dovegreyreader scribbles

Kate of Green Gables...

Firstly Happy Canada Day on July 1st everyone, I don't see why we can't all enjoy a celebratory day tomorrow and sing a round of O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command... then, though perhaps it's a heinous crime to mention it in the same sentence, could we have a Happy Independence Day on Monday and make a long weekend of it.

And if I have my schedule right then this coming weekend will see our newly wedded Royal couple, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on a tour of Canada. We probably all need to brace for a right load of old tosh appearing across the red tops (did you see that Kate had apparently patted a child's head which was clearly an indication of forthcoming babies) so for a more knowledgeable and measured resume of these modern monarchs-in-waiting than you are likely to read anywhere else, head to Mrs KevinFomCanada's guest blog post here.

Very sensibly William and Catherine are stopping off for a visit to Prince Edward Island because Anne of Green Gables was a favourite childhood read of the Duchess's, and alright I'm a bit jealous.

It's on my list of Places to Go To One Day.

I'm sure typing Anne of Green Gables into the Prince Edward Island website is not an unusual thing to do but it has rescued me from royal-trip-envy and I'm sure there is a great deal more on the site since the last time I looked, a wonderful virtual exhibition that I have spent ages wandering around.

Lovely pictures of the book jackets... it was a favourite book of my mum's so she bought me this one, and I have the books downloaded free from girlebooks onto my Kindle too because who can know when an Anne Shirley moment may come upon me.

Imagine my surprise when I told the Tinker this over lunch recently and he recounted how close I had come to being born in Canada. 'Whaaaaaat' I said choking over my Brixham prawns (hate fish love prawns) ... I had no idea, but 'tis true, he and my mum were all set to emigrate to Edmonton with friends after the war. It was all systems go until the friends got cold feet...about having cold feet probably, but also felt at the last minute that they couldn't leave their extended family. No such qualms for my parents but it was all just a bit too daunting to see through on their own so Mr & Mrs KevinFrom Canada, we were that close to being neighbours:-)

There are fascinating links on the website to L.M.Montgomery's scrapbooks where she assiduously pasted fabric scraps from the dresses she had made, and being very fashion conscious went to great lengths to look her best for a visit from the Prince of Wales,

On 6 August 1927, a year after writing so approvingly about fashion in her past, Montgomery went to a garden party at Government House in Toronto to meet the Prince of Wales and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Mrs. Baldwin. She made a special trip to Toronto to buy a new hat to go with her "cocoa-colored lace and georgette" (SJ,III,351). Though she may have lamented the changes in fashion, she was certainly not going to wear anything but the latest style herself!

Can you just imagine how excited Lucy Maud would have been about the Royal visit to her island on Sunday.

So that all led me to the Lucy Maud Montgomery shelf because she does of course merit a shelf of her own..

and drawn as I am, with Team Edward Thomas, into reading how the Great War affected the diary writers of the time I have been immersed in Volume Two of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Selected Journals 1910-1921. I absolutely treasure these, five volumes edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, and yes I have just found the elusive Vol IV at a very reasonable £13, having been on the lookout for an affordable edition for several years, so I now have a full set. Spanning  the years from 1889 to 1942 they are a fascinating lens on the changing sphere of women's lives and a wonderful resource.

Now, whilst I am mindful that she rewrote with an eye for publication so could have been revising in the light of hindsight, but events in Lucy Maud's life surrounding the declaration of war in August 1915 still reveal the state of shock, and the reverberations echoing around the colonies who were also implicated and likely to have to send men to fight.

August 5th 1914 and Lucy Maud is awaiting the imminent birth of her second baby...

England has declared war on Germany!
Good God, I cannot believe it!  It must be a horrible dream. It has come like a thundercloud....I sat down weak and unnerved. I could not eat. I could only sit there dumbly trying to realize it - to realize that our Empire was at war. And such a war! No paltry struggle in an out-of-the-way corner - no Boer conflict which we all thought so terrible at the time - but a death grapple. For Germany comes to conquer or die.

Strangely I can indentify a little with that fear of war and pregnancy back in the early 1980s, having given birth to Offspringette in 1981 and expecting the Kayaker in early 1983 and watching the Falklands War unfold in 1982. It's a time of heightened emotional turmoil anyway but there was something about that war being the first that Britain had been involved in during my lifetime, and I remember the almost addictive visual presence of those MOD announcements (and you'd keep the TV on in the background for fear of missing one) and there I was with my babies and what sort of a world was this going to be for them.

Lucy Maud waits...

As for me I had expected that by this time I would have had my baby. But my hour has not yet come. I have been feeling very miserable and the days are long and trying...my nurse has been here ever since July 17th.. I am full of forebodings...'

And then this entry for Sunday August 30th 1914

My heart seems broken. On August 13th a darling little son was born to me - dead.

...at first I thought I could not love! All the agony and pain I have endured in my whole life heaped together could not equal what I felt when I realized that my baby was dead - my bonny sweet boy, so beautiful and perfect..
And while I was lying helpless bad war news began to come too, news of the British defeat at Mons...everything seems dark and hopeless.

and the diary entries that follow recount that combination of depression and despair over events both personal and international, the jarring letters of condolence, the increasingly tragic war news.

But forthright as ever Lucy Maud had this to say in 1915

In praising the work of women in the war effort, she told a reporter: "But I do hope that it will in some measure open the eyes of humanity to the truth that the women who bear and train the nation's sons should have some voice in the political issues that may send those sons to die on the battlefields."

It all led me to another treasure of a book Lucy Maud Montgomery and Canadian Culture by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly and a chapter entitled L.M.Montgomery and the First World war, an account and analysis of the four novels that she wrote during the war and which clearly seem to reflect her concerns and her distress, Anne of the Island, Anne's House of Dreams,  Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside so more reading to come.

I'm not sure how I have ended up in such a sad place after starting in such a happy one, but in many ways isn't that the delight of following a reading trail, you can never tell quite where it will take you.

Anyway I wish Kate and William a wonderful day on Sunday and no I'm not jealous at all and I hope he buys her a souvenir doll at least.

The Alice Behind Wonderland ~ Simon Winchester

I do have all the books, all dipped into over the years, Morton Cohen's Lewis Carroll A Biography, considered the definitive work, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild - A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll by Karoline Leach, the book that purported to have discovered definitive reference to those lost pages of Lewis Carroll's diary. Pages that seem to have been dated around the time that there was the unexplained and irreconcilable rift with the family of Alice Liddell, Carroll's muse for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the young subject of the controversial photographs. Then there is The Mystery of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Woolf and The Agony of Lewis Carroll by Richard Wallace and so it goes on, the author of Alice in Wonderland it seem a never-ending subject for reinterpretation and renewed understanding.

I'm not quite sure where the Lewis Carroll, 'guilty' or 'not guilty' of offences against children debate rests at the moment, though there is little doubt in my mind that, were he to be judged in the context of present-day sensibilities and safeguarding awareness, he'd be banged to rights pronto for 'that' over-revealing photo and not allowed near a child unless supervised.

And there can be little doubt that Alice Liddell, was an ethereally beautiful and photogenic little girl with a gaze that almost defies description, so when The Alice Behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester arrived I was in half a mind whether to read it or not. Would this be more of the same-old same old or perhaps a different perspective on a man, who for all his perceived faults and transgressions left us the legacy of one of the most famous children's books of all time.

Coming in at just under 100 pages I decided I could afford to risk it and was almost pleased to discover that Simon Winchester has tip-toed around the paedophile sensation approach, acknowledging that the absent diary pages do leave room for 'ambiguity and speculation' but steadfastly refusing to tread further on those egg shells. Simon Winchester prefers to explore his subject through the medium of the photography, a burgeoning phenomenen of which Lewis Carroll was an early enthusiast. And a very good exponent of the craft he was, not only capturing the images but doing his own developing too. Carroll's photographs are recognised as of the highest compositional standard and I was interested to discover that many of the originals now lie in the vault of the Princeton University library. Copies are available but it has been declared, by the current Curator of Manuscripts, that the actual Alice picture itself will not see the light of day again, ever, for fear of light deterioration. Simon Winchester clearly did his level best to lay eyes on those originals whilst researching this book but

' after some courteous chafing, I felt obliged to abide by his ruling.'

 There is a fascinating potted history of Carroll's life in a rather decadent and loutish Oxford and his unusual elevation to a Fellowship at Christ Church college whilst still an undergraduate; an honour which guaranteed him lifelong residence, food and a grant of £25 a year with no requirement to work  for any of it, so clearly someone somewhere recognised something about him worth rewarding.

Simon Winchester includes a good account of the history of photography woven around the life of Lewis Carroll, his friendship with Family Liddell, the mysterious falling out and the later life of Alice too. I had no idea that one of the very few signed copies of Alice in Wonderland was given by Alice as a gift to a young Princess Elizabeth, or that the original manuscript, which I have
often looked at in the British Library, was presented to the British people by a group of US book lovers after the Second World War. It had originally been in Alice's possession and sold to a US buyer when she hit hard times but eventually handed over with great ceremony  and received by the Archbishop of Canterbury no less,

'as an expression of thanks to a noble people who held Hitler at bay for a long period single-handed.'

And it's obvious that this postcard from The British Library was my bookmark for this read, a fascinating little book that explores a life we think we may know well enough, but recounted from a really unique angle, so an interesting and useful addition to the Lewis Carroll shelf....and now it occurs to me...

I may never have read the original.

How on earth has that not happened.

Have you read it?

The original rather than an abridged version?

Bookmarks...

You aren't going mad, it's me...some of you may have seen this post which went live on Saturday evening before it was supposed to...blame the jet-lag.

So where were we...

I've long been convinced that the choice of bookmark is as important as the choice of the book I'm reading, but have to admit that this may have reached the point of obsession. I can't walk round a gallery or museum these days without thinking  'Hope that's in the shop' every time I see something that inspires, and of course I mean the postcard version for a bookmark...and I have a feeling, as with desks, fountain pens, ink and paper, I may not be speaking to the unconverted.

I keep the booty in a drawer and have been known to linger there for ages making my choice from the increasingly vast selection.

Our recent trip to Tate Britain yielded good results swiftly followed up by the National Gallery which yielded more, and the shop at Westminster Abbey even more with its exquisite cards of the stained glass, Poet's Corner, the breathtaking vaulted ceilings and tiled floors and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.

Incidentally, let all critics of the Royal Wedding think on the benefits that such an event has brought to the coffers of Westminster Abbey. £16 a head entrance fee and the queues snaking right around the Abbey and beyond.. I made do with the shop which was bursting at the seams.

My most recent gallery 'acquisition'... because I gaze at these for so long it really does start to feel as if I own a share in these artworks, was The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke by Richard Dadd.

and this has seen me through my recent read of Meghan O'Rourke's The Long Goodbye, a memoir of mourning in a cultural age which has largely set aside the the rituals that acknowledge grief, and it has now found its way into Julia Blackburn's Thin Paths.

In the end perhaps the bookmark may not even reflect the content of the book but it will provide something to stop and stare at while I pause and think, perhaps even a distraction from the content, and having now seen the original of Richard Dadd's painting in Tate Britain, it has also been a prolonged chance to revisit the moment when my eyes first tried to take it in. Of course no reproduction can do justice to the real thing, which at 54 x 39.4 cms quite took our breath away. I can't quite describe the intricacy of those daisies but they are in my mind's eye and readily overlay the rather tame limitations of the postcard version.

Having been declared insane and admitted to Bedlam Hospital after murdering his father, Richard Dadd benefited from the compassion of a new hospital director who supplied him with painting materials, sensing that this may be good therapy for his patient and the years from 1855-1864 were spent working on The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke.

And who can know what on earth is going on here beyond nods to A Midsummer Night's Dream and the fruits of Dadd's restless and perhaps distorted imagination, but it all makes me think how precious art like this is. Nowadays perhaps we have speedy recourse to treatments, medication and counselling that would settle and dispel such disquiet and in doing so switch off that inspiration. I sense the same about a writer like Virginia Woolf too, the curse of the rest cure apart, who can know how much her unmedicated depression gave us what we have today.

But as if to answer this bout of artistic inquisitiveness, two very beautiful books have arrived which I have been strolling through at leisure and which have started to expand my rather limited understanding of the art world. I squeezed a year of Art History into my OU Literature degree on the basis that a year of looking would be a rest from so much reading. In fact it transpired I knew so little about art and suddenly realised I wanted to know so much more, that I ended up reading twice as much as for any literature year. But I still wander around an exhibition and know I'm missing so much, time-limited gazing and the distractions of others and I'd have given my eye-teeth to have pulled a chair up close to the Richard Dadd painting and just stared and stared.

So the two books by Francoise Barbe-Gall How to Look at a Painting and How to Understand a Painting - Decoding Symbols in Art are fast becoming regular reading matter.

Weighty books both, high production values that offer clear reproductions of the paintings and facilitate attention to minute details too, and interestingly a painting that Meghan O'Rourke mentions with special poignancy in her book, Claude Monet's The Magpie, is also analysed by Francoise Barbe-Gill, I was there and understanding it in a flash.

So how about you....bookmarks??

 

 

 

Catching up...

I think I might still be jet-lagged after that trip to Dublin because it seems to have taken me all week to catch up with myself, then there's been

....the longest day which I always feels I should make the most of.

....the dental hygienist - are they not the new traffic wardens?? The mouth police tsking over inadequate flossing and demonstrating how to clean your teeth properly whilst wielding a very threatening set of huge false teeth as if to say these too could be yours, and a toothbrush. I'll stop you there I said, very nicely, paid an arm and a leg and sneaked off shopping whilst naughtily leaving my car in the patient's car park (next to the sign telling me not to) feeling a bit of a rebel, and thinking to get my money's worth out of thirty minutes of sonic torture and opprobrium.

...the cholesterol telling-off at the doctors...actually no I lie, he was a GP trainee (always go to the trainee if there is one, they are diligent and conscientious, if it's gone wrong they'll find out where) and he said I wasn't to worry...yet, come back in six months time and worry then.

...afternoon tea with a retired school nurse colleague who I worked with for thirty years, heck did we laugh about the olden days.'How's 'yer cock?' she always says to me and it's a long story involving a bantam cockerel called George (long deceased) which I was given whilst at work one day, so she made it a nice cage out of a radiator cover in her office and from whence it proceeded to crow very loudly until I came back for it at 5pm. We'd be up before a disciplinary now and infection control would have our guts for garters.

....oh yes and a full-on week at work.

.... plus Port Eliot liaison and planning with the Festival team

But editing the Dublin photos has been a wonderful reminder of the trip, and I'm happy to report that my Ulysses enthusiasm remains bright and undiminished so expect more about that eventually.

The hotel I stayed in was just along from the Dublin fire station with fabulous views from my sixth floor room across to Trinity College and the hills beyond..

and this sign made me chuckle every day as I walked past it and still makes me chuckle now...

It was good to hear from Irish blog reader Brenda, who I met whilst I was in her home city, that the Queen's recent visit was greatly appreciated by the country and held some deeply symbolic moments of reconciliation over past errors of English action or misjudgement.

But it's all good, I'm home and now very focused on being as organised as possible for Port Eliot and with a War and Peace instalment coming up too, but I must give a quick mention to Offspringette who happens to find herself living and working in Christchurch on the 'lightning-doesn't-strike-twice' principle, except with earthquakes of course it often can. So she was caught in the middle of  those two big earthquakes on June 13th; we woke up to the last trill of the phone at 5am in the morning before she rang off and it's odd how you know isn't it...

'Earthquake in Christchurch!' I said to Bookhound immediately, and as we fumbled around looking for glasses and trying to remember the international dialling code for New Zealand I flicked the TV on, and there it was and we knew she'd been trying to ring us before we saw the news and then had conniptions wondering if she was alright.

Having recovered from the Richter 5 and nipped into a shop to award herself a cheeseburger as a survival celebration, the Richter 6 swifty followed which had Offspringette making a dash for the door. Unfortunately everyone else in the shop had the same idea and all converged at the exact same moment that the plate glass windows buckled, caved in and shattered so it was all a bit terrifying.

Outside the road was undulating madly, cars were in the air, more buildings were tumbling, and then there was the liquefaction. I had not the first clue about liquefaction however I may now be the nation's expert...who knew that the vibrations in the ground create this process whereby the soil yields up the liquid onto the surface. Offspringette set too and was digging dogs and cats out of it for days apparently.

Though we've been making light of it and suggesting she sleeps with a headtorch on, and what a pain that she'd paid for the cheeseburger and never got to eat it (she has now, they made her another one about a week later) because what else can you do from thousands of miles away but offer anxiety-containing good cheer, yet I can only begin to imagine how stressful it must feel for everyone else to be living there and watching the ongoing decimation of your home town. We'll be more than a little relieved when Offspringette moves on to the USA in time for her thirtieth birthday in August. Meanwhile in the midst of all this she has completed and submitted the first half of her Masters degree in Education and nabbed a distinction, so clearly a little bit of edgy stress hones the concentration no end.

As a reward for being so busy I have the bliss of a completely empty diary this week, so how's your week been...do you have that strangely enjoyable chasing your tail whilst spinning plates on poles feeeling sometimes too??

 

 

...the express train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop - only the name.

Team Edward Thomas are reading to a leisurely schedule having set ourselves an almost Adlestropian pace at which to enjoy our pre-publication reading of  All Roads Lead to France - The Last Years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis, and a wealth of associated books leading us along a variety of trails. For those interested in reading along those trails with us you will find a list of books over here >>>> somewhere, and we will be sharing thoughts on those eventually too as well as welcoming Matthew Hollis here to answer our questions and to talk more about his book.

But we are also busy on the  tracing footsteps front.

Hilary is this very day travelling on the Oxford to Worcester train line that Edward Thomas also travelled,

and on the very same day June 24th and ninety-seven years later that his train made that unscheduled stop at Adlestrop. Even the timings will be almost identical, and though the station was a victim of the Beeching cuts in 1966 this remains a historic literary journey, so we are very grateful to Hilary for setting out on our behalf today and greatly looking forward to sharing her thoughts on here soon.

Meanwhile Fran has walked around and about the village of Steep, one time home of Edward Thomas and his family, the surrounding landscape the inspiration for much of his poetry. Fran's pictures and commentary and a wonderful moment of homage on our behalf have had us all entranced, bringing so much of what we are reading to life, so I feel sure you will enjoy them too....over to Fran.

 

Last Friday I spent a glorious afternoon following an Edward Thomas walk around Steep in Hampshire. The PDF of the walk as published by East Hampshire can be seen here.

Steep is still a small village just outside Petersfield, a small country town. Bedales school is right in the middle, where the Thomas' sent their children. Sadly the noise from the A3 road now disrupts the peace of this sleepy place, although there was plenty of birdsong to be heard on Friday. Throughout the walk the sound of blackcaps, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, wrens and dunnocks were to be heard. Both Edward in his prose and poems, and Helen in Under Storms Wing mention hearing the nightingales often whilst living here, but none heard by me although they are known to sing in the day as well as at night.

The hedgerows were full of all the flowers of which Edward Thomas wrote; dog and field roses, honeysuckle, foxgloves, elderflowers, a few common spotted orchids and when up on the open part of the hanger, cushions of thyme,marjoram, plenty of rock rose and the evidence of many cowslips. These were at their best about a month ago on the Downs near to where I live. It must have been a picture up by the memorial stone then. 

The War Memorial was sobering. I sat awhile on the bench, and counted fifty four names.
The village is not large now. Before WW1 it must have been a small, spread out rural community. Six of the names appear twice, so those families lost more than one son. The enormity of the losses felt by each and evey town and village in the country could be seen from this sad record.

 

 

On up the Shoulder of Mutton Hill and The lanes were steep sided just as Thomas describes in his prose work, full of ferns and trees over head, mainly yew, ash and beech.

The part along the stream and pond was particularly delightful; clear running water, then the silent pond fringed with iris, and a moorhen with her chicks.

The path then climbed steeply up the wooded hanger, until I reached the eastern end of Cockshott Lane, and walked along to the far end to catch glimpses of The Red House and The Bee House. Both had high hedges and I didn’t want to intrude too much as they are private homes. Walking back towards Shoulder of Mutton Hill, the road unmade for much of the way, I felt it was not that dissimilar to how it would have been when Edward walked that way with one of his children up on his shoulders. Up here there was only the sound of the wind in the trees, and the birdsong. It was worth that stiff climb....what a view. Having rained the day before I probably could see for "sixty miles", the Downs rolled away endlessly in both directions.

I spent a while near the memorial stone, and laid a bunch of wild flowers I had gathered in the afternoon, on behalf of all of us. I just wish we all could have visited together.

Then down the hill again, to see Berryfields. In the photos taken from up on the hill it is the small house set sideways on the right of the complex of buildings. I noticed the unusual way it was built of both brick and flint, and then the next day in Under Storms Wing I read Helen Thomas' description of it.


Of all their houses in Steep I think this was the one they liked best. It is in a delightful situation with views up to the wooded hills, a stream nearby and deep tunnels of lanes all round.
My last stop was at the church to see the two engraved windows, by Laurence Whistler to mark the centenary of Edward's birth.

I was met with the sad notice that one of them had been broken recently during a break in. As they are clear glass it is difficult to photograph them but it was a fitting end to such an enjoyable afternoon, and one that has brought to life much of the prose I am reading.

With thanks to Fran for that wonderfully evocative walk, and I'm sure the members of Team Edward Thomas will be along in comments soon to give their early impressions of reading so far.

But it all set me a-thinking...what of other literary walks or journeys, there must be so many, can you recommend any others??

London Walks! ~ Badaude

Now we all know that I can't draw for toffee. It's a good evening's entertainment to sit me down with a piece of paper and a pencil and say

'Lynne, draw those houses.'

It's just not going to look good at all.

The perspective will be shockingly askew, the proportions will be up the swanee, the houses will be wonky and there is no way my brain will figure out how to get the proportions right. Everything gets the naive treatment because I have the drawing ability of a six year old. Cornish artist Alfred Wallis seemed to get away with it, I haven't pulled it off yet.

So it comes as no surprise that I have huge admiration for anyone who can draw properly. Bookhound can, and in his design days, forget computer graphics, he would do a 3D perspective drawing of how someone's kitchen could look and of course they'd want it yesterday.

But if I could draw I think I'd want to be able to draw like Joanna Walsh, famously known as Badaude, in fact I'm seethingly jealous unashamedly envious of her wonderful style. It's a little like I may have been trying to achieve on the covers of my school books when 70's psychedelia was all the thing, and we were forever imitating that big fat loopy distorted font. Joanne has sharpened it into something uniquely 21st century and her drawings are a wonderful lens on life a la everyday.

I am a keen follower of Badaude's blog, once saved her from a ferocious wasp sting whilst at the Port Eliot Festival in fact (where we will both be again this year,) have her posters (signed...to me...) on the wall in my Bookroom, and so when I knew that she had a book coming out entitled London Walks! I had my copy ordered in a thrice.

Devon rambling apart I think I walk further on a trip to London than I do at home. Six miles from home would take me into Tavistock but I'd be a heap by the time I got there if I was still alive that is, after the main road and uphill blind bends with no pavements, so wouldn't dream of doing it. But my pedometer on our last London trip was notching up 16,000 paces a day which is about eight miles, and I hardly knew I'd done it, whilst in Dublin I was doing about nine miles a day. So city walking I like.

Badaude has the consummate eye for the detail, the little observations that are so easy to miss, so whether you live in London and can do these walks easily, or are thousands of miles away and have to imagine them, you will have no trouble enjoying this gorgeous book. In fact you may well think you've been there.

Little snippets of overheard conversation mingle with historical facts and the things that the rest of us may see and forget, but which Badaude has immortalised in a book that has the feel of a living and very vibrant graphic novel. There are plenty of unusual routes to pursue and the eye readily scats across the page and picks up on a little trail to follow, or homes in on the balloons of a conversation, or perhaps when I don't want to eavesdrop and would rather look at what everyone's wearing instead I can meander across the page and stake out the clothes, and here of course Badaude excels...well she excels at all of it really.

And if you're visiting Tate Modern this summer you won't miss the latest Badaudery, the mural on the glass walls of the bookshop, and you can read more about that here...

 

 

Port Eliot Festival 2011 St Germans, Cornwall

It's been all go here and the dove-eyed among you may already have spotted that the pre- Port Eliot planning is now almost done >>>> and you won't be surprised to hear that it has been occupying my mind with more than a little excitement since I went over for tea with Cathy St Germans a couple of months ago to discuss the dovegreyreader tent.

A tent of my own at this summer's Port Eliot Festival, July 22nd to July 24th, up in the walled garden, sofas, quilts, tea, cakes, knitting, books a little oasis of calm (hopefully) and a place to park your wellies and sit and chat informally with some of the many authors who will be visiting this year's festival.

I have had quite a few writerly acceptances for a visit to the tent including Gillian Slovo, Helen Walsh (who I will also be interviewing on the main stage about her forthcoming novel Go to Sleep ), Edmund deWaal of the hare, Patrick Barkham of the butterflies, Katie Hickman of Daughters of Brittania and The Aviary Gate, Justine Picardie of the Coco, Daisy Goodwin of the Orange Prize judges and My Last Duchess, and quite a few more...and then if we have a gap we'll just go out and net a few more and drag them in.

So you can probably guess that this is going to direct my reading over the next few weeks as I work my way around the books, and I shall be writing about them here in the hope that some of you may want to contribute in comments if you have read them ... because I would really love to be able to ask some of your questions too. So keep an eye out for a list of Port Eliot Reading over here >>>>

One thing I am also very much looking forward to is the Paradiso Outdoor Cinema..

Nightly double-bills chosen specifically for Port Eliot by one of the acknowledged greats of filmmaking. Martin Scorsese’s selections will be screened from twilight on each evening of the festival in the festival’s Paradiso Cinema, set in gardens created by landscape gardener Humphrey Repton, with a backdrop of a secret estuary of the river Lynher and a railway viaduct designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

And one of the films that Martin Scorsese has chosen, and probably because he knew I wanted to see it, after that Reading Italy post last week, is The Leopard starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale.

You might also like to be thinking about the dovegreyreader flower show entry(ies) because we had so much fun creating our 'Great Expectations' installation last year, you commented, we implemented hence 'that' sunflower as suggested by KevinFromCanadaand we nabbed ourselves two rosettes.

So I have already entered us in Class 4 as follows...

Class 4 - Oh What a Beautiful Morning!
e.g. Oklahoma, South Pacific, Carousel, THE SOUND OF MUSIC,
An arrangement to depict any Rogers and Hammerstein musical.

Perhaps you can you spot my preference there?

I have been just dying to get the Pelham puppets out of the loft and we could throw in a few nuns and frocks made out of curtains, and get an Alpine poster from the travel agents for a backdrop and dangle some lederhosen and a guitar around, and things, so thinking caps on for that one everyone. Oh, better not forget the flowers I suppose, shortage of edelweiss here but that needn't be an obstacle, we can substitute.

We are also entered in Class 7 - Greensleeves - An arrangement of foliage

of which we have no shortage.

 

 

 

Riptide

Mention of Riptide is so long overdue I'm almost embarrassed to do so because it was 2008 when editors Ginny Bailey and Sally Flint made contact and sent me Volume Two of this Devon-based journal of 'short stories with an undercurrent', a journal emanating from the Arts department of Exeter University, and now they have very kindly sent me Volumes Five and Six. I really can't moan about the cultural landscape of the UK being based in London, whilst ignoring good things happening on my doorstep can I.

I love the title too with all its connotations of undercurrents that can take you by surprise, transporting you off somewhere that perhaps you hadn't expected to go, but with the added bonus that hopefully you're on dry land and someone won't need to call the RNLI to rescue you. The stories are far-ranging and far-reaching and include writers like Michael Morpurgo, Helen Dunmore, Jane Feaver and our very local Tom Vowler. And there's another book sitting waiting for me to write about it, Tom's brilliant collection of short stories The Method, currently short-listed for The Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and if you take a look at the long list you'll see that is a real achievement..he doesn't need any help from me:-)

The Riptide editorial board comprises some well known names including Philip Hensher whose last novel The Northern Clemency was a real favourite of mine, ( I haven't seen the latest one King of the Badgers, but I'm hearing various marmite-like, love-it-or-hate-it reports) and James Long whose novel Ferney many of us loved, and now I'm wondering where the much-anticipated sequel to Ferney may have disappeared to?
Have I missed it?

Volume 6 (below right) of Riptide is a collection of prize-winning stories for young adults, the result of a competition that formed part of the inaugural Exeter Children's Literature Festival, and the stories are a wonderfully perceptive and eclectic mix of young love, loss, the subtle intricacies of what we now call the 'blended' family, the school play, illness and much more, and all achieving what judge Philip Hensher wanted to see...

'I don't want to read about people just like me. I want to read short stories that are about people I am not going to meet, in situations I probably won't experience for myself...'

I think I might move in slightly different circles to Philip Hensher so I'd add, about people we've met and who we think we know, but actually we discover we don't really know them at all.

During her talk at Fowey Linda Grant was asked the old chestnut 'Did she believe that everyone had a novel in them?' After some hesitation she replied that she felt everyone had a story in them but not necessarily a novel, perhaps implying that not everyone had the writer's ability that could end in publication. Interestingly Stella Duffy expanded on this (nicely) during her talk the next day, suggesting that everyone had the right to have a go, and no one should feel that this whole writing thing should be out of their reach, or that they were somehow not good enough to try.

Alongside all this Carole J mentioned Riptide editor Ginny Bailey's first novel in comments a while ago..

"I just have to recommend 'Africa Junction'. It is a first novel by Ginny Baily, and one of the best novels I have read for ages. I know Ginny (a little) from the Dept of Creative Writing at Exeter University. She is a poet, a writer of short stories, and co-editor of 'Riptide' the Department's annual anthology of short stories - and now she is a novelist!
'Africa Junction' is excellent, and I don't say things like that lightly - Kingsbridge (Devon, UK) Reading Group can confirm that I am very hard to please. Ginny's novel interweaves several very different lives, particularly those of Adele - an Exeter-based teacher and mother, struggling to cope as her life and sanity begin to unravel; and Ellena - who was Adele's childhood friend in Senegal, and is now in exile from the horrific war in Liberia. Ginny handles her material superbly, skilfully threading her different strands together with detailed, poetic writing and deft structuring. Ultimately she produces a humane story of love and life. Do read it.

and I have my copy of Africa Junction, published by Harvill Secker, here ready and waiting.

That was all enough for the Riptide planets to align and for me to place this really excellent journal in your orbit and to mention a forthcoming edition and a call for contributions.

Devon – is truth stranger than fiction?

Do you have a story to tell?

For the Devon-themed volume, unusually, the editors are looking for two different kinds of submissions – fictional ones and ‘memoir snapshots’.

Fictional stories can be up to 5000 words as usual.  The memoirs need to be very short – a brief account of no more than 500 words offering an unusual insight into Devon. 

If you know someone with a story to tell, go out and interview them, write it up, edit it into sparkling form and send it to submissions at riptidejournal.co.uk before the deadline of July 31st.

 

So where are the short story writers out there?

And if 5000 words feels a bit of a push, I'm wondering if some of you have 500 words-worth of Devon recollections that you could submit?

I'm thinking I might have a bash at a Memoir Snapshot, I've done Julia Blackburn's course after all, and it doesn't seem five minutes since those childhood holidays at my grandparents' tiny cottage in the village of Coleford just outside Crediton.

My grandad would meet us off the train from London at Bow Station and drive us home at 30mph, no more because he said any faster and you were aiming a car not driving it, but I was allowed to take charge of the sticky-out-arm-with-yellow-triangle indicators on the Austin A30 (PGU 114) and twist the dashboard button right or left.

Lord knows where we ended up because I have never known my right hand from my left.

Then there was the excitement of trotting off down the hill to collect the milk from the farm and walk it back up (without spilling it) in a jug with one of those bead-edged lacey covers, and what about the Elsan toilet... no plumbing in those days and look, here's me with the hula hoop that my grandad made me out of some old plastic hose. This would have been about 1959 and I wasn't allowed to carry it home on the train (probably big sulk) so hula hooping became my entirely Devon-based holiday pursuit... see it's all there.

I'll bet some of you have some wonderful Devon memories too...go on why not have a bash.

 

 

 

 

Homeward Bound

Home safely yesterday evening even though I took a wrong turn heading for my departure gate at Dublin airport ( just how on earth did I manage that) and ended up in customs and passport control for flight arrivals and entry into Dublin. Fortunately no one else there and the policeman took one look at my face when he told me I'd need to walk out of the airport, walk right the way round, come back in, book in again, go through departures again, and I think fearing he'd have to make a 999 call if not resuscitate me himself if he didn't move fast, he whisked me through all the coded security doors and let me back into Ireland so I could leave again, and I promised not to tell anyone so if you could keep that bit quiet I'd be grateful.

As you can see a huge number of passengers alighting from the enormous plane at Plymouth airport...this was the sum total of us with a few more carrying on to Newquay. You can imagine the crush in baggage reclaim.

My window the second from the front and in that bag I am carrying...wait for it...

Some of you may recall my last visit and that really excellent twenty-one volume series of James Joyce Studies books for sale at the National Library in Dublin. Well to my delight, as I nipped in to see the Yeats exhibition once more, a little sign saying 'Library Shop - Closing Down Sale.'

Last visit, being a wimp and thinking I couldn't carry them all I bought about six volumes and had been unusually organised this time and noted down the ones I still needed, and at 1 euro each that seemed like a bargain. So I pulled them all out and then noticed the sign saying ' Complete Set 5 euros.' I think we can all do the maths there, so my right arm is straining under the weight of twenty one volumes of James Joyce Studies, the very weighty copy of Ulysses Unbound, a copy of Ulysses given to me at the talk, the books I took along to read, some wool, gifts for the family,...usual story.

So three very wonderful days, and my sincere thanks to blog-reader Brenda who I met yesterday morning and apart from the wonderful bookish natter, Brenda, a Dubliner born and bred, really got my history up to scratch before very kindly dropping me off at the prison.

Kilmainham Gaol the location for the execution of the prisoners after the 1916 Easter uprising, and Brenda was right, it is indeed very sobering to stand out in the stonebreaker's yard on the spot where James Connolloy was tied to that chair..

By my pedometer calculations about thirty miles of city walking done so I feel a bit jet-lagged today, I mean that flight was all of fifty-five minutes.

More about Dublin slotted in over the next few weeks but meanwhile today has been more preparation for the imminent arrival of the book room woodburning stove and we are bracing for one of life's inconvenient days tomorrow, major electricity work somewhere out on the grid so no power all day, which also means no water, no phone, no internet, no work, no e mails, might as well be round the dark side of the moon, so it'll be a bit like the olden days and I'll just have to read a book I suppose.

 

Dublin Friday...

A pictureleless post because the iTouch won't talk to the netbook but you can all add another 17,000 paces to the tally because we've walked miles.

Out along the banks of the River Liffey to the National Museum located at the imposing Collins Barracks complete with parade ground. When I asked where the cafe was and was told it's at 90 paces, the photos will explain all but 90 paces it was because I counted. Of particular interest was the Understanding 1916 The Easter Rising exhibition which I hadn't, and I can't carry on blaming the glaring gap in my 1960's history education (was that an intentional omission I wonder??) for my lack of knowledge about the uprising. I have it now and why I found the nightshirt that James Connolly was wearing during the GPO battle quite so moving I'm not sure, was it the stain that looked like blood wiped from a hand that had been holding a wound, or was it the fact that for the execution he was tied to a chair because he couldn't stand. Anyway I think I understand it all a little better now, though I don't feel any better for being English and knowing.

Then a very wet walk back into Dublin city centre, and right across town via St Stephen's Green to the Flying Book Club event in Lower Leeson Street, 'Feel the Fear and Read it Anyway' and an introduction to Ulysses. Now this was  so good that I'm going to think about it a little more before I write about it because...wait for it... I knew this would happen, I think I might want to read the book again. So much I knew I'd missed first time round and having now been here twice and listened to Dubliners talking about their book, and after a year's break, I can feel that promised more in-depth read coming on. I won't inflict it on all of you month by month but having had a really good approach explained, and then listened to a local read that episode about the dog....

The novelty of this idea may wear off when I get home but to make that a little less likely  I have already been to Hodges Figgis and made my sole book purchase spending 19.50 euros on the highly recommended (and apparently very readable,) Ulysses Unbound by Terence Killeen.

On my way to that event I took a route through all those locations that Helen Berry mentions in her forthcoming book The Castrato and His Wife, Fishamble Street, Dame Street, Molesworth Street treading in the footsteps of Tenducci. My delight at finding a Chop House dating from 1760 knew no bounds and despite being dripping wet I stood there and imagined the man himself walking down the cobbled street having sung for his supper.

So I have to pack my bag and check out this morning but have a day in the city planned before my early evening flight. Take That are in town and playing Croke Park tonight, much more to my liking would have been Paul Simon in Dublin for a concert on Monday.

Bloomsday and that Martello tower...

Oooops ...SandyCOVE not SandyMOUNT...so did you all buy the train ticket that didn't take you far enough and then wouldn't let you through the turnstile at the other end as well?? My fault, sorry.

And didn't we get a little soaking there, my Gaelic with the help of signs is clearly improving. I'm very taken with listening to the weather forecast that's for sure, what an intriguing language. I walked past a party of Gaelic-speaking schoolchildren en route and the chatter was incredible but we were right about the rain.

So having headed out to SandyCOVE on the Dart train because it said that's were the James Joyce Museum and the mythical Martello tower were, except you then find it's a bit of a trick because there it was on the very far and distant horizon like a mirage. So we took a long but pleasant forced march walk around the sea front to get there and you can all add 16,000 steps to your pedometers for today...but Team Ulysses and supporters, thanks to the Irish Tourist Board, (and I am very grateful, they have been very kind) we have been there at last.

Past the Forty Foot bathing pool...

and on into the tower.

A nice collection of James Joyce memorabilia and a stove to be reckoned with

I nipped up onto the roof just so I could say I'd been on the roof of the Martello tower that features in Ulysses and that involved the narrowest little spiral staircase known to mankind but worth it for the view back across the walk we'd just done...yes, ALL of that..


The stairs made even more impossible with a rucksack so I had to keep unwedging myself and hope no one was thinking of coming up while I was thinking of going down.

A centenary stone to mull over in the park nearby...

And in the end there was nothing for it ..I've been taking hits on your behalf all day.

So if my precious little camera was going to break anywhere I can't think of a nicer, more special place for it to have happened...this its final picture, the very last gasp before it keeled over, the automatic lenses went into a frolic of their own, made some wheezing death rattle noises and refused to play anymore. If it's really gone I shall be sad, RIP my trusty Olympus All-Weather AF Zoom 5.8- 17.4mm 6.0 megapixels, which has mediated between my eye and almost every picture on this blog, we've been friends for a very long time.

I feel as if my right arm's been chopped off.

Good excuse to upgrade...I'm over it.

Bloomsday Breakfast at The Gresham Hotel

So I looked a lamb's kidney in the eye but that's as far as it went...I'm sorry I just couldn't.


But a really sumptuous breakfast of cholesterol plus trimmings on a plate (hope the Practice Nurse isn't reading this) in the Ballroom of the Gresham Hotel on O'Connell Street where, surrounded by Edwardian costume (even the babies) I felt distinctly under-dressed in my walking togs.

There followed a brilliantly acted homage to scenes various from Ulysses, very very funny when it is brought to life in this way ..

And I managed to snap Leopold tucking into his breakfast as I left.


To Sandymount this afternoon, lovely warm sunny day though I felt sure the TV weather forecast rain, but it was in Gaelic so I could be wrong.

OK follow me, we're off to that Martello Tower.

Happy Bloomsday...

I'm in Dublin somewhere... stand by

 

Failte chuig Baile Atha Cliath

I am very reliably informed that means Welcome to Dublin and I have ignition on the wireless signal so we are all systems go, though I'm working on my tiny netbook so seeing the screen and hitting the right keys is a bit haphazard, my apologies for typos.

I think I might know why Plymouth Airport is closing... and I'm not complaining at all but I have never known security like it and I guess with so few flights leaving they do have the time to be thorough. So my suitcase, and only mine was selected for a spot check and complete unpack at check-in. Might as well have had it all in a carrier bag and packed it on the counter.

Do I look shifty??

Anyway into departures after much more bag searching and shoe removal where I made friends with a lovely Irish nun going back home for a week. Sister Mary told me she was always being stopped and searched because no one trusts a nun these days, it's the garb of choice for the drug smuggler apparently. And the metal head band in her wimple always sets off the alarms and we agreed that she could indeed get a fair stash of all manner of illegal bounty under her veil. I am working on the assumption that she really was Sister Mary of course.

But 'twas lovely to fly up and over Plymouth and as the plane headed towards Newquay I feel sure we must have flown over home, and many apologies to the Canadian gentleman sitting in the window seat next to me who had to put up with me leaning across and snapping away with the camera. But we had a geography lesson too and how incredible the Tamar looks from the air and then the china clay pits in Cornwall, a really dramatic impact on the landscape.

So I am installed, have had a wander through Trinity College and meant to go to St Stephen's Green but found myself in the wonderful Hodges Figgis bookshop and well, doesn't time fly.


Tomorrow it's Bloomsday Breakfast along O'Connell Street and it's suddenly dawned on me that it might be fried kidneys which is likely to turn it into more of a bushtucker trial where I'm concerned, but I'll do my best for you all.

 

 

Bloomsday Eve

Never mind all this going to Italy from the armchair (and I am so looking forward to that reading holiday through August,) when I really should have been concentrating more on the fact that today, thanks to the Irish Tourist Board, I am flying to Dublin again, this time to be in the city for Bloomsday on June 16th, tomorrow.

Excited?? Hell yes I should say so.

I've been revisiting Team Ulysses  and my copy of the book in readiness, and to my surprise it is still as fresh and vibrant in my mind as it was last year, so I am really looking forward to seeing how Dublin marks this day of all days and I think it will be pretty amazing.

My copy of the book now full of postcards and pictures from my last trip, and this visit I have a little more time so I'm hoping to get to Sandymount and I will be doing one of the organised James Joyce walks too. I've been invited to a quiz night, themed questions on Dublin 1904, so I may not exactly be an asset to the team that gets lumbered with me. I'm also looking forward to a session at The Flying Book Club entitled 'Feel the Fear and Read it Anyway!' ...a guide through reading Ulysses. I'm still unlikely to be an asset but at least, thanks to Team Ulysses, I'll know what the talk is about. As on every trip I try to catch up with some of you too so I am hoping to meet Brenda in or near the wool shop she very kindly told me about after my last visit.

To get in the Dublin mood I've also been dipping into W.B.Yeats & George Yeats The Letters and if the book didn't weigh as much as my entire packed bag I'd be taking it with me. The twenty-two years of correspondence between Mr & Mrs in a beauteous new edition from OUP. From homes in Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares Dobbs kept 'Willie's irons hot in Dublin' while he travelled, wrote, networked, earned money on lecture tours and wrote home to ask for things like a spare vest or some money in the bank account. The little details that I love to find in letters, the everyday in amongst the creative genius.

If my technology holds up you won't miss out ...if it fails then I'll catch up when I get home.

I have travel reading sorted too. I have almost finished James Cain's Mildred Pierce on my Kindle and have skimmed but not read an article this weekend, about Kate Winslett's recent role in the TV dramatisation of the book (and heaven knows how we get to see it on Sky Atlantic on June 25th... America I think you are getting it first on HBO??) so I'm keen to tie up all the loose ends on that and will write more soon.

Plus I will be sharing more about some of the authors I hope to be meeting in the dovegreyreader tent at the Port Eliot Festival in the coming weeks, but suffice to say this week I am concentrating very hard on the writing of Gillian Slovo, with her memoir Every Secret Thing and her novel Black Orchids. Both so good that I will have to break my 'travel light' rule and take the books with me. Fortunately I have read Ice Road or that would have severely tested the baggage strategy.

But how sad is this, all these years that Plymouth has had an airport, sixty to be exact and I have never used it until today because they never seem to have flights to where I want to go, so we trek up to Exeter or even further up to Bristol. I can't be the only one because through lack of use Plymouth City Airport is closing down later this year and suddenly I'm going to miss it.

We drive right past the runways on our way into Plymouth, always enjoy seeing a plane taking off in front of us (we don't get out much) and soon it will be gone, and once more Plymouth becomes that isolated outpost that's a little to far west for shops like Habitat or Ikea to consider. But at least I'm going to get today's aerial view of the city we've lived in or near since 1976 and on my way to Dublin and Bloomsday 2011.

 

Thin Paths - Journeys in and Around a Mountain Village ~ Julia Blackburn

It was one of the memorable trips of the summer of 2009, an invitation to take the blog on a memoir-writing course in SW France to be led by Penelope Lively and Julia Blackburn, and if you missed the action you can read all about it here.

It was a special delight to meet Julia and her partner Herman because that year I had read The Three of Us, Julia's remarkable memoir in which, amongst other life events, she recounts her reunion with Herman after a gap of many years. And Julia had also done dovegreyreader asks... so I greet these poor people, who have never met me before and don't have the faintest idea who I am, as if they are life-long friends, and they probably want to turn round and go home at the very thought of having to spend a week with me.

The subject of the course was obviously how to write a memoir and I was able to sit in on quite a few sesssion as Julia shared some of her process and what her next book may entail, so I was thrilled to see a copy of Thin Paths - Journeys In and Around a Mountain Village arrive knowing that this was that book. I knew that if I could hear Julia's 'voice' as I had heard it during that course then this was likely to be a winner for me.

We had sat around the candelit table in the evenings and listened as Julia and Herman shared the joys and love of their home and Thin Paths is an account of life in their remote mountain village in Liguria in Northern Italy. Short pieces and a mixture of the personal blended together with local history, nature and travel writing, I think much to come about Herman's tough call with serious illness, as well as a wonderful account of the lives of the people that are their neighbours.

Julia and I had an affinity over our footwear and our twin red Lamy safari pens, but perhaps less of an affinity over nature. As I recall Julia, very clearly besotted with wildlife and I don't just mean nice furry cuddly things...it was she who lovingly picked up one of the enormous bright orange French slugs that we couldn't help but tread on because there were so many of them, for us to have a closer look at it...and a stroke...no thanks.

So yes, already I can 'hear' Julia's voice in Thin Paths as she recounts the tale of the dormouse, and through Julia's voice I can hear Herman's as I'm reading too

'Yes I'm alright'

he shouts from afar as Julia rushes outside having just seen Herman's car ( with him inside) plunge over a cliff outside their home. So this is all making this book a huge pleasure.

For anyone who keeps a special book shelf of permanent reading gems, this one deserves consideration. It's not a book that I want to rush, each piece offers much to think about and I want to make this one last so it will be alongside me through the summer and during that armchair trip to Italy and I shall write more eventually.

Reading Italy...

Thank you for such an amazing read around Italy list today, such a wide and varied selection I think something for every reading mood here. Quite a few I've read and loved including Giorgio Bassani and Alessandro Barrico and plenty that I haven't though one or two I have on the shelf including Mr Palomar so thank you for that tip Jonathan B. I wonder has anyone read Pietro Grossi?? I see him on the shelf too.

I have taken so long reading the comments and cutting and pasting the titles all into one comment so they didn't get lost that I was timed out of my own blog!

Too good to miss so here's that list in case anyone else fancies some Italian reading this summer and if you think of any more and add them here in comments I'll edit them into the list drekkly.

After Hannibal ~ Barry Unsworth
Stone Virgin ~ Barry Unsworth
The Jinx ~ Theophile Gautier
Madame Solario ~ Anon
Midnight in Sicily ~ Peter Robb
Foucault's Pendulum ~ Umberto Eco and
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana ~ Umberto Eco
The Legend of Redenta Tiria ~ Salvatore Niffoi
The Agony and the Ecstasy ~ Irving Stone
Sicilian Carousel ~ Lawrence Durrell
The Betrothed ~ Manzoni
The Glassblower of Murano ~ Marina Fiorato
The Madonna of the Almonds ~ Marina Fiorato
Saving Caravaggio ~ Neil Griffiths
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana ~ Carlo Emilio Gadda
Il Bell'Antonio ~ Vitaliano Brancati
The Plague Sower ~ Gesualdo Bufalino
The Tartar Steppe ~ Dino Buzzati
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis ~ Giorgio Bassani
Zeno's Conscience ~ Italo Svevo
As A Man Grows Older ~ Italo Svevo
Mr Palomar ~ Italo Calvino
I'm Not Scared ~ Niccolo Ammaniti
Without Blood ~ Alessandro Baricco
Summer's Lease ~ John Mortimer
Lady's Maid ~ Margaret Forster
Love and War in the Apeninnes ~ Eric Newby
A Small Place in Italy ~ Eric Newby
The Colour of Heaven ~ James Runcie
Miss Garnet's Angel ~ Salley Vickers
The Other Side of You ~ Salley Vickers
Pompeii ~  Robert Harris
Pompeii ~  Mary Beard
Under the Tuscan Sun ~ Frances Mayes
Bella Tuscany ~ Frances Mayes
A Year in the World ~ Frances Mayes
The Solitude of Prime Numbers ~ Paolo Giordano
The Moon and the Bonfire ~ Cesare Pavese
History ~ Elsa Morante
Roman Nights ~ Pasolini
Gogol's Wife ~ Tommaso Landolfi
Kaputt ~ Curzio Malaparte
The Day of the Owl ~ Leonardo Sciascia
Eating Up Italy ~ Matthew Fort
Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons ~ Matthew Fort
The Aspern Papers ~ Henry James
The Comfort of Strangers ~ Ian McEwan
City Lit Venice
Enchanted April ~ Elizabeth von Arnim
The Silent Duchess ~ Dacia Maraini
The Leopard ~ Giuseppe de Lampedusa
Images and Shadows, Part of a Life ~ Iris Origo
War in Val D'Orcia ~ Iris Origo

Authors

Carlo Lucarelli
Gianrico Carofiglio.
Donna Leon
Luigi Pirandello
Giacomo Leopardi
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Eugenio Montale
Primo Levi

Films

Tea With Mussolini
My House in Umbria
Only You
The Leopard
Summer's Lease
Cinema Paradiso

A trip to Italy...

...well not exactly, I mean from the armchair, and by a circuitous literary route that has me pulling more books off the shelf to continue the journey later this summer. I'm working right through August so it seems like a good month to do some armchair holidaying.

Departure was initiated when KevinfromCanada recently reminded me about the Inspector Montalbano series the very same day that the latest in Andrei Camilleri's detective series, The Track of Sand, arrived from Picador. The distinctive Jeff Fisher cover designs are irresistible,,, didn't we first meet these all those years ago on Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres. Cohesive and enticing with their attention to fine detail, and that detail always makes sense when I've finished the book. I've read quite a few Montalbanos out of sequence which is usually the prompt for me to go back to the beginning and have a good 'tambasiare' (that apparently means dawdle and Salvo Montalbano likes to) and fill in some gaps, so I settled down on a trip to Sicily with The Shape of Water and remembered why I loved them. In fact 'tambasiare' is used in the context of 'poking about from room to room without a precise goal, preferably doing pointless things' which I seem to do a lot of too, so Salvo and I have an affinity.

It's impossible to dislike Inspector Montalbano, beyond the fact that he's partial to a plate of octopus which I couldn't countenance. He's that wonderful muddly mix of detective as confused romantic, shirker of the 'love' commitment to long-term, long-distance significant other Livia, sharp as a knife and several steps ahead of the team when he's on the trail, and a man of compassion too, always spotting the under-dog and giving a helping hand. So when a local dignitary is found in his car at a local trysting spot, deceased by coronary and suitably de-bagged and presumably in flagrante, all is never likely to be as it seems given that this is Mafia territory. Natural deaths are just not the order of the day for Vigata's police department.

There are a smattering of literary references, Salvo is nothing if not that happy blend of crime-busting cultivated aesthete too, so has a hankering after fine food, classical music and the writing of Luigi Pirandello... more affinity which was all enough to send me scurrying to the shelves. Not only to see which Montalbanos I had, and next up it's The Terracotta Dog, but also to the Norman Lewis corner.

I've been meaning to ask you all about Norman Lewis for ages. I have his biography Semi-Invisible Man by Julian Evans along with a pile of Norman Lewis's travel and journalistic writing all awaiting its moment, which might be soon, because in the pile was In Sicily. An account of Lewis's return there after a first wartime encounter and subsequent fascination with the island, and halfway through I am really enjoying his style; genuine and honest, informative yet informal with plenty of anecdote to support the 'stark contrasts and the contradictions' to be found in Sicily and mentioned in the cover quotes.

Voices of the Old Sea also by Norman Lewis had been suggested to me by Julia Blackburn and in another twist of literary fortuitousness Julia's latest book arrived recently, Thin Paths Journeys In and Around an Italian Mountain Village to be published by Jonathan Cape very soon. It was all a sign that I must spend some time in Italy from the sofa with this book by my side. More about it tomorrow, it is special and deserves a post of its own.

So now I'm planning ahead for a proper armchair reading jaunt to Italy later this year . I've found a newer fiction that I'd missed  Last Train From Liguria by Irish author Christine Dwyer Hickey ...

'Heart-rending, fearless and effortlessly gripping...an epic tale of displacement, friendship and one woman's life-long struggle for survival. Ranging from London and Dublin to Italy and spanning the twentieth century...'

Has anyone read it, should I??

I've read The Leopard and would happily read that again and staying in Sicily I've found A Simple Story by Leonardo Sciascia (thank you Hesperus) which I like the sound of

'In a small Sicilian town, a young and inexperienced policeman receives a strange phine call from a retired diplomat. On investigating the matter he finds the diplomat dead. What at first appears to be a simple case of suicide threatens to turn into a much more intricate situation, as the mounting investigation begins to implicate pillars of the community..'

It's translated by Howard Curtis, I'll like it.

And then there's Italo Calvino. The Path to the Spiders' Nests seems to build on those themes of WW II partisans fighting in the hills that I recall from  Beppe Fenoglio's A Private Affair   (Howard again) so I've pulled that off the shelf. But the elephant in the bookroom has to be If on a Winter's Night a Traveller?? I've never read it but feel if I'm reading Italy then I shouldn't miss Calvino's masterpiece, and while I'm there perhaps an even bigger Italian book elephant, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

Any more Italian reading suggestions most welcome.

The People's Book Prize

Two books that I read, loved and wrote about here have made it through to the finals of The People's Book Prize...

Thin Blue Smoke by Doug Worgul and

War on the Margins by Libby Cone.

Congratulations to Doug and Libby, I'm thrilled for them both... but I know Doug won't mind me being especially delighted for Libby because I think we helped a little there.

Libby's self-published book War on the Margins, a brilliant factional account of the German occupation of Jersey, arrived one wet Saturday morning and I idly started reading, two hours later I was still reading but much less idly, in fact the book had my full attention.

War on the Margins subsequently found a UK publisher after I had written about it here having cheekily hitched it a ride on board the massive publicity campaign surrounding another book about another Channel Island and something to do with pies and spuds.

Duckworth's saw it and ran with it.

So if you liked either of these books please do cast your vote over at The People's Book Prize. It's a bit of a palaver, you have to register first, but I know both Doug and Libby (or any of the the other finalists...in case you get there and see a book you liked even more) would appreciate your vote.

Spindle Ermine Moth update...

Yes. we're certain that's what it is and festooned with it we are, it's like angel floss on the Christmas tree... we're going to have Yponomeuta cagnagellus everywhere.

First fledging of 2011...

A guided tour of a pile of guano, a quick skim past a toilet chain attached to a door bell and final destination a swallow's nest all to a background melody of Bookhound unloading the dishwasher..

Still crazy about Paul Simon after all these years...

It's time for one of those intermittent Simon & Garfunkel conversations because we haven't had one for about a year and they are humming and strumming around in my mind again. Such a long time since I pre-ordered a music album unless it's by Joni Mitchell, Seth Lakeman or the wonderful Unthanks, I'm really not famed for my musical keeness, but I did just that after reading an article in last Saturday's Telegraph magazine, an interview with Paul Simon by Nicholas Dawidoff.

In fact Bridge Over Troubled Water might be the last Paul Simon (and Art Garfunkel of course) album that I can remember feeling distinctly very excited about, and that after hearing a preview of the title song on my tiny little transistor radio whilst lying on my bed one winter's afternoon reading a book when I was about sixteen.

Do you remember your first transistor radio?

I can see mine now, and google images confirms the memory, this was the exact one. A twelfth birthday present from my brother, it measured about 6" by 4" took two big U2 batteries, and came with a sort of black leatherette case, and it was like being let loose on the world to have a radio of my own.

I paid a whopping 24/ 6d for the Bridge Over Troubled Water LP, almost a whole Saturday's wages at Woolworths (28/-) playing it until the needle nearly pierced the vinyl, and I still love every single song on it to this day. The title song was played beautifully during the signing of the register at our wedding, well I expect it sounded good, we were in the vestry.

Well that's enough irrelevant detail because now I'm all of a dither about So Beautiful or So What, the new Paul Simon CD out on Monday, and my copy had better arrive in the post or else. Paul Simon about to tour the UK too but Bournemouth too far on a work day so the CD will do.

I lashed out £2.95 for the Paul Simon songbook in the 1970s and the fact that I am word perfect on so many confirms what we were saying about words and music and memory a while ago. I laboured over these songs for years, transposing chords and deciding where to put the capo (that thing on a guitar that can turn a fiendish Bb7 chord into a much more acceptable G7) and then fluting my way through too, and though I hardly play either these days, just browsing the music books again and who knows I just might. I wore my left hand fingerprints smooth trying to perfect that guitar riff that opens April Come She Will, and playing Sounds of Silence and Homeward Bound to distraction, and it's obvious I took America very seriously indeed...just look at all this

I wonder is it possible to spend a life time thinking someone is quiet and nice and unassumingly modest just from hearing, singing, playing and loving their songs?

Well I was relieved on reading the article to find that I'm on course, what a nice guy Paul Simon seems, even after all those creative differences with Art Garfunkel, who is currently resting his voice after the smoking finally took its toll... yee gods, can you believe that is the voice of a smoker?? Hitting those top Gs in Bridge (I was there I heard it, Albert Hall, 1970) after a packet of Kensitas hardly seems possible. I got as far as  emailing Art Garfunkel's agent in the early years of this blog to see if he might do dovegreyreader asks... because I wanted to know so much about Art's fascinating reading life. It never came off but if Art's sitting there twiddling his thumbs waiting for his voice to come back perhaps I'll try again, because I have always been very intrigued by this.

And then there are the songs, all my life I have loved the songs..

'Anyone who knows Simon's best songs knows that vulnerability is his great subject. Like all the great artists, he's more interested in process than resolution, in the smallest subtleties of feeling. His characters are downcast, unguarded people trying to keep up their hopes and striving to connect...'

and what about this...

'...early in his career, Simon learnt that one of his favourites writers, the poet Philip Larkin, despaired that his muse had deserted him....

Who'd have thought it, our Paul's a fan of our Philip and now I think perhaps I can see a link.

And as to whether we may ever hear Simon & Garfunkel sing together again..

'But there is always the pull. And now that Garfunkel is suffering from a vocal condition that has kept him form singing for more than a year, Simon feels it more strongly than ever,' Aside from my own compassion for him,' he says,' I also think how terrible it would be if I couldn't sing with Artie again.'

Come on lads, you know it makes sense.

 

 

Team Tolstoy troika stop ...is it eight?

To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers and generals and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.'

Bingo, and what an opening chapter to this month's War and Peace Team Tolstoy schedule.

I've had to stop and do a double check though, can it really be stop eight? And by my reckoning we really are on the home run now, past the 1000 page mark and with just over 300 to go, not that I'm counting or anything. I'm not sure how many of us are left on the troika but I hope we have a few cheering from the sidelines who will be there to see us across the finishing line on September 9th? It could be time to start thinking about who's going to man the samovars and bake the blinis.

But what another astonishing month's reading this has been and I know I don't feel that every month. There's a rhythm to War and Peace that seems to become evident in the way that I/we are reading it if you are a schedule reader. After a rather tough month I might have been momentarily tempted to throw in the towel altogether, but after this instalment I've had to stop myself galloping on.

The first few chapters fair took my breath away this month, and as I re-read them for the third time I began to wonder whether I might just get stuck at first base admiring the narrative scenery as Tolstoy expounded his theories on history. It felt like that old chestnut of having little or no idea of what the ordinary people of 1812 might have been thinking. Or perhaps what reason lay behind their actions, but how skillfully Tolstoy depicts that and there were moments when I too was packing to leave Moscow.

I loved the brief but very clever chapter wherin Tolstoy worked his bee analogy. Moscow as the deserted hive, a few desultory bees sticking around out of habit or duty.

So Borodino has been a bit of a disaster for the Russians, Napoloeon is marching on Moscow and Tolstoy sees exactly what the dilemma is

'The general always finds himself in the midst of events as they unfold, which means he is never at any moment in a position to contemplate the significance of what is taking place..

Kutuzov eventually makes the decision not to fight for Moscow but rather to abandon the city to its fate, knowing that his troops will lose any battle for the city, and those descriptions of the conferences with the generals are so detailed that I recognised this the minute I saw the picture, complete with the young girl watching from the top of the stove

And yet Kutuzov seems to emerge with honour. He is a listening man and one who is prepared to take the responsibility for his decisions whilst unknowingly for him it is Napoleoen's total humiliation that comes a step nearer. There is no Russian delegation waiting to hand over the keys and, as Napoleon's soldiers enter the deserted city as conquerors, it was like watching something unfold in slow motion...because of course an army dispersed is no longer an army. The French troops emerge five weeks later as the looting rabble that they have become and in no fit state to fight with their cart-loads of rich pickings. And didn't you just love and then loath Count Rostopchin, the duplicitous Governor General of Moscow, caught with his pants well down having quite thought the city would be defended to the death by 'someone', though preferably not him. Rostopchin's scapegoating of Vereshchagin a despicable act and couldn't you just sense the scorn that Tolstoy was raining down on him.

And so much else happening too...

Helene enters stage right for a brief dalliance with her Columbus's egg 'love' dilemma and I was grateful to the notes for explaining that

'A trick that is easy once you know how to do it. Legend has it that Columbus, riled by the charge that anyone could have discovered America, once asked the company how to make an egg stand on end. When nobody could do it he tapped one end of an egg against the table and stood it up, showing how easy things can be once a pioneer has led the way.'

Personally I'd have told Columbus that wasn't cricket, in fact more like cheating but never mind, Helene's not above a bit of cheating either in her plan to marry either this one or that one whilst ignoring the fact that she is still Mrs Pierre....and I've been waiting for some reference to an egg to come along just so that we can have a nice Faberge one to keep us amused.

Talking of Pierre I'm worried for him as always, such a delicate fragile soul and now seems to have post-traumatic stress disorder to add to the list after his unfortunate entrapment at the centre of the Battle of Borodino. Interesting that something we've now given a definitive diagnosis was equally evident to Tolstoy. The assassination of Napoleon was never going to happen but I sense that Pierre may find his burden of guilt lightened and assuaged a little by a spell of punishment and prison... I'm never quite sure what Pierre feels guilty about though.

Is it his inability to be part of the action? Or is it his unasked for wealth, or his failed marriage or his love of Natasha? Or just life itself ?

Then there's Natasha, initially oddly hyperactive about events before taking charge of the family's departure from Moscow and ensuring that the wounded soldiers can leave with them, and despite the long arm of coincidence that placed the wounded Prince Andrei on the same wagon train, I have to say that my heart was in my mouth waiting to know whether Natasha would find out or not.

What followed was deeply moving and am I right.. Prince Andrei's not dead yet?

So over to you, I am eager to hear your thoughts as always because I suspect we all home in on very different things...me, I'm sorry but I'm still very worried for Andrei's intestines.

 

Next Month :: Volume IV Part 1 Chapters 1-16...Meanwhile in Petersburg a complex struggle..
                                     Part 2 Chapters 1-19 (approx 100 pages)   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gillespie and I ~ Jane Harris

So are we all holding our breath for tonight's Orange Prize for Fiction announcement... and looking back I see that it was June 2007 when I squeezed in a last minute reprise of Orange Prize short listers a couple of days before the announcement. In amongst them my thoughts on The Observations by Jane Harris and I sense that I enjoyed but didn't rave, harboured a few disappointments that the author took control and didn't do what I had wanted her to do (tsk will I never learn) and generally plumped for Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun to win, which it duly did.

Rebecca mentioned in comments back then that The Observations reminded her of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters which is interesting, because I had thought whilst reading Gillespie and I, Jane Harris's latest novel, that it reminded me in some ways of Sarah Waters and The Little Stranger. None of which is to suggest that Jane Harris is derivative because the plots are entirely at odds, but more that her style here resembles that detailed, no-point-too-minor-to-mention, sustained and steady approach that would have the potential to induce reader fatigue in the wrong hands. I remember I did need a rest through The Little Stranger which ensured I emerged at the end feeling the book was something of a triumph over every sense I could bring to bear on a book, leaving me rife with uncertainty the more I considered it, and it still resonates with me even now.

In fact I have avoided any chance of fatigue by coming to Gillespie and I in instalments spanning several weeks, and at over 500 pages the book can cope with that and this may well explain why I seem to have been carrying this one up and down stairs for ever, but it's paid off...what a brilliant read.

Harriet Baxter is the elderly spinster narrator writing her account, from her Bloomsbury flat in 1933, of events as they unfolded at the 1888 Glasgow exhibition. Through a fortuitous encounter on Buchanan Street, Harriet eventually meets the young artist Ned Gillespie and his family, becoming a part of their lives until tragedy strikes and everyone's world quickly disintegrates. The fortuitous encounter involved Ned's mother and set of swallowed false teeth...not a word more and in fact this, like The Little Stranger is a hard book to say more about without giving too much away.

If I tell you that in the early chapters of the book I noted what an astute judge of character Harriet seemed to be and how wiley were her means of winning over those around her, you'll just have to appreciate that I am sort of proved right on that score several times over by the end of the book, whilst also realising that Harriet's insights into the sub-currents are entirely lacking. There's a sort of missing chip in her recollections, an inability to see how events impact on others, a self-centredness that remains almost childlike in its intensity, all of which starts to make you see just how clever and manipulative a novel can be of both character and reader.

Jane Harris's consummate skill which I recall so clearly from The Observations is that happy knack of grabbing a narrative voice and working it to its very limits to facilitate her plots. Bessie holds and charms in The Observations, Harriet also holds the reader here, but charms...well, not exactly...she is lonely and obsessed and gradually you realise to what extent.

Gillespie and I is a book with an afterlife, I have been thinking about it for days, little clues and discrepancies, an insidious unreliability creeping into the narrator's voice, until by the final pages pennies are dropping left-right-and-centre, and back I went looking for the clues I knew Jane Harris had planted but I had surely missed. Facts start to creep in but by-pass explanation from Harriet, cleverly glossed over the changes just 'are' and you realise...well you just realise.

So this may have missed the boat for this year's Orange prize, but it's never too early to start predicting for next year surely.

 

 

 

 

dovegreyreader asks ... Linda Grant

It was my pleasure to meet with Linda Grant and hear her talk in Fowey backalong ( as us sez down y'ere) and I am very grateful that Linda has taken some time off from her next novel to do dovegrey reader asks...

As you will see Linda said something that really resonated with me during her Fowey talk and which has opened up new and even more vivid understandings for me about her latest novel We Had it So Good. One of those books that is really good value, a great read that has stayed, shifted my focus and has added to my thinking at every level.

Linda, very simply...why this book, why now?

I don't begin with an idea for a novel, but there are certain thoughts which have often been in my mind for several years which come together, coalesce as plausibly something which might become a novel. It;'s usually a flash-bang while I'm filling the kettle. That's a novel! I'd been quite preoccupied in a more political sense since the day after 9/11, when I was fifty, with the thought that here we were, a generation which in Britain at least, had enjoyed unparalleled prosperity and peace, free from being clouted round the head by the forces of history, as our parents had been. I felt certain, that day, that London would be next. I expected a major bombing within the next month or two. In fact it took another six years and was far smaller in scale than the attack on America. Yet still I kept thinking about my charmed generation, our great good fortune and when it would come to an end.

In 2005, a rather distinguished looking man in a very good suit came over to me at a party and said he thought we'd been at the same university at the same time. We had indeed, and better than that, I remembered him when he told me that he and a group of other students, living in a commune out in the country, had started up a hippie wholefood brown rice brown sugar brown milk soya bean joss patchouli oil emporium called Alligator. I probably shopped there every day, everything really was brown, apart from the the milk. So what do you do now? I asked him. Advertising. I had to know how the guy with hair down to his waist had turned into the family man with the one and a half million pound house in North London. What was the arc of his life which had led there? I came to understand that the person who seemed at 20 to be the essence of his self, as we do at 20 when we are at our thinnest, prettiest and have the most energy and the most sex, is really just the briefest of highwater marks. We are more like ourselves as children than we are as young adults. 

So these thoughts which had been playing around in my mind for years turned one day into 'I could write a novel about that.'

Linda, during your talk at Fowey you made a very interesting comment about there being only one generation who had changed the world, I wonder if you could elaborate and explain a little more about that?

One of the ugliest characteristics of my generation was our tendency to dismiss our parents - they way they dressed, their conservatism, their allegiance to materialism and comfort. Believing as many of us did, that we wwre the generation put on earth to be young forever and to change the world, we regarded our parents as the obstacles in the ay of progress: 'Oh mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don't criticise what you can't understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/The old ways are rapidly changing/Please get out of way if you can't lend a hand/Because the times they are a changing.'

I played this over and over again on the the family gramophone in the living room, looking up at my mother and father and repeating the words to them with patronising menace. What I never did was ask my parents anything about themselves. In fact when they did let slip any information, (such as my father's stay of several days with Houdini in New York in the 20s) i was bored to tears with these dusty old reminiscences. 

But of course if any revolution was made, it was by those who suffered the Depression and defeated fascism. That was the world we inherited from them, the extraordinary peace and stability which was their bequest and which I don't think we ever really appreciated.

Can you tell us band of nosey parkers about  your writing day/life and your process, how you knuckle down to it, pen/computer etc, does the place need to be immaculate, easily distracted etc and please expand on your life as a writer if you wish to.

I have an office which is lined with books, a desk with a desktop computer on it, shelves with tax files and floor covered in mess. I very rarely go in there. Instead, for about ten years now, I have written on a laptop on the dining table in the living room. This is because it's a nicer room and is not a mess. I feel those book-lined walls pressing in one me, issuing taunts and curses. I start writing as soon as possible after I get up, because, I'm quite convinced, that is the time we are closest to our unconscious, to the dream state. I am not superstitious but I do have a sequence of routine which I don't like to be disturbed: get up, have a cup of tea, shower, get dressed, have breakfast, read the newspaper online. Finally I make my one-a-day cappuccino using the fancy machine in the kitchen, and this is the signal to start. 

I work usually for two or three hours. Anything I write after that will not be very good, and even that writing is done in no longer than 20 minute bursts. Save to Dropbox, print out, sit down and read through it, making notes and a lot of crossings out, feel depressed, do a bit of housework until lunchtime then brood. If possible, I go for a walk in the afternoon, because it is only while walking that plotting is worked out. I believe this is because we walk at he same natural rhythm as we think, but whatever the case, it is a kind of waking dream, which is why I frequently ignore people I know when I'm doing this. I would not like to tell you how I dress to write, all I'll say is that it doesn't really involve brushing my hair.

Who must we read ...

Like many people I have been honing my list of Desert Island Discs for several decades, but my choice of book remains remarkably consistent. It's Dickens' Bleak House which is, in my opinion is the greatest nineteenth century novel and possibly the greatest Modernist novel. I re-read a month ago, and was awestruck by its range, its control of language, its comedy and above all its ideas. I will sit on Carmen Callil's face myself if she does not stop talking nonsense about Philip Roth. he is a misogynist, I don't disagree with that, but American Pastoral, another novel I have read multiple times, stands beside Bleak House for its scope and daring and humanity. I would also like to mention here the Sadlers wells books by Lorna Hill, first published in the Fifties, and the novels I loved as a child. I re-read them a few years ago and saw what it was I liked so much for they are about girls and boys who want to be artists - ballerinas and conductors. They grow up in the country but see London as the place where dreams and ambitions can be fulfilled. I think the first five are the best though there are twelve in all. I still believe in Veronica and Sebastian and the flat in St John's Wood with the restaurant on the ground floor. 

 

Team Edward Thomas...

... Bet, Carol, Cheryl, Curzon, Fran, Hilary, Kate, Jeannette and Nancy (thank you Faber for a few extra copies) have all been informed and are busy doing that 'ice-breaker' thing of introducing themselves behind the scenes whilst they await the arrival of their proof copies of All Roads Lead To France by Matthew Hollis.

Do you receive me Team Edward Thomas?? Perhaps you could hop into comments and say a little about why you are as riddled with excitement as I am about all this, and where your reading trail may lead.

I can promise the rest of you a very exciting ongoing project on here once we embark because some inspired reading and 'visiting' trails including 'that' train journey have already been suggested. We are keeping in touch behind the scenes but will be sharing our thoughts and discoveries on here as we go along.

I've armed myself with a very beautiful edition of Edward Thomas The Annotated Collected Poems edited by Edna Longley and published by Bloodaxe.

In fact, you can probably guess that I have been completely seduced by the cover art, Spring in the Trenches, Ridge Wood, 1917 by Paul Nash.

There will be a fiction project coming along in the future too and a chance for another eight of you to receive a copy of the chosen book to read along with me and talk to the author ... more soon.

But War and Peace calls and having made a start on the current instalment ( Book Three Part Three, p880 and the next 34 chapters in the OUP Maude translation ..Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind...) I think we are in for an incredible discussion on the first three chapters alone this month, I've already had to read them several times over.

 

 

Life on the hedge ...

Firstly goodish news on the seemingly deceased but miraculously resurrected Escallonia hedge

 
It's looking scraggy I'll admit but at least it's with leaf and green and even a few flowers, as you may recall 'twas not ever thus.

On a butterfly note, not a lot to report, tortoiseshells and white ones but it's been windy, wet and chilly and they've gone off elsewhere despite us leaving the garden to its own devices to attract them (good excuse.) But I am on the summer instalment of Patrick Barkham's The Butterfly Isles in readiness. Any more sightings?? I think we were up to about twelve last count except I've lost the piece of paper.

Meanwhile the moths seem to be right at home and did I hear that London has an invasion. No strimming or tidying means unusual things reappear, as with the very odd-looking plant, diagnosed as a verbascum, which sprouts up around the place of its own free will and then attracts the fiercest looking caterpillars in their droves.

Thanks to the Observer's Book of Moths we think this will turn into a fairly ordinary brown edition which is a little disappointing as it seems to suggest something big and flash and tiger mothy, but never mind because more of a mystery follows ...thinking caps on everyone

Perhaps someone will know what this is.

What do I mean perhaps?? Of course one of you will know... and an extra big picture to enable you to tell us.

We have never noticed this before, and everyone who walks or rides past the house is commenting on it because the hedges around us are draped with a silky,cobweb-like lattice of this..

And these little cocoon-like nests are now absolutely heaving with a wriggling mass of caterpillars ready to break out and start feasting before turning into 'something', and whatever that something is we'll know it. So it would just be good to know what to expect a plague of because there are gazillions of them. I'd love to think it might be a nice happy abundance of butterflies, but I'm nervous.

However good news from the How to Build an Extension to Your Home department. The Delabole slate roof is finished and I think you'll agree it's a very pretty darn good looking roof we have there and all his own handiwork. But look, nice windows too, and this being Bookhound, they fitted into his blockwork to the millimetre.

Next step is rendering the outside (with help) and laying the final floor inside (without help) before electrics (some help) followed by plastering (with more help).

Clever Bookhound

 

A Girl in Winter ~ Philip Larkin

  Only one place left to visit if I was going to do a Complete Larkin and that was to read one of his two books published in the early days of his writing career, when the life of a novelist beckoned and before the poetry took over. A Girl in Winter published in 1946 proved to be a good choice,(all I have read suggests Jill may be a weaker novel) because the forthcoming poetic leanings are most certainly evident as Philip Larkin writes of war time work in a library and the life of one of the library assistants, French refugee Katherine Lind.

The novel moves between present day and flashback of Katherine's penfriend correspondence with an English schoolboy Robin, a relationship sustained by letters much as Larkin's own life would be. When, as a teenager, Katherine comes to England for a three week holiday at the invitation of Robin and his family, the old adage of visitors and three days and stinking fish proves itself apt. A subsequent wartime reunion, predicated on those memories for Katherine, proves that the fish haven't improved on keeping either. It's an interesting book given that for all his philandering (I want to invent Philipandering because it would work on many levels) I always sense, and obviously misguidedly, something of the closet mysogynist about Philip Larkin, yet here he is writing lucidly and openly about the stifling nature of women's lives and the limited ambitions and opportunities available to them and the controlling nature of the men in charge...Mr Anstey the head librarian is 'theatrical, scraggy and rude,' whilst his assistant Miss Feather is a 'pale ghost of his wishes.'

A thoroughly enjoyable read and it's clear this is a novel where Philip Larkin is experimenting with the language that will become his poetry.

So there you have it, Philip and I had a lovely evening at the Endsleigh Salon, he joined in owl-like through those specs, had a quick tut over the state of the hotel library shelves and has happily taken his place back on mine until the next bout of Larkinitis hits dovegreyreader.

 

Letters to Monica ~ Philip Larkin @ the Endsleigh Salon

For April's Endsleigh Salon theme of the 1950s I pushed the boundaries and took along a person as well as a pile of his books. It was a beautiful sunny evening so Bookhound dropped us off at the top of the hotel drive and Philip Larkin and I strolled down to the hotel admiring the rhododendrons along the way.

It all started quite a while ago with the arrival of Letters to Monica, Philip Larkin's previously unpublished correspondence with Monica Jones which only came to light after her death in 2001. Almost 2000 letters, postcards and telegrams chronicling Larkin's day to day life and the complexities of his relationship with Monica. They had met at Leicester University in 1946 when Larkin was the assistant librarian and Monica was a lecturer, and whilst Philip Larkin moved first to Belfast and then to Hull, Monica remained in Leicester and quickly became his correspondent, confidante and eventually his lover until his death over forty years later in 1985.

That much the cover blurb reveals but the letters reveal so much more, yet frustratingly only half the story. Isn't it always the way with books of letters like this, one side of the correspondence that leaves you hazarding a guess at what the other person may have said to elicit the response it does. Easy to gauge Larkin but some deciphering required to reveal that Monica may have been scathing, angry, depressed or funny and as the letters settle into a mutually appreciative and trusting groove, much cynicism and bitchiness too at which Larkin was no slouch either.

I'm still only a fraction of the way into the letters but it was enough to make me pick up some poetry too and The Whitsun Weddings came quickly to hand with that favourite of poems

Side by side their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet....

An Arundel Tomb, still amongst the most perfect of Philip Larkin's poems for me perhaps a throw back to that A Level English exam in the summer of 1972




And with its final line 'what will survive of us is love' seeming like a fitting if veiled tribute to Monica given that Larkin could never commit to permanence, and had simultaneously kindled another love interest, Maeve Brennan, a librarian on his staff at Hull University. In the final countdown and with Maeve and Monica meeting for the first time at his sick bed, it is Maeve who Larkin expunges from his will leaving everything to Monica.

Time to find out more about all that so I spent a few days whizzing through the interesting bits of Andrew Motion's biography A Writer's Life - Philip Larkin. I'm sure it's all interesting but I was intrigued by the complexities of Larkin's love life, his loathing of Ted Hughes and also by the poet's acute hypochondria and a near-pathological fear of death.

The vacant Laureateship hung like the sword of Damocles over the head of a reluctant Philip Larkin on the death of John Betjeman, and, having turned down the offer when it was made, it was to Larkin's eternal regret that his refusal granted Ted Hughes a place in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. Hughes represented the younger generation of up and coming poets who wrote for a living whilst Larkin worked as a full-time librarian for his. All those insecurities and jealousies evident in Philip Larkin's account of a shared poetry event...

'Hughes filled out hall and got a great reception. I was in the chair, providing a sophisticated, insincere, effete and gold-watch-chained alternative to his primitive, forthright, virile, leather-jacketed persona...'

The thoughts going through these two great poetic minds when this picture was taken can only be imagined.

In the end Philip Larkin's demise was a sad one. Deaf and living on a diet of cheap red wine and Complan while Monica sustained herself on tomato sandwiches and gin, Philip Larkin slowly succumbed to cancer. Monica took the decision that Larkin shouldn't be told the truth of the terminal nature of his illness, perhaps as much for her own sanity in having to bear the brunt of his melancholy and distress as for Larkin's own mental well-being. He was to confront his greatest fear, dying alone in hospital one night, just a nurse holding his hand, and after uttering his final words 'I am going to the inevitable.' All his diaries were burnt some days later in keeping with his dying wishes and how ironic that Ted Hughes, as Poet Laureate was called on to read 'Let us Now Praise Famous Men' at the memorial service along with Jill Balcon widow of C.Day-Lewis who read An Arundel Tomb.

I almost feel our Philip deserves an honorary place here don't you.