain. After all my scenes were ‘in the can’, as they say in film speak, I flew to Sydney to do a little publicity. The hotel I was staying in – it no longer exists – was home to the entertainment world. (I frequently found myself having breakfast at the next table to Elton John or I’d sit in on a late-night jam session listening to Mark Knopfler on piano) so it was no surprise that the French executive producer of the mini-series I had been shooting was also staying at the same hotel. He heard I was there, rang my room and invited me to join him for a drink. He claims to this day that I walked into the lobby some half an hour and he first set eyes on me fell in love. I did not know that then, of course. He invited me to have dinner with him the following evening and during that dinner, even before the first course was served, proposed to me. I was flabbergasted, did not take him seriously, took a long slug of my Chardonnay and moved on to  other subjects. The following morning I saw him in the breakfast room. He was leaving the city and promised to telephone me for my response to his question... And so the love story began. The following spring he invited me to accompany him to Cannes for the TV festival. While he was setting up deals, I moseyed about and went looking for my House By the Sea. At the end of the week together we visited a jungled ruin of an olive farm and vineyard. Both crazily in love, completely broke, we were enamoured by the property and decided to put in an offer... Thus began our love affair with the Olive Farm. It took us over two years to cut back the land and when our hillside was finally cleared we found the ancient drystone terracing  and on those terraces were sixty-eight, 400-year-old olive trees... There began my love affair with the olive, the tree, its golden oil and the tree’s mysterious mythological past.

We also love to know about your writing day.. I imagine if I lived where you do I'd at least have to wander round the olive tress first, do a bit of sweeping...too many lovely distractions so can you tell us a little about the process, special writing place, fountain pen and paper or laptop, writing clothes (we've had several interesting garments without which a book can't be written)

If I began by sweeping the terraces, Lynne, I’d do nothing else. They run for many square metres! I write by candlelight, no matter what time of day or night. I find the flames (usually about six tall candles burning at once) soothing and inspiring. If possible, I like doors and windows open. The birdsong and sounds of nature are hugely important to me, to my work and descriptions. I am the world’s BIGGEST scruff at my desk and usually work in a sarong, barefoot, or a bathing costume. My hair is knotted up on my head so that I resemble a suntanned turnip. I usually work for about two - three hours, then pause, have a swim, root about in the garden, getting my fingers dirty and active. I like to run with the dogs, visit the bees, make sure they have sufficient water, and generally shout and holler to get the blood flowing and the energy channels moving after sitting still for a while. When alone I start about sixty-thirty am but a little later when Michel (my husband) is about. I work till somewhere round two in the afternoon then stop until about five when I go through till eight or later if I am deep in a book and up against a deadline. It is not unknown for me to work seventeen hours a day though I cannot keep this up for too long. It is usually the last month or six weeks before delivery when I want to be IN the book. Nothing else exists for me during that period of time and if I could go for twenty fours, seven days a week I would but obviously cannot. In other words, total immersion becomes the norm and then once delivered I crash, restlessly at first but slowly picking myself up and coming back to life

When you are not writing what do you like to do?

Aside from running an olive farm and rushing back and forth to Paris, to our Mad Old Château from where  Michel runs his small film business? I travel a great deal and write articles for quite a few journals and magazines. I love travelling. I am a gypsy, no doubt about it, and have Traveller blood in me from grandparents on my father’s side.
I love hanging out in Paris, going to the movies, sitting for hours in cafés and bars reading, watching people, eavesdropping on others’ conversations. We entertain a great deal and I enjoy that too particularly if we are serving our own produce.
Last night because I was leaving this morning for a three-week book tour and I had arrived at the Château with sixteen lettuces plucked from the garden we had a Salade Niçoise party and invited the neighbours, the priest who lives across the grass and those young trainees working with M and living in with us at the Mad Old Château. ‘Lettuce Say Bonne Chance to Carol for her Book Tour!’ It was great fun and I get very thrilled when I impress the French with the quality of my food products. It is a real coup!!

Who would you want us to read if we were short of a good suggestion? Who mustn't we miss?

I have recently read Troubles, the Farrell that has just won the Lost ManBooker. What a tragedy his early death. I love his humour and his attention to detail. He is a must, I think
Marguerite Duras is my heroine. I have no idea how popular she is in England or English. I read her in both French and English and think she is marvellous. She writes close to the bone and her raw emotional perception can be heart wrenching. I translated one of her plays into English when I was trying to master a level of French that went beyond: ‘Please can you deliver eight sacks of cement and one and half tons of washed grey sand’
It was a challenge but a wonderful discipline in the mastery of compression, of succinct elegance. When she hits her stride, I think she is almost unsurpassable.

This year's brood...

So far just one very noisy woodpecker having a tap at the  BranWolery but this little crew have just stuck their heads over the parapet out on the verandah.

Don't miss...

... Badaude's fabulous take on the Port Eliot Flower Show.
Badaude sat next to me in the press tent and I had a sneaky et envious watch of her drawing and now I'm really sorry I missed her exhibition in the basement.
Her artistic skill is immaculate perfection unsurpassed, especially compared to mine which hasn't really developed into anything much since I was about six years old.
I also saved her from a fate worse than anything else by pointing out that the grape poised near her elbow harboured a wasp ready to sting and which would probably have taken out that drawing arm for at least a week.
I'm sure you have me to thank for this drawing really.

Are they funny, are they dead? ~ Marjorie Ann Watts

"Life is too short for a long story..."

So sayeth Lady Mary Wortley Montague (1689-1762) her good looks and her eyelashes apparently decimated by smallpox and Mary one of the first to have her children innoculated against the disease in 1717 thus paving the way for Jenner's discovery and the widespread acceptance of his much safer process of vaccination.
All of which has nothing to do with Marjorie Ann Watts' book Are they funny, are they dead? published by CB Editions, but I came across that quote whilst looking for some pithy mention of the short story genre by someone famous, and was then completely sidetracked by Mary's colourful life and her position between Aphra Behn and Jane Austen in the canon of literature by women writers.
Except Marjorie does have a literary claim to fame... her grandmother CA Dawson Scott, known as Sappho, wrote twenty novels and also established PEN, the international writer's organisation and it will coincidentally be my pleasure to visit PEN, having been invited to take part in a panel discussion there in the autumn.
But Marjorie Ann Watts's story is interesting in its own right and perhaps that quote isn't so out of place, because at the age of eighty three she finally has a book for adults in print after successes some years ago with children's books, namely The Mill House Cat.  Marjorie trained as a painter at the Chelsea School of Art, studying with Edward Ardizzone and was taught life drawing by Henry Moore.
Are they funny, are they dead? originally presented to a publisher who tutted and sent Marjorie off to write a novel first, far more acceptable than a short story collection. That novel duly written and liked by the publisher but publication then declined again on the grounds that eighty three was too old for a book deal....gasp...if the Tinker reads this he'll be onto the Ageism Dept @ EqualOpps in a flash. He's currently arguing the toss with car hire firms who class him as too old to hire a car for his next trip around Orkney, this despite a lifetime of No Claims bonus to his name....don't get him started.
So I think we must be grateful to Charles Boyle of CB Editions who saw through the hogwash and has published this remarkable collection of short stories which I have been reading slowly over the last few weeks. I'm trying to keep a collection on the go at all times now, on that one-a-day basis which allows the story to blossom and grow petals in my mind through the day, though I must admit I was frequently tempted to race on and squeeze in several a day of these.
So much publicity recently surrounding press lists of the up-coming twenty-somethings, the promising authors we absolutely must look out for, all very laudable and interesting, but I'm sorry the blindingly obvious has to be said ...you might know about cutting edge literary devices and creative writing at that age, but you know very little about life compared to the experiences of an eighty-three year old, and it is that life that shines through in Marjorie Ann Watts's stories.
Ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, the daily humdrum stuff of living and loving all telescoped through the perceptive eyes of an octogenarian. So the insensitivities of others laid bare with refreshing candour, those miscommunications, the innocent observations of children so frequently misunderstood by adults and there's something about revenge being a dish best served cold that is meted out here too...
...Mrs Calder wickedly determined to go out in her own style despite her daughter's best and more socially acceptable intentions
...the deliciously and much-deserved retribution awaiting the blase and cynical psychiatrist, or the philandering husband
...the struggles with conscience
...the unlikely combinations of characters, the immigrant and the vagrant
all beautifully observed from that unique vantage point of age and experience; ageing seen through the eyes, with respect, of the 'aged' and then that retrospective analysis of childhood that it's impossible to make when you are younger.
Clare Wigfall writing of her own short story collection The Loudest Sound & Nothing sees it as a book of her twenties for its recollections of time and place as she wrote, the books she was reading, the friends she hang out with and, as she sent the book out into the world, hoped it wouldn't be judged or rejected unfairly; in fact it won prizes.
This is surely Marjorie Ann Watts's book of her entire lifetime and I sincerely hope there are more to come.

Holiday snaps...

I probably only have myself to blame, but vacate the book room sofa and my curl-up-to-read spot on the Hudson Bay blanket for a few weeks and it was obvious squatters would move in and claim the territory for their own (can you tell the Aga's off again) but this won't do at all.
All this playing has been very nice, if not a bit exciting at times, staycations work so well when you live here, but it was back to "work" last week and now that life has quietened down a little it's back to books too, but I thought I'd do a final round up and reflection on the playing first because I have met some very lovely people over the last few weeks.
I think the excitement started over a lunch with Carol Drinkwater while she was in Devon on her recent UK book tour. For those who may be unaware, Carol is known to many of us as the first Mrs Herriot in the much-loved 1980's TV series All Creature Great and Small.
I heard Carol speak to a packed audience about her life on the olive farm near Cannes and was very impressed; actresses who turn to writing know how to command a stage at a literary festival and Carol spoke flawlessly and notelessly, was incredibly entertaining and the applause at the end and the chatter afterwards suggested that this had been a very enjoyable event indeed. So Carol and I lunched at nearby Buckfast Abbey, of great interest to Carol who had explained about her endeavours on the olive farm to encourage a stable bee population by ceasing all chemical spraying of the olive trees. Carol has written a lovely dovegreyreader asks... for us which will be up later this week and I also took a couple of days out from getting Emily quilted and ready for her trip to Canada to make Carol a little quilted ' thank you' for all the hours of pleasure this family have had curled up on the sofa watching that TV series.

The block I chose was called Providence and necessitated that trip to Cowslip Workshops to find some olive-y looking fabric to go with the bees and the blue of the Cote D'azur as well as that deep red to signify the heat. I got quite carried away quilting it in circles which felt a bit like the bee dance and flight.
Then Canada came to call,which you all know about but may not have read Mrs KFC's very flattering write-up of the visit here and you can see Emily in her new home. I'm blushing but we really did have such a good time and I have lovely memories of working on that quilt in the lead up.

Calm, quiet June evenings which draw cats around like a magnet.
Next I whizzed off to Honiton for a wonderful meeting with Karen from Cornflower.
Despite being an e mail friend and doing the shared Persephone teas on our respective blogs we had never met, so of course we settled down in an instant and proceeded to drain Honiton of available oxygen as we talked our way through a very pleasurable couple of hours. We swapped book gifts too, I gave Karen that spare copy of Stoner by John Williams and she has promised to pass it on to... well that person will have to wait and see, while Karen gave me Hawkfall by George Mackay Brown. How incredible that we managed to choose unowned and previously unread books for each other.
I think I may have mentioned the hysterically funny and memorable visit from author David Vann and his wife Nancy, touring around the West Country and a perfect excuse for another cream tea. They got lost and in the end I drove out to meet them rather than try and explain, and it was a white-knuckled couple who followed me in after that drive around the lanes which apparently don't resemble US freeways. I doubt there are many people who would happily let the conversation wander into hunting, shooting, fishing, skinning and the like over the scones and jam, but the Gamekeeper came in halfway through so it was inevitable. Such a delightful couple, it's a real privilege to have met them and don't miss David speaking at the Edinburgh Festival if you're there this year.
Lunch here (thank you Bookhound...again) with Amanda Craig was a chance to catch up on the literary gossip, none of which I could possibly repeat, but Amanda, who has an idyllic rural retreat nearby, always has me falling off my chair with hilarity and incredulity and a sort of thankfulness that I'm down here in Devon, miles away from it all.
So that's about it, I think you know about all the other excitements of Port Eliot but just some advance warning, and I'll try and say this calmly but actually I'm on the ceiling with excitement, I have been offered a dovegreyreader tent of my own for next year's festival, so watch this space, plus Cathy St Germans is going to do dovegreyreader asks... any day now on what it's like to have thousands of people tramping around your home and garden.
Meanwhile I think it's time to reclaim my reading corner from these two layabouts and settle down with some good books. I've had a completing and finishing few weeks of  books that seem to have been on the go forever, didn't read anything I had planned to, and now I'm dipping my toes gingerly into the Bookerthon. I've abandoned two already, one on the grounds of depressing subject matter and the other on deeply unpleasant characters and more 'f' words than I care to cope with. I would do a huge disservice to both right now because we've had such a wonderful few weeks I somehow don't want to burst the bubble with depressing cutting-edge, very clever for the sake of it, contemporary fiction...does that make sense?
Good holidays... that down time from the day to day, are precious and I find that mood they leave you with needs to be preserved, eked out and spread into the weeks and months that follow; some times are far too precious to sacrifice on the altar of depressing fiction.
How often did I used to go back to work in a doctor's surgery and feel every holiday benefit had dissipated by lunchtime on the first day, now I work from home I can control all this.
All in good time, I'll get there eventually but meanwhile Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America seems infused with an irrepressible joie de vivre and so far I'm loving it and who'd have thought Dartmoor would feature, but I have also fatally picked up Peyton Place by Grace Metalious and it is making strangely compelling reading.
How about you...I'd love to know about your vacations, staycations and associated reading choices.

 

In the running...

It's going to be back to books again this week but we are indulging in athletics addiction this weekend, watching the European championships from Barcelona and feeling a sense of rising anticipation with all the "2012 two years away" publicity this week too.
Team GB doing unusually well, but what about the amazing Merlene Ottey, still competing at 50.
I meanwhile am watching from my armchair (Merlene will outlive me for sure) feverishly knitting and more quilting because I am on the Village Show committee this year, and expectations are running high for the first week of September that I'll at least enter my staples in those favoured classes to say nothing of the five flowers in an eggcup etc.
So in keeping with my completer-finisher policy I'm working on more UFOs (UnFinished Objects) and I think you can see there's going to have to be a deliberate error, mix and match thing going on as that hand-dyed wool runs out as I approach the second foot of these.
The WI judge may well not be amused

and will doubtless have a moan about the quilting stitches on this but it's the taking part that counts isn't it.

Anyone else busy running a marathon or making something?