dovegreyreader scribbles

Bird Watching With Your Eyes Closed ~ Simon Barnes

In keeping with this week's outdoor theme we're going all ornithological today, and just look at me the socialising party girl, out on another blog tour, and this time I'm with the twitchers and the real tweeters to celebrate the publication of Bird Watching With Your Eyes Closed by Simon Barnes. Honestly, don't anyone say we don't do variety here, and this week I'm in the esteemed company of an ex Conservation Director of the RSPB , an author ,  a reviewer of natural history books  and grrl scientist (no I don't know either)  so I feel a bit like the cuckoo in the nest...definitely no slacking today. You might want to have this playing in the background while you read because by the miracles of techno-wizardry you can listen to Simon Barnes and sixty-six birds (not all at the same time) on the podcast here...

Just to establish our credentials, we do love our birds here in the Tamar Valley. We waved off our two annual broods of veranda swallows ages ago...

... and then we get the bird tables out (planks on top of the hedge) and fill the feeders and melt fat and mix it with seeds for the half coconuts, all to welcome back the winter residents and I know a lot of you do likewise.
We do plain...

and we do show offs...

The fifteen wrens that squat in that vacant swallow's nest cause mayhem every time we open the front door to bring in the logs, and a wonderfully eclectic mix of robins, blackbirds and tits various, blue, coal and long tailed, along with chaffinches et al muster each day. We are currently spending more on our bird feeders than we might be on feeding ourselves because we get so much pleasure from just leaning, and staring at them outside the kitchen window...

And of course we are still waiting for the barn owls, who circle around every evening, to realise that they hate where they are living now and that this des res is indeed the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and can be theirs for the taking...
And you can read how this Pole Box arrived chez dovegrey (with pictures) as part of the Westmoor Barn Owl Scheme in The Barn Owl Trust newsletter here

....but put a blindfold on me and I doubt I would know many of our birds from their songs.

Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed is the sort of book I love because I open it thinking I know so very little and really can I discern one bird call from another, do I know a raven from a jackdaw, would I know my dunnock from my great tit, and am I going to be made to feel a bit stupid for not knowing when really I should.  Well the answer is a resounding 'no' to everything because Simon Barnes does that really sensible thing of encouraging his reader rather than excluding them, so within a few pages it has become clear that, if I sat and thought about it carefully I, and most of us, do know more bird song than we realise.

Cuckoo, seagull, owl, wood pigeon, pheasant, buzzard, woodpecker might be my definites, your list would be different but equally populated I expect,(knowing how far flung you all are someone somewhere's bound to have a vulture or a bald eagle or something on theirs)  and as I write them out I have that wonderful podcast from Short Books, playing in the background. If you are listening you will already know that Simon Barnes has a very soothing voice, gentle dulcet tones.

In fact to try and learn these I have been listening on the headphones during my walk each day, which seems a bit daft along the deserted lanes of the Tamar Valley where, if I did but listen, I would hear them all for real. Except I don't instinctively know my blackbird from my song thrush, or my robin from my wren...not really or with any accuracy.

So how have I got this far in life without really paying proper attention to birdsong??

Actually I am getting better by the day and by jove do you know, the man's right. This time of year, according to Simon Barnes, the bird I am most likely to hear singing a territorial solo will be the robin, even if I can't see it. So I have listened and heard and with some careful looking spotted the songster...and yes, each time it's a robin.

The book is about much more than birdsong though as Simon Barnes explores our relationship with our bird population, the ecology and how fragile that can become, whilst also exploding many of the preconceptions we may have about some birds. I'm warming to rooks now I know that they mate for life and seem to love each other dearly, so I'm currently focusing on identifying my corvids, which all sounded the same to me until Simon explained otherwise. Crows caw in triplets, rooks usually once and jackdaws, not surprisingly say 'Jack', so now you know.

And it's a book about the art of listening too and about silence and paying attention and not in a preachy way. This is about the pleasure of noticing, and for free, and noticing so much that I know I have been taking for granted.

Scroll down for gifts...

 

Prize Draw copies of Bird Watching With Your Eyes Closed ~ Simon Barnes

Leave a comment here as usual if you would like to be in with a chance of winning one of ten (yes really) copies of Bird Watching With Your Eyes Closed by Simon Barnes.

And my thanks to Short Books for the blog tour invitation, for spreading the love for the birdsong and for encouraging me to read a book I might just have missed, and now I see how much more I would have missed too.

The Light, The Dusk, The Dark - John Caple

We have a busy week ahead on here so you might want to get the kettle on.

I think you will see that our theme this week is going to be the Great Outdoors, and with the emphasis later in the week on the Birds and the Bees...the actual rather than the euphemistic ones. I'm partaking of another blog tour which I couldn't resist and which will involve a bit of tweeting and twitching and with a great big prize draw on Wednesday, Team Middlemarch finally sets off on Thursday and then I know you'll get a real buzz from the other prize draw that will come on Friday:-)

But if December is approaching then it must also be time for John Caple's annual art exhibition, and though I am unlikely to make it to London to see this one, I have been spreading the word to those who might be able to go, whilst drinking in the pictures for myself via the catalogue...and my thanks to the John Martin Gallery for sending it. You can download an e catalogue here.

This year's exhibition (at 38 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4JG from 2nd - 22nd December) is entitled The Light, The Dusk, The Dark and features another beautiful selection of John's trademark work from the Somerset Levels.

I know I repeat this every year, but for those who don't know, I first discovered the paintings of John Caple via Nell Leyshon and the original cover for her novel Black Dirt,

and a copy of John's book Somerset, still a permanent feature on a bookstand near my desk and periodically I turn the page and gaze at a new painting.

Something twanged a huge and very harmonious chord in me the minute I set eyes on these paintings and I never tire of them

So I am loving the latest collection for its traditional Caple feel but also for John's description...

'...The meeting place for these two worlds is in the landscape at dusk, a place where the two worlds cross over, blend and blur, bringing meaning and enchantment to our lives...'

There is 'alchemical intertwining' here as John explores his timeless landscapes and 'real,metaphorical or spiritual journeys'.

I'm still doing a lot of walking, and getting out for at least two brisk miles a day but often it is late afternoon before I can finish work and get out along the lane. So with winter afternoons dusk-walking is becoming the norm, and thank you to Bookhound for the day-glo reflective waistcoat he bought me for fear I was going to get mowed down by the one car/ tractor/ school bus likely to pass me en route. I cut a dashing figure, somewhere between a lollipop lady, the Dyno-rod man and a refuse collector, but everyone thinks I'm the Police, and if I carried and pointed a hairdryer and pretended it was a speed camera ultimate power over the lanes would be mine....though I might look even more daft.

But dusk-walking is good at this time of year and John Caple perfectly captures the atmosphere in his paintings.The last notes of birdsong are fading as I walk and the night shift are taking over, much hooting of owls and if I am very fortunate I might catch a flash of white as the barn owl glides around the fields. The sky might be doing this as I set off...

and the moon will be rising soon...

And time and again I imagine the people that used to live and work here. I walk across to the old Methodist Chapel ('Just going across to the Meths') and back, that tiny building in the centre of this glorious summer's day picture.

and ponder what will become of it now that it has finally closed because of dwindling congregations and is to be converted into a holiday let, complete with graveyard which we are assuming has to stay put.

I love it when I get there (this was yesterday morning) and look back across to the white dot that is home.

We extend the boundaries of isolated rural living with 21st century amenities, so our experience can bear little resemblance to our forebears here, but we never forget the people for whom this little corner must have been their entire living and working world, and who may have travelled little beyond it. They would have walked and worked these lanes and fields every day, from dawn to dusk, much as the Gamekeeper still does. On those bitterly cold mornings, or the freezing afternoons as I walk out in my thermal layers, I often think how perishing the cold must have been for those people who lived here before us.

Somehow, with his range and tones of colour, John Caple conveys all that I imagine on my walks and much more. There is unspoken mystery and tradition, a certain atmospheric eeriness but nothing that feels malevolent or spooky. His communities feel close knit, and supportive and warm, doors you could safely knock on perhaps in that Lark Rise to Candleford way we talked about last week, and I wonder too what we will all make of the Middlemarch community we are about to meet.

As I walk back along the lane to home the lights are on, the birds are almost silent and I can smell the dinner cooking. This is the lovely Aga thing, you can't smell it in the kitchen, but it pervades the air outside and I am always filled with gratitude that we live in such a magical place.

So if you are in London The Light, The Dusk, The Dark is an exhibition not to be missed, and I'll leave you with one of my favourites from this year's selection ... Winter Evening (22.5 x 38.5 ins)

That could be me walking up the lane see... though John has sensibly omitted the day-glo reflective jacket.

 

A Dickens of an Evening.

It being a little on the chilly side I decided against the Barouche and took the Brougham out for a test drive yesterday. I just wanted to make sure it is in fine working order and the springs are oiled and the upholstery is brushed before Team Middlemarch leap aboard, but whilst out I left my card at the homes of friends various.

In fact I went to visit a friend who has just had some heap big major surgery, and with more arduous treatment to come will clearly will be needing books (my spare copies of Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James and A Diary of the Lady, Rachel Johnson's hilarious account of her first year at the helm of the magazine) and also some watching (twenty-eight episodes of The Pallisers) for which she was very grateful.

Then off to a quilting lunch with two more friends (basically we eat then quilt and chat for a few hours) and I am deligthed to say the Brougham is in sparkling shape and ready to welcome you. It was all a relaxing end to a working week, and one where the evenings have been spent finishing Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens - A Life, so I was well in the mood for Tavistock's pre-Christmas Dickensian evening last night. This is unusual because I am more often to be found in denial that Christmas is even going to happen until about December 22nd, and then I really wish I'd thought of it a bit sooner.

Anyway Bookhound and I fought our way through the traffic and the road blocks to the Tinker's very convenient town centre bijou residence and parking space, went to call for him...we all stopped muttering 'bah humbug' and set off for a wander around. The town was packed to the gunwales, and the atmosphere was relentlessy cheery and festive as we said hello to friends and bumped into bands playing carols around every corner...

The Mayor, the Town Crier and his Consort were all joining in outside the Indian restaurant..

In fact we know the Mayor from Bookhound's days with him in the Dartmoor Rescue Group, the Town Crier sings in the Sultans with Bookhound, and his Consort is the Vocal Harem (my Tuesday evening choir) MD, so more 'hellos' in between verses of Oh Come All Ye Faithful.

Hogs were being roasted at every turn...and not a lot left of this poor little creature...

The Parish Church lit from within looked Dickensianly perfect..

The Golden Gallopers were out in The Square...

Unusually tall people were walking along Duke Street

Charles Dickens himself and...well, was it Catherine or Nelly, were out and about meeting and greeting his public..

This poor chap was being punished for the ills of the world...I am always amazed at how much venom and force people can invest in throwing a freezing cold wet sponge at someone they don't know...

And then I found these two clowns posing in front of an inflatable woolly mammoth... truly no genuine Dickensian evening should be without one.

Guarding our collective cholesterol from onslaught we avoided all bacon baps, hog-burgers, chips and other greasy temptations and repaired to the Tinker's for a cup of tea, whereupon we agreed we had had a lovely time. The town had put on a fine display of cheer and goodwill given the misery that resounds nationally, and we decided that it did not seem but 'twas five minutes since the Tinker had put his decorations away last Christmas, and, if that was indeed the case, he might as well have left them up.

Lark Rise to Candleford ~ Flora Thompson

I've had a paperback copy for years, bought for me by my mum, so when the Oxford University Press edition of Lark Rise to Candleford complete with ribbon bookmark and original wood-engravings arrived, I had a quick look, stroked it lovingly for a while and put it on the shelf to await its moment. I'm sure plenty of you have read it.

But did anyone get engrossed in the BBC series?

I'll admit I started with great gusto because I think we were getting a dose of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford at about the same time, but sadly my enthusiasm quickly waned. Something seemed to go seriously awry along with some very distracting casting. Anyway for reasons which even I can't explain I picked the book up again a while ago, and had a very interesting read of Phillip Mallet's introduction.

For example I hadn't realised this 'lightly fictionalized memoir' of Flora Thompson's childhood in 1880's Oxfordshire, Lark Rise, was first published in 1939, nor that her son Peter was lost at sea when his ship was torpedoed in 1941. And for the benefit of the Tinker who will want this detail, the ship was the Jedmoor, part of a convoy NW of St Kilda and sunk by a German U boat. (your starter for ten Tinker). By this time Flora Thompson had volume two, Over to Candleford ready, swiftly followed by Candleford Green in 1943, and the compilation volume as we know it today Lark Rise to Candleford appeared in 1945.

So a book that I had somehow imagined to have been a contemporaneous account written in the late nineteenth century, was in fact a product of the Second World War, and perhaps a welcome echo of the traditions and camaraderie of a bygone age for a country whose sovereignity was under threat.

And lawks-a-mussy, there was some ambiguity about whether Lark Rise...

'the spot God made with the left-overs, when He'd finished creating the rest of the earth '...

was an autobiography or fiction, and it then emerged that it was a sort of retrospective compilation of place and experience, not entirely accurate, but one that paid homage to the myth of rural England as a nostalgic homeland and which

'harks back to a time when men and women were happier, and perhaps better.'

Phillip Mallet explores all aspects of the debate in his introduction which was enough to give me some solid background as I dipped into a few chapters, and I'll admit I approached it in the light of these previously unknown factors thinking well this is all a bit of a swizz.

Except that all vanished as I started to read and I found myself surprisingly involved.

Is it the way that Flora Thompson, though writing in the third person and as an adult, has somehow managed to distill the essence of childhood whilst capturing the cultural and social customs of the times??

That all-seeing yet often incomplete vision of the inquisitive young observer overlaid with the day to day life of the community

Each chapter stands alone really, a book that can be dipped into almost at leisure rather than read chronologically, and it was the one entitled The Box that initially fascinated me. I was reminded of all those conversations we had on here last year about the Threads of Feeling exhibition I had visited at the Foundling Museum in London, and us all trying to identify the baby clothes and sort our biggins and our barrows from our mantles, clouts and pilches. The exhibition now has a website of its own...so now you can all visit, don't miss it, the fabrics are such an archival treasure, and freighted with so much emotion.

Flora Thompson's 'box' in question is a small oak chest of clothes, 'a popular institution' containing six of everything that a woman would need on the birth of her baby,

'tiny shirts, swathes, long flannel barrows, nighties and napkins, made, kept in repair, and lent for every confinement by the clergyman's daughter.'

In addition the box contained gifts of tea and sugar and a tin of patent groats for making gruel.

The entire village would know that a birth had taken place (the box never allowed to go until it had)  when a young girl from the family would be seen wheeling the heavy box precariously balanced on a perambulator through the watching village.

And then there's Queenie, sitting by her beehives tossing the bead-spangled bobbins hither and thither and lace-making...I mean just imagine it. Having tried lace-making I can't imagine attempting it whilst sitting outside being plagued by bees. This incidentally is not mine, it's some I felt very sorry for and rescued from the market...

and nor is this some I made earlier either, instead a recent and very exquisite exhibit at The Devon Guild of Craftsmen...

But Queenie was on the lookout for a swarm which would have meant a huge financial loss. And it is the bees Queenie tells of news of her husband's death '...or they'd all've died, poor craturs.'...all bee-keepers tell their bees the news of a death and it's a reference I keep coming across in the oddest places now.

And so it goes on, the daily round in Lark Rise, and so it goes on for me too. More perfect Middlemarch atmosphere (though of course Middlemarch is set considerably earlier in the nineteenth century)  and Lark Rise to Candleford a book that has been, and I think will continue to be, a really lovely surprise after all these years.

And the winners are...

We fired up good old Colossus at Bletchley Park especially for our draw this evening, I feel sure George Eliot would have loved all this...

Research Randomizer Results cut and pasted from the site at 6.58pm GMT

1 Set of 6 Unique Numbers Per Set
Range: From 1 to 84 -- Sorted from Least to Greatest

5, 11, 23, 28, 36, 57

5  - Marion Webb

11 - Amy C

23 - Mystica ( woo hoo, you have the luck of the Irish with these draws Mystica!)

28 - Kate

36 - Virginia

57 - Becky

Congratulations, check it's really you and pristine and perfectly lovely gorgeous new copies of Middlemarch will be winging their way to the lucky winners as soon as you send your address to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and if you could mark it TEAM MIDDLEMARCH that would help a lot.

 

Happy Birthday George and welcome to Team Middlemarch

Mary Ann Evans aka George Eliot, one hundred and ninety-two today, and to celebrate this seems like a good day to launch our year-long read of Middlemarch, because if this had been 1871 it would have only been eight more sleeps until the first part, Miss Brooke, is published.

I have been indulging in some minor preparations which included stumbling across a really excellent essay by Zadie Smith entitled 'Middlemarch and Everybody' in her collection Changing My Mind. Zadie Smith's assertion that the book 'gets better as you age' is a theory I am keen to test out. It is about ten years since I first read it which feels like ageing enough, but I'm also wondering whether it was because that first read came later in my life that the book made such an impression on me. And thanks to Zadie Smith for reminding me that George Eliot was fifty when she wrote it and

'can look upon her young self with satirical good humour and clinical self-knowledge.'

Because that's something that gets easier with age too.

I have also been re-visiting my copy of The Journals of George Eliot to track the progress of Middlemarch, both the writing of and especially the publishing schedule and thinking through until our read ends on the anniversary of her death, December 22nd 2012 (deo volente etc)

1869...

Jan 1st - A bright frosty morning! And we are both well. The servants are going to have their little treat, and we are going to see Mr. and Mrs. Burne Jones and carry a book for their little boy. I have set myself many tasks for the year - I wonder how many will be accomplished? A Novel called Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and several minor poems.

August 5th ...This morning I finished the first chapter of Middlemarch. I am reading Renouard's History of Medicine.

August 29th...at p40 of Middlemarch

Sep 1st - I mediated characters and conditions for Middlemarch which stands still in the beginning of Chapter III

Sep 11th - I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of Middlemarch. I have need to remember that other things which have been accomplished by me, were begun under the same cloud.

Sep 22nd - We went down to Watford for a change.

Progress is slow, and having seen the original hand-written manuscript  in the British Library that is not in the least surprising. Family bereavement and 'a swamp of illness' intervene but insufficient to stifle some socialising and travel, and all the while Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes remain blissfully happy and fulfilled in their life together.

Eventually Miss Brooke, the first of eight parts of Middlemarch is published on December 1st 1871 at a cost of 5/- and is 'excellently well received', and the second, Old and Young, will follow on February Ist 1872. Incidentally this eight-part serialisation was all about the publisher's attempt to break the monopoly and control of the libraries, and I'm not sure how accurate it is but a bit of research suggests that 5/- in 1871 may have been the equivalent of about £18 in today's money. George Eliot negotiated 40% on each copy sold, Blackwood printed 6000 and it was a sell out each month. I'll leave you to do the homework but it sounds like a lottery-sized amount to me.

So the approximate plan is (though of course not compulsory) to start reading Miss Brooke one hundred and forty years later on December 1st 2011, and not to read Old and Young until its 'arrival' on February 1st 2012. I will doubtless publish some interim posts between now and then because I can see I'm not the only one with the George Eliot bug, but with the focus for our first main discussion happening here in comments on Sunday January 22nd 2012

I'm planning to stay with the reading schedule (I'm half-tempted to dissect one of my copies and hide the rest) because I am interested to see how well-imprinted Miss Brooke becomes on my comparitively over-full twenty-first century mind, and how eager am I to 'receive' the next part. I might even read it several times as I feel sure the Victorians would have done, and doubtless they would have read it aloud too. There are frequent mentions in George Eliot's journals of her and George Henry Lewes settling down for an evening of reading aloud or having friends round to do likewise.

May 29th 1870 - Mr Spencer, Mrs Burne Jones and Mr Crompton came. I read aloud No.3 of "Edwin Drood".

I shall be using a mixture of real (Oxford World Classics) and digital copies depending on whether I happen to be travelling in the brougham or not, and my thanks to Diane who very kindly extracted me from the muddle I had got myself into with my Kindle, because having downloaded twelve different free sample copies I then had no idea which was which. The file Diane has compiled about available digital editions is over here >>>>> under Team Middlemarch so any Kindlers amongst you may find it helpful as some editions have indexes and some don't.

For ease of finding, all relevant posts on here will be tagged under the Team Middlemarch heading so one click will bring them all up together.

So is everyone ready??

If anyone else has being doing any pre-reading please do share in comments.

Oh and I almost forgot, scroll down for gifts.

 

Prize draw copies of Middlemarch

A copy of Middlemarch in the delicious new Oxford World Classics edition for six lucky Team Middlemarchers.

The cover illustration is one I'm going to be very happy to have around the house for the next year, a detail from Lady in Grey 1859, by Daniel Macnee.

This draw is open worldwide so add your name in comments if you're planning to join the shared read and fancy starting the year with a pristine new copy, and we'll draw the winners very soon.

Letters to Vicky

What a fine time I have been having this weekend reading Letters to Vicky which, since finishing Helen Rappaport's book Magnificent Obsession, now makes for even more interesting reading.  In fact it's quite easy to see how all things Victorian can become an obsession as I shelve most of the 20th and 21st century in order to continue my stately progress through Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens - A Life, and George Eliot's letters and journals to get in the mood for Team Middlemarch which will be rolling into town tomorrow (and with gifts).

I am very fortunate to have been sent the Folio Society edition of Letters to Vicky, Queen Victoria's correspondence between 1858 and 1901 to her eldest daughter Victoria, Empress of Germany. I could never afford these editions in the past because there was membership and the minimum number of purchases involved, but the rules are changing and Folio Society books can now be bought individually. Introductions are now written by authors as diverse as Carol Ann Duffy and David Vann, and there is now a newly opened Folio Society 'Reading Room' in Bloomsbury...wish I'd known that last week.

Talking about the beauty of a book compared to a Kindle as we were, and really this is like comparing a Reliant Robin (with apologies to all three-wheeler devotees) to a Rolls Royce. These are books you want to have as special gifts and to hold and read and to see on the shelf, and though I used to find them a bit elaborate and unnecessary... what's wrong with my well-worn paperback after all, it hasn't stopped me picking up quite a few Folio Society editions second-hand down the years and I still do (a lot of Trollopes for a start and some Virginia Woolf) I have to admit that I treasure them, and if I had my time over I think I would have made more of an investment in them for children and Godchildren.

But Letters to Vicky now has heightened resonance since I have been furnished with the detail. I knew snippets but I'll own up to getting in a bit of a muddle previously with all the children and the sequence of births, marriages and deaths.

I now have a much fuller picture so I read of Victoria's unconcerned mentions to Vicky of Albert's failing health with interest...

February 16th 1861

'Poor dear Papa has been suffering badly with toothache since three days...it comes from inflammation at the root of the tooth...I hope however it is a little better today, but dear Papa never allows he is any better or will try to get over it, but makes such a miserable face that people always think he's very ill. It's quite the contrary with me always; I can do anything before others and never show it, so people never believe I am ill or even suffer.'

Perhaps Victoria may have lived to regret expressing such confidence in her own fortitude which, when put to the ultimate test of grief, crumbled so spectacularly. And poor Albert, his gravestone inscription really should have read 'Told you I was ill.'

November 30th 1861 (remembering Albert will die two weeks later)

I can begin by saying that dear Papa is in reality much better - only so much reduced and as usual desponding as men really only are - when unwell..

Also evident, and something Helen delineated so clearly in her book, is Victoria's unshifting faith in the 'admirable' Dr Jenner. Interestingly a trust that seems to have been unshaken by Albert's death given that some years later he remains in attendance and continues to reassure with

'no cause of alarm but anxiety'.

as the Prince of Wales writhes on his bed in the agonies of typhoid fever and something excruciatingly painful in progress with his leg. And who sees nothing unfavourable in the symptoms of Alice's diphtheria just two days before her death.

Whilst after the death of Victoria's beloved John Brown...

'On Tuesday we were so much happier about him and Sir William Jenner who knew him well and is never over-sanguine or ever misleads you told me that evening at 10 o'clock I need not be so much alarmed, that his pulse was better and he took plenty of nourishment and the eruption had not spread! An hour after, all was over in his sleep!'

Perhaps the good doctor's role was to sooth and contain anxiety in a fragile monarch, nothing more and with little expectation of happy outcomes. It will certainly be interesting to reflect more on that role in the nineteenth century given that doctors had so little at their disposal in terms of effective treatments, and to follow  Dr Lydgate's progress in Middlemarch as one of the first general practitioners to feature in English literature. I have been reading George Eliot's journals too. There's another one who was a martyr to an unpredictable and painfully bilious digestive system... enough to make me wonder, from reading the symptoms she describes, whether she may have had gallstones. It would certainly explain the prolonged episodes of debilitating pain and sickness that delayed the writing of Middlemarch.

The Queen is not averse to the writing of George Eliot either ..

November 17th 1860

'I have finished The Mill on the Floss and I must say it made a deep impression on me. The writing and the descriptions of feelings is wonderful and painful! Poor Maggie! Why must they be drowned, but poor Philip Wakem I pity the most of all! Stephen did behave very ill, Tom had much good but was very hard.'

And throughout the letters, mother and daughter discuss their reading.  Vicky is riveted by The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins to the point where 'I can hardly get away from it.' Victoria reads Jane Eyre aloud to Albert, she mentions that Elizabeth Browning's poem Aurora Leigh whilst at times seems 'dreadfully coarse', yet still finds it 'an incredible book for a lady to have written.'

Vicky replies three days later...

'I have read Aurora Leigh and dislike it extremely...I think it thoroughly without taste and poetry. The feeling is very crude and does not touch me - in fact I put it down with disgust.'

The Queen is right back at her with

I think you judge Aurora Leigh too severely; that is I mean you have overlooked the decided genius and some most beautiful passages...

And mention of a book that has intrigued me...

February 17th 1886

'I send you two books which I think you will find interesting and very powerfully written. The author (whose real name I do not know) is only 21 - and I must say I think the writing worthy of George Eliot and Currer Bell. Donovan should be read first. I have not yet read We Two but Beatrice has and many others and men of intellect who are immensely struck by it...'

It transpires the writer is Edna Lyall, the pseudonym of Ada Ellen Bayley (1857-1903)...does anyone know her??

I certainly don't and the books seem to have vanished without trace, though I see there is a Kindle edition and a free download here.

And all mixed in with the politics of the time, and of course Vicky well-placed to keep her mother informed about the wider European picture, are fascinating details about the search for a bride for the errant Bertie, Prince of Wales. Defects as various as strange manners, loud laughs, a bad figure in a low gown, broad square shoulders, foolish and frivolous parents rule countless victims out of the running, and one can only wonder whether letters from our own Queen might reveal anything similar should they ever see the light of day....though I'm not sure who she'd write too, and perhaps she does e mails anyway.

So a real gold mine of a book that has kept me deeply rooted in the nineteenth century all weekend.

Right... is everyone ready... let's bring on Team Middlemarch tomorrow.

 

 

A mooch around the British Museum.

Whilst in London, and with a few hours to spare before meeting up with Helen and heading off to her talk at the V&A, I wandered into the British Museum for a mooch.

Really there can be no better place to amble as I discovered on those cold, rather grey wintery London afternoons back in the 1970s when I lived very nearby. Often I would come off duty after an early shift, everyone else would be working a late shift or the nurse's home in Bedford Place would be tip-toe quiet because my room-mate was on night-shift and still asleep, and it was also a bit chilly.

So I'd go to the British Museum for a wander.

In those days it really was, dare I say it, deathly boring to my nineteen-year old eyes and a mind full of the excitement of London life and this new career I was embarking on, but it was nearby and my feet were usually killing me, and it was free, it was quiet and it was warm. Now of course a bustling, user-friendly and inviting place, still free and if it was good enough for George Eliot (who I am discovering often visited daily) then it's good enough for me.

Being a keen Olympian I nipped up to look at the exhibition of the 2012 medals, this being the nearest I am likely to get to seeing one. Some of the ore mined at Salt Lake City, some in Mongolia, tens of thousands of tons of it to make the 4,700 medals, and each one taking about ten hours to make at the Royal Mint in Wales.

And then I just had a bit of an aimless, map-less wander and isn't it just amazing what you see.

I looked at these for ages, foot guards from umpteen years BC,
and pondered all that careful attention to the toenails and the hinges and wondered when might your average Grecian wear them ...

And then a dazzling treasure trove, the largest quantity of coins ever found in Britain (I think) and I spent a while wondering what it must have been like to be the one to dig this lot up... and I wish I could remember where it had been discovered. It might be the Hoxne Treasure??

After a wander around the Grecian urns I just followed the noise because of course the Egyptian Galleries, devoid of the living bar me on those grey 1970's afternoons, now one of the museum's main attractions for school visits. Harrassed teachers were trying to control over-excited children who were supposed to be drawing things but were mostly playing hide and seek around the antiquities.

But there they were, all me old mates...


Still a source of endless fascination forty years on.

And as I left the Museum thinking it was really time I read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Golden Child again, of course a glance upwards to the spectacular roof which illuminates even the greyest of days.

Magnificent Obsession with Helen Rappaport at the V&A.

With working days either side my two day whistle-stop trip to London seemed to be over in a flash this week, but it was so good to meet up with Helen Rappaport for her talk on Magnificent Obsession at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The talk was predictably excellent so if you find yourself within travelling distance of one of Helen's events over the next few months don't miss it. The audience was spellbound not only by Helen's delivery (BBC are you listening...Fiona Bruce is not the only one who can do this sort of thing) but the brilliant content and a succession of fascinating and beautiful pictures to go with it. I think this is long-suffering daughter Alice who nursed Prince Albert, her father, through his final days and sadly died of diphtheria on the anniversary of his death all those years later.

Helen and I then spent the following day in London and I have to say it was a special and memorable moment to go into the National Portrait Gallery with her in order to pay homage to the painting of Mary Seacole. I snatched this shot for you all just before I was in trouble for taking pictures inside the gallery...

Suitably chastised we took ourselves off to a seat 'neath the gaze of a bank of portraits of Victorian luminaries, from William Morris and Lesley Stephen to John Stuart Mill, who I like to think would have applauded my rule-bending courage on your behalf. Helen then recounted the story of how she discovered this portrait in the possession of an art dealer, was convinced it was Mary Seacole, bought it and has since ensured that it remains in a national gallery for all to see rather than tucked away in a private collection.

We then couldn't do other than divert to the fabulous cafe in the National Gallery next door, where the temptation of the coffee and walnut cake was all too much to resist, before heading into the exhibition currently in progress back in the Portrait Gallery, The First Actresses, Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons. And how excited was I to see that the first portrait was of Hester Booth in her harlequin costume, a woman with very strong links to Port Eliot (Hester's daughter Harriot married into the family) who also have a very similar painting of her. The exhibition wasn't crowded either so a chance to get up close to the pictures and read all the details and talk our way around.

A stroll across London took us down to Hatchards in Piccadilly to witness 'the book' on the shelves, and I have to tell you that to get to this shelf we had to push Andrew Marr out of the way as he plodded through signing about a thousand copies of his latest book.

Anyway we got the picture we wanted.

A stroll up to Liberty's in Regent Street so that I could stroke the fabrics and drool over the Ianthe rug and earmark £4000 for one in the Book Room when we win the lottery...

and as we said our goodbyes later in the day and headed for respective trains, time for me to reflect on a really special trip and my thanks to Helen for her excellent company.

 

Friday Finds... Ness, Murray, James and some homework

Having enjoyed a revival of my dormant inner child thanks to the Red House Children's Book Award shortlist, and having then discovered that I love the writing of Patrick Ness, I am now really looking forward to his Chaos Walking Trilogy which has just arrived, The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men.

Has anyone else read these and if so what can I expect... apart from the fact this might take me a while given that the three books run to about 1500 pages (double spaced admittedly)

I also had a serendipitous moment of the long-arm of coincidence-ness last week which led to the arrival of another book.

The Endsleigh Salon theme was the 1970s and they very graciously allowed me to subtract five given its Orwellian1984 connections and take in 1Q84 to talk about, on the basis that Haruki Murakami had rendered me incapable of picking up anything else for weeks. Of course then I was in trouble... only half way through the book and trying to explain what it was about...er..well, there are these two people and these sort of two parallel universes and one of these people has semi-ghost re-written a book by a really strange girl, oh yes and there are two moons in the sky and then the other one of these people, a girl, goes round murdering people. Yes, it's really good. Not sure this will help Murakami sales at all but suffice to say I finished it between Paddington and Taunton, thought about it all the way to Exeter, have Volume Three lined up and ordered a whole box-load more of Murakami because I have finally found a way into his writing with 1Q84.

But I digress. Fortunately everyone else had stuck to the Endsleigh theme and amongst the books was one from one of the Happy Campers, who had heard Tiffany Murray talk about Diamond Star Halo at Port Eliot Festival, read it afterwards and loved it. Halo Llewelyn grows up in a rural recording studio, mixes with the rich and famous rock stars as a child and I was sold on it and made a note. Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs because the very next morning there it is, an e mail from Tiffany Murray, who clearly has extra-sensory-sixth-sense-crystal-ball-perception asking if I would be interested in reading her latest novel Diamond Star Halo.

Some things are obviously destined to be and I said yes with indecent haste.

Now I know there are some purists out there who will find any book that attempts to add to the shrine of Jane Austen's literary output something of a crime, so how fitting that it is P.D.James who has done it. Death Comes to Pemberley and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years, there are sons in the nursery and happiness is complete until Lydia Wickham's chaise comes hurtling down the drive, out she tumbles screaming that her husband has been murdered and we can only wonder whether Adam Dalgliesh is in hot pursuit ready to investigate. I'm really looking forward to this one and on the subject of sleuthing, did I read that the latest theory is that Jane Austen may have died from arsenic poisoning, or did I dream that...

Another new arrival that is most definitely tapping into my inner child, Homework for Grown Ups Quiz Book - fiendishly fun questions to test your old-school knowledge by E.Foley and B.Coates. It actually has the look and feel of one of those school text books that you'd open and be faced with geometry pictures and then start to feel a bit sick whilst hoping you'd got the one that someone had pencilled in the answers. Lord knows how I passed the Eleven Plus.

I shall now test you with some 'simple mental arithmetic' for starters, my klutz subject ... hands on desk, no calculators hiding under the desk lid please... except for Dark Puss who has to put on a blindfold and try and get the answers without even reading the questions :-)

A typist averages 14 words to a line and 30 lines to a page. How many pages will be needed for 38,406 words?

Pencils cost a stationer £1.80 for a packet of 10. How many can she buy for £36.00?

Robert accidentally divides by 8 instead of multiplying by 8 and gets an answer of 564. What should his orginal answer have been?

One lucky contest winner receives 1/4 of his winnings in cash, and is given four more prizes, each worth 1/4 of the balance. If the cash and one of the prizes are worth a combined total of £35,000 what is the total value of his winnings?

a) £70,000
b) 75,000
c) 80,000
d) 140,000

Don't put the answers in comments because we really don't want to give Dark Puss any help, I'll post them later.

Listen, you'll thank me on the day that doctor asks you to count backwards from a hundred subtracting seven each time...

 

 

Our version of one dog and his boy...

I'm catching up after a couple of wonderful London days but I thought this picture needed to follow right on from the post about Eva Ibbotson's book... this is our 'boy', with a very baby Rusty, now two years old and the very best, most faithful and hardworking friend a gamekeeper could ever wish to have.

 

One Dog and His Boy ~ Eva Ibbotson

I don't know why on earth I have been dragging my heels about settling down to the late Eva Ibbotson's writing.

Not the first idea.

It's not as if I haven't seen her name in lights around the internet and the review pages, and I have diligently acquired the books as I have seen them mentioned, but just never really settled down to read them. I suspect my attention was first drawn in Eva Ibbotson's direction when I read Manja by Anna Gmeyner and realised that Eva was Anna's daughter. Manja remains one of the most powerful and disturbing books from the Persephone list that I have ever read and I have always been grateful to them for bravely bringing such a different book back into print. If you haven't read it and perhaps think of Persephone books as generally warm, comfy hot-water bottle reads, then think on, because Manja could not be more different in the way it tracks the lives of a group of children in Nazi Germany making such stark contrasts with the terror that is going on around them.

Incidentally don't miss this beautiful and poignant piece by Eva Ibbotson on the salvation that was Hampstead Library when she and her family first came to London as refugees from Germany in 1934...

'I was eight years old when I came to Britain as a refugee - and was not particularly grateful. Mostly this was because after years and years of being a sheep coming to the manger, or a grazing cow, I had at last landed the part of the Virgin Mary in the nativity play at my convent school in Vienna.

And then ... Hitler....'

So thanks are in order yet again to this year's Red House Children's Book Awards shortlist for another read that might have passed me by. I don't know about all this Orange and Booker stuff any more but I'm definitely going to add the Red House list to my reading every year from now on. Really refreshing reading towards the end of another year of grown-up books, and Eva Ibbotson's final book, One Dog and His Boy, completed a few weeks before her death at the age of eighty-five in October 2010.

Having read a couple from the shortlists that deal with the gritty and challenging subjects of loss and bereavement and terminal illness, I am slightly relieved to see that the Nation's Children still love books like this too because I know I enjoyed them .

Does anyone else remember reading The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford??

I still have my copy bought with 3/6d of my pocket money from the school book club and I was transported right back there to the animal journey apsects with One Dog and His Boy, as young Hal, remarkably resistant to the over-indulgence of his wealthy but emotionally neglectful parents pleads with them, not for the toy department of Hamleys, but a dog. When Hal's dream comes true and young Fleck appears on his birthday let joy be unconfined until it becomes clear that Fleck has only been rented for the weekend from Rent-a-Pet and will have to be returned on Monday.

Add together a timely release of five dogs including Fleck from Rent-a-Pet by a kennel maid, a happy reunion with Hal followed by young Hal's decision to make the journey north to go and live with his grandparents with all the dogs in tow, and of course Eva Ibbotson has all the material for one of those wonderfully gently anarchic, parent-free voyages of discovery. This one lacks nothing, with all the potential for nasty grown-ups to reap their just humiliations and punishments, and for some changes of heart and a bit of forgiveness and redemption where needed all making this book such a joy to read.

Alison Lurie in her fascinating book Don't Tell the Grown-Ups - Subversive Children's Literature, expands wonderfully on all these themes...highlighting the importance for children of the books

'...that recommended - even celebrated, daydreaming, disobedience, answering back, running away from home, and concealing one's private thoughts from unsympathetic grown-ups.'

The books that don't support the status quo

'...and whose values may not be overtly of the conventional adult world but which appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change.'

Yeeeeeeesssssss. Eva Ibbotson captures all that and more in One Dog and His Boy.

And I must mention the little illustrations by Sharon Rentta which are delightful and enough to make you want to head down to Battersea Dogs Home and claim a 'Tottenham Terrier' of your own. Beautifully atmospheric images of the dogs in all their moods, especially Fleck in his extremes of misery and clutching his bit of cuddly blue flannel ...

and happiness...

This book is on the Books for Younger Readers shortlist and it is the children who will vote... if you know any could you sort of twist their arms a bit and say vote for this one?? 

No, no I didn't mean that, just shut them in a cupboard or something until they agree.

This is a book that would bring pleasure to all ages, so highly recommended for a child near you, but just make sure you read it yourself first and benefit from the wonderfully, warm feel-good inner glow this book will give you.

Final words to Alison Lurie...

'Too often we leave the tribal culture of childhood ...behind, we lose contact with instinctive joy in self-expression: with the creative imagination, spontaneous emotion, and the ability to see the world as full of wonders. Staying in touch with children's literature and folklore as an adult is not only a means of understanding what children are thinking and feeling; it is a way of understanding and renewing our own childhood.'

No I've changed my mind, final words to Eva Ibbotson and Hal...

'For a few moments Hal, sitting opposite, just let her cry. Then something horrible happened. The anger he felt with his parents began to get weaker...and weaker still. He missed it badly, this rage which had kep him going on his adventure. But there was nothing to be done about it; it was gone. His mother had done a wicked thing; she was foolish and misguided - but she was his mother.

    He put an arm round Albina.
    'It's alright,' he said. 'It's over. It's alright.'

And the very final leap to Fleck.

 

 

The Story of Swimming ~ Susie Parr

You might have noticed, under Looking... over on this sidebar>>>>> that some really very fine books indeed have arrived. I've called it Looking... when in fact they all have a great deal of reading in them, along with the requisite sumptuous pictures, and so I will be writing about quite a few over the next few weeks.

The first one I picked propped up was The Story of Swimming by Susie Parr.

The hidden bounty in books like this is the fact that I didn't have the first clue about the story of swimming, nor that I might even want to know, but when Susie wrote to me and mentioned that she had been a crocheting dovegreyreader tent visitor at Port Eliot, and would I be interested in seeing a copy of her book on swimming, I very politely said yes please, expecting perhaps a little handbook on the history of the swimming gala or something.

Jim the Postie may now have a hernia but this gorgeous great big book arrived, and I have spent many happy evenings reading it...

I'm not a brilliant swimmer, this I must admit. I'm self-taught really, so some very flaky keep-the-hair-dry breaststroke, more suited to having a conversation with someone swimming alongside me than any aspirations to be Anita Lonsborough (Rome 1960, my first remembered Olympic Games). I can manage a passable backstroke but I really hate not being able to see where I'm going, and only a very rubbish four strokes at front crawl before I splutter and panic because I have forgotten to breath. I've been too busy worrying about what my arms and legs aren't doing properly, and then I feel as if I'm drowning, and as for butterfly, well let's not go there. About diving, hmm....well, it always feels as if I am in perfect alignment whilst the look on everyone's face when I surface seems to say 'That must have hurt.'

Susie Parr far braver than I, a devotee of outdoor swimming, the term 'wild swimming' often used, and one coined by Roger Deakin in his book Waterlog, and wild swimming in the River Lynher now a regular feature of Port Eliot Festival. This all involves being really keen to plunge into the nearest lake/loch/dock/harbour/ocean, whilst I'd be stuck on the side wondering about the raw sewage and the E Coli count per cc of water.

Not Susie, and it is her own intrepid swimming life (and presumably a tried and tested immune system) that mingles perfectly with the social and cultural history of swimming, from the Romans to the present day, alongside the pictures many of which have been taken by Susie's husband photographer Martin Parr...

'During the lake season (May to September) I fall into the grip of a powerful addiction. I have to get to the lake every day, no matter what the weather. If I cannot go, because of work or visitors, I become crochety, edgy, ill at ease...'

I have a nursing colleague who is an outdoor swimmer, except this very day she is en route to Africa for a two week nursing project in Kenya where I have no doubt she will find some swimming. She somehow manages to bury her extensive knowledge of pathogens and the risk of septicaemia via an innocent looking cut in order to regularly traverse Plymouth Sound or Roadford Reservoir in aid of charity, and I just pay up and offer words of encouragement and gaze on with incredulity.

So why don't I want to do that??

It's not as if I wasn't showing potential at an early age after all...

Somewhere along the way I must have wimped out big time because swimming was most definitely encouraged in us as children and we loved it.

Remember the Lido? Susie has plenty on the Lido and this is one of the multitude of very revealing aspects in The Story of Swimming ...the fascinating detail surrounding the many different and influencing factors on the practice of swimming; the wars, poverty and class, legislation, transport, the economy, and changing concepts of health, education, beauty and fashion, politics, feminism and sexual liberation.

And then there are the literary swimmers from Wordsworth to Iris Murdoch and let's not forget Rupert Brooke's skinny dip with Virginia Woolf at Byron's Pool near Grantchester. Suzie swims there too... we'd call it a bandit run (the Kayaker paddled many of these slightly out-of-bounds places) ignoring all the Private/ Do Not Bathe signs and exercising a sort of Right to Swim. And Susie definitely risks a plethora of water-borne diseases in a pool that is now a very far cry from the cool, inviting place it must have been when Rupert and Ginny first dived in there, on the eve of the Great War. Fighting with a scum of plastic bags and other unmentionable detritus plus a great deal of mud, Susie emerges feeling her furtive swim in a place that should be 'glorious', has instead been 'rushed, fearful and unpleasant.'

Lidos were about the democratisation of a sport and form of exercise that had become a little elitist in the 1930s, initially challenging the expensive changing facilities on the beaches. Easy to forget the sensitivities, and the fact that rummaging your cozzie on under a towel was absolutely not the done thing. I had no idea that 'mackintosh bathing' even existed, let alone that many local authorities banned the practice of travelling from your guest house to the beach with your bathers on underneath your mac to avoid the expense of hiring a beach hut.

Lidos now fast disappearing, but we'd be awake all night at the thought of the next day's promised trip to Tooting Bec Lido. Speechless with excitement as we sat on the bus from Mitcham and all to swim in a freezing cold pool with the multitudes whilst fighting for about a cubic foot of water each. Now I discover it is one of the largest open-air pools in existence, so you can just imagine how many of us crammed in there back in the early 1960s, and why we had to wait hours for a free changing cubicle. And we were robust and didn't catch things either, now every time I swim in a pool I have a sore throat within days... rubbish and unchallenged 21st century immune system obviously.

Frankly I blame children and the wetsuit.

Children because they would insist on spending hours and hours in the sea so we would have to do the same, hence the wetsuits, and the consequent reluctance for cold water ever thereafter. Susie would be having none of that. The whole point seems to be the envigorating cold water on your skin, pulling clothes back onto a half-dried body afterwards and sitting huddled up with a thermos... and I'm almost tempted to go and have a quick dip in the Tamar right this minute.

Only 'almost'... there's wild and then there's crazy. It was all looking a bit swift under Horsebridge this weekend, I'd be out in Plymouth Sound before I knew it..

So a really lovely book and my thanks to Susie Parr for at least making me think about my own swimming history whilst pretending that I might go 'wild-swimming'. I have spent many worthwhile evenings reading and browsing  this book, and with much pleasure. The Story of Swimming is published by Dewi Lewis media, a company of whom I knew little but now know a great deal more, and what an eclectic and unusual list of books they produce.

So any one else keen on plunging into the nearest lake??

Any other 'keep-the-hair-dry' swimmers like me out there??

Bugle Boy ~ Len Chester

Each Year, on Remembrance Sunday, I usually publish one of the Tinker's (father of dgr) stories from his little wartime memoir Bugle Boy, and so in keeping with tradition, here's another one. For those who may not have met one of these before, and with apologies to everyone who already knows this... The Tinker, who I'm sure won't mind me saying is now a very sprightly eighty six, joined the Royal Marines in May 1939 at the age of fourteeen. He was sent off to the battleships at Scapa Flow in December of that year once he had mastered 150 bugle calls, the drum and the flute, thus becoming one of the very youngest to see active service during World War Two.... and he's that little tiddler on the left on the cover.

Pay

As I have said, we were paid 1s a day. But out of this
grand sum 1s 9d was deducted and placed into an
account to be paid when you attained the age of eighteen,
so in fact we only drew 5s 3d (26p) a week, out of which
we had to buy all our everyday requirements – soap,
toothpaste, Bluebell, boot polish and so on. Yet somehow
we always seemed to finish with enough for pictures on a
Saturday afternoon and half a pound of angel cake to take
back for a feast in the evening – we were always hungry.
There were alternative ways of getting things like forbidden
‘fags’, you could always beg; but our skills were in
scrounging, we became past masters at this as we became
streetwise. The Artful Dodger would have lost the coat
off his back within ten minutes in our room. I have mentioned
before how we would wait outside the beer canteen
(we weren’t allowed in of course), and with a penny in
hand and a doleful face we would approach some Marine
and say ‘Sell us a fag for a penny’.
In barracks Royal Marines came under the Army Act,
but once on board ship we came under the Admiralty and
Admiralty Fleet Orders, so we boys were paid the same as
Royal Navy boys, 6s (30p) a fortnight; the remainder went
into your ‘account’. But even then we managed to exist
and smoked like chimneys with tobacco costing 1s 9d a
pound and we could always sell any excess. Many boys
took up skills like haircutting, snobbing boots or tailoring,
talents that had no recognized trade in the Services; but
the boy who was the only one on a ship who could cut hair
was maybe on his way to being a millionaire next year.
My other bugler, Curly Regan, and I had a ‘dhobi’
firm and as we lived in with the band on HMS King
George V we had a constant demand for clean laundry,
starched shorts and shirts every day. How we managed
this when we had no electric irons remains our secret, but
it was a lovely little earner!
When we eventually ‘passed out’ as competent
buglers, drummers and flautists our pay rose to 8s 9d
(45p) a week, as I have said, and we could really lord it up
then.
My eighteenth birthday, my rainy day, did come – it
must have done – although I can’t remember it. It would
have been on 5 April 1943 whilst I was in the
Mediterranean and probably went on wine, women, and
song. Why leave it to earn interest; there were men out
there trying to kill us and they were very good at it too.

Bulbs

Every year, around Christmas time, I look at the expensive bowls of hyacinths in the shops and kick myself for not planting our own. I end up buying some just to have that gorgeous scent wafting around in January as a real filip to the dark days of winter.

So this year I have finally done it, Paper White narcissus because the dark evenings are here and they will cheer, hyacinths (colours various) for Christmas and some tete-a-tetes for the spring, and all planted in anything I could find, which ended up being old glass trifle dishes (thank you to the Tinker who seemed to have a cupboard full), some charity shop pots and three really lovely glass bulb vases going for £1 each on a junk stall in the market.

So far so good,the Paper Whites apparently don't need the dark so they are storming away in the kitchen, we'll be enjoying these very soon, and another batch in the Book Room ...

and everything else is shut away in cupboards all over the place, six bowls in total and roots...lots of them in the bulb vases..

So now, can someone advise...at what point do I bring the hyacinths out of the dark if I want them to flower for Christmas??

What are the rules about all this??

11.11.11

Having a quiet thinking day today...

 

And the winners are...

The Christmas Truce on its way to these five lucky winners. Perhaps check it's really you here and send your address to dovegreyreader at gmail dot com, and if you could include LAUREATE in your subject line that would help ever such a lot.

20 ~ Avril

15 ~ Val

25 ~ Abigail

37 ~ m

80  ~ Joanna

Random numbers generated Nov 10 2011 at 17:56:32

My thanks to Picador for the books, and keep an eye out for another Carol Ann Duffy prize draw coming up very soon....clue...bzzzzzzzzzzzz

Moonrise in Devon...

"The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear,cold sky..."

The Christmas Truce ~ Carol Ann Duffy

11.11.11 on Friday, and the day that this year seems to hold even greater significance with those numbers, and after our recent Edward Thomas reading, making it also the perfect moment to say the Christmas word a bit early I know, but to show you Carol Ann Duffy's seasonal offering.

And it is quietly wonder-ful.

The Christmas Truce, and most of you will know what follows.

Christmas Eve in the trenches of France,
the guns were quiet.
The dead lay still in No Man's Land -
Freddie, Franz, Friedrich, Frank...
The moon, like a medal, hung in the clear, cold sky.

The Poet Laureate's account of the moment that 'peace found a place in No Man's Land' in World War One. The firing stopped, the carols began and the men played football.

The verse is measured and so so clever, all that we have come to expect from Carol Ann Duffy, and this little book, measuring just five inches square, beautifully illustrated by David Roberts. A must-have to add to the Carol Ann Duffy Christmas Collection.

So Christmas dawned, wrapped in mist,
to open itself
and offer the day like a gift...

And talking of gifts, scroll down..

Prize Draw - The Christmas Truce ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Five copies of The Christmas Truce by Carol Ann Duffy which can go worldwide to very lucky homes. Names in comments as usual and we'll draw the winners on Thursday evening.

All night, along the Western Front, they sang,
the enemies -
carols, hymns, folk songs, anthems...

 

Charles Dickens - A Life ~ Claire Tomalin

I'm hoping everyone is braced and ready for wall-to-wall Dickens centenary celebrations in 2012. I'm preparing in advance but I'm also hoping for some great books and some good media coverage through next year.

Years ago I bought a nice hardback edition of Claire Tomalin's biography Katherine Mansfield - A Secret Life from a second-hand bookshop. To my delight, tucked inside the book was a hand-written card from Claire Tomalin dated 1991 and sent to the previous owner of the book who had obviously done what I said I was going to start doing and had written to the author. I seized upon this little token as if it were my own, as if I had somehow inherited the goodwill in Claire Tomalin's really lovely reply...

'Thank you for your lovely letter, quite undeserved but so nice of you. I went abroad for three weeks, hence my delay in answering...'

And somehow I've always felt an affinity with Claire Tomalin ever since. I moved heaven and earth to hear her talk about Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man when she came to Plymouth University a few years ago and so it has been a seamless endeavour to move straight onto her new biography Charles Dickens - A Life in the wake of my recent read of Helen Rappaport's Magnificent Obsession. I feel so bathed in the nineteenth century I now can't wait to start on our read of Middlemarch which I think we will launch on November 22nd, George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans 192nd birthday (better check the maths someone... 1819)

The first point to make is that as long as books remain the thing of beauty that Charles Dickens - A Life is, then the Kindle will always be a handy Fisher-Price-like reading device for travel purposes (and I would be lost without mine) but never a complete replacement for the real book-lover, the book as object will remain supreme. A printed hardcover with a half slip band dust jacket in fetching shades of sepia and eau de nil combined with superior weight and quality paper make this volume a real joy to hold and to read, which with a £30 price tag is a good thing. Whilst book prices have steadily increased I haven't always seen the paper quality improve accordingly, there will be no foxing of this book in years to come you can be sure of that.

I am not as big a fan of Charles Dickens' novels as I would like to be so this needs to be interesting. I have a few firm favourites and usually because I have been made to read them for study and ended up admiring them (Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Dombey ....) but so many of the books I pick up under my own steam, and then start and stop and start and give up on, so it is quite refreshing to read a very honest appraisal of each one, as Claire Tomalin weaves her narrative of Dickens's life around the novels as they happen. Perhaps a sign of the best biographies is neither hint of craven idolatory nor out and out dislike, and thus far Claire Tomalin achieves a disinterested and very balanced critical approach to the life of a man who perhaps undoubtedly remains the greatest novelist in the English language.

The book reads as a novel and I think I can promise that if you settle down to read it you will be drawn into the life of Charles Dickens in the most intimate and endearing way. But with it came for me a real resurgence of  enthusiasm to give it another go, to pick up yet another Dickens' novel over yet another Christmas and promise myself a read. I have decided to plump for the one that Claire Tomalin might raise above the rest in her estimation and I am wondering which it might be as each comes under her meticulous scrutiny. David Copperfield seems to be winning so far, but it is only 1850 and some lesser know works are also coming to light which I should like to explore too.

And not only the novels, but the life and with it a real appreciation of the bench mark that Dickens set himself and the pressure incurred by having to write for serialisation. Week in week out he had a deadline to meet, a story to concoct, imagination to find, but alongside it rest all his flaws, and I am wondering quite how I will emerge from the traumas ahead.

Poor Catherine, 'pregnant again' seems to be a recurring chorus, Nelly Ternan is about to enter stage left and I can hardly bear it, because despite knowing the general gist of what is to come, I decided to start the book with an open mind. Thus far I have warmed to this manically busy, clever, imaginative man with a philanthropic heart beating in there somewhere,  but alongside this book another little Dickens volume has arrived... Dickens' Women by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, and published by Hesperus.

This is a transcript of Miriam Margolyes's one woman show  of the title's name, and reading her introduction I am getting a sense of the strength of opinion that abounds  ...letters from Dickens about Catherine described as ' a tissue of self-serving lies,' whilst Miriam Margolyes states quite baldly and assertively 'I cannot forgive him,' damning Dickens as the abused turned abuser. Valid but subjective opinions, and so I am intrigued to see how Claire Tomalin walks this particular biographer's tightrope.

I'm wondering what you all think about Dickens and his treatment of his wife... and I wonder how I'm going to feel?? Will I forgive him in the grander scheme of things ... I can't wait to find out, and of course I will report back.

 

 

 

 

A Monster Calls ~ A novel by Patrick Ness from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd

Did I say I couldn't read anything else fictional until I had finished 1Q84?

Well I didn't mean it because a book arrived and I changed my mind, and can I just quickly apologise for more death... what with Jamie's sister Rose and Prince Albert I know I've put you through rather a lot lately, if only writers wouldn't keep writing about it.

It was serendipity to receive an e mail late last Sunday evening from Red House Children's Books with news about the short list for the their Children's Book Award, and this just the night before I was due to post here about My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher, and then my delight when I saw  that Annabel's book had been shortlisted in the Older Readers category.

I think we may have been amongst the earliest subscribers to Red House here chezdovegrey when they set up some thirty years ago, and I clearly remember the doors that they opened for us, and for starting off our reading as a family, and after all what a great way to spend the Child Benefit. Three small children and we still have the stack of books we bought, many becoming the stuff of family legend...

I Want to See the Moon, On Friday Something Funny Happened... and all the wonderful Lucy and Tom series by Shirley Hughes. Those small children might now be thirty, twenty-eight and twenty-six but we still get Lucy and Tom's Christmas out every December, it's part of the tradition ... and another Shirley Hughes favourite of ours Dogger, and then there were the Ahlbergs giving us Each Peach Pear Plum, Peepo and The Jolly Postman. And what about The Tiger Who Came for Tea and The Hungry Caterpillar and Peace at Last, all new then but timeless classics now. The stack of books now suitably dog-eared but precious and much-loved for the memories they hold, even perhaps the sort of thing I would walk past in a charity shop or a jumble sale without a cursory glance, condemning as far too scruffy... I shall think on that next time.

So the e mail came as a lovely reminder that Red House is still there and has gone from strength to strength, now running its own awards for books shortlisted and voted for by children, and the winners will be announced in February. I was very grateful to Red House who then kindly offered to send me any other books from the shortlist. I've started with the Older Children's category, but I've enjoyed this reading so much I think I might make my way through them all...it's all a bit refreshing after the Booker.

The one thing that strikes me is how little the realities of death seemed to crop up in the books I read as a child. Perhaps the 1950s was still too near to the war for comfort and children were being shielded from any more grief after so many years of it... perhaps I just missed the books, and you are probably all going to come up with plenty of titles now. But interesting that the two I have read off the Red House shortlist so far deal with death head on.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd and published by Walker Books, with fabulously atmospheric illustrations by Jim Kay, is another brilliant read so deserving of a place on any shortlist.

Philip Pullman calls it..

'Compelling...powerful and impressive.'

Meg Rossoff thinks it is...

'Exceptional...This is storytelling as it should be - harrowing, lyrical and transcendent.'

I'd add in astonishing, amazing and what a wonderful collaboration Patrick Ness has created with the late Siobhan Dowd; a writer who had left the baton charged with characters, a premise and a beginning for this book before her untimely death from breast cancer in 2007, and which Patrick Ness has picked up and run over the finishing line in superb style... in Patrick's own words 'Go. Run with it. Make trouble.'

Talking of running, congratulations to Patrick Ness who ran the Dublin marathon last week to raise money for Breast Cancer Campaign in memory of Siobhan Dowd, and has way exceeded his fund-raising target.

I have only read one of Siobhan Dowd's books, Bog Child and always meant to read the others, now I certainly will, but I will also seek out Patrick Ness too. By his own admission he had never met Siobhan and nor could he contemplate mimicking her voice, but he did let the idea grow and develop..

'Siobhan's ideas were suggesting new ones to me, and I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.'

That story is the life of thirteen-year old Conor, mostly lived within a nightmare because his mum is dying of cancer. We know that, she knows that, all Conor's friends and teachers know that, and deep down Conor knows that, but it will take some extraordinary encounters with a monster who appears in the shape of a gnarled old yew tree to help Conor come to a trusting acceptance of what is happening and to understand why he has to let his mum go.

The illustrations are monochrome throughout, moody and giving real credence to Conor's inner sense of chaos at being out of control of events and his life, and the significance of the yew won't be lost on those with some knowledge of chemotherapy. Several of the drugs used in the treatment of breast cancer have been developed from yew clippings, but the whole sheebang has put Conor into territory he never asked to be in and, like little Jamie in My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece, he is a complete mess inside. Set apart from his friends and knowing something they may not... that really bad things can happen, Conor has to cope with the cruelty of children too. It's hard to imagine really isn't it... children being bullied when they are in such fraught emotional turmoil, but it is not uncommon, and often a reflection of all children having to learn coping skills in new situations like this. There is no pre-learned behaviour, it all has to be learnt anew and the road is rarely straightforward.

Likewise the all-consuming grief of an adult, in this case Conor's grandmother, which may eclipse that of a child, is incredibly well portrayed.

Conor is at an interesting age too. Whilst Annabel Pitcher's Jamie, at ten, might not quite have known the questions to ask, Conor at thirteen knows exactly what to ask but just can't bring himself to put it into words... how will he manage without his mum... where will he live... how will life carry on....what will happen...

It's at least a ten hankie read and by the final page I had tears in my eyes that just wouldn't stay there, but the most invigorating part of all this is that it is children, not adults, who have chosen this book for the Red House shortlist. A book that is unafraid to embrace, confront and challenge head on the fact that loss happens, and the more any child can learn how to cope with it in childhood... to learn that to love is to grieve when that loss happens, perhaps the better and more useful the coping strategies they take into adult life with them. And you would hope most children learn this through hamster and goldfish funerals rather than as Conor had to, but it would seem 21st century children are unafraid to read books like this, and clearly value them when they have.

The book is slowly gathering in the plaudits it deserves too..

It has been longlisted for the Carnegie and Greenaway medals...

And last week won the Galaxy Awards ~ Children's Book of the Year, which means it is now in with a shot at Galaxy Book of the Year, it's already had my vote even though Claire Tomalin is racing up on the rails. I'd love A Monster Calls to get the recognition it deserves, both for Patrick Ness but also, I feel sure he would agree, for Siobhan Dowd....and more generally for the fantastic quality of children's literature out there.

But I have a feeling that it is the voice of the children that matters here, and the Red House shortlisting that may be the most significant.

 

Two Bridges...

Two Bridges Hotel up on Dartmoor perhaps the perfect setting to meet up with an old acquaintance. Not old as in old...you know what I mean. Someone I had met via an online reading list many years ago, and though we had met in person a few times, it was a part of a larger group and we had never really had the opportunity to sit down and talk together properly, or perhaps cross that bridge from acquaintance to friendship. A shared love of books make that inevitable really don't they.

Anyway, B was down here on holiday from her home in Bronte-land, and I arrived a bit early and nabbed the fireside chair that didn't have the cat in it..

And in fact we were too hot and moved across to the sofas in the bay window, where our cream tea (minus the cream) but with scones the size of cushions was mixed with a couple of hours of wonderful and fairly intensive bookish chat, and we had an audience.

The hotel assured us they weren't being fattened up for the Christmas menu. Chance would be a fine thing, these geese were very assertive. That one at the front tapped on the window when he saw our scones.

And we talked blogs too because B has just started writing about all her travels to literary places, which I am very pleased about because it saves me the trouble of going. I had discovered Milady's Boudoir, who knows how, but knew there were treats in store when I read B's account of a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. My interest was piqued because I have the delightful little Pushkin Press volume of Henry James's letter to Isabella by the bed and often dip into them, but had no idea about the museum. I left a comment and so our acquaintance was re-kindled.

By her own admission B is enjoying keeping a record of her travels and observations for herself and that was the purpose of her blog (Milady's Boudoir now signposted in Visiting, over here>>>>) but I have to say I am enjoying them very much too, and it has created a welcome opportunity for us to get in touch and hopefully keep in touch again.

Thank you to B for a really lovely afternoon. Clever interwebs.

Music while you read...

So do you??

Have music playing while you read..

I  don't own an Orla Kiely radio, just the plain wooden version, though if anyone wants me to test run one I'll try my hardest, but I may often have Radio 3 tinkling along at very low volume until something very modern or experimental comes on, or worse opera (which, with apologies to the buffs does sadly have the power to set my philistine teeth on edge, akin to fingernails down blackboards). But it was the complimentary CD of Janacek's Sinfionetta which came with my copy of 1Q84, the new Haruki Murakami novel, that has really focused my attention on the background trilling again.

Incidentally, if you are swithering over 1Q84 but fancy something so very completely different, swither no more, get it on the Christmas list. I am having a fairly unique reading experience with it, and had to download it onto my Kindle as well just so that I could carry on reading whilst in London recently. I can pick it up and be immersed in an instant and anywhere, so the Book Room Dowagers and I are now nicely into Volume 2 and this is quite unlike anything else I've read in a very long time.

But 1Q84 renders me incapable of picking up any other fiction at the moment, and I foresee this might have to be the case until I have finished it, which doesn't bode well for next week's Endsleigh Salon remit of the 1970s. I'm hoping I can swing this through by just subtracting five years and plugging the 1984 connection.

And thank you to Erika who very kindly posted me an interview by Sam Anderson with Haruki Murakami from The New York Times Magazine.  I hope Haruki knows that I am repaying his statement...

'Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life. If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy...'

with a vast amount of happy concentration of my own. Considering the book 'held Murakami prisoner for three years' it seems the least I can do. According to Sam Anderson who spent several days in Tokyo with him, this is a writer who has produced,

'three decades of addictive weirdness that falls into an oddly fascinating hole between genres and cultures, a hole that no writer has ever explored before, or at least nowhere this deep...he has produced his longest, most serious book yet'

This is Murakami so expect some explicit content, and if that offends you dreadfully then you might be put off, if you can just accept that it's life and for the way it blends in seamlessly with the whole then proceed. It is the intriguing plot of the book that is taking me into this hypnotic and mesmerising world to the extent that I don't really want to go anywhere else 'made-up' until I emerge blinking into the light again. As to what it's about...eek, well parallel worlds, and normal but at the same time unusual happenings, and two lives glancing off each other with clever connections to try and spot, and worlds which I assume are about to collide, though predicting Murakami probably about as reliable as second-guessing what will win the Booker prize.

So I have a pile of non-fiction on the go when I need a rest from 1Q84, as you'll see over here >>>> and an incredible book on my Kindle, my thanks to Kevin for suggesting The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt at about 11pm one evening, and which I had downloaded and was reading within minutes, and all of which is creating a really vibrant and unusual reading balance for me.

Anyway, where were we...yes, music.

So I have been playing the Janacek and loving it but after about a hundred pages of 1Q84 I was almost subliminally note perfect and needed a change, and having worked my way through quite a few failures it is Bach who now wins the day. Most specifically the Cello Suites which I have on a double CD and played by the inestimable Pablo Casals. Despite its complexities for the musician, and I feel sure Pablo was nurgling  his bow to shreds, there is something hauntingly simple and undistracting about the music to my amateur ear, it's like a bass note to my reading and so far I've done two hundred pages-worth and not tired of it. I've dragged a bit more Bach out, usual suspects, Brandenburgs, Goldbergs, a compilation of keyboard favourites and that seems to be the sum total of my Bach collection.

That's a pretty poor show so I'd love some more Bach recommends, and even some more cello recommends beyond Jacqueline Du Pre doing Elgar...oh yes and I've got some YoYo Ma somewhere. But if you listen while you read I'd love to know what you have trilling away in the background... or are you a silence is golden person??

Oh yes, and one more thing, have a safe and happy Guy Fawkes night everyone, the Book Room Dowagers are used to loud bangs, living as we do in the midst of a shooting estate, so I doubt they will be phased, too busy fighting the War of the Vacant Cushion as usual.

 

Magnificent Obsession - Victoria and Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy ~ Helen Rappaport

'The Times was confident: 'we have on the throne a Sovereign whose nerves have been braced rather than paralysed by the chill of adversity'. But the newspapermen did not know the Queen as Lady Lyttelton did. Albert's death was, she had no doubt, a ' heart wound' that had torn her world apart.'

I have been unashamedly looking forward to Magnificent Obsession (published today) having followed Helen Rappaport's Facebook updates as she wrote the book... reading of her disappointments when travelling miles to a dusty archive full of anticipation only to find letters which yielded little.. or the excitement when something unexpected gave up its long-held secrets. The trials and tribulations of a writer's life coupled with the certainty that I always enjoy Helen's writing style, books grounded in meticulously accredited scholarly research but all presented in an accessible and informative way; the same style that instantly drew me into No Place for Ladies, Ekaterinburg and Beautiful For Ever.

So I settled into post-London recovery mode...

The book opens with a scene that may well enter my pantheon of Extracts to Read Every Christmas, as Helen describes Christmas 1860 for Victoria, Albert and their children. It creates a wonderful and cleverly contrasting setting for what it is to follow as the Royal family settle down to their traditional Christmas holiday at Windsor Castle, and the coldest for some fifty years.

The ice on the Serpentine is thirteen inches thick and on December 20th the snow started to fall. Windsor is decorated to the hilt with countless Christmas trees whilst the 360lb baron of beef along with fifty turkeys are being roasted in the kitchens. By now Victoria and Albert have been married over twenty years and have nine children ranging in age from three to twenty and the atmosphere is one of spirited happiness as the corridors of Windsor echo to the noise of playful children interspersed with outings for sledging and skating...

And so the scene is set for the dawn of 1861 and Victoria little knew of the annus horribilis that was to follow as she noted in her diary...

'Dearest Albert and I took leave of the old year and wished each other the joy of the new...'

A great deal of fascinating, and to me unknown, detail is revealed as the burdens upon Albert become more apparent. His responsibilities as Prince Consort have become increasingly onerous as he assumes a greater role in the running of the country, whilst Victoria has spent much of the last twenty years mired in pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood; a role which, by her own admission she enjoyed much less than I had realised. Health issues prevail for Albert and with little sympathy from his wife who dismissed many of his problems as being of the 'man flu' variety...and the really-if-men-had-to-give-birth-where-would-we-be genre. So poor Albert, suffering with increasingly worrying gastro-intestinal problems weakens before our eyes, yet largely unnoticed by his devoted wife and eventually the seriousness hidden from her by her closest family and advisors. Albert is on his death bed before the panic sets in and Victoria, still in denial, is prepared for the worst.

Gathering momentum alongside has been Victoria's own grief reaction at the death of her mother, the first such serious loss she has suffered in her life, and as a portent of things to come a clear indicator that the Queen's emotional coping strategies are limited and there may be trouble ahead. Even the excesses (as we may now view them) of 19th century mourning practices cannot contain Victoria's emotions, whilst the evidence of sanctification of the deceased holds worrying predictors. If Victoria is this distraught over the mother she steadfastly maligned then how on earth will she react to the death of the man she loves with all her heart. It is only a stern rebuke from Albert that pulls the Queen to her senses, but when the Prince Consort's time comes there will be no one to do likewise, and the Queen's grief will know no bounds.

Whilst I was aware of the generalities, I had little idea of the fine detail of Victoria's mourning, and as Helen Rappaport burrowed down into the diaries and letters in order to add substance to it all I slowly developed a fascinating picture of an emotionally labile woman, seemingly selfish and woefully oblivious to the needs and feelings of those around her, as any resilience she may have is severely tested to its limits. Helen Rappaport's account steers a steady course through both the personal and the political as the Queen's increasingly alarming retreat from public life leaves the country wide open to talk of revolution and republicanism. Interestingly it is illness that twice saves the Monarchy, firstly when a seemingly hale and hearty Victoria, whose fragility is constantly given credence and fiercely protected by her personal physician William Jenner, does fall prey to a serious illness. This included the miserable spectre of an excruciatingly painful abscess some six inches in diameter under her arm which Lister is called in to lance and drain ... unimaginable. The wayward and troublesome Prince of Wales's near brush with death during a bout of typhoid is all sufficient to arouse public sympathies further, conveniently bringing the populace neatly back on side.

What emerged for me was the pitiful vision of a very lonely, socially detached, unreachable woman, blind to the state of her nation and its people... present-day theraputic parlance might deem Victoria 'psychologically unavailable'. No one can physically touch Royalty... protocol dictates that you can't go and give them a hug (remember the scandal when the Australian premiere may have 'touched' the Royal back?) Royalty are thus effectively cut off from the emotional support that many of us may rely on in times of grief, sometimes the kindness of strangers, whilst Victoria, remote and bereft of that physical contact with others, and especially with Albert, had only the conversations with her grieving family and her courtiers to sustain her. And despite their best and strenuous efforts for many years, especially those of daughter Vicky in her letters, few seemed to came close to offering the comfort that might penetrate Victoria's wall of sadness and make any difference. Nowadays I'd want to give Victoria the Cruse helpline number for a start ...send her along to Kate Boydell's Merry Widow website... make sure she knew about The Way Foundation, whilst all Victoria can do is retreat alone to her beloved Balmoral wearing her widow's weeds and planning yet another national memorial in her dearest Albert's name.

Further latter-day theories could also usefully be employed, especially that of 'secondary gain' where the perpetuation of symptoms can become, for the sufferer, a conscious or sub-conscious means of avoidance. Victoria seemed bereft of confidence and terrified of public exposure in the absence of Albert which, for all that their love seemed deeply genuine, gave me serious pause for thought about the dependency and control he may have exerted over her during their marriage. His death certainly left her seriously disempowered and it became perhaps easier for Victoria to unwittingly sustain her grief as an excuse rather than have to face up to the rigours of her public duties as a monarch, issues which Helen Rappaport explores to the full ...and of course a stance increasingly difficult for Victoria to sustain credibly when Scottish ghillie John Brown comes into her life, bringing with him his down-to-earth no-nonsense philosophies and not a little joy and mirth at his Balmoral hoe-downs.

Utimately good things, if they can be called that, did emerge as Victoria's sensibilities became so carefully attuned to the impact of loss and bereavement, it became her specialist subject and to the point where, with mounting personal bereavements as the years went by, 'her sacred monopoly on grief transcended all criticism'. The death of daughter Princess Alice on the same day as her father some seventeen years later, sealing the deal. Always the first to sympathise with others in times of loss, and something of an expert on the etiquette of mourning practice, yet from somewhere, through it all Victoria did ultimately find the courage and steely determination to endure.

Helen has added an appendix that really did interest me. As I read the book it was hard not to speculate about the possible differential diagnoses for Albert's final illness. Long thought to be typhoid though with very little investigation and no post-mortem results this was questionable, and Helen has extracted some compelling evidence, along with symptoms of an ongoing and chronic gastro-intestinal condition, that may now suggest a possible diagnosis of Crohn's Disease.

So a remarkable book. A brilliant read, great illustrations including one of Albert on his deathbed, and now I really am looking forward to hearing Helen Rappaport's November 15th talk on Magnificent Obsession at the V&A more than ever.

And you still have time to listen to Helen talking about the book on Monday's edition of Woman's Hour here.

 

 

Team Edward Thomas @Faber

So the day we had all been looking forward to, and Team Edward Thomas meet together in London for the first time and head to Faber for a visit to the Faber archive followed by afternoon tea with Matthew Hollis, author of the book we have been reading and sharing with you Now All Roads lead to France.

Now when I suggested that we all met up at the British Museum courtyard cafe, because whenever I go there it's always deserted, I really should have taken Half Term into account. It was heaving and though four of us miraculously managed to find each other, none of us we then realised had actually laid eyes on Nancy and Bill before. Nancy and Bill had arranged their vacation especially to be in London for this visit so I felt the onus was on me to find them and therefore spent some time circuiting the concourse looking for people who might seem American and look as if they might be called Nancy and Bill, unsurprisingly to no avail.

Nancy and Bill meanwhile astutely spotting the flaws in my plan had had the sense to go direct to Faber HQ and were waiting for us there when we arrived.

With some time to spare beforehand the four of us headed across to Boswell Street off Queen's Square just to see the original location of The Poetry Bookshop. Hopes were high that it might be this building which seemed nicely poetic in appearance...

Though later in the day we were sadly disabused of this fantasy, the building was actually next door, long-demolished and now replaced by a block of flats

After a fascinating visit to the Faber archive, and our thanks to archivist Robert Brown for talking with us (and for future reference L>R Bill, Robert, Carol, Fran, Hilary, Moiself, and Nancy seated...)

We were whisked off to the Covent Garden Hotel where I was momentarily diverted by the curtains because they were real proper tapestry..

... before we settled down to tea and a lovely talk with Matthew Hollis. In fact a celebratory tea because just the night before Matthew had won the First Biography award for 'our' book.

It was good to put our questions to Matthew direct and to share our thoughts about Edward Thomas, the man who had emerged from this book as well as Edward's long-suffering wife Helen, to talk about Edward Thomas's fame achieved in death and what may he have yet achieved in life had the trenches not claimed him and also the legacy of the poetry and which poems felt special for us. And all whilst eating our way through what can only be described as a very divine tea..

Our sincere thanks to Faber, to Gemma and to Matthew for such a wonderful afternoon,and my personal thanks to Team Edward Thomas for their participation and for embracing this reading project with such enthusiasm. Matthew will be back here with some written answers to our questions soon but cited As the Team's Head Brass as one of his favourite poems and I think we would all agreed with him on that...

As the team's head brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed an angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
                 The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away?'
'When the war's over.' So the talk began -
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps?'
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more....Have many gone
From here?' 'Yes.' 'Many lost?' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.