dovegreyreader scribbles

And on the sixth day....

....they didst kick off their Jimmy Choos, didst hang up the frocks and didst arrange for their hats to be installed at Goonhilly Down as satellite dishes, before resting after quite enough excitement for one week.

But whilst here in the UK we have been enjoying unseasonally warm weather and indulging in open and increasingly rare displays of national pride whilst basking through a clutch of public holidays in quick succession, I am very aware that some of you in America may be dealing with the aftermath of something very different... the tornadoes which look quite terrifying.

Thoughts are with those caught up in this tragedy and I hope as always that you and yours are safe and well.

The dovegreyreader Royal Wedding Album ~ Part Two

So where were we...right, yes, time to process out and forgive the indulgence but I'd like all this recorded here, and if it's time to process I should mention the all important processing music.

I've done a lot of choral processing at weddings in my time, and just one procession of my own of the bridal variety. I walked down the aisle to a very understated piece, Rhosymedre by Ralph Vaughan Williams and back out again with Bookhound on my arm to Widor's Tocatta, this was thirty-five years ago before everyone else decided to have Widor too. I have always loved singing Parry so to hear I Was Glad as Catherine walked down the aisle created just the right atmosphere for what was to follow. Out to the Elgar and magnificence guaranteed.

and that all-important left wheel around the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior
 







Carriages and pageantry fabulous, even some sunshine, though thank heavens the cameras swiftly panned elsewhere as the Philip tried to get into his well-sprung vehicle, I thought it was going to catapult him out again....honestly I doubt he'd thank anyone for helping him but he is ninety so you'd hope someone is keeping an eye on him and HM these days... falls prevention etc. I'm starting to worry.
But the rain held off and we all loved every minute here.



Apparently one horse unseated its rider, bolted and then joined back in with the procession, but I missed all that, too intent on soaking up the atmosphere which just lifts the spirits.

Thence to the balcony and the kiss by which time my eyes are in a permo-mist.


 
and my source tells me this was a Hurricane.


I can understand there are plenty of people who hate all this but I suspect all the cynics and the Royal Wedding curmudgeons might be the people with the loudest voices and with the biggest platforms to shout from perhaps, thus giving the impression that there is little appetite for an event like this here in the UK. All I seem to have heard is moaning and people leaving the country to get away from it all, but who can doubt the enthusiasm of the British public, as well as people around the world for an event like this??

Here's wishing the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and long, happy and peaceful marriage and by the way...did anyone hear the music the BBC played immediately after the coverage had finished?

Bring Me Sunshine, so we did get our moment.

 

 

The dovegreyreader Royal Wedding Album ~ Part One

Oh my, wasn't that grand... the dress, Alexander McQueen and the way those gentle pleats fell so perfectly and the bride radiant beneath that delicate lace veil. Then the ceremony, the music... that John Rutter anthem, the pageantry and the crowds. But hold on a minute didn't the dovegreyreader party all look the bees knees. Great turn out everyone and sorry to have been dashing around getting the best camera angles etc but I think you'll agree we have captured the essence of the moment with the dovegreyreader Royal Wedding album.

A sensible move for us to opt for the Great West Door I think, and just let the celebs fight it out round at the North Door. Posh and Becks ... Elton and David

I was choked after the first glimpse of that dress...


and then I come over all Sound of Music when I see any wedding from this angle and that was me done for

 
This one saw me well and truly out of puff but I hope you'll agree worth the climb

A beautiful service, I went through several hankies

I had to bribe a few Deans to get this angle but as soon as I said it was for dovegreyreader scribbles and we knew RevCheryl, no problem...

and I tried not to put these little chaps off but had to get a choir shot

Oh... hello Bookhound...

and the cat (Tess, sister of Rocky) isn't the least bit interested


Second half in a minute, because I've just done a round of  the buffet, sumptuous fare... hope you're enjoying the Street Party.

The Street Party

and before you ask, no I didn't knit all this but someone did.

It's the big day...

dovegreyreaders you shall go to the Royal wedding...

OK it's our final rehearsal day and I'm soooo excited. I've been busy all week sorting out our corsages much to the detriment of my knitted Archbishop of Canterbury who is currently not looking in any fit state to conduct a wedding.
One corsage each, hope you like..

There's a box of pins so if you could fix this discreet little installation to your person tomorrow that would be ideal and won't we all look grand.

I just wanted a quick run through of the final arrangements. Here's the official dovegreyreader guest list for the Abbey, [grandparents name] [first pet] - [road you grew up in] and I have to say, what a distinguished party we make...

Lady Nellie Sparky-Russell
Lord William Patch-Fullers
Lady Ada Hickory-Washington
Lady Florence Martha-Queensbury
Lady Hartha Malkin-Redwood.
Lady Ellen Sooty-Marmora
Lady Mary Binkie-Dibbs
Lady Lillian Sooty-Tamar
Lady Frideswide Abdul-Whinney
Lady Cecilia Marmaduke-Chessenden
Lady Kathleen Alfred-Edwardes
Lady Florence Penny-Montpelier
Lady Francis Scotch-Broughton
Lady Olwen Ziggy-Cavendish
Lady Isabel Digby-Chilston
Lady Alice Swimmy-Kingsfield
Lady Lillian Squidgy-North
Lady Beatrice Rosie-Cecil
Lady Amelia-May Snow-Clarence
Lady Daisy Benjy-Shepherd
Lady Alice Hoppity-Larkins
Lady Feigy Tufty-Walm
Lady Beatrice Abner-Westmoreland
Lady Harriet Jade-Caldicote
Lady Louisa Billie-Seneca.
Lady Beatrice Ginger-Walker
Lady Edith Muzzi-St.Clements
Lady Helen Rajah-Overbrook
Lady Dorothy Dandy-Princes
Lady Eleanora Le Touquet-Southend
Lady Annie Smudge-Millview
Lady Elizabeth Timmy-Tyringham
Lady Ada Punkin-Hill
Lady Violet Fluffy-Stoney
Lady Audrey Milton-Guscott
Lady Alma Rags-Oranut.
Lady Geraldine Rodney-Somerset
Lady Ada Terry-Lightbowne
Lady Mary Shakespeare-Tidcombe
Lord William Binky-Queensholm
Lady Dorothy Mitzi St Margaret
Lady Anastasia Sam-Oldoak
Lady Violet Rose Ophelia-Saffron
Lady Sylvia Blitzen-Ridgedale
Lady Violet Alice-Vaucluse
Lady Emma Trixie-Knoll
Lady Emily Rayner-St Martin
Lady Malkin-Redwood
Lady Fanny Snowy-Gladstone
Lady Messoda Fuzzy-Chancellor
Lady Winifred Corrie-Gloucester
Lady Dorothy Bob-Jackson
Lady Elizabeth Timmy-Tyringham
Lady Iris Bernie-Westend
Lord George Bridie-Roselands
Lady Renee Bandit-Cowes

Doing refreshments - Smuttie Schottenring
                             - Algernon Oswaldthistlethwaite

If your name is listed then you're in and on the seating plan (sort of) even better if you could embroider your full name on an outer garment for ease of identification. Can we all be gathered at the Great West door of Westminster Abbey by 10.15am prompt ..it's this big one under the pointy window (not the one under the round window, that's for the commoners) you can't miss it.


That gives us time for a quick catch up on what we've been reading and then I've arranged for us to enter the Abbey just before HM The Queen and Prince Philip and the other Royals.

Sorry but there will be a bit of a pat-down search before we're allowed in but I've enlisted the best help I could find and Il Divo have agreed to sing while they...er ..pat.

If we could process down the aisle in step, right foot leading and at a measured pace, please be sure not to tread on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, but do wave to anyone you know of course and then we'll need to peel off (not clothes) ... half of us are helping to bulk out the Middletons in the North Lantern and the other half supporting the Royals in the South Lantern, reserved seating of course and there will be a name on your seat. It might be someone else's but don't worry about that, just screw it up and say you got there first.

Dress code...well the posher the better though I'm sticking with the thermals and I'll have Offspringette's Ugg boots on because you know how hellish cold these old church floors can be. I'll also be armed with a cushion and I don't go anywhere without my Kindle these days either.

Afterwards I've pulled a few strings and as we already have the Team Tolstoy troika harnessed up we'll be part of the main carriage procession back to the palace...vitally important that everyone wears gloves for the waving. I suggest home-knitted muffattees because you can never be sure of the temperature at this time of year, plus it seems a shame for us to have survived the Battle of Austerlitz only to get frostbite along the Mall leaving us depleted for the 250 pages of Borodino to come, and if we could share knee blankets too. Balaclavas probably best left at home. Fergie did ask if she could sneak in with us on the troika but I'm afraid, as she isn't reading War & Peace this year, I had to say no. 

These are approximate timings but of course there will be a huge number of people who know us along the way so we might slow things up a bit, but the Palace have agreed that's all fine and the aeroplane flyover thing can be shunted back a bit if needs be. Rain is forecast but since when did that bother us, so we may need to do a sort of aerial tortoise-phalanx formation of brollies.

So here's our schedule and I've highlighted the most important bits for your attention. Note the timing of our arrival, I have negotiated this with the Palace explaining that 8.15am was just a tad early for us because by 11am and after that early morning pot of tea..well...

8.15 -9.45am  The general congregation will arrive at the Great North Door of Westminster Abbey.

From 9.50am  Governors-General and Prime Ministers of Realm Countries, the Diplomatic Corps, and other distinguished guests arrive at the Abbey.

10.10am          The Bridegroom and Prince Henry of Wales leave Clarence House for Westminster Abbey.  They arrive at the Abbey at 10.15am.

10.20am          Members of Foreign Royal Families arrive at Westminster Abbey from Buckingham Palace.

10.20am          Mrs. Michael (Carole) Middleton and Mr. James Middleton leave the Goring Hotel for Westminster Abbey.  They arrive at the Abbey at 10.27am.

10.25am          Members of the Royal Family (except those listed below) leave Buckingham Palace for Westminster Abbey.  They arrive at the Abbey at 10.30am.

10.32am          The official dovegreyreader party enters the Abbey by the Great West Door and processes down the aisle taking every chance to ask people what they are reading and share book recommends on the way ...subsequent timings may run a little later than scheduled.

10.35am          The following Members of the Royal Family leave Buckingham Palace for Westminster Abbey.  They arrive at the Abbey at 10.40am:

The Duke of York

Princess Beatrice of York

Princess Eugenie or York

The Earl and Countess of Wessex

The Princess Royal and Vice Admiral Timothy Laurence

10.38am          The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall leave Clarence House for Westminster Abbey.  They arrive at the Abbey at 10.42am.

10.40am          The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh leave Buckingham Palace for Westminster Abbey.  They arrive at the Abbey at 10.45am.

10.48am          The Bridesmaids and Pages leave the Goring Hotel for Westminster Abbey.  They arrive at the Abbey at 10.55am.

10.51am          The Bride, accompanied by Mr. Michael Middleton, leaves the Goring Hotel for Westminster Abbey.

11.00am          The Marriage Service begins.  The Marriage Service will be relayed by audio speakers along the Route. The dovegreyreader contingent have been asked to sing Bring Me Sunshine as the happy couple leave the Abbey... can we rely on someone for a prefectly -pitched A flat please?

12.15pm          The Carriage Procession of the Bride and Bridegroom with a Captain’s Escort of the Household Cavalry, followed by The Queen’s Procession with a Sovereign’s Escort of the Household Cavalry, leaves Westminster Abbey for Buckingham Palace.

12.20pm          The dovegreyreader Team Tolstoy troika, with a Sovereign's escort of the Royal Hussars, balalaikas and cossack dancing, will be providing knitted blankets for the Royal knees as well as their own, and will follow the wedding carriage closely. Should a Royal horse be taken lame we can manage with two and supply a spare.. does anyone have emergency harnessing skills /ostler capabilities? Preferably at Level 3 NVQ?

12.30pm          The Bride’s Carriage Procession arrives at Buckingham Palace with the Team Tolstoy troika right behind. We will therefore be the first to congratulate the Royal couple and wish them every happiness for the future and I feel sure Wills and Catherine will want to thank us for the singing.

12.40pm          Members of the Royal Family and Members of Foreign Royal Families arrive at Buckingham Palace. They may need to use the tradesman's entrance as there are quite a lot of the dovegreyreader party and ten minutes isn't long to get us all unloaded.

From 12.40pm Other guests for the Reception arrive at Buckingham Palace but the dovegreyreader party goes in ahead of them for the main photos

1.25pm            The Queen and the Bride and Bridegroom, together with their  Families, appear on the Balcony along with the dovegreyreader contingent...haven't you always wondered what that room's like behind the balcony?

1.30pm             Fly Past by the Royal Air Force and Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. Please know your Spitfires (top) from your Lancasters (bottom) to impress Philip, Charles etc and you might want to bring along some ear plugs for this.




General points of etiquette...

Don't touch the Queen...unless she touches you first that is, in which case all's fair etc.
Call her Ma'am to rhyme with jam.
Do laugh at all Prince Philip's jokes, he wrote the foreword to the Tinker's book, he's a mate.
Don't kick the corgis no matter how tempting.
Don't mention the Romanovs.
Don't mention Wallis Simpson.
If you see Camilla taking a crafty fag break indoors please warn her of the dangers of passive smoking to the rest of us and ask her to step out onto the balcony to light up.

I'm afraid if you are not on the guest list you will have to watch it on the tele but don't worry, you can be getting the street party sorted.


If you could be cutting the crusts off the cucumber sarnies and make sure the urn is switched on that would be a great help. We'll be done and dusted and gasping for a cup of tea by about 2pm so we'll come back, kick off our shoes and tell you all about it.

PS If you can't spot Lady Nellie Sparky-Russell there tomorrow it's because she's in the Tower.             

Fifty Hats That Changed the World

So we've done the bags, now it's time for Fifty Hats That Changed the World and a book that I thought may be of less interest to me as the one and only person in the world who definitely doesn't seem to suit a hat and has little interest in them either. However reading this book suggests this may say more about the era I have lived in than anything more perceptive or damning about my bone structure or general unsuitability. In fact just this year, feeling so cold during the winter, I eschewed the drawer full of dog-walking pull-on fleece affairs with integral ear flaps all laying on a bed of knitted striped bobble hats various, and regressed instead to the beret and with some degree of success.

Now I discover the beret was not the French fashion chapeau of choice either, its origins lie with the Basque peasants who wore the txapela in the foothill of the Pyrenees to keep off the constant mountain drizzle, which obviously makes it equally well-suited to the foothills of the Tamar Valley.

The popularity of the fashion hat declined after World War II, so perhaps by the time I arrived in the 1950s hats were fast becoming a dated thing of the past and possibly now I'm feeling a bit out of the fashion loop, not really knowing where to start, with the recent hat resurgence? By the time I arrived gone were the days where it was considered unseemly for a woman to leave the house hatless though I was regularly clad in home-knitted bonnets in the winter to fend off earache and sunhats in the summer to fend off...the sun.

So the book was suprisingly interesting given that the functions of a hat can be so various, for warmth, protection, as the symbol of a role or with the aesthetic power to transform, and once the book had elaborated on the power of the hat 'as a kind of frame for some very human moments in history' I was intrigued.

The book launches with the Monomakh's Cap, a pertinent beginning given our Team Tolstoy venture, this the ultimate connotation of status in Russia and one still capable of creating that mystique, though it is almost a century since Russia dispensed with monarchy. Rich golden filigree and a band of sable make this the comfiest looking crown any monarch could wish for. I often feel sorry for the Queen having to sport our Crown Jewels, this looks infinitely preferable.

On Friday we are going to have a high time of it with the hats I feel sure and none more so than the top hat. At its fashion zenith in the 1860s I had no idea it was Prince Albert we have to thank for leading the European top hat trend here in England, nor that the top hat had phallic connotations and in direct contrast to the enclosing nature of the Victorian bonnet. Nor did I know that they were originally made out of beaver's or rabbit's pelt, now replaced by hatter's plush.

Bowler hats, the Derby, the fez, the balaclava with its predictable Crimean war origins, stetsons, and then the Australian Akubra. The cork-strung hat looked on by Australians with a mixture of affection and dismay apparently thanks in large part to Crocodile Dundee. And then the trilby, so which came first, the book or the hat, a close cousin of the fedora and yes, it really did take it's name from George du Maurier's book Trilby gaining a bohemian glamour as a result. The trilby much in evidence on the heads of the 'dapper crooks' in a book I have just read again, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

And there was me thinking this would all about women's hats because again, through my era, hats for men have seemed in decline too...except here that is, where tweed flat caps still rule despite Madonna's best efforts. The original working man's headgear with all its Northern male connotations of pigeon fanciers and whippet-racing, so with Prince Charles now cited as the 'iconic flat cap wearer' my chaps are in good company.

Some of the most iconic hats for women proved interesting, Jackie Kennedy's pill box hat worn at the presidential inauguration.Jackie apparently disliked hats as much as I do but protocol insisted. The 'Jackie Look' was born and It became her signature hat throughout the presidency.

Audrey Hepburn's supersized black and white hat for My Fair Lady and the suggestion that every film she starred in launched a trend.. notably the 'little black dress' of Breakfast at Tiffany's fame. This hat designed by Cecil Beaton as 'part parody - part celebration.'

Millinery as spectacle taken to its limits with Gertrude Shilling's Ascot hats and Audrey's hat provided all the inspiration that David, Gertrude's son needed in designing for his mother.

Even Aretha Franklin's Obama inauguration hat gets a mention. The dove-grey, big-bowed hat designed by Luke Song and destined to upstage everyone else for miles around but redolent of the African-American tradition of wearing a 'crown' to church as a mark of pious respect.

So many more I could go on for hours, but what incredibly enjoyable and informative books these two have been and interestingly not a fascinator in sight, though doubtless hundreds on show at the nuptials.

I can now bore for England on the subject of bags and hats but at least that's us named and dressed ready for the big day, I'll be publishing the full dovegreyreader guest list tomorrow and we'll be having a full dress rehearsal and run through of timings etc too, but for now I search for book covers with hats on and can I find one...

What would a hat say about the contents of a book I wonder?

Protection, a shield, a disguise...

 

and while we're on the subject...

...just look at these re-issues of Winifred Holtby's novels that have arrived from Virago. Talking today about the way that a cover can tempt me into a book, add in South Riding and this series feels like a 21st century version of  those 20th century Virago covers we all loved so much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

goodbookalert ~ Stella Gibbons

I often get e mails like this and just had to share this one from Vintage Classics because I for one will be very much looking forward to these, my thoughts on Cold Comfort Farm here...

Stella Gibbons is best remembered for her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, but she wrote over twenty books. Like Nancy Mitford, PG Wodehouse and Barbara Pym, her novels are deliciously funny and her dissection of the British class system is spot-on.

 ‘[Gibbons] actually wrote another 23 novels before her death in 1989, and the ones I’ve read all show the same supple wit applied to the eternal tussle between romanticism and common sense… Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the 20th century’ Lynne Truss

 Vintage Classics will publish fourteen of Stella Gibbons’ novels between August and November 2011, including Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, the wickedly funny sequel to Cold Comfort Farm, with a new introduction by Libby Purves; Westwood with a new introduction by Lynne Truss; Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm with a new introduction by Alexander McCall Smith and Starlight. These charming books will delight Gibbons’ legion of fans and also introduce her work to a new audience.

Fifty Bags That Changed the World.

As we are due such a mammoth fashion week and doubtless floor to ceiling fascinators on Friday, it seemed the right moment to bring you a couple of books from the Design Museum which have been keeping me nicely entertained over the last few months.

The first is Fifty Bags That Changed the World, safe territory for me unlike Fifty Hats That Changed the World which will present more of a challenge, but for today I am on familiar turf with yet another opportunity to own up that I am the original Bag Lady. The search has been underway for the Bag of My Dreams for the last fifty years I'd say, and each time I think I may have found it, well would you believe it a few months on and another one usurps the throne.

I can't tell you exactly what it is about a new bag but that moment of transference, when, as fickle as they come, I reject the old monarch and swear allegiance to the new young pretender, is unrivalled. All that excitement about transplanting the contents into new pockets and zipped compartments, deciding where everything's going to go and then that day when you take it on its first outing. Always a bit nerve-wracking as I fumble for my purse or the annoyingly insistent ringing mobile and can be heard to mutter...sorry, sorry,new bag, can't remember where I've put everything.
Here's my current friend which is actually an old friend that I have sworn new loyalty towards...for now.
The introduction to the book helps me explain..

'The bag is at once the simplest, the most complicated and the most emotion-laden of accessories...in one of its key manifestations, the handbag, it can be deeply expressive of a woman's life - serving as a companion, a receptacle of secrets, a status object and a means of self-display.'

Which may all go some way to explaining why Bookhound just can't grasp this at all...but you've already got more bags than there are days in the year, and I try and explain and I fail. The range in this little book seems to confirm this need because I can safely say that I have at some time or another owned a version of many of them

The carpetbag, for which we must thank the American Civil War, 'the sure sign of a stranger in town...the bag of the opportunist' so I bought one of these having coveted it for a very long time. It was expensive but I loved it instantly whilst also instantly denying (as is the case with many of the current buckle-laden bags) that it was heavy enough before I had even loaded it. I looked at it and stroked it for a week before the load and I tried, I really did, but in end I had to face the truth, that carrying around an Axminster carpet on my shoulder was never going to help my back, admitted defeat and sold it on eBay for as much as I'd paid, so came out quits.

The bicycle panniers, yes I had a nice green set of those in the days of my pink mountain bike, the bike with more gears than I knew how to manage and which never saw much further than the Camel Cycle Trail, let alone a mountain. But we were doing the cycling thing with small children, and I loved the panniers as much as any handbag for the fact I could still carry everything with me.

Then there's the schoolboy satchel,and perhaps this is where it all began, according to the book

'last widely used in the 1950s...butter-soft leather, buckled flap, long strap worn diagonally across the shoulder'

The rucksack, where on earth would I be without mine, both my nice leather ones, the brown and the smaller black one and my Karrimor walking one... or the Vango walking one...or the Lowe Alpine walking one... a girl needs choice after all and that need explained as follows

'The backpack or rucksack, is one of the most ancients types of bag, used by hunter-gatherers who needed to have their hands free as they wandered through primordial forests in search of prey..'

Which is why I do as the book also suggests and use one of mine whenever I am tackling the urban jungle.

Then there's the sports bag, the basket, the bum bag, the messenger bag, the tote bag, the shoulder bag, the clutch, the examples are endless and a fascinating stroll through the baggage requirements of my life. Not to mention work bags, because I have been through a legion of those, nothing like a new work bag when I was feeling a bit jaded with the NHS. Now I work from home I'm 'making do' with my last work bag, in fact my favourite, something about that shade of Karrimor turquoise that is always pleasing on the eye.

I was commenting on KevinFromCanada's blog recently about the significance I always sense from the sight of luggage on the cover of a book.

Perhaps it's viewed as a well-worn design cliche these days but all those wonderful messages to be conveyed about journeys and travelling, about secrets concealed and precious possessions to be carried, and above all about 'baggage' and all that 'stuff' we all carry around with us all our lives. I will always want to read a book with luggage on the cover, so given the choice of these two covers for the same book it's obvious which one I would want to pick up and which I might leave on the shelf.
 

Is it just me or does it seem worth the aggravation and upheavel of emigrating to Canada just to be blessed with that cover on the right? I want to read The Free World by David Bezmozgis very much and I will eventually because Kevin tips it for Booker-dom, but I'd have read that Canadian edition the minute it plopped on the mat, and for the same reasons that I can't wait to read House of Exile and eventually persevered and fell in love with Suite Francaise.
 

Any other bags on book covers I could be missing out on and should know about?
Any more bag people out there?

 

It's all in the name...

I hope everyone's still eking out a peaceful and relaxing Easter weekend break, we've had a wonderful homey time of it and made the most of the sunshine which apparently won't last and it may even rain on the Big Day.

I was thinking ahead to the nuptials and found myself suddenly overcome with a huge sense of sadness that Diana wouldn't be there to see it, and suddenly I saw the point of the engagement ring. Seen by many as a blighted token of a sad history I can see now that Diana will be right there in the middle of it all. Bless her.

I'm bringing you some Bank Holiday fun in the shape of a meme that is doing the rounds at the moment (thanks Kirsty.)

If we want to be in with a shout at the Abbey we all need proper names to get us in the door, a fascinator perched on our swedes or full morning dress is not going to cut the mustard, and with apologies to all those of you who feel your name is 'proper' enough already, the rest of us will have to invent as follows...

Lord/Lady [Grandparent's name] [First Pet] - [Childhood Street]

So here's Lady Nellie Sparky-Russell ... which I think you'll agree still has the ring of the commoner lightly tinged with a hint of Duke of Bedford dynasty about it, and is deserving of something outrageously Gertrude Shilling in the hat department, and hoping to meet some of you there this Friday.

If you could just introduce yourselves in comments now that would be helpful and I'll add you to the guest list.

Happy Easter everyone...

Good Friday...

Tradition lives on and for the thirty years that we've lived here Ellis's Bakery in Tavistock opens as usual early on Good Friday morning. All fresh-baked buns now consumed by us, with the help of the Tinker (who did the Hot Cross Bun Run at 8am) and the Gamekeeper, and with an envious-looking audience ...behiiiiiiind yoooooooou.

And just look at the ground... that's a very brave mole to take up residence in a Gamekeeper's garden.

Easter blessings ...

Did anyone see the full moon the other night?

Gloriously orange here and wrongly called a Hunter's Moon by me until I looked it all up, those come in November, but can it really be that the last full moon before Easter is called an Egg Moon ? If so I like it.

In keeping with my now annual tradition here, and deeply rooted in that memory from childhood where going out to play on Good Friday was not allowed, dovegreyreader will give you all a rest from the constant chatter over the Easter weekend and we'll have ourselves a quiet time and let the pictures do the talking rather than too many words from me.

Maundy Thursday today and HM The Queen's eighty-fifth birthday so celebrations this morning at Westminster Abbey and I still haven't cast on the Queen or done the Archbishop's robes so I have work to do before next Friday when we'll be back in the Abbey for more. And in case you were wondering, no I am not one of the cynical, so yes I will be watching every last frill and flounce of the Royal Wedding and wishing Kate and Wills well.

We'll be home and doing our hot cross bun thing as usual on Good Friday...a local baker opens for a few hours for the sale of freshly baked buns and so we traditionally work our way through a baker's dozen, and if this weather holds up (23 degs in April, never known the like) we'll be eating and living outside.

The summerhouse is open and cleared out and this year has been designated as our gardening base. Half the garden still resembles a building site... because it is,so we're opting for container growing in an effort to thwart the slugs and have spent a very leisurely afternoon sitting out here potting our geraniums and getting some seeds planted, though still a bit wary as plenty of time left for a frost to ruin it all. And we have yet to figure out how to Rusty-proof the cold frame because his dog-trick of the moment is a leap through those railings.

The little orchard is heaving with blossom and we never tire of this sight, often it's late May before we get out here but we have been enjoying it for weeks now. This year's path through is being mowed and the rest will be allowed to grow wild in the hope of attracting butterflies and the odd barn owl (still no sign of a resident in the pole box)

If all this goes to apple we'll be busy in the autumn.

Bookhound will no doubt be playing over by his wood pile of which he is inordinately proud, having spent the last few weeks out with his chain saw gathering in. As you can see he's built himself yet another woodshed (he's got a little village of them out there) and this one will house the little logs that I will need for my new little woodburner.

As always I have a pile of good books to see me through, I've almost finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates and have been completely swept away by it so thank you to everyone who suggested I read it. It is still early days with several others so I'm not sure how they will go, but having read the first few chapters of Long Time No See by Dermot Healey I am struck by that same sense of quirkiness and complete enjoyment I had when reading Nicola Barker's Darkmans, so I'm hoping for good things. I have the new Ann Enright The Forgotten Waltz waiting and I'm also about half way through and enjoying The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller, this a read prompted by the arrival of the second in the series, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton when I haven't even read the first.

A fascinating non-fiction book has also arrived, due for publication in May, House of Exile - War, Love & Literature from Berlin to Los Angeles by Evelyn Juers, the 'dislocated existence of the emigre, a group biography of wartime writers centring on Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf  and many others. I came across some interesting pages on Joseph Roth as I was reading which all had me yearning for a biography of him in English... someone...please, but meanwhile what a wonderful cover this is and on first peek a highly readable book.

So how about you...nice plans for the weekend?? Sunny weather?? A pile of good books?? Will you be watching the nuptials next week ??

Let's hear it again for the publicists...

A few years ago I was invited to speak about dovegreyreader scribbles at a Publisher's Publicity Circle lunch at Foyle's in London. It was in the early days of the blog and though I constantly tell myself that nothing but nothing is ever worse than being subpoenad to give court evidence in a child protection case, I was still a bit nervous. I hadn't slept a wink the night before and had travelled up to London on what felt like the milk train for fear of being late, and so by lunchtime it really was starting to feel like it was time for cocoa, bath and bed. I loitered incognito outside the Gallery in Foyle's and watched the publicists arrive whilst noting to my horror that I was definitely old enough to be a mother to most of them (if not grandmother) and surely I was going to be one huge disappointment when I walked in. I took a turn around Algebra & Geometry to steady my nerves and of course it was fine, they were very welcoming, it was lovely to meet them all and I am still in touch with quite a few people who I met for the first time on that day.

Now there are doubtless those who would argue that this whole blogging thing should be pure and impartial, devoid of any influence from publishers, let alone subliminally influenced by heavy marketing strategies or publicists, and I would argue that this is now increasingly difficult. I have my own avoidance strategies and several checks and balances in place and I will often defer the moment of reading a book until the hype has subsided, or conversely I'm way ahead of the game and have either quietly given up as wrong reader for a book or my thoughts are written long before publication date. In that latter case I often have no idea whether I might be the only person to like a particular book... apart from the publicist that is, because really they have to 'like' and 'be excited' about them all and somehow convince me that I will be too.

Now you could also argue that really we should ignore whatever the publicist has to say because they are hardly likely to pronounce other than effusively about their charges, given they are being paid to do so, but that always seems a bit impolite so I do actually read the little notes that come with the books and the e mails too, I mean I'm no stranger to the art of book passion myself as you all know. So last Friday, when I had a really lovely e mail from Chiara, (and I expect lots of others received it too but yes let's name and praise) the publicist at Allison & Busby, to remind me about a book she had sent in proof, to be published in May and asking had I had time to look at it yet, and if not please would I because etc, I sort of melted. I probably am old enough to be her mum (at least) but I've got a daughter who's trying her hardest to do a good job at what she does too, and I'd like to think people are kind and encouraging towards Offspringette when she's doing her best, and kindness costs nothing so I replied to Chiara to let her know that she had made me uncrack my knees and get up and fetch the book off the shelf (which she had) and of course I'd have a look.

I have a week off from the day job this week so the timing was as ideal as the weather is proving to be, lots more reading and thinking time instead of worrying about the welfare of the nation's children or the bereaved, but I wanted what I can only term as a 'lovely' read to unwind with as well; a really good story, a followable plot with characters I was bothered about. But nor could it be too heavy and not too depressing either and ideally if anyone were to die I'd rather it happened in the wings than in front of me, or could they die 'nicely' if I had to witness it, no weaponry involved and I'd also prefer it if no women, children or cats were hurt and no dogs eaten, plus really I'd like a nice happy ending too. Not a lot to ask is it and finally I get to Chiara's suggestion, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks and has already sold 650,000 copies largely by word-of-mouth recommendation in the US. Small publisher Allison & Busby will be publishing it here in the UK in May and everyone's fallen in love with the book apparently which is enough to make me think 'huh do I have to' and not want to do anything of the sort.

So I have to admit that none of this was encouraging, in fact sometimes the book may have to work a good deal harder to impress. Yet all I could think of was poor Chiara chewing the edges of her desk in an attempt to promote this one on behalf of a small publisher, and with probably a fraction of the budget of the big players, and taking the trouble to send e mails late on a Friday afternoon when I thought everyone in publishing had gone home hours ago after a long lunch and... well the least I could do was read the first twenty pages before sending it to the hospice shop.

This is asking for trouble but publicists may wish to note, clearly my defences are down late on a Friday afternoon because the very next morning and 160 nicely engrossing pages later, here I am at Jericho's in Launceston last Saturday for hot chocolate, cake and newspapers, and forget the newspapers and the review pages because I have lugged this flippin' 400 page proof copy all the way there in my bag for fear of being parted from it because drat, darn and dash it all, I think I have fallen a little in love with it too...

In a sentence a novel that recounts a lesser known aspect of US WW II history, located in Seattle, this is about the internment of the Japanese population after the bombing of Pearl Harbour and via the memories of recently widowed Henry Lee, all prompted by the discovery of the belongings of the Japanese families, stored and forgotten for over forty years in Seattle's Panama Hotel. I won't tell you whether or not it fulfilled all my criteria for fear of giving anything away, and whilst this is not the Booker, a book doesn't have to be high-end literary to be a best-seller, nor is that a requirement for it to wend its way into my heart, sometimes I am as grateful as a million other people for a really good, genuinely heartfelt novel.

So yes Chiara, you were right, those million people weren't wrong and thank you for persuasively ensuring that by Sunday evening, as I turned the final page, I would be the million and one-th to enjoy Hotel on the Corner of Bitter & Sweet, and I've decided that if by some grave twist of fate and misfortune I ever find myself on Death Row, I'm going to demote the lawyers and just ask to have a publicist in charge.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter & Sweet coming to a bookshop or library near you on or around May 9th 2011.

The Hare With Amber Eyes ~ Edmund de Waal

Sometimes a surname lodges in my mind and I had some back tracking to do when I first came across The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal.

I recognised Edmund de Waal as the potter who had assisted A.S.Byatt with many technical aspects of The Children's Book, and I also made an instant connection with Esther de Waal's tranquil and beautifully contemplative book A Seven Day Journey With Thomas Merton which I owned and read many times back in the 1990s, and now can't find anywhere. Thomas Merton one of those meditative heroes of mine, and Esther de Waal I think mother of Edmund, the author of this book, and it seems fitting that a book that has been alongside me for several months seems to have become a treasured meditation of its own along the way.

The Hare With Amber Eyes, and I have it in this exquisitely minimalist hardback edition, included in so many end of year 'Best Reads of 2010' and for me it will have to be in my 2011 one. I started the book way back in January and have been reading it very slowly, a chapter at a time and with a pause inbetween to wander off on the trails that Edmund de Waal offers the interested reader who likes a diversion, so I feel as if I have been in the company of the netsuki (pronounced netski) and Family Ephrussi for a very long time.

Every chapter enthrals with Edmund de Waal's account of his family history via the legacy of the netsuki collection, the tiny Japanese ivory carvings and, wrapped around these precious objects, the lives of Family Ephrussi, wealthy Jewish bankers who had amassed untold riches as grain merchants in Odessa in the nineteenth century before establishing themselves in Vienna.

And there was so much to fascinate and divert me...

I wanted to know much more about the netsuki of course and their place in the family (you can see some of the collection here) but also more about the fabulous impressionist artworks once in the family's possession, paintings by Morisot, Cassatt, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir. And given the furore that the Impressionists were causing in Paris with all those blobs, how ahead of his time was the family's First Collector, and what does it feel like to know that there is that very same ancestor depicted in Renoir's famous painting Le Dejeuner des canotiers...

Charles Ephrussi there in the centre background wearing the top hat and talking to the poet Jules Laforgue.

Then there was the new-to-me concept of the literary feuilleton, the essays and social commentaries printed in the newspapers and which, dare I suggest it, sounded to me very much like a nineteenth century form of blogging.

I needed to find out about Cafe Griensteidl too, the hub of fin de siecle literary Vienna and the daily cafe culture that prevailed for those who could afford it, and for many impecunious writers who doubtless could not) ...

Hoffmanstahl and Schnitzler would take their melancholy souls there, an insidious and ever-present anti-semitism is taking a firmer hold, the culture of suicide as the grand gesture prevails and Family Ephrussi are moving in the midst of it all. Stefan Zweig (often read and mentioned chez dovegrey) was a Cafe Griensteidl regular and I knew I had heard the Ephrussi name elsewhere on my reading travels too. An evening with a pile of mitteleuropean books and I had pinned it down to Joseph Roth, also written about on here a great deal in the past.


The Efrussi [sic] family feature either as jewellers or bankers in several of Roth's Vienna-based novels and I kept having eureka moments as I found them in Napoleon's Tomb, (Joseph Roth's  'sequel' to The Radetzky March) and A String of Pearls. 

So, there I am having a lovely frolic of my own with this incredible book and I love that real sense of bonding when a book like this comes along, and I had picked it up again as usual when my leisurely rather languid and relaxed approach dissipated in an instant at this moment...

    'The last door they reach is Emmy's dressing-room in the corner, the room with the vitrine containing the netsuke, and they sweep everything off the desk she uses as a dressing table...and they drag the desk out into the corridor.
    They push Emmy and Viktor and Rudolph against the wall, and three of them heave the desk and send it crashing over the handrail until, with the sound of splintering wood and gilt and marquetry, it hits the stone flags of the courtyard below.
    The desk... takes a long time to fall. The sounds ricochet off the glass roof. The broken drawers scatter letters across the courtyard.'

After all our desk eulogizing a while back I think we'd better have a moment's silence to cope with that.

The Nazis have arrived in Vienna and the persecution of the Jews is reaching its zenith. Frozen and rife with indecision about whether to flee and if so where to, Viktor and Emmy can only stand by and watch as Palais Ephrussi, the opulent family home on Vienna's grand and wealthy Ringstrasse is about to be ransacked. Except the Nazis know the value of this home when they see it, the contents will be catalogued and removed whilst Hitler decides which items he would like in his personal collection and which will go to museums.

'This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.'

Well there's me sitting in the midst of a very down-market version of all that, but I have often wondered at what point our treasures, mostly of purely sentimental value, will become 'stuff', and I sat up late into the night experiencing a devastating literary Ephrussinacht version of Kristallnacht, whilst knowing I now couldn't possibly put the book down and wouldn't sleep a wink until I had finished it. I wasn't going to sleep much when I had either but needed to see this through with Edmund de Waal and his family, because whilst I'm also deeply embroiled in all this and can't bear to let these netsuke out of my sight, I am desperately fearful for Viktor and Emmy and also wondering quite what effect researching and discovering all this is having on the author.

Surely, if I'm feeling this upset, he must be quietly unravelling in the midst of this too?

And then it happens and I won't reveal why but Edmund de Waal is suddenly overcome with tears.

He has remained remarkable objective in my eyes as I've read, far more objective than I have felt but gradually words like 'terribly' and 'calumnies' and 'venemous diatribes' and 'appalling' seep into the narrative and at this point the book seems to enter a new and extremely moving final phase.

'I knew the story. I didn't feel the story until my third visit to Vienna when I was standing in the courtyard of the Palais...'

'Here in this house I am wrong-footed... I can't make people and places and things fit together any more. These stories unravel me....'

Well that makes two of us Edmund because the injustices that follow, though well-known on a larger historical scale, are so much harder to credit when invested with the detail of the personal.

Viktor's extensive library is scattered to the four corners, its contents still largely unknown, lists unhelpfully lost by bureaucrats or incomplete, whilst in contrast the objects taken from the house are meticulously recorded  and handled with inordinate care, many now residing in galleries and museums around the world. Reparation? Well don't get me started, the injustice is profound and Edmund de Waal does well to rein in his deepest feelings... me, I was livid verging on inconsolable.

Edmund de Waal makes a startlingly honest and profound observation.

'Jews matter less than what they once possessed. It is a trial of how to look after objects properly, care for them and give them a proper German home. It is a trial of how to run a society without Jews.'

The statistics are bleak too.

'There were 185,000 Jews in Austria at the time of the Anschluss. Of these only 4,500 returned; 65,479 Austrian Jews had been killed.'

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the netsuke do live happily ever after (no netsuke, no book after all) and remain in the family's possession, but you will have to read the book to discover the remarkable story of how they survived that ransacking of the Palais Ephrussi in 1938, or alternatively don't miss The Hare With Amber Eyes as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week from today

In the end there was only one place to take my reading and that bereft feeling I sense on turning the final page of a book that has somehow possessed me for so long, and because I had to acknowledge my dependency and couldn't quite let go of Family Ephrussi, it was to Joseph Roth's final novel, The String of Pearls.

'The pearls were lodged with Efrussi's bank, there was no need to worry about them.'

 

 

 

Our Aurelian Year...2

I feel sure all the budding lepidopterists out there will appreciate just how much standing still was required to capture this one and tucking into our early bluebells too.

We've had the The Butterfly Isle out and then the ancient Observer's Book of Butterflies and diagnosed it as a female Orange Tip, and both Bookhound and I are agreeing that either these have never been around in such numbers before, and perhaps this is a result of the gorgeous spring weather, or possibly we've been walking around with our butterfly eyes closed all these years and must thank Patrick Barkham for opening them.

Thank you for all offers of aurelian scouting around the country, we should notch up a fair tally by summer's end.

How to make a mess...

So the plan is that next winter I will have a little woodburning stove in my book room...won't that be bliss?

This will make us into a three woodburning stoves household which seems a bit excessive, but nothing like as excessive as a fill up of the underground gas tank right now, so needs must. Bookhound and the woodburning stove man say it can be done but there is really only one place it can go if the chimney is to emerge on the highest spot at the apex of the single storey roof, and there are pros and cons. The cons, yes the stove will create dust and ash and the general mess that burning wood creates, and yet another chimney to be swept etc, and ideally I'd rather not have living flames anywhere near my books, but the pros seem plentiful. Gas isn't going to get any cheaper, wood is in sufficient supply for us here, and the constant warmth will be a real bonus after another freezing winter spent trying to keep a room warm that has large windows on three sides and faces into a north wind.

You might recall the ridicule in which I held that enormous Alafoss Lopi pink elephant of an embarrassing jumper which grew year on year? Hmm, well this winter I have worn it day in day out, only taking it off to go out because even I wouldn't be seen wearing it in town, and since Offspringette went to New Zealand and left her Uggs at home I've adopted those too for the complete Nanook look.

There is however another downside to Project Bookwarming... I will have to lose some shelf space.

Now that is very serious indeed. Forget surveys of the roof and cutting holes in ceilings and slates, and fireproofing the wall and lining up flues and stoves and safety certificates and things, this losing a whole bookcase tells you that I am completely serious about keeping warm in the face of -18 degs again next winter. And possibly also guarantees that the big freeze won't be repeated for another thirty years.

Anyway, this week we decided I may as well get used to the idea and start a bit of a book cull. This doesn't quite mean the books will leave the house yet because any parting with a book requires a series of gentle stages, but Bookhound came back with six banana boxes from Morrisons which, with lids doubling as more boxes, means I have filled twelve so far and averaging fifty books per box you can see that I am deadly serious about this keeping warm thing.

Every book has to pass through my hand and I have to pause and see if I get a pang.

If I don't get an immediate pang then in the box it goes.

If I get a delayed pang a few minutes later, out it comes again.

As you can imagine this being in touch with my inner pang was very time-consuming, if not exhausting and used up 5000 paces on the pedometer in the process.

Anyway, I've made a start. There's more shifting because shelves have got to be moved around and it's all going to be a heap big mess for a while before it's sorted, especially as Bookhound has taken full advantage of the sunshine and been back on his How to Build An Extension project after a winter of looking at the very icy unslated roof and me forbidding him to go near it.

But once the sun shines, if I have anything to do with it, a man's work is never done.

Berwick Church

    It feels like the right time of year to start a few literary excursions and when I can think of one to go on I'll be there, but meanwhile I realised that I hadn't shared these beautiful images that regular dovegreyreader commenter Fran H-B took last summer. It was only on looking back at these that I realise how inspiring literary pilgrimages are and how welcome colour is at this time of year too, so having enjoyed butterflies this week, now some wonderful paintings.

    Fran very kindly gave me the inspiring little book Bloomsbury in Sussex when she came to visit last year and then Sussex Writers & Artists, in the same series from Snake River Press, the next time we met up in London. All in the call of duty Fran valiantly trotted off to Berwick Church in Sussex and took these pictures for us of the church itself and the beautiful decorations inside painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.


The glorious view from behind the church towards Charleston and Firle Beacon...


The Nativity by Vanessa Bell. The barn depicted is a Sussex Barn at Tilton [close to Charleston] and through the opening is a view to Mount Caburn. The infant Christ may be Quentin Bell, or possibly Julian.


Detail from The Nativity, showing a South Down lamb and a Sussex trug holding vegetables. Sussex trugs were first made[and still are] in Herstmonceux, a village quite close to Fran's Sussex home.


Part of the Chancel Arch by Duncan Grant, with the Downs behind the figures. Grant was recording the landscape and people of wartime England.


The only surviving panel by Vanessa Bell from the pulpit. The thought of this makes me want to weep but the three central panels were vandalised in 1962. Duncan Grant repainted them to designs by Angelica Bell.


The Annunciation by Vanessa Bell. Angelica Bell was the model for Mary. The walled garden with its ordered beds is based on that at Charleston but how impressed I am by that graceful figure of Mary...


And finally a detail of the Altar Frontal. Designed by Duncan Grant and embroidered by his mother.

Our Aurelian Year...

I have decided that if Patrick Barkham can have one, so can I... in fact stand by, because I think I can make that 'we'.

To explain, I am reading The Butterfly Isles A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals by Patrick Barkham, his account of a year spent tracking down and sighting every one of the sixty species of butterflies native to the British Isles.

Such a good idea for a book but quite a tricky one to make interesting, but having just read the first section, Spring, somehow Patrick Barkham has pulled it off. In fact pulled it off sufficiently well that I had to momentarily put the book down, grab the magnifying glass and go out and see if any Black Hairstreaks had laid eggs on our blackthorn.

Well it was worth a look wasn't it and needless to say despite my best efforts, I couldn't find any microscopic dots stuck to 'the crook formed by a thorn and a twig and located between knee and head height.' First of course, know your blackthorn from your hawthorn and I do happen to know that this little cluster by our gate onto the lane is indeed blackthorn because it's the first place we look for sloes in the autumn.



So I set off on my first butterfly walk of the year... well the first one where I have specifically been paying attention lepidopterally that is, and I came back with a good haul, four sightings. No camera to hand so had to commit to memory, but my first and apparently all-important butterfly of the year was an Orange Tip, quickly followed by a Red Admiral, a Comma and a Large White. Not surprisingly when I read that two of those are of the 'robust elite' who spend the winter here hibernating as adults, so the ones most likely to be spotted on a mild spring day.

This was last year's Comma...

and I am praying I come across that magical field of Small Coppers again later this year as I did last

and will this be another year for a massive influx of the Painted Lady as last year...

and surely our Small Tortoiseshells will be back.




Lots of butterflies to look forward to and I'm looking forward to paying close attention too.

So that's my 2011 total standing at four and I have Bookhound and the Gamekeeper on full alert too, but this is still looking like a tall order so surely we could cover most of the UK with all of you helping??

It's all going to rely on that old pledge of the I-Spy book honesty unless any of us are quick with the camera, and please don't ask how many times I was tempted to tick Swallowtail and scoop maximum points off Big Chief I-Spy as a child living in Surrey, when everyone knows it's Norfolk or nothing. So if anyone wants to join the dovegreyreader Aurelian Year and report butterfly sightings that will help us get nearer to the sixty please do, I'll post mine on here and add yours.

We have a few rather elite sites to cover too, I'll be nipping out to a few Dartmoor ones and if anyone's on or visiting the Isle of Wight you are our only hope for a sighting of the Glanville Fritillary and I'm not holding out much hope for a Green Hairstreak either but I'll keep you updated on others as I read more of this really lovely book.

Concentrated Oranges...

So twenty becomes six with the announcement of the Orange Prize shortlist today

Emma Donoghue (Irish) - Room; Picador; 7th Novel
Aminatta Forna (British/Sierra Leonean) - The Memory of Love; Bloomsbury; 2nd Novel
Emma Henderson (British) - Grace Williams Says it Loud; Sceptre; 1st Novel
Nicole Krauss (American) - Great House; Viking; 3rd Novel
Téa Obreht (Serbian/American) - The Tiger’s Wife; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1st Novel
Kathleen Winter (Canadian) - Annabel; Jonathan Cape; 1st Novel

    And I think you can imagine my delight after yesterday's post on Kathleen Winter's Annabel, and Great House by Nicole Krauss a few weeks ago. I had also made a start on The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna and was already sensing my high hopes for its inclusion.

    But let delight not be confined to books because I'm also relieved that the wisteria has survived the winter and is in flower, so I have combined two delights into one for this gratuitous picture of the five books I have and some blossom.

 

 

Annabel ~ Kathleen Winter (Orange Longlist 2011)

    Many years ago, in the midst of my nurse training, I had done a stint of night duty and come back on duty after days off. It was always interesting to see which babies had gone home and who the new admissions were, because this being Great Ormond Street you could always rely on the diagnoses being something out of the ordinary. I feel sure it's quite different now, but back in the early 1970s, with babies being admitted from around the country and around the world, it wasn't always possible for parents to be resident and so in many ways us nurses stood in for them. It was no hardship. We'd cuddle and coo with  the babies, play with them, talk to them and read to them, and I've been known to sing to one or two as well and generally we loved them dearly. Sometimes we were their only physical contact so it was considered an all-important aspect of the job especially given that all babies under a year were nursed in single cubicles.

    Peter (name changed) was one such baby, several months old and who had been admitted with something, I can't recall what, and as an aside we also knew that he had what was then known as ambiguous genitalia. The 'it's a boy' decision had been made by the midwife and that was that and we all loved him to bits, so imagine my surprise when I walked back on the ward after those days off to be told that Peter had gone home, but he'd gone home as Petra. And that was the end of it really as far as I was concerned, it had all happened while I'd been off duty, we never saw Petra again, or her parents and I hadn't really given any of that another thought until I read Kathleen Winter's Orange long-listed novel Annabel. Then almost forty years on I realised that what had been an ending for me may just have been the beginning for that family.

    Annabel is the story of the only child, born to Treadwell and Jacinta Blake in 1968 (and Kathleen Winter's timing for this novel feels carefully chosen) gentle people both, and residents of a remote coastal area of Labrador in the far north-east of Canada, where Treadwell makes his living from the traplines and hunting whilst Jacinta has been a teacher in a nearby school. Family friend Thomasina, whose husband, and daughter have recently died in a tragic accident, is present with Jacinta at the birth and she is initially the only one who shares the secret with her ... that the baby seems to be neither boy nor girl. They evade the truth with Treadwell who eventually, sensing that all is not as it seems with the baby, and deducing more from what is not said than what is, makes the decision that he and Jacinta have a son.

    It was at this point that I first started to think about baby Petra after all these years, because what becomes immediately evident in Kathleen Winter's telling of Annabel is  the bereavement and sense of loss and grief that Jacinta suffers in the aftermath of Treadwell's decision. Jacinta has effectively been deprived of a daughter, and slowly but inexorably this will be the undoing of the very fabric of her soul, there is much sadness to come.

'There was a mirror on the wall and Jacinta could see both their faces in it. She realised that of the two, her own had no strength left, while Thomasina's held reserves...
    'If a stranger came here now' Jacinta said, ' they would would guess I was the one who had lost a man and a daughter.'
    'You won't lose Treadway unless you want to lose him. Treadway is a husband for life.'
    'I know.'
    'But it looks to me like I'm not the only one who had lost a daughter.'
    'I've always felt,' Jacinta said, 'that daughter is a beautiful word.'

    And suddenly I realised that I had never before considered the impact on Petra's parents back in the early 1970s when I doubt there was much counsellling or support to help them cope with such a momentous change...when you've bonded with a son for several months, how do you then bond with a daughter.

    Kathleen Winter's Labradorian location demands a certain set of rules for living and surviving because this is a land that dominates, it is harsh, unforgiving and to be respected. Now I haven't flown over that many places but I have flown over Labrador and it seeemed like hours and hours of this view, so I had a keen sense of that in mind as I read.


And one of those rules for survival is that the men hunt and shoot and fish, so it is into this macho culture that Treadway introduces Wayne, but in the process Wayne becomes the dearest of children and here Kathleen Winter excels. Now whilst not wanting to be critical of any other book on the Orange long list that utilises the voice of a child, (but can you tell that my third and final attempt with Room has failed) Kathleen Winter achieves hers with no recourse to more overt devices like age-related speech patterns, preferring to concentrate instead on a steady and harmonious stave of dialogue and rapport between her characters that pays enormous attention to the smallest detail, thus allowing the reader to invest it with the heart-wrenching grace notes which create the perfect childs' voice. 

    There are countless pivotal emotional moments in the book and none more so than when, much to Treadway's discomfort, Wayne shows a keen interest in the girl-only sport of synchronised swimming whilst watching the Russian team on television. There follows a lengthy conversation between Wayne and his parents with Treadway trying to persuade him to watch hockey and ending in this exchange with Wayne and the hapless Jacinta who realises exactly what is happening...

'Because I really, really, really, really, really, really -'
'Stop it.'
' - want a bathing suit like Elizaveta Kirilovna's. More than anything else in the world.'

and the next day the conversation carries on with Jacinta over breakfast...

'I wish I was her.'
...' you can't go on wishing that Wayne.'
'But I do. I wish it. I would be so good at that. If we had a pool. Maybe we could get a pool. Some people have pools in their backyards. They have them in the catalogue. How do they get the water so blue?'

and so it goes on..

'Would it be alright if I got a really nice bathing suit like Elizaveta Kirilovna's, instead of swimming trunks?
'No.'
'It wouldn't?'
'No, Wayne.'
'Boys don't wear them?'
'They could, if people would let them.'
'But people won't?'
'No.'
'Even if I wore it when no one was looking?'
'I don't know about that, Wayne, I don't think so.'
'Would you let me?' He gave her a fierce little look that broke her heart. ' I know Dad wouldn't let me. But would you? You understand, don't you Mommy? '

And dear reader, be warned, your heart might break too and not just for Wayne but for Jacinta and Treadwell as well.

    As Wayne moves into adolescence... well I'm not going to say much more beyond telling you that I read Annabel in two days thus breaking all my rules about taking time with my reading and having 'thinking rests', and I can't tell you how much this book has filled my thoughts since. Suffice to say it's clear that with such a blurred and confused sense of self and increasing loneliness and isolation there will be trials ahead for Wayne and his family. Imagery of bridges between Wayne's two selves prevail in Kathleen Winter's narrative and she explores every possible corner of the very clever scenario she has created... about lies and secrets, about gender and body image and society's attitudes towards difference, about shame and abuse and ultimately about being true to yourself and being the person you have to be.

    With few exceptions I only write about books I've loved here and as you know by now that always incorporates my highly subjective take on the book as an experience as much as about the content, whilst feeling I must then leave you to make up your own minds about whether you decide to read it or not and with no special pleading... but just occasionally I think I have to beg and grovel and say  'pleeeeeeeeeeeease don't miss Annabel' . It will be in my top reads of 2011 no matter how many good books follow.

     As you can imagine, I am very much hoping to see this on tomorrow's Orange Prize short list and as an afterthought which speaks volumes to me about Kathleen Winter herself, just how often do you read in the author's acknowledgements, in amongst thanking the world, its mother and the dog for being there, the washing machine repair man for the plot idea, the creative writing group friends for telling you like it is and then the bit about all the mistakes are entirely of my own making etc... well how often do you read the very simple words that Kathleen Winter has added...

'And thank you, dear reader.'

 

 

 

Team Tolstoy - Troika Stop Seven

Здравствуйте and all hail Team Tolstoy Рад тебя видеть and it was with a renewed and invigorated enthusiasm that I opened War and Peace this month. The Trouble With Tolstoy  proved to be just the thing, a real half-way tonic because with 1812 looming large and 250 pages of the Battle of Borodino still to negotiate I was feeling in need of something warm and sustaining to see me through. My bookmark with lists of important characters was much in evidence this month too, and if anyone missed this little aide memoire you can download it as a file here and print one off.

So this is the supposed science of war, or is it the art of war and who knew there was even a difference, I certainly didn't until I read on as Tolstoy scrapes away layer upon layer of brash arrogance, exposing the conflict within a conflict, and the folly, chaos and uncertainty of how to prosecute the war. What a mess the Russians seem to have fallen into and pride, arrogance and misunderstanding splitting them asunder. The war-mongers who are fed up with sticking pins in maps and just want to go out and thrash the living daylights out of anything that gets in their way, then the theorists, the pacifists, the moneymakers all come under Tolstoy's microscope for their vanities to be examined.

And suddenly I realised exactly what Tolstoy had wanted me to understand, namely how misguided and pointless and futile all this was.

And here's the lad, Napoleon in his doeskin breeches, just 5ft 6" tall, one lock of hair curling down his forehead and portrayed as quite the ridiculous man by Tolstoy, dumpy fat little legs, small hands, prone to tantrums, behaving like a toddler and wielding the consummate power that a toddler can when given free rein to do so. And forgive me for saying it all Bonapartists out there, but there is something childlike in his stance in this painting, little Napoleon does look as if he's off to playgroup doesn't he. That's me holed up in the Bastille next time I set foot in France.

Meanwhile the Russians in utter chaos, everyone speaking in a different language not only literally but strategically too as Tolstoy sets the war in the context of the times, and that converging constellation of causes that set this collison course in motion. One tilt of one aspect in a different direction and all would have been different but it was not to be....the Battle of Borodino is almost upon us.

Some pricelessly droll and humorous moments too. All the tip toeing around the Tsar's ego and how to remove him from any say in the running of the armed services and compromising situations on the field of battle without offending the leader of the country yet a man who was hardly an organised military strategist...

'A meeting had been convened in the old drawing room at the Tsar's behest, not a council of war - the Tsar liked to keep things vague - just a few people he considered worth consulting over their imminent difficulties.

Or what about Tolstoy's blisteringly honest assessment of the other nations...

'...only a German could be self-assured on basis of an abstract idea..'

'A Frenchman is self-assured because he sees himself as devastatingly charming, mentally and physically, to men and women alike.'

and perhaps saving his most scathing for the English...

'An Englishman is self-assured on the grounds that he is a citizen of the best-organised state in the world, and also because as an Englishman he always knows the right thing to do and everything he does, because he is an Englishman, must be right.'

On which subject please forgive a quick diversion. I have been reading Volume Two of Tolstoy's letters since watching The Trouble With Tolstoy in order to follow up more about his strange and extraordinarily powerful friendship with Vladimir Chertkov and the fate of the Dukhobors, the religious sect that Tolstoy helped to emigrate to Canada. They make for very engrossing reading and to my complete surprise, having known that Chertkov was sentenced to administrative exile for ten years, I was fairly sent to the foot of our stairs myself when I discovered where he was exiled to.... go on guess...in fact I'll make it a multiple choice question

1. Siberia,
2. Croydon, S.London
3. Irkutsk

Well Croydon of course and swiftly followed by Essex, many would say punishment enough (but not by me having been to both and each seemed fine) but despite his concerns that Chertkov might be corrupted by 'that astonishing, self-satisfied English dullness..' even Tolstoy yearned for dear old England in the correspondence.

'...in my desultory dreams I journey to England and live in Essex with all my friends and cultivate my kitchen garden.'

Sorry, back to the book and more glimpses of Natasha, physically and spiritually fragile and in torment and Pierre's inner life seemingly on course to converge ...are these two planets destined to align??

Younger brother Petya about to enlist... is that going to end in tears??

Poor Marya, still in the grip of the tyranical Prince Bolkonsky, and Andrei, where's Andrei, I've almost forgotten, is he back in the thick of the military??

And what about Rostov's moment when he looks into the eyes of the enemy and realises this is a man like himself ??

Such an enjoyable Team Tolstoy reading month for me, I hope it has been for you too.

Next month :: Volume III Part 2 Chapters 1-39 (about 150 pages)

 

 

 

Bring me Sunshine

Yes, Vocal Harem are singing Bring Me Sunshine at our annual gala concert coming up in May, the loveliest song to rehearse, it's been cheering us up every week since January, and I hope if you have been having 'the glorious weather' this week too you've been able to enjoy it. I feel ready to banish winter now but perhaps not the thermal vest just yet... we all remember that year we had heavy snow in Devon on April 28th.

I'll explain why I was out looking at the blackthorn with a magnifying glass next week, but meanwhile here's evidence of the moment and I didn't see the reflection of the house until I downloaded the picture. Had I tried to do that it would have proved impossible.

and then a very tranquil sunset looking from the same spot down to Cornwall that evening. Tamar Valley loveliness.

More Trouble With Tolstoy

So having taken the blog-scissors to Alan Yentob's coat it didn't feature in programme two of The Trouble With Tolstoy, though Anthony 's bookshelves were still on the higgledepiggledy professorial side, ( and I was right about the Faber Finds editions of the diaries) but no matter because my eventual verdict is that these two programmes have been worth the license fee alone this year. In fact I'd like to think we've probably covered some of the train fare or perhaps the cost of the consultation after he'd gamely downed a bowl of koumiss, the fermented mare's milk, whilst reclining in the middle of the steppe and barely containing that look of green-ness around the gills... mm delicious he intoned, yeh right I thought. And now you're all going to tell me it is delicious and I can buy it in Morrison's aren't you...

But here we were back with our hero, the provocative thorn in the side of the the establishment (Leo not Alan) established as Russia's greatest writer by the 1870s and ill at ease with the wealth he was amassing and the fundamental inequalities that surrounded him. Taking himself across the Volga river and traversing the steppes, Tolstoy settled on Samara as the location for a farmstead where he could live a simpler life. That retreat long gone but the site of a memorial and here it was our Alan supped the elixir.

Nineteenth century Samara in the grip of a drought and subsequent famine which Tolstoy brought to the attention of the world, but also the location at which he wrote Anna Karenina and where our Alan read several extracts from a nicely dog-eared copy, emphasising that this was was the book about who Tolstoy had become. Its tone darker and in essence autobiographical, portraying the character of Levin as himself and Dolly as Sonya, a woman who is finally given a voice as she talks about giving birth and the strains of motherhood.

Alan now seemingly non the worse for the koumiss encounter follows part of the trail along the Road of Tears, the old route taken by those exiled to Siberia and though I haven't read the book (but will do very soon) it is clear that Anna Karenina is a must once I have finished War and Peace, the extract from the final moments as moving as I'd expect given what happens. Anna Karenina (please shorten the 'a' roll the 'r' and emphasise the middle 'en' if you want to sound right) the novel that Tolstoy, disillusioned with the art of fiction, struggled to complete. Continually depressed and searching for answers he subsequently set out on a pilgrimage to the monastery of Optina Pustyn (sorry the site is in Russian, but don't you think that adds something glorious to the mystique for those of us who haven't a clue)

This part was fascinating, one of the monks designated to talk to our Alan about the still highly sensitive subject of Tolstoy, and how on his visit he had been a soul in pain, seen by the monks as sick and nursing a 'scorched heart with clotted blood on his lips.' But it had been the start of a profound religious journey for Tolstoy and one that would consume him for the rest of his life.

Interestingly, given that we might have been wondering about the absence of UK female input in comments after the first programme, Rosalind Bartlett did indeed play a greater part in this episode, and against a beautifully atmospheric backdrop of muted flowers and low light, whilst in Russia the commentators were almost all women with the exception of Tolstoy's great great grandson.

Professor Olga Slivitskaya elaborated on how much Tolstoy changed, walked away from the demands of his family as an obstacle to his ideal along with his attempts to abandon his literary persona and deny knowledge about his books, whilst the dire and barely imaginable state of the Tolstoy marriage was borne out by Rosalind Bartlett's summation of Sonia as flawed and humourless too... though I would have thought some of the responsibility for this must have lain at Tolstoy's feet. Tolstoy seemingly maintaining a collison course with everyone, proceeded to write his own highly edited version of the Gospels, jettisoning what he didn't like, so confrontation with the Russian Orthodox church was inevitable and eventual excommunication almost a given.

Tolstoy's strangely disempowering friendship with the controlling and dominant Vladimir Chertkov was the focus of much attention in the programme, with the rift between Sonia and her husband widening into an impossible chasm once Chertkov arrived on the scene. Described as an evil genius with the gift of antagonising just about anyone Chertkov, not surprisingly hated by Sonia for his monopoly and seeming control of her husband.

Professor Elvira Osipova along with our own Anthony Briggs both recommended a revival of Tolstoy's most submerged novel Ressurrection for the relevance it offers to contemporary readers, many of the issues as pertinent now as they were when the book was written,  but this novel the final nail in the proverbial and the eventual cause of Metropolitan Anthony's announcement of Tolstoy's excommunication. A move which only served to galvanise public support for a man now seen as a national hero.

The Death of course dominated the final part of the programme. Tolstoy's sudden decision to leave the family home described by Professor Olga as his King Lear moment, whilst Galina Alexeeva, the warden at Yasnaya Polyana fleshed out the background details in her beautiful English with a Russian accent. Tolstoy had been looking for an excuse to leave for many years, denouncing his lifestyle in the dramatic fashion long expected of him by his followers and he yearned for solitude ...it didn't take much... Sonia rummaging through his papers, her nervous breakdown in the face of so much sadness and at the age of 82 (better late than etc) he was off.

The unplanned flight by train with little idea of where he was going, the illness, the medical decision made that he was unfit to travel any further and must leave the train at the next station wherever it may be, and as we know it was in the station master's house at Astapavo that Tolstoy was to succumb to that bout of fulminating pneumonia, denying Sonia access to see him in his final few days there.

But how strange... media stars to the last then as now, camera's rolling, the paparazzi in evidence, film footage of Sonia arriving and peering in the windows, the deathbed scenes.

The film footage of the funeral was extraordinary, thousands turned out undaunted by the oppression, there is that whiff of revolution in the air and I have found an extract from the old Kenneth Clark Civilisation series which was also used in this programme, from the days when a BBC coat and a cut glass accent was a force to be reckoned with.

However I've forgiven Alan the coat and I've reined in my envy at him landing the plum job now, because, having anchored this admirably, his summing up was very simple, to the point and sincerely done, and in the end I got the impression this programme had been as moving for him to make as it had been for me to watch. At the time of his death Tolstoy unacceptable to both the establishment and the opposition and even now still difficult and problematic, an advocate for the unavoidable truths of life.

Team Tolstoy convenes here as usual on the 9th of the month, this Saturday to discuss War and Peace Vol III Part 1 (Chs 1-23)

Orange Inheritance

When news arrived recently of the Orange Inheritance series, a selection of titles being published by Vintage in celebration of sixteen years of the Orange prize I was very quick off the mark and a set arrived within days. Quick because the six titles, with a couple of exceptions, are a little out of the ordinary, if not unusual and unexpected, making an interesting blend and I wanted to see them.

I'm dipping in and out of this year's Orange longlist, concentrating on the serious end rather than the lighter or seemingly more experimental titles, and that's all hopelessly judgemental and subjective, and relevant only to my current reading mood rather than any reflection on the quality of the books.

Witness my recent sense of humour failure with The Afterparty by Leo Benedictus, reading mood and context can be everything. Not an Orange contender obviously, but many are tipping it for Booker stardom so you are bound to hear more about a book that is employing some very tricksy publicity angles ensuring that, love it or hate it, an afterparty is exactly what this book is creating in its wake.

Kimbofo loved it, KevinFromCanada didn't, so if you missed the debate last week nip over to Kevin's blog where I have shared my thoughts on his review as to why I was completely the wrong reader for this book .. let's just say it wasn't Kevin's best read of the year either.

Leo Benedictus has joined the debate in most gentlemanly fashion, father of Leo Benedictus has joined the debate in most fatherly fashion and I have no doubt his mum's probably pouring the gin all round, because the world and its mother have gatecrashed this particular afterparty for which no invitation required. Jonathan Cape the publishers must be thrilled and delighted with the number of guests pushing in the doors to say something, tipping one hundred comments last time I baled out for some air vowing to have a quiet night in...but I keep going back for more.

Last year the Canadian Curmudgeon (his own description, not mine) accorded similar low status to The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson and we all know what happened next... best get your bets on now, he has a real gift for this sort of thing.

It seems that celebrations of something or other are becoming an essential add-on to these literary prizes and I'm not even going to begin to reason why, I'll just enjoy the books that find themselves in the spotlight as a result. In this instance Orange asked a bevvy of previous prize winners to nominate the book they would most like to place in the hands of the next generation and here's the result.


To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf selected by Helen Dunmore, Orange Prize winner in 1996

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy selected by Anne Michaels, Orange Prize winner in 1997

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman chosen by Linda Grant, winner of the Orange Prize in 2000         

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell selected by Ann Patchett, Orange Prize winner in 2002

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates selected by Lionel Shriver, Orange Prize winner in 2005       

Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac selected by Rose Tremain, Orange Prize winner in 2008

Probably the only occasion a publisher is going to knowingly and justifiably stray into the Penguin colour chart and of course it's good to see Virginia Woolf and dear old Tess of the D'urbs in there. I am more than delighted to see both William Maxwell and Balzac too, books I have written about on here, whilst Richard Yates will be new to me, and nor did I see the film of Revolutionary Road, but what of Linda Grant's choice Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman?

Each prizewinner has written the introduction to their choice and, being in full-on Russian mode at the moment, but not really knowing what to expect, I idly picked up Life and Fate to read Linda Grant's introduction. I'm now not quite sure it's ever possible to 'idly pick up' a book like this and not feel the need to make an instant commitment to reading it. 800+ pages that having been written through the 1950s were then confiscated in their entirety by the KGB in 1961. No other book apart from The Gulag Archipelago was ever considered such a threat.

Told that the novel would not be published in the Soviet Union for three hundred years, Vasily Grossman suprisingly kept his freedom and continued to fight for the same liberty, sadly unsuccesfully, for his 'arrested' book. He died in 1964 and as far as was known Life and Fate had died with him, until a liberated copy appeared in France in the 1980s when it became clear that the microfilm had been smuggled out to the West.

How plucky in that case of Orange to publish such a book, and thus giving lie to the assertion that this prize is all about women, but what a fortuitous opportunity for Linda Grant too, who has been urging everyone to read it since she first did so seven years ago, in the hope that they may, perhaps like her, also experience Grossman's ' furious joy of life itself ' whilst feeling as she has done ' that they are entering the heart of the twentieth century, feeling its pulse.'

Frequently compared to War and Peace, Life and Fate, in the words of Linda Grant

'encompasses the whole of Soviet life, from Stalin down to the luckless peasant in the line of fire...'

whilst also elaborating on something fundamental to all humankind.

'The right to be oneself. however modestly ordinary that self is... Grossman's plea to be left alone, continues to resonate, whether it is a man building a cathedral out of matchsticks or a teenager choosing a mobile phone ringtone. Without these modest peculiarities we are ciphers.'

I warmed to that suggestion readily, turned over the page, started reading the book and was fifty pages in and consumed before I realised it. How this is going to fare alongside War and Peace I have no idea, two chunksters on the go at once, I'll need a trolley and it could all end in tears. But I can already see, as Grossman's account of the siege of Stalingrad unfolds, that the books are likely to interrogate each other with ideas. This could be the very best time for me to read it, I might be Russia-d out by the time we reach the September finish line with Team Tolstoy.

Grossman's observations on the heat of battle for example,

'A deep change of perception takes place at this mysterious turning point: a gallant, intelligent 'We' becomes a frail timid 'I' , while the enemy changes from a hunted isolated prey to a terrible threatening 'Them'.

or the misunderstandings between the Soviet prisoners-of-war

'...The more they talked and argued the less they understood each other. In the end they fell silent, full of mutual contempt and hatred.
    And in this silence of the dumb and those speeches of the blind, in this medley of people bound together by the same grief, terror and hope, in this hatred and lask of understanding between men who spoke the same tongue, you could see much of the tragedy of the twentieth century.'

Has anyone else read Life and Fate?
Is there hope for me?
Will I survive?

 

 

 

 

Happy Birthday to...

...the Tinker (father of dgr) who is eighty-six years young today and we seem to have had three lunches on the strength of it already.

And searching around for a nice picture I came across this one and he'll see the joke because we have an ongoing debate about the state of the jerseys, and though we occasionally buy him a new one he's very partial to keeping the old friends until both elbows have gone right through properly, having been darned at least twice (he does this himself)  which means one I bought him in about 1973 is on its way but not quite there yet. This one is circa late 1950s, I think my mum knitted it, it's probably still lurking in a cupboard somewhere and he'll have hidden it so I can't find it.

Happy Birthday Dad!

 

 

The Devil's Garden ~ Edward Docx

'In your heart you believe that it is better this way. We all do. It began - as it always begins - in blood and slaughter; it becomes conquest and slavery; and by way of shame and in need of disguise, it pulled on the robes of religion and then the suit and tie of the market; until eventually it came to... conservationism.'

Butterflies yesterday, ants today and thus sayeth one of the characters in Edward Docx's latest novel The Devil's Garden, and I suppose one day someone will be able to write a book about travelling up a river through some rather menacing rain forest or other to reach the point where as yet unknown tribes still live in the impassable jungle interior...

'Our boat chugged the sullen backwater. We were travelling upstream but this no longer felt like a journey back to the earliest beginnings of the world, rather to its end.'

and I won't automatically think ' Oh right, Heart of Darkness stuff going on here then' or be searching for signs of post-post colonial literature or something.

It hasn't happened yet and it didn't seem likely with Edward Docx's book given that Dr Forle finds himself drawn 'deeper and deeper into a world of mystery and violence involving remote Indian tribes'. Somehow I just can't stop myself thinking of that wonderfully ambiguous Conradian moment in Heart of Darkness, when someone is faced with dinner...

'the lumps of some stuff that looked like half-cooked dough of a dirty lavender colour' 

and my 2am Open University essay-writing imagination had that marked as human and for consumption.

Dr Forle (hmm fall?? you see how can I not think Conrad) the first person narrator, is a rather buttoned-up scientist, a myrmecologist (ant expert) who actually finds himself working at the remote scientific station along the Amazon with a team researching the complex social structures of the ant world. Ants apparently blindingly good at co-operation in a way that the humans involved in this novel might not be and world supremacy and survival against all the odds seemingly well within their capabilities given that according to Dr Forle's work in progress

'The combined dry weight of all the ants on Earth is about the same as that of Homo Sapiens.'

and the total ant population is underestimated at ten thousand trillion.

Poor old Dr Forle, nursing his 'blistered heart' and thinking the rain forest will be the right place to escape from the largely unknown details of a relationship breakdown in order to progress his life's work.

'I made a false floor to fireproof myself from what feelings burned below; and the greater the heat within me, the greater my effort to seal it off. Outwardly I grew colder. Science, method...'

By page 13 there's some prescient advice Dr Forle could well do with remembering on page 235

'When a man is wounded in the river, he must swim as best he can upstream from his own blood if he is to have any chance.'

and whatever you do DO NOT LET YOUR EYE STRAY TO THE FINAL LINE OF THE BOOK until you get there. Mine accidentally did and I could have kicked myself. But then when you finish the book be sure to go back to Dr Forle's little introduction and read it again just as a reminder.

But Dr Forle hasn't reckoned on a jungle love-interest or the sudden arrival of a boat-load of rather menacing individuals headed by a Colonel and a judge who are ostensibly trying to register all the local inhabitants prior to an election. Given that we're talking unknown and undiscovered tribes this is quite a tall order and obviously all is not what it seems.

Human nature is examined under Edward Docx's microscope just as carefully as are the ants, and the tension for this reader felt initially understated and on a par with the seemingly turn a blind-eye approach of Dr Forle. With a bit of head-burying-in-sand our doctor just hopes the problems will go away when of course they don't, they escalate and as he found himself increasingly drawn into the dangers and the violence so was I. It's an object lesson in how to find yourself unwittingly pitched into the middle of a war zone without really trying, and when the potential consequences dawn on Doctor Forle he is really going to worry much less about saving his hard drive when it's his skin that's at risk.

I see it's almost four years since I read and enjoyed Edward Docx's last novel set in a very chilly Russia, Self Help, which looking back I see felt like

'...a slow burner of a book that gets under your skin and takes hold as you follow the undulating course of all these lives as they move towards an unexpected twist in the tale that I hadn't really seen coming.One of those twists that was clever enough to make me go back over the long and chilly Dostoevskyan Russian journey with some New York, Paris and London thrown in and interpret first thoughts into second thoughts and come to some quite different conclusions about everyone.'

A change of climate and perhaps the expectation might be that this book, with its shimmering heat and gallons of perspiration, might be even slower but not so. As the pace quickens so did my page-turning but not so fast that I wasn't taking in the rather clever wordsmithery of Edward Docx... one liners that stay in the mind

'...courage was only ever madness anointed.'

It's always interesting to read a book like The Devil's Garden about a place in the world seemingly dripping with menace and fear for some whilst being that safe-as-houses place of home and comfort for those who live there, and then to see how a writer juxtaposes those two worlds. Though the aggressors are of the local variety for which I heaved a sigh along the lines of 'at least it's not our fault', the issues have a far greater international import. This alongside the many correlations that bear scrutiny between the ant world and the human one (I won't extrapolate because making those connections happens very enjoyably as you read)  and I couldn't help but reach the conclusion that we might as well just hand it all over to the ants now, they've got the right idea and there are just so many of them anyway...

 

 

Happy Mothering Sunday...

...and that includes everyone.

I feel sure we all 'mother' someone or something, and since I'm reading Patrick Barkham's The Butterfly Isles A Summer in Search of our Emperors and Admirals let's say it with a small tortoiseshell, Aglais urticae and I just hope to goodness that's right.

 

The Lazarus hedge

The announcement of the day is that, whilst out logging on Wednesday this week, so March 30th, Bookhound saw our first swallow. Probably part of the advance party but still very early and, according to this research, perhaps connected with the very temperate, warm and sunny month we have just enjoyed. So we will live in hope of yet another brood like this.

and I also have to share Rocky's Corner with you because bless him, the old chap has sprouted a lovely show of daffs this spring, all planted back on that sad day last October.

And a very special little feature alongside. You may recall I bought the Tinker a packet of Shamrock seeds with my last bit of change at Dublin airport on my way home from that memorable trip, and this being the Tinker he has grown two lovely trays of it on his kitchen window sill through the winter, so we've planted one out and it's rooted well so this is now ShamRocky (!) corner too.


But meanwhile we have been bracing ourselves for the raising of a hedge fund.

Bookhound had measured it out at about fifty metres of deceased supposedly evergreen escallonia, and all the evidence was pointing towards a diagnosis of terminal fungal something or other. If not that then one harsh winter had laid it low (though not until the August moult ) and a second one seemed terminal because the hedge hasn't ever been remotely sparse, let alone this bald in the sixteen years we've lived here.

Dead as a dodo, wind whistling through it, big branches cracking and falling off every time a sparrow as much as glances at it and Monty Don had said as much on Gardener's World, albeit about Box hedges dying across the nation, and was suggesting a solution of seaweed nutrients (thank you to Linda for that, Bookhound saw it too.) We, as in the royal we, had done a bit of digging/ pulling out of the ivy that wasn't helping around the roots, but things weren't looking great and this was going to need far more than a helping of bladderwrack, if this was Casualty this hedge has a Glasgow Coma Scale of three.

We've spent the winter trying not to notice it when we walk or drive past and into the gate, idly fretting over the work that would be involved in grubbing up the remains and replacing it with something that would look reasonable but more importantly would be instantly stock proof, because without the hedge we will have sheep and bullocks leaping up onto the garden off the lane every time they are moved. In the interests of economy we'd quickly ditched the nice but foolishly extortionate iron railings whim, settling on a basic pig wire fence and we'd just grow plants that had words like 'profusion' and ' fast growth' and 'not suitable for confined spaces' on the label in the hope they would hide it all quickly. I was thinking Clematis Montana x twenty.

Bookhound was on the brink of phoning the man with the big digger who does fencing as well because the sooner we got rid of the eyesore the better, we've almost got away with it looking normal through the winter but once the rest of the lane greens up we'll be rumbled. And then there was all the worry over whether the wall would be uprooted with the remains and the roots. Phone calls to the insurers, the wall is covered unless demolished by an Act of God but would we be complicit in one of those if we took a digger to it... all very complicated.

So there we were standing out on the lane with our mugs of tea staring at it glumly yet again, when lo and behold we spotted...yes...vital signs of LIFE.

and more life...

Well let joy be unconfined. Thinking we couldn't do it any harm with a bit of fertility treatment we dug a rather damp old box of Miracle Gro powder out of the shed, mixed it by the bucket-full and tipped one on each hedge plant.

One week later look...MULTIPLE BIRTHS!

And now it's in intensive care and we're nursing the thing like a baby returned from the brink and to think how we've always taken it for granted and many's the time cursed it for growing so fast. We've had the debate about possibly chopping it down to the base to give it the best chance, but decided against that given that it's sprouting everywhere, even on the deadest looking branches, so we've been out clearing around the roots, pulling up the ivy and anything else that might be a problem. We live in hope that one day it might look as happy as it did last June and currently we have adapted the Monty Python parrot sketch for our own ends and to keep us cheered... that hedge isn't dead, it's just sleeping, GCS currently nine or thereabouts.

 

April reads

I'm not even going to try and pull an April Fool on all of you, you're all far too clever, but I am always reminded (and I think I probably tell you every year) of the Grand April Fool in my younger health visiting days, played on a GP in the brand new doctor's surgery where I worked, and how can I say it...one who held himself in very high esteem. Quite how I kept my job after this I'll never know.

The letter telling said doctor that the expensively hand-made bricks used in the build had been fired at the wrong temperature and the white efflorescence now evident on the surface (and worrying him madly) was in fact a sign that they could expect severe structural defects to the building within five years. It always seems like such a funny idea when you think of these things doesn't it, but the moment when, hiding in my office, I knew he must be opening and reading the letter ranks along with some of the most terrifying moments of my life. He did go ballistic and hardly saw the funny side when, having shouted across a packed waiting room for the Practice Manager to 'Ring the *&*%^&* architect NOW' , he then rang  the contact number on the letter and got Dial-a-Recipe. He was only slightly more grudgingly good humoured by coffee time and I expect all the patients got very short shrift that morning...ah yes, happy days. And that surgery about to be demolished to make way for a new one which tells you how long ago that was, but at least the bricks did last out the thirty years.

So rest easy, we'll talk about books for a change instead. So many books arriving and still I have to overcome that urge to start reading all of them immediately. To that end I have a special shelf where I "make" myself put them as soon as possible and sometimes with great difficulty, all safely filed according to month of publication and I head there towards the end of each month to see what upcoming delights I might want to sample.

I have pulled a few out a few books publishing in April, and there are so many this will take a couple of instalments.

The Vagabond's Breakfast by Richard Gwyn.

I read The Colour of a Dog Running Away on Scott Pack's recommendation, a novel which I enjoyed immensely and now I'm intrigued to see that this memoir recounts the nine years of Richard Gwyn's life lost to vagrancy and alcoholism that left him in need of a liver transplant in 2006. Now the Director of the MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing at Cardiff University suggests some fairly drastic life-changes in Richard Gwyn's life so I am looking forward to this account of 'redemption via friendship, imagination, literature, love and fatherhood.'

The West Rand Jive Cats Boxing Club by Lauren Liebenberg

1950's life in a J'berg mining city for Chris and Tommy, two pre-teen boys for whom a life of rock 'n' roll and boxing will be turned upsidedown when Tommy's sister goes missing.Innocence will be lost and choices between courage and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal will have to be made. Lauren Liebenberg previously shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers.

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young.

Now this one comes with the following plea from the publisher...

' This is the most powerful book you will read in 2011. You will want to tell everyone what happens in it. Please don't.'

A First World War novel which recounts the experiences of the women left at home as much as those of the men in the trenches. Louisa Young's grandmother, Kathleen Scott, widow of Captain Scott of Antarctic fame, worked with the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, (cousin to Archibald McIndoe) helping him by making clay models of the wounded faces as guidance for the surgeons doing the reconstructions. Now even I have heard of Gillies ...in fact anyone who has worked in an operating theatre may have done too... 'Gillies forceps nurse.' The publisher has very kindly sent me the audio version too so if I can get it onto my iTouch this will be good walking listening.

The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee

January 1997, the dying days of John Major's government and 'newspapers fighting for a dwindlign readership amid wild rumours that the internet is about to change the world forever.' and two women journalists, one olf, one young, one a veteran war correspondent, the other a writer of celebrity gossip, meet for the first time. Wit and satire are promised and to be honest that has enough ingredients already for me to give this one a try.. The Devil Wears Prada meets Scoop apparently.

The Beauty Chorus by Kate Lord Brown

The Second World War this time and female pilots delivering Spitfires, and the recommendation is that the reader sinks into a hot bath with a glass of cold wine to read this. I'm not a bath reader and I don't drink so I'll have to make do with an armchair and a mug of hot chocolate and hope I get the same effect.

The Proof of Love by Catherine Hall

I really enjoyed Catherine Hall's last novel, Days of Grace and I'm looking forward to a novel about the long hot summer of 1976 because I have my own particular and very vivid memories of that year too... nursing finals, wedding, little things like that. A young Cambridge mathemetician arrives in the Lake District and takes a job as a farm labourer which is bound to arouse some suspicion...when he saves the life of a young girl in a fire more secrets are revealed and the tension wratchets up accordingly with the increasing heat. The blurb promises shimmering atmosphere and taut plotting, we'll see.

A Man of Parts by David Lodge

It doesn't seem like five minutes since I read David Lodge's last novel Deaf Sentence and now here's a doorstop of another one about the life of H.G.Wells. It's 1944 and 'the man who invented tomorrow' seems like a spent force, ailing and depressed he looks back on his life and his loves, including of course Rebecca West. Interestingly a new Virago edition of her novel The Fountain Overflows with a fascinating introduction by Amanda Craig has also just arrived. Two literary lives of which I know next to nothing and I am hoping that a writer of David Lodge's calibre won't wander off on a frolic of his own with the facts of those lives.

All About Love - Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion by Lisa Appignanensi

A wise, funny and vibrant meditation on love which draws on a wide range of literature, psychology, popular culture as well as personal experience and if Mad, Bad and Sad - A History of Women and the Mind Doctors was any indication, this book promises to be a really good read.

And not in the photograph, but not to be missed by anyone who loved The Morville Hours, Katherine Swift's sequel, The Morville Year  published in March, recounts a year in the life of the garden with presumably ne'er an inch of dead escallonia hedge to be seen, and very beautiful colour plates to accompany this book too.

Any of these take your fancy?