dovegreyreader scribbles

Festival Finale

Tripping over Roy Hattersley and Buster his dog to find my three authors and get to the event I was chairing all got quite fraught last Saturday afternoon, in the end it was like herding kittens as I rounded them up and kept them in one place long enough to get the flow of things sorted before we 'evented'.
Having chaired and kept order over The Women's Guide to Saving the World by Karen Eberhardt Shelton, with Penelope Shuttle and Fiona Walters on the panel too, I realised that chairing is a thoroughly enjoyable pastime. I thought it would be nerve-wracking and actually this event could have been because it's a subject that arouses passionate comment, and though I did need my wits about me as the debate ranged around the room it all felt very enjoyable.
Ensuring the person with their hand up in the back row actually has their say before the blood supply to their hand runs dry, politely but firmly retrieving the floor from the person in the front row who has a lengthy point to make but not actually a qestion, it's all in a day's chairing work.
But Ways With Words Dartington 2008 now over and what a magical experience it has all been.
An interesting nay challenging experience to post immediate thoughts here but an opportunity I've relished. I've heard some inspirational speakers, read some fantastic books and had my thinking well and truly provoked and prodded out of its usual apolitical carpet slipper comfort zone.
I almost feel I'll return to work something of an activist next Monday, that'll shock them.
I mean Martin Bell said it, 'If you want bad things to happen do nothing' but I expect it will all have dissipated by about lunchtime on Tuesday.
Actually make that Monday afternoon.
My colleague is away for the next three weeks, it's just me and 375 under fives. Everyone said it must have been exhausting and very hard work covering a literary festival for ten days...absolutely not, it was pure unadulterated pleasure; 375 under fives on just three days a week is what I call hard work.
I've almost filled a Moleskine notebook with Lamy Safari fountain pen scribbles and become very attached to it. Even more bonded to all my books full of marginalia and notes now they are also signed by the authors, I will treasure those.
My thanks to Ways With Words for the festival pass and comfortable accommodation when I needed it; gratitude to all the lovely people in the office who guarded my laptop, the stewards who kindly reserved me my back row balcony seat for the 'packed to the rafters' events and all those lovely enthusiastic festival goers with whom it is so easy to strike up the most fascinating conversations.
Thanks also to Jennifer, Festival Artist in Residence for the portrait, a lovely memento.
Books really do remove all boundaries and forge friendships.
The jewel in the crown surely Dartington Hall itself, looking spectacular in all its glory, revealing yet more of its secret and hidden places and creating a store of memories that will last through the winter especially as we are still waiting for summer to arrive here.
I sincerely hope you've all enjoyed it too, I think you have because I've had some lovely e mails and thank you for such encouraging words. You've been fine company, it's been a pleasure to take you along every day, fancy being able to cram that many people in a Fiesta?
I also have to agree that the Barn Theatre Cafe was very tempting and we probably didn't need a slice of that luscious lemon cake quite so regularly, but wasn't it  delicious?
Yes indeed, I think a good time was had by all.

Esther Rantzen

It's got to be said, Esther Rantzen looked quite stunning and I think there were audible gasps as she walked on stage, all confirmed by a very complimentary (and clearly smitten) gentlemen who stated in questions afterwards that he wouldn't have recognised her.
Esther beamed.
Poised and graceful, elegantly dressed and the dyed blond hair now eschewed for brunette, Esther settled down to tell it to us like it was.
Having left her hair to revert to its original colour, and now bemoaning the £14,000 and countless hours of her life she calculates to have spent with tin foil wrapped around her head, we all agreed with just about everyone else she knows that it absolutely suits her and she should have done it years ago.
Another public person you feel you know so well, and for those who don't know her Esther Rantzen was the presenter of a hugely successful consumer affairs programme back along as we say in Devon. Esther's huge media presence and undoubted influence with  That's Life and its viewing audience of 21 million, all largely responsible for the fact that plenty of people felt able to go and have a conversaton with her as if talking to an old friend after the event.
That said Esther certainly talked to the audience like an old friend creating a warm and mutually accepting atmosphere, modest and self-effacing as she recounted some fascinating and hilarious episodes in her life.
Esther's latest book If Not Now When recounts her attitude to life which has evolved in recent years and this is all about renegotiating life with yourself as age encroaches.
Thinking back to Jenni Murray, breaking with convention something it would seem the Baby Boomers have been doing all their lives, discarding the stereotypes of the wartime generation that went before. Having transformed their lives by embracing the 1960's they are now heading into their pensionable years looking for microlights to fly and other new challenges to fulfill.
This must all mean me too, Coronation year babies must count.
It was all enough to persuade a member of the audience to encourage Esther to stand for Parliament except by her own admission she hates being told what to do and needs to be a floating cross-party voter depending on manifesto.That said it's clear she still has a voice and can use it to influence from without, though acknowledged that this was also much easier in the days of a TV audience of 21 million.
Esther needs a blog that's what.
All good stirring stuff as I ponder whether at Esther's suggestion my own fifties are fab or fearful. I'd opt for fab right now but might just give the microlight a miss.

Lloyd Jones and Philip Hensher

I know Ways With Words finished on Sunday but thanks to the joys of the blog, we can and will make it last a few days longer.
Fiction events at literary festivals are often quite tricky to pull off but it's a good combination to pair an author whose novel has been read by many with another author whose novel has only recently been published. As a fellow eventer and I agreed, it's a good way to discover a book you may perhaps have passed over.
Lloyd Jones of much-lauded Mister Pip fame matched with Philip Hensher whose recent novel The Northern Clemency has gathered a host of mixed and interesting reviews. Here's my copy of Mister Pip getting a signature and Lloyd Jones asking me if it was the same dovegreyreader quoted in the Guardian, and Philip Hensher about to tell me he has heard of it too.
Amazing.
It's a known fact that I adored Mister Pip from the cover onwards the day I discovered a discarded unread review copy in the Oxfam shop in Marylebone High St. This was before it made the Booker long and shortlist last year and so it was wonderful to hear Lloyd Jones speak in person about the novel's origins.
I guess Lloyd Jones has travelled the world talking about his novel and perhaps he always starts the talk with the audience question

' I doubt anyone's been to Bougainville?'

You'd hardly expect the affirmative in dear old Devon so he coped admirably with the unexpected response from a member of the audience who had lived there for four years.
Lloyd Jones quickly divulged that the first novel that had come to mind to embed within his story of civil war conflict on a Pacific island had been The Lord of the Flies, but that was all too tricky, Great Expectations far more apposite and far more successful and with that we all agreed.
Searching for imaginative risk and underpinning fable with realism seems to be a winning combination because there was much love for the novel expressed around the Great Hall.
One questioner asked whether the violence in the book was based on fact.
Lloyd Jones acknowleged he was a magpie when it came to storing up ideas for fiction and assured us it was, much of it had been heard whilst in the company of the revolutionary leader and on hearing the minutiae Lloyd had been forced to keep dashing out to the toilet.
I assumed this was to throw up copiously on hearing about people being fed to the pigs but in fact it was to discreetly write down all the details.
Philip Hensher then elaborated on his own love for the realist novel and and the illusion that the conversation established by a book can carry on beyond the final page of a novel where you have come to know the characters well. This is not about readers admiring the scaffolding, this is about readers engaging with the narrative and, despite the recent past being the most remote and difficult history to delineate with any accuracy, Philip Hensher has gone for it with his huge doorstop of a novel on life in Sheffield from 1974 to 1994. I love well-written doorstops and it awaits to be seen on July 29th whether The Northern Clemency fulfills Telegraph Literary Editor Sam Leith's prediction that it will make the Booker long list this year.
I'm waiting for the book to arrive but in that case may be reading it sooner than planned, the Bookerthon gets underway on here and hopefully (unless he's chickened out!)  John Self's Asylum very soon...anyone else up for the challenge?
By Philip Hensher's own admission The Northern Clemency is an autobiographical novel, which led me to have instant and very confusing thoughts.
It's no wonder poor readers like me are wading around in Death of the Author arguments and mired in the criticism often levelled at us, which I do find slightly disparaging, that we assume a book is about an author's life when really we shouldn't be so daft because of course it's not. More and more writers seem to be owning up to having overcome the shame and guilt they feel for doing it and then mining their own lives remorselessly for novel material, so perhaps readers are not so daft after all.
In any case frankly who cares as long as it's a great read and a case in point, Remember Me the latest from Melvyn Bragg, so far a brilliant and uncompromising novel, a remarkable book and one I will write about at length eventually.
Lloyd Jones led us into some final thoughts which have lingered long after the event in my mind as issues of the value of literature and the power of the imagination were mentioned. David Grossman said it,Lloyd Jones quoted it, I sort of managed to write it down and it's along the lines of mass media creates masses, literature creates individuals.
I like that.

The Grand Literary Balloon Debate

I fear Diana Birchall will be looking to have my guts for garters because I think I may have inadvertently hastened Jane Austen's demise, indeed ensured that she was the first to be jettisoned over the side of a hot air balloon and now I'm wishing Jane had stuck with her less risky pursuits.
I'd never been to a Grand Literary Balloon Debate before and it seems likely I may now be banned.
For anyone who doesn't know the form, four people, in this case Andrew Davies, Philip Hensher, Carmen Callil and Mary Beard played advocate to four authors under the capable piloting skills of Alexander Waugh. The imaginary hot air balloon is losing height and authors must be off-loaded, so their advocates must advance a strong case for them retaining their place in the basket, capturing the audience's imagination and thereby their vote. A great deal of hot air is required.
I had been to Andrew Davies's event earlier in the day.
As British television's acknowledged master of the literary adaptation and with a keen and undisguised adoration of Jane Austen, I quite thought Jane would be the last remaining occupant, surely this was a foregone conclusion?
Novelist Philip Hensher was flying the flag for P.G.Wodehouse, Virago founding editor Carmen Callil displayed a penchant for Voltaire and Oxford Classicist Mary Beard sang the virtues of Homer.
No contest for our Jane, that basket was hers as of right.
After initial opening statements it was over to audience cross-examination and not a lot of arms were raised, in fact no arms were raised, so I thought I'd help Andrew Davies's cause along a bit.

'If Jane Austen was so brilliant, why have television dramatisations required so much extra detail ?'

It was a high risk strategy but my theory was to stir Andrew into telling us that Jane was a passionate and sensual woman bound by the proprieties of the age, that everything was of necessity encoded within the books and he was merely the channel for Jane's veiled expressions of healthy lusts and appetites. That's what he'd more or less told us in the afternoon as he showed film clips and explained the thinking behind log-splitting scenes and stroking-hawk's-feathers scenes.
This was surely Andrew Davies's moment, Jane belonged firmly in that basket and would remain.
It all went horribly wrong, clearly Andrew and I do not have the gift of psychic connection, sadly he missed my cue and was caught completely off-guard by the googlie I had inadvertently bowled.The audience remained unconvinced by his argument that he'd just written the scenes Jane had forgotten to write and would be a hell of a lot poorer (in more ways than one) without her.
Attempts at a resuscitation of Jane's campaign and a rallying of Andrew Davies to the cause by members of the audience failed miserably.
It was too late, the damage was done.
Put to the first vote, Jane was over and out, that empire line sprigged muslin billowing in the breeze and I shut up.
P.G. Wodehouse soon plummeted into a rapid descent after Jane, unable to survive allegations of Nazi collaboration levelled at him by Voltaire fanatic Carmen Callil, and the reluctant admission from Philip Hensher, extracted under fierce cross-examination from Carmen (surely terrifying?), that though Plum wrote laughter he was a bit of a dull chap in company.
Sophisticated and witty he might be but Homer's days were numbered once news of an Odyssey of war crimes emerged.It must be acknowledged that Mary Beard put up a spirited defence on behalf of homecomers everywhere and even tried to tempt us with last-resort suggestions that Homer may have been a woman. Alexander Waugh urged us to consider carefully before casting our vote and being complicit in any literary deception and that was Homer hurled out into oblivion.
The utterly exceptional Voltaire that genius of joy and freedom was victorious and Carmen Callil was jubilant. Personally I would have welcomed assurance that Voltaire would have read Virago Modern Classics and embraced the ethos as well as having a shelf full of them in his study, but having scuppered Jane I decided it best to keep quiet...most unlike me but then this is Carmen Callil we are talking about here, let Philip Hensher take the flak.

Elsie's take on Roy Hattersley

Sadly I missed Roy Hattersley my absolute festival favourite as I had to chair another event, but as luck would have it Elsie didn't.
Elsie is the shy and retiring bursary student from Friday's comments who did eventually stop me to say hello rather than have me shout out 'Is Elsie here?' to a packed Great Hall.
We had a fine old natter about all the events we'd enjoyed and Elsie, who lives in Devon and is studying English at the University of East Anglia, very kindly agreed to 'cover' the Roy event for me. I thought it would be good to hear a young person's view on one of our Elder Statesman because I'm developing a hopeless and possibly age-related bias, they are all impressing me immensely.
So a very warm dovegreyreader scribbles welcome to Elsie who I think you'll agree has done us proud, and my thanks to her for filing her insights so quickly and capably.

It was with an open mind and a sense of curiosity that I entered the Great Hall to take my place for Roy Hattersley’s scheduled talk, Borrowed Time. He’s a bit before my time, politics wise, but having recently finished Andrew Marr’s excellent A History of Modern Britain in which he is mentioned, I had felt a flicker of interest when I saw Roy Hattersley’s name down in the Way With Words program and so decided to go and see the man for myself. When my father dropped me off outside the Great Hall, I asked him whether or not he had any ideas about what questions I could possibly ask during the talk. He pondered for a moment and then said,
“Perhaps you could ask him what it was like to be represented by a tub of lard on Have I Got News For You?”
An incisive and probing question, I’m sure you’ll agree, but I felt perhaps it wasn’t quite in keeping with the tone of the event. However, I would rather like to know…
There was a brief flutter of tension as it was revealed that Mr Hattersley had not actually arrived by the time the talk was due to begin but happily he did turn up and was only a trifling ten minutes late, looking supremely unruffled (which, after he explained that he had just endured a lengthy six hour drive to be at the event, was impressive). He was given a speedily flattering introduction by Paul Brassley, who informed us that Roy Hattersley had once been described by Gore Vidal as a “journalist’s politican”, whether or not those two professions can ever be truly reconciled is another matter, but he is evidently well-regarded.
He began by outlining what he would be speaking to us about, namely the uneasy period between the first and second world wars, listing such crises as the armed rebellion in Ireland, the King’s abdication, general strikes and the mounting economic crisis. He was quick to stress, however, that it definitely wasn’t all doom and gloom.
There was also the entrance of the movies into England’s collective consciousness, the creation of the BBC and an increased popularity of Shakespeare, all of which sounds pretty darn wonderful. I suppose this country’s current economic climate (opening the papers, all you get is hysterical headlines screaming about we’re all going to go into meltdown or something, the end is nigh, etc etc) means that we may be all focusing on the ‘doom and gloom’ and it made me feel hopeful that we too might look back upon this period and try to remember the exciting things as well as the bad, such as winning the Olympic bid, more people going to the theatre than ever before, the huge literary output, the emergence of blogging…!
Anyway. Back to Roy Hattersley.
He was the youngest member of the Cabinet during the period of the abdication (this raised a comment whereby he suggested that the fact that Wallis Simpson was twice divorced was not an issue to the monarchy and government, rather it was because she was American that they objected, cue much laughter in the Hall), and was very much involved in the process of trying to reason with the future King. The then Prince of Wales tried to wangle it so that he could marry Ms Simpson with the provision that she would not become queen, but it was to no avail. As Roy Hattersley put it, it was perceived to be in danger of creating a constitutional crisis that the monarchy (and perhaps even the government to some extent) would not survive.
It was all very fascinating stuff. Roy Hattersley is an extremely competent and engaging speaker, proceeding to deliver his entire talk on his feet, in the middle of the stage, without any notes and without, it seemed, pause for breath. It’s exactly what you want from a speaker, someone who gives you the chance to absorb what he’s just said but then smoothly moving onto the next point. I kept repeatedly jumping at the realisation that I hadn’t been taking notes as I was so absorbed, which probably gave the people sat behind me the impression that I was falling asleep or very twitchy. I would like to reassure everyone that I was definitely neither.
The inevitable political question-what would his advice be to the current government?
He revealed that he has admiration for Gordon Brown, citing his dependable, honest and straightforward qualities as reasons. Roy Hattersley spoke of how he believes that Gordon Brown should aim to make these personality traits more obvious in his politics, and therefore win back more support. He explained what he personally thought the government should have done upon Tony Blair’s departure. No further extension of the 28 day detention period for terror suspects, slow withdrawal from Iraq, and the gradual reversal of privatisation.
Tricky aims, but I got the impression that Roy Hattersley has not yet given up hope in his party’s resurgence and ability to bounce back, which is heartening.
We were even treated to a little bit of spontaneous singing, which is always a bonus in my opinion. He has a great love for the music and musicals of the 1930’s and gave a rather dismissive view on modern pop music, which I think should be rectified.
Get in touch, Roy Hattersley, and I’ll try to change your mind!
Although it has to be said, he certainly knows his own.

Tony Benn

Tony Benn might not know this but he's been in my car and out and about on a Health Visitor's day. I listened to his diaries on audio last year as I drove around and he made a fine companion.It had been Bob Dylan the week before and I needed something uniquely British to balance.
Tony Benn, 83 years old, one of those people who needs little introduction because actually you feel like you know him well, another of our elder statesman we must cherish and heed. Except Tony was having no truck with the suggestion that age imparts wisdom...he knows some very silly old men and some very wise young ones.
James Long introduced the event with a quote of Tony's,
'If we can find the money to kill people we can find the money to help people'
and the applause was warm and immediate and somehow the atmosphere for an intimate session was established. Not easy to achieve in a Great Hall packed to the rafters yet again and actually, here are the rafters just so that you know what rests above our heads.It is a grand and magnificent building which oozes history every way you look.
Contemplating writing a book Letters to My Grandchildren (yes Tony, yes) of which he has ten, it was a sobering thought that we now have the first generation who have the wherewithal to destroy the human race but also the capacity to save it and much ot Tony's talk highlighted the unchanging moral decisions that must prevail even given the breakneck speed of change and progress.
Imparting a great deal of wisdom and humility as he spoke, even more than I had picked up from listening to the diaries, Tony Benn emphasised countless times his belief in respect and doing unto others only that we would wish done to ourselves.
In many hands that might sound cliched but in Tony Benn's fervent yet gentle and compassionate world view it all radiated utter sincerity.
Tony Benn is not in favour of war, privatisation, means-tested pensions or student loans and hoped that might be plenty to get us started as he left 45 minutes for questions.He wanted to debate with the audience not preach at us, hands shot up all over the Great Hall and there followed nigh on twenty thought-provoking questions to which Tony Benn offered considered, well-thought out responses.
Topics ranged from the US election, through education, truth in politicians, religious difference, the Iraq war, interventionism, democracy, public service tradition and so much more.
The whole event all surprisingly engaging for a non-political animal such as I and with it an awareness that I was watching a man who would be incapable of succumbing to David Owen's newly identified Hubris Syndrome.
Was that really a week ago?
Tony Benn has so many personal checks and balances in place it would be absolutely impossible, his self-effacing humour alone makes him immune. Cue more rapturous applause and what would have been a standing ovation had we not been packed in like sardines and incapable of moving.
I listened in on the book signing afterwards as he asked everyone their name and what they did and thought yes, Tony Benn is indeed a National Treasure a kind, good and honourable man.

The Art of the Complaint

I've been to plenty of events that remain in note form and will get to them eventually but one that deserves a mention is Julian Baggini's talk on Complaining and meanwhile to keep us all nice and calm here's a soothing picture of the Meditation Garden at Dartington.
I think plenty of people were hoping we'd pick up tips on how to turn a Victor Meldrew moment into a Victor Ludorum moment and reap ourselves loads of cash for tripping over a paving stone but it quickly became apparent that we we were to be bathed in philosophical argument and this at 3.30pm in the afternoon.
Hell's teeth this is not my best hour of the day to be waxing philosophical, in fact it's my hour of the day for winding up my visits and heading back to the surgery; first one back filches milk from the doctor's common room and gets the kettle on as we prepare to swap notes on the traumas and those amusing little anecdotes of the day. The pit bull terrier that has perched on the lap throughout the visit because you have inadvertently sat on its squeaky toy, the house with the tank full of tarantulas, little things like that and then you write up all the clinical records in case anyone, well...complains I suppose.
Then we check all the phone messages in case, well in case anyone's complained by phone.
That said I think I coped admirably with all Julian Baggini's arguments, please just don't ask me to repeat them all because there are complaints and then there are other complaints and then there are degrees of complaints. There was mention of the grievance culture we now live in and the need to hold someone accountable and apportion blame, but still no news on the productive paving stone dosh complaint.
Using the ability of complaint correctly would seem to be an art form I don't possess.
I tend to send Bookhound in on my behalf these days because he's exceptionally good at it. I always seem to start any complaint with an apology about being a nuisance and it all races downhill towards a complimentary voucher for something I don't want, whereas he gets full refunds and compensation.
My best complaining moment ever in the world was however born of the despair of the young mother which, once upon a time, I was.
There's nothing like despair to spur you on to dizzying heights of complaining achievement and as Julian said, the point of a complaint is to change things.
The revolutionary new washing machine with 1300rpm spin that mostly failed to spin at all and trapped the half-washed wet nappies fourteen times in four months. We became sort-of good friends with the repair man who always took about three days to arrive even though we were on a 24 hour repair contract, by which time the nappies were ripening and clearing the immediate vicinity of all human life. Phone calls to manufacturers achieved precisely nothing and eventually in a fit of complete despair I wrote a Private & Confidential letter to the Managing Director of Hoover the washing machine company and said my goods were clearly not of merchantable quality and unless they bought this dire piece of rubbish back within a week it would be placed in our showroom window (the days when Bookhound had an interior design showroom in town) and I would paste all the repair dockets around it.
Cheque arrived in the next post.
I'm not sure whether this was a complaint of the luddite, self-serving, self-defeating, conformist or empty genre but sometimes I think we get beyond the point of caring and just have to give it hell.
So please, if you are of a philosophical nature, don't complain that I haven't done the book justice, I really am very very sorry about that, and besides you can change things, your dilemma is easily resolved, off you go and seek out the book Complaints, From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by the very entertaining and doubtless expert complainer, Julian Baggini.

Virago is 30...again.

I'm not sure why I think a picture of the medieval jousting yard should be appropriate but if it's Friday it's Virago at Ways With Words.
This is the second Virago 30th anniversary event for me this year, same chair, current commisioning editor Donna Coonan, different guests, this time founding editor Carmen Callil and author Michele Roberts.
Good crowd in the Great Hall and Carmen Callil apologised for having 'bored for England' on the subject of the Virago anniversary already this year but we were very happy for her to carry on and 'bore' us some more.
The first Virago writers, Antonia White, Rosamund Lehman,Margaret Atwood, Stevie Smith, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead and many more were the subject of discussion between the members of the panel as we learnt about the early days of Virago and the delight all round at bringing these books back into print. This was an era fed by feminism but as Carmen elaborated, also driven mad by it and Michelle gave a good account of the provocative time that was the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was about not about nostalgia it was about changing the face of literary history.
Talk turned to favourite Virago books and authors so imagine my delight when Carmen Callil then lauded Enid Bagnold's The Squire as one of the best books written on the early days of motherhood.
Michelle Roberts cited her love of the good convent read, and went on to mention the wonderful Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them, and The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien as perfect books for accessing her 'inner nun'.
Virago author Elizabeth Taylor gained magnificent plaudits from all three panellists described by Michelle Roberts as the spy in the home where the most dangerous things happen.'The thinking woman's dangerous housewife' in the words of Valerie Martin apparently and I was sitting pondering those chintz-bedecked battlefields so perfectly defined by Paul Bailey in his introductions to some of Elizabeth Taylor's novels.
Yes indeed you could feel the lurve for Elizabeth.
There were good questions, one about chicklit, and Michelle Roberts gave an excellent defence of a genre that enables young women to ask and answer the questions about life and love, the answers are there beneath the froth and then suggested we look at the difference between chicklit and Jane Austen, in fact ask was there a difference?
Why not share your apoplexy or agreement in comments where smelling salts and lavender compresses await those overcome and feeling discomposed with a fit of the vapours, but I'm of the mind that there's a good debate to be had there.
The Orange Prize came up in discussion and Carmen Callil reiterated her refusal to attend the ceremony because of the Taittinger champagne connection and you'll have to read her book Bad Faith to discover exactly why. Michelle Roberts now wants to see men and women competing on the same level literary playing field whilst Carmen would like to see a return of the French Revolutionary spirit, she'd liked writers to object far more, to tackle injustices near to home.
It was all good stirring Virago stuff, vive la Virago.

Roll Up - Ekaterinburg Prize Draw

Almost forgot to announce, I have a very special copy of Ekaterinburg, The Last Days of the Romanovs for you, special because it's been all the way to Dartington where Helen very kindly signed it for me today.
Yes, it's dovegreyreader prize draw time again. 
For those unfamiliar with the process, it's bizarre but for two years a very large and ageing cat assuming an appropriate alias has done the prize draws around here. I'll sort out whether Rocky fancies being Russian as the moment approaches at the end of next week, but just look at those Faberge eyes.
He's a natural.
Meanwhile names in comments and whether new visitor or part of the furniture, living in Devon or Dallas don't be shy, we will post worldwide so the book could be yours.

PS Prize draw update, I had another copy which Helen has kindly signed and she is offering another one for the draw so there will be not one but THREE lucky winners.

Helen Rappaport

Nothing was going to prepare us for the Romanovs and Helen Rappaport, not even reading the book, because when an actress who is also a writer, academic and Russianist takes the stage to talk about her favourite subject there are treats in store.
The Barn Theatre was packed and Helen delivered a wonderful account of the origins of her love for all things Russian and the evolution of her latest book Ekaterinburg. The Romanov sources were there, diaries, letters, testimonies and witnesses and once Helen had identified her route into this much-written about subject it became clear that she was onto a new and exciting approach, one she described as ever-increasing circles. Beginning with the last fourteen days in the life of the family and allowing the circles to spread from the Ipatiev House onwards and outwards to Russia on the brink of a catastrophic civil war.Silent black and white film footage of the house itself gave us a valuable and memorable visual reference.
Discovering the background to a book like this had the audience entranced as Helen elaborated on her search for the essence of the Romanovs as she travelled to Ekaterinburg to do her research. Walking the town, visiting the site and finally the scent of the lilies on the eve of the anniversary of the massacre, followed by the all-night vigil and the Orthodox litany at the Church on the Blood, built on the site of the now demolished Ipatiev House.
The applause at the end was lengthy and utterly deserved. It was all very moving and the Bookgroup Babes and I were enjoying ourselves immensely.We'd held up well considering we all found the book so emotional, then alas we were undone as Helen ended with this 90th anniversary tribute made by a Romanov research student and, as of one, we all emerged sniffling and sobbing. After her signing the introductions were made and I've sent Helen off in the capable hands of the Babes and by now they will all be tucked up in sun-dappled corner discussing Russia to their heart's content.
It's been a two hankie day so far, will Julia Blackburn make it three?

Jenni Murray

Another early start with Jenni Murray at 9.30am, as the chair remarked, even earlier than Woman's Hour.
It was a good morning for a stroll because I haven't had much time to do that this year and it's a very important part of the experience. Dartington is in my diary annually as a 'retreat and reflection' oasis of calm often recalled to mind during those long, dark, murky winter days driving out on Dartmoor, so it's crucial to recharge my own batteries too.There are always hidden corners to discover and I doubt I will ever find them all but the walled garden is looking stunning this year.
I had an interesting chat with Nicola Tyrer about her excellent book Sisters in Arms mentioned on here recently and then had to make the terrible choice as Nicola was speaking at the same time as Jenni Murray; feeling I knew Nicola's book well I opted for Jenni whose book I didn't know at all. Climbed up into my seat in the gods wondering whether I'd made the right choice, Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter, was this going to be misery?
Jenni appeared on crutches as she awaits hip-resurfacing, a treatment for those too young for hip replacement, all very flattering really, and was introduced by Lorna Duffin. Lorna is one of Ways With Words most accomplished chairs, I've listened to her thoughtful introductions and questions with writers here for years and she always does it all with consummate elegance and skill.
Jenni proceeded to read two brief extracts from her book. One about the death of her mother on the day that Jenni herself was diagnosed with breast cancer, and one about the death six months later of her father. As an only child the burden and significance of such loss was profound and Jenni's grief palpable.Life had not always been perfect and there was much that needed to be reconciled.
Many writers and speakers at Ways With Words must hope that somehow they can flick on the switch and create that emotionally electrically charged atmosphere. It's rare but when it happens the audience senses it, buys into it and submits willingly and as I looked down from my heavenly seat the Great Hall was motionless, frozen in that deep concentration. Me, I was fighting back the tears, so was Jenni, and as she said ' Goodbye Dad, I love you' I'd given up trying to stop the tear rolling down my cheek.
I suspect just about everyone else listening was fighting the same battle.
Jenni had captured us as her own and kept us there for the next hour.
The book is an account of her upbringing in the 1950's and 60's and the conflicts that ensued as one generation brought up the next into a world they had not anticipated, let alone knew how to cope with. Jenni's mother must have known trouble was brewing when Jenni rejected the offer of the Playtex girdle and the alice band.
The book Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter has only been published this week so I hadn't been able to get my hands on a copy before the festival and I actually wasn't sure it was a book I would read. Naturally an hour of listening convinced me that this was essential reading, so essential in fact and from an event so memorable that I'd best buy one and get it signed as a fine memory of the day.
I'll be giving it the dovegreyreader treatment over the next few weeks and will report back on my findings, I suspect there will be much in there to reflect on and share.
Now time to prepare for Helen Rappaport and the Romanov 90th anniversary experience.

Jay Rayner

The West End Whingers said I had to be sure to call Jay Rayner middle-aged after he'd called them likewise in that article, as if I would, honestly.
Yes Son of Agony won over Agony but I did have an ulterior motive.
One of the lovely little thoughtful aspects of Ways With Words is a Festival Artist, this year Jennifer Johnson who sits in on events and dibbles and dabbles with her watercolours and does paintings of the audience and speakers. Jennifer had said that if I would only come down from my seat in the gods she would do a painting of me.
What a nice gift for Bookhound.
So I thought I'd brave it for Jay Rayner's event which would also mean I could see Jay close-up and decide if the Whingers were right.
Described by Gordon Ramsay as ' a fat bloke what types' Jay Rayner is the now the considerably slimmer restaurant critic for The Observer and occasional interviewer of bloggers when he's not eating. Apparently he's been working out and divesting himself of the inevitable adipose that must go with the job.
It takes some guts...no I can't say that...yes I can, it does...it takes some guts to eat your way around the world and of course I stopped myself asking all those medical questions but sometimes nurses need to know these things.
I mean seriously, it must all have had repercussions? There were no details but did he get sponsorship from Gaviscon ? It would seem like a sensible idea.
The nearest we got was someone asking about food poisoning and Jay did own up to an episode of alimentary canal urgency in Tokyo, but that might all be too much information if you're having dinner, sorry.
Anyway he managed it, Tokyo won Jay's finest food experience and also his worst, possibly linked to the alimentary canal episode? Salt fermented sea cucumber which in Jay's words resembled 'fish snot' can't have been too gut-friendly. Sorry again.
It was all very entertaining, the book is a good read though I've yet to digest Paris. A Michelin star meal per day? That all needs careful pre-reading preparation but Jay is a very lively and witty speaker and as for middle-aged I couldn't possibly comment.
Meanwhile sadly there is no portrait of Jay speaking because this time Jennifer concentrated on painting the audience, but here's his book just to make up for it.

Busy day tomorrow, Jenni Murray kicks the day off at 9.30am followed by John Sargeant, Edward Docx and Helen Rappaport.
Remember the Bookgroup Babes? The reading group who invited me along to their evening and I left them all with a copy of Ekaterinburg? Tomorrow the 90th anniversary of the Romanov massacre at the Ipatiev House. Helen has kindly agreed to meet with the bookgroup after her event and they are very well prepared.
What better among the various delights of a blog than linking authors with their readers in this way, it promises to be a very memorable day.

Ways With Words Wednesday

Ways With Words weather has prevailed and we have warm sunshine conducive to a laze in a deckchair, though I haven't done a great deal of that this year. Besides deckchairs make me nervous, you can't predict the collapse until the thing's taken the majority of your weight, and then you've gone beyond the point of no return and all pride is lost.
The queue is gathering already for Sandi Toksvig who isn't on for another 45 minutes and suddenly I've wilted and decided that I'll give the comedy a miss this evening and bring news of today's events.
I was chairing at 10am, so up early and off sorting out the techy input to Christina Hardyment's talk. Remembering how it was drummed into us in the olden days when we used to do Health Promotion events, make sure your reel-to-reel projector works before the event, don't test it out during the event?
There used to be nothing worse than that film of To Janet a Son flying off the reel just as Janet, fresh as a daisy and on hearing the twinkly music sound, prepared to breath gently and quietly through another welcoming contraction after thirty hours in labour. I clearly needed to be diligent on behalf of my speaker and fortunately Christina knew what she was up to, though we hadn't meant the laptop to revert to the screen saver of her holiday snaps, but do hope the audience enjoyed them as they waited for us to make our entrance.
I decided to begin with the mobile phone thing. In the words of another chair, it is an impertinence for mobile phones to ring at Ways With Words, so we did an audience bag-rummage and double-check before we got started which saved me having to send anyone to the naughty stair.
Could the power be going to my head?
Dream Babies is a marvellous book and Christina took us through childcare through the ages with some very entertaining pictures. After the event I was delighted to meet a retired Great Ormond Street paediatrician who had been at the old Alma Mater at the same time as me though possibly moving in different circles. We swapped memories of wards and night sister harridans. It wasn't just me, he knew of them too, sufficiently all-powerful that even consultants were terrified.
I then decided it was governesses for me and Ruth Brandon talking on her latest book Other People's Daughters, The Life and Times of the Governess. It was a remote, strange and lonely world, a dreadful life, one full of despair and complete lack of hope and expectation and this all became startlingly clear as Ruth outlined the life of Nellie Wheaton born in Wigan in 1782 and researched from her diaries. These incidentally discovered in a junk shop in the 1920's and something that had never really occurred to me before; governesses were poor and the papers of poor people rarely survive. Chairing this talk Clive Fairweather and Clive offered a reading suggestion for the most dreadful fictional governess of them all, we must all read Uncle Silas by Sheridan Lefanu.
Then it was time for Katharine Whitehorn and Selective Memory. Some speakers really do pack an event out and Katharine was another one, here are the rafters I was talking about and the view from my favourite blogging seat up in the gods. As ascerbic, witty and subversive as ever Katharine was hugely entertaining as she took us back through her retrospective look on life.
But enough of all this, it was time to make a choice about the 5pm events.
Should I go to Agony or should I go to Son of Agony?
Virginia Ironside or Jay Rayner?
Growing old disgracefully, about which I would welcome confirmation that I'm doing it properly, or a man eating his way around the world? Food and restaurants about which I know nothing, but Jay is mine and the Whingers new best friend after all.

Looking for Daphne

My second foray into a Green Room. The hallowed inner sanctum for "Writers", I felt a bit of fraud but stuck with Justine and braved it.
So I'm drinking in the atmosphere and not feeling in the least bit nervous which can't be right and what happens?
The fire alarm goes off that's what, and we have to leave the Green Room, it's the St Paul's £10 thing bouncing back to remind me again.
I'd re-read Daphne in the run-up to the event and so was completely zoned-in and with new and exciting insights. Second time around there's even more to find but if there was any doubt about getting into the zone, ten minutes talking Daphne with Justine and you're at Menabilly and hearing the voice of Rebecca before you know it.
Obviously I couldn't take notes so I haven't a clue what I said but Rachel had really done her homework on dovegreyreader and I'm very grateful for her very thoughtful introduction. Rachel may be better known to some as Rachel Trethewey author of Mistress of the Arts, the book which recounts the history of Georgiana Duchess of Bedford and the building of Endsleigh and we had a great chat about history and houses and atmosphere.
It's quite odd to be sitting in front of the audience instead of onlooking and when the sound chap said he'd flash a light if I wasn't projecting my voice into the microphone I made a mental note to watch out for that, but was having such a good time I completely forgot. Also there was a money spider crawling across the fresh air in front of me, I'd normally assist it to another bit of air but didn't feel I could under the circumstances.
Fortunately Rachel keep things moving, Justine held the fort and I chipped in with a reader's point of view as appropriate (hopefully) and the time just flew. I don't know what an audience think but I think a reader's point of view (not necessarily mine) definitely adds something.There was a question about the significance of the pink cover on the book, we tactfully steered everyone round to understanding we thought it was red, and pink would have to send us all back to the drawing board.
Offspringette flew into town unexpectedly which was a lovely surprise and handed me a bag full of Canadian goodies which was another lovely surprise and then smiled supportively from the back row. I was reminded of all those hours spent watching school plays and gymnastic displays and smiling supportively from the back row too. It's always a good idea to send your camera off with someone with an eye, so thanks to her for the photos too because I would have forgotten.Lots of other friends came along to support which was very kind, I'm very grateful and a big thank you to all of them.I could feel the good vibes.
Justine signed books and chatted for ages, and I'll send those pictures to her to post over on her own blog. I didn't sign anything but just chatted, and all in all I think we all felt we'd been part of a lovely, warm, relaxed and uber-friendly Dartington event.
Busy few days coming up, lots of events, just look at all the books I've brought with me!

John Julius Norwich

I'm now into the residential phase of my Ways With Words experience, a couple of days where I finish late and have an early start. Tomorrow I'll be chairing Christina Hardyment's talk on her book Dream Babies at 10am. Working it out wasn't difficult, need to arrive 9am, therefore need to leave home at 7.30am just to be sure. In that case better set alarm for 6am to be on the safe side.
Book a room and save the hassle and here's the view.
I'm tucked up in the eaves, overlooking the main courtyard, I have tea-making facilities, thoughtfully brought a packet of biscuits and the Earl Grey, so that's me sorted.
I arrived in the nick of time to hear John Julius Norwich speaking on his memoir Trying to Please published by Dovecote Press, this sounds like just the publisher for me to know and they kindly sent the book. I see they also publish Jack Hargreaves, remember Out of Town, I'm humming that theme tune already, wasn't it Max Bygraves?
I'd read a fair chunk of Trying to Please before the event but nothing can prepare you.
Only child of Diana and Duff Cooper, his mother a society beauty, (this was confirmed by a member of the audience who had met Diana, 'she was all woman and I see where you get your panache from' ) his father a cabinet minister and political ally of Winston Churchill, John Julius the baby whose nurse remarked as he screamed in his cot, 'poor old baby, he's only trying to please.'
I'm realising how lucky we are to have these people with the gift of raconteuration, possibly a non-existent word but one which fits the moment.This was all hilariously, uproariously funny and highly entertaining and we could all have listened for hours and hours, all day, far into the night and on into the weekend given the chance.Wonderfully chaired by Rachel Kiddy and as well as taking 'How To' notes before my event tomorrow I also remembered that Rachel would be chairing the Daphne event later, good, very good.
By his own admission John Julius has had a charmed and lucky life for which he is very grateful and I'm equally grateful that he's remembered so much of it. Things got off to a flying start with the news that his grandfather was a doctor and Court Physician specialising in venereal disease and piles, his grandmother was a nurse and between them they knew more about the private parts of the British aristocracy than anyone else in the country.
Could it get any funnier?
Well yes, much, and it did as John Julius guided us through his life and people he'd met with a wit that had us rolling in the aisles. He does a wickedly spot-on impression of Winston Churchill, probably perfected through many childhood meetings and along the way he told of encounters with Maurice Chevalier, Prince Yusopov (Rasputin's murderer) and the assertion that as a nation we owe Wallis Simpson a huge debt of gratitude.By whisking Edward VIII away from the throne in what was known euphemistically as The Crisis, Wallis really deserves a statue and why mess about? Give her that empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. John Julius was in no doubt that had Germany invaded Britain, as friends of Hitler, Edward (and doubtless Queen Wallis the First ) would have been back on the throne as Hitler's puppet.
As a teenager John Julius sat in on the Nuremberg trials, played the piano for Ernest Bevin, knew a great story about Winston Churchill playing football in the bath with a sponge and so much more that I was laughing too much to write down.
He left us with these wise words.
Always push the boat out.
When in doubt say yes.
You can have your cake and eat it.
and I for one am delighted to have seen the man behind the radio voice I know so well and will enjoy reading the rest of this memoir which I can only imagine is just as funny.
But now I must focus the mind, the Daphne event beckons and I must go and find Justine.

Simon Montefiore

Quality not quantity that's what this must all reflect and so I mustn't be tempted to dash around to events just to serve up loads of blog posts at the Festival Feast that we are enjoying. Besides, talking of feasts, I'd sat down to Stalin's Hidden Legacy nursing a bout of indigestion after bolting that lunch and if there was a single mention of people under siege living off boiled shoes I wasn't in the mood to cope. Gaviscon that's what I needed.
But who says you can't have quality and quantity?
Certainly no one's told Simon Montefiore because he delivered in an hour a talk that would have taken the average English-speaker at least two hours. He speaks at 78rpm, breath-takingly fast, no notes and it is all so compelling you have no choice but to keep up, there was smoke coming from my Lamy Safari and I can only apologise if that distracted anyone.
The man is indeed a human dynamo and he said it not me, a civil war seems to break out in just about every country Simon visits just as he arrives.
Sashenka was the subject but Simon took us on a guided tour of his life as both a historian and a writer with some high octane adventures on the way. I'd be surprised if his mother isn't grey with worry bearing in mind that he rang her from the President's personal satellite phone just as civil war was pending in Georgia.
By his own admission much of it was terrifyingly foolhardy and settling down to a life as a writer sounded like the grown-up solution to ending Simon's Boy's Own adventures, except it all involved frequent return visits to do battle with the impenetrable Russian archives. Having written a book on Catherine the Great which had been well-received in the Kremlin, Simon Montefiore bathed in the warm light of approval and with it an open door for his research.
The result was Young Stalin but also enough material gathered to write Sashenka, a novel which focuses on the lives and struggles of the women. It was a photo in the archive of a woman who had been arrested and executed some days later which was the starting point, her face telling so much. You could be arrested for a million unknown reasons, when you fell everyone you knew fell with you, etched on her features the pain of that moment, of losing everything. The joy of writing a novel evident as Simon recounted the pleasure of getting to know his characters and what they might or might not do.
This was quite my most exhilarating event so far, no fear of falling asleep and I hope I've given you the essence. Simon Montefiore is a marvellous raconteur, brilliantly entertaining, another one not to miss if he's down your way. I think speakers like this are few and far between these days or perhaps I don't get out enough. A true storyteller and one by all accounts striving and succeeding in writing readable accessible history for people like me who never really paid enough attention to it at school and have regretted it ever since.
So yes, I have definitely come away enthused enough to read Young Stalin and anything else Simon has written.
If he's done an audio version expect it only to take up half of one CD and therefore no good for a long train journey.

James Long

Right, it's obviously a day for the planets to align in my favour and I have been forgiven for not paying that £10 to get into St Paul's.
Parking here at Dartington can be fraught and involve a wet field and a long walk. Today the second space along in the nearest car park was free, it was going to be a good day.Things got even better about ten minutes ago when I found a wireless signal radiating from this remakable comfortable chair in a quietly relaxed sitting room off the Courtyard.
11.30am and I was perched up in the window seat, ready and waiting in plenty of time for James Long to speak on The Rebirth of Ferney and in conversation about it all with his son Ben. Sons clearly know their fathers well and can ask questions and probe in a way that the rest of us cannot so it was an hour of good interviewing and Family Long done good.
For a book about reincarnation to find itself coming back from the dead seems entirely appropriate and it was good to hear thoughts and ideas about the book being expressed by the author himself. So often I go to events like this having not read the book, this advance reading is making some events doubly enjoyable.
An interesting observation that this could not be a book of the city, too much clamour, Ferney requires the vision and the landscape of the countryside and I am now wondering how this soul match of Ferney and Gally will play out next.
I'm now in a state of highly suspended animation about the sequel because as James Long admitted he'd left himself a very big hole to dig his way out of if he was to successfully carry on from the final moments of Ferney. It's been difficult but he's done it and it will be shocking and that's as much as we know.
The next big decision is the title, all suggestions welcome.
Now must dash back to the hamper and then onto Simon Montefiore on Stalin's Hidden Legacy. I'm halfway through his latest novel Sashenka and really enjoying it, I might, just might, tackle his Young Stalin if he's really good this afternoon.

Too much excitement for one day.

Far too much excitement for a woman of certain age in one day, I've had to come home and have a lie down, calm myself with a few more of Penelope Fitzgerald's letters. My she was a such a wonderful correspondent, the book just oozes humanity and compassion with a beautifully unrehearsed and naturally self-effacing humour, I'm going to be raving about it for the rest of the year and probably some of next.
Now then, The Observer.
Well, so far we've bought ...er...six copies several and yes the Whingers and I are fighting over Jay Rayner as our new best friend. They took him to the theatre, I get to meet Jay at Dartington on Wednesday, hear him speak about his book and then it's my turn to do the writing.
Ho Ho.
Actually he got it all down much as I said it and I thought the whole piece was nicely balanced. No Whingers mask for me so the picture does accurately reflect my early morning start, five hours travelling and a last minute dash by foot across London because the tube network had shutdown, plus I had to prop up that nice comedy chap next to me but that's life in the fast lane I suppose.
Now back to the slow lane and the dovegreyreader event at Dartington, a select little event as Diane Athill pulled in the crowds, but I had the cream and we had a lovely time. After all that mobile broadband kerfuffle Wi Fi has come to Dartington this year and they had rigged up a live computer link to the blog on the big screen so that was excellent. I've sent my elite audience away with a pile of books (with bookmarks) to read, and instructions to send me their thoughts as and when or send the book to Oxfam if no good, and I've promised to post those here eventually, spread the love and the work I say. I also took along evidence of quilting and sock-knitting lest there be any doubt.
I meant to go and hear Gervase Phinn this afternoon but as a speaker you partake of festival lunch in the inner sanctum and I was too overcome with sweet and sour pork and a plateful of excitement to manage anything but a lie down after all that,sorry.
I did see Gervase so I do get one out of ten for that in my I-Spy book.
Decided that it wasn't fair to stalk Sam Leith for the entire week so have introduced myself to him and we had a good parley about the state of the book world and I expect we'll wave at each other for the rest of the festival.
Now I must sort out the books for tomorrow's events, read some more of Daphne for Tuesday, write my intro for the event I'm chairing on Wednesday and pack up the hamper again.
Tomorrow the schedule is James Long, Simon Montefiore, Poppy Adams and Rebecca Abrams and I might squeeze in Julian Baggini talking on Moaning and how to complain differently, I like the sound of that.
Lots of points for the I-Spy book if I manage it all, see you there.

Compline

Well here I am reflecting quietly at the end of a long and fascinating first full day day.
Sharing the Festival with all of you is certainly adding to my own enjoyment, subjects I don't often write on.  I have to think much more carefully about what I've heard if I'm to recount and for the record I'm taking notes with my Lime Lamy Safari fountain pen with blue-black ink and 1.1 italic nib on a Moleskine reporter's notebook, probably highly annoying for the person sitting next to me, sorry.
Tomorrow a much quieter day, just going to me talking about dovegreyreader with Kay Dunbar in the morning and Gervase Phinn's event in the afternoon...oh yes and buying The Observer.
I really should be rehearsing but the book I've been anticipating and coveting for years was waiting for me when I arrived home, my copy of So I Have Thought of You The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald.
It's bath and bed for me, night night.

David Owen

So I'd left it late and indeed I sat right up in the rafters to hear Lord Owen, qualified medical doctor and I could probably tag this under my Doctors Who Write section now I think of it. David Owen a specialist in neurology, talking on illness in political leaders and his newly identified Hubris Syndrome.
'But David' someone bravely asked, 'didn't you suffer from this?'
To his credit David Owen held his hands up guilty as charged, but takes one to know one he offered in mitigation. The man's right, how could he empathise and diagnose without suffering first?
In Sickness and In Power - IIlness in heads of government during the last 100 years is David Owen's latest book  (I haven't read it) which examines the effects of power on politicians and it made for scary listening.
Politicians lie about their health and their doctors lie too and David Owen puts forward a convincing case for this whole area to be much more carefully regulated, we have a right to know. His account of the life and contemporaneous medical history of John F. Kennedy was gripping.
JFK had Addison's Syndrome. I'm sure Jane Austen is thought to have had this but fortunately had nothing more dangerous than Pride and Prejudice (how apposite!) to write, not sort out the Cuban Missile crisis. This defect in the adrenal glands leads to wildly fluctuating hormone levels and JFK's were very poorly managed. By all accounts he was massively and incompetently drug-fuelled and unstable around the time of The Bay of Pigs debacle. Kruschev clearly thought that this rich and privileged young upstart was a push-over.
How fortunate in that case that a single doctor had got a grip on things some months later and stabilised the treatment in time for JFK to handle the Cuban Missile Crisis with all the skill of a senior statesman.
Much was revealed about Tony Blair and his secret heart condition, more serious than everyone was led to believe. His Presidential style of leadership which unpolitically-minded me had just let him get on with (too busy keeping the NHS in one piece) comes under intense scrutiny by David Owen. If I heard it right, Tony removed the Cabinet Secretariat, the system of combined intelligence, foreign policy and defence advice that could inform and allow for collective decision-making.
Hell's teeth, wish I'd been paying more attention to what was going on in Downing Street behind the spin , but according to David Owen few of us realised until it was too late, everyone missed it. According to David, Tony found power intoxicating and even the media weren't vigilant enough on that score.
The danger of world leaders with fundamentalist religious views was interesting and often led to a suspension of critical faculities in those who should be opposing, he cited Bush and Blair again.
Hubris Syndrome in leaders could well become officially recognised

• Acquired in office
• Self congratulatory arrogance evident
• Longer in office = increasing susceptibility
• Preventable by self-effacing humour

That's the gist and you'll have to read the book for an accurate and full account with several world leaders put on the examination couch and under the medical spotlight. David Owen wants the past medical history of those aspiring to political leadership to be revealed, he maintains we have a right to know. I might have opted for the sharp intake of breath and muttered 'patient confidentiality' yesterday, today I'm shouting 'someone get me Gordon's and David Cameron's notes right this minute.'
The inevitable name came up in questions
'Mugabe?'
David hedged but did reveal his unease about Mugabe taking up the reins of power many years ago, better a crook than a zealot was his thinking at the time.
All in all a great talk, can you believe it? Politics and I was riveted, I hate politics, it wears me down and makes me cross, I practice evasion and avoidance and end up being done to, as Martin Bell said, 'if you want bad things to happen do nothing'. In that case it's all my fault.
Impression - We absolutely need our elder statesman and we need them more than ever, of that I am assured.

Penelope Lively

That wireless signal went into fluctuating after all but I'm back at Mission Control restocking the hamper for tomorrow and reflecting on a day of contrasts.
Up bright and early to be across the Moors and seated in time for Penelope Lively at 10am. Always the most gracious and measured of speakers and never to be missed if you have the opportunity to hear her, Penelope Lively's theme was Reflections on Living and Writing and Letters Home and if you are interested my thoughts on her autobiography Oleander Jacaranda here.
The Letters Home was a lovely touch, the comparison of a book once published to that of a grown-up child leaving home, off they go to live their independent lives which it is is meet and right so to do, but nice to get the occasional letter home. Penelope Lively kept us smiling with her accounts of some of the letters from readers her books have generated down the years, and that blurring of fiction and reality which often happens,
' was the character called Mrs X in your book Y any relation to the Z family now living in Chester? If so do you have a contact address as they are old friends and we've lost touch with them.'
Yes really!
This was a warts and all account of an accidental writer's life including the frequent financial insecurities of a profession for which no training is required and no qualifications needed, and Penelope Lively gave good account of all the endeavours required. Endeavours of which she knew precious few when she loaded the first sheet of paper into the typewriter forty years and some fifty books ago, becoming by chance (and our good fortune I might add) a writer.
Furnishing a writer's mind and the suggestion that in order to write a writer must read, and read more alongside the idea that the roads not taken in life can often offer interesting material made for fascinating listening. Penelope shys away from the term research for a novel, it's too scholarly, often the imagination will suffice but more often than not background reading and the beloved library work are essential. The benefits of the mature long view back on life as it unfolds were highlighted, that richer and deeper seam of material that becomes available to mine, the more of it you've witnessed the more material you have to call on.
The essence of the process of writing was shared alongside the comforting fact that Penelope Lively can also procrastinate and just absolutely have to clean the oven rather than settle at her desk and her typewriter. No drafts,no computer, typewritten manuscripts annotated and altered by hand and surely those must be fast disappearing in this cut-and-paste age? With it I realise we lose the fascinating workings of a writer's mind so often the source of rich analytical material, back to the Olivetti's everyone.
Lots of questions, too many to cover here but asked which was her favourite book Penelope Lively mentioned her Booker prize winning novel Moon Tiger, though it's fame and the blaze of ongoing publicity and public speaking did somehow temper her love of it and the associated prize money did attract some remarkable begging letters (we heard one which had us in stitches). The book which has sent the most letters home a children's book, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and with it invitations ot tea 'which my mum says will be all right as long as it's Thursday.'
Delightful, the entire hour, just delightful.

Fethiye Cetin

I've just dashed back to Fiesta Base Camp and remarkably I have a wireless signal, is it mine? Is it someone else's?
But before I dash off to hear David Owen speaking on Ilness in Leaders I must quickly tell you that Maureen Freely the translator of Fethiye Cetin's book My Grandmother was exceptional this morning.
I'm starting to gather an understanding of something I've been on the edge of, never quite knowing the details and now I realise that actually My Grandmother is a perfect starting point. The humanitarian angle about the Armenian genocide before the political, and the fact that the book is a best-seller in Turkey and Fethiye Cetin hasn't received a single hate letter suggests that the Turkish peoples (Maureen Freely urged us to use the plural) were ready and waiting to read it too.
I did ask a question about Fethiye Cetin's safety. Maureen acknowledges that the time to be worried is when Fethiye is in court as she is at present and that perhaps the more she is known in the West the safer she may be.
There are only two things for it, firstly I must read Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely is his translator too, and secondly I must now hightail off to hear David Owen, the Great Hall will be packed to the rafters.

Martin Bell

Martin Bell, the nation's Sleaze Detective, the ex-journalist and war correspondent and now UNICEF ambassador but the with the nose for the nasty whiff; if it's there Martin Bell sniffs it out and exposes it to air and daylight for that stink to be fully appreciated.
The Parliamentary candidate who opposed and ousted cash-for-questions MP Neil Hamilton, Martin Bell was elected on a wave of people's insurrection and then kept his promise of only serving for one term, but interestingly he rates those four years as the most shocking of his life. Even worse than National Service (not one but two gap years) where after failing the intelligence test not once but twice, he found himself posted quite logically to the Intelligence Department.
The House of Commons is most certainly not about the Best of British in his eyes.
His book The Truth That Sticks gives good account of all the very nasty smells that Martin Bell has uncovered and as I listened I realised that, though Neil and Christine Hamilton may disagree, we need more Martin Bells. The truthtellers who have the courage of their convictions and complete and finish on the task of exposing deceit.
Several revelations that made me sit up and take notice.
So I claim not to be a political animal, I vote but if I'm honest I don't look at it that deeply but I was shocked to hear that not a single member of the current Cabinet has ANY military experience, not a single second apparently and they are responsible for sending our armed forces, our young soldiers to war.
Very sobering thought.
Martin Bell recently returned from the high-profile David Davis campaign, and if the Tories get in at the next election, which he predicts with utter certainty, Davis at least has served in the SAS.
Whilst acknowledging that there are good people in Parliament, Martin Bell's interesting observation that MPs as young as 28-29, with no career prospects outside Parliament if deselected, will follow any whip or mandate to keep their seat and keep power. When it can take a mere five years to rise from the photocopier to a seat in Parliament it would seem to pay me to examine more closely what I expect from any candidate who may seek to win my vote. In Martin Bell's words we need to elect responsible, decent people who we don't distrust too much (complete trust seems to be a bit too much to expect) It's not a quest for a new Jerusalem but we do need integrity and competence.
There were some fascinating questions from the audience.
Do we get the politicians we deserve, why should good people put themselves forward for the inevitable vilification that goes hand in hand with  political office?
Is their a place for Sharia law alongside UK law?
Might the next quest on the British Foreign Policy agenda be Nigeria? Martin Bell cut his journalistic teeth alongside Frederick Forsyth in Biafra in the 1960's. Forsyth was recalled and wrote The Day of the Jackal on the back of that experience.
Has our ability to question the infringement of civil liberties effectively been silenced by the climate of fear created by the police and the media?
Martin Bell is a passionate and commited speaker, a man of integrity and this was a thought-provoking opening to the 2008 Festival. He left us with the suggestion that the power lies with every individual 'If you want bad things to happen do nothing' and then a great joke at the end about a stand off between US warships and Canada.
Nor had I any idea that Anthea Bell, that most-favoured of translators here at dovegreyreader because she translates not only Asterix but  Max Sebald, Stefan Zweig and plenty more favourites, is Martin Bell's sister.

Question from James Long

Kay Dunbar kindly introduced me to James Long author of Ferney this afternoon and we had a very quick Ferney conversation before James dashed off to his event on the book he has co-written with his son Ben, The Plot Against Pepys. We discussed the horse and oats moment, there is to be a sequel and he's asked me to ask you a question.
The book was a very slow-burner first time around and the theory was that this was all down to the title which didn't say enough about the book.
So what do you all think?
Is that title too bland?
Do we need longer titles to make us buy a book?
If you've read it can you think of anything better?
Loads of feedback welcome because I told him there were millions of you and I'm not sure people ever believe me when I tell them that...there are millions of you aren't there?

Base camp established

Right, so here I am sitting on the back seat of Fiesta Base Camp, parked up and the summit is in sight.
How sensible of Bookhound to suggest pillows, heavens above I may drop off and miss entire days it's so cosy in here. My lovely hamper of food is going to save my life through the week. Available Festival food is divine but divine is expensive and I'm having to feed the car daily as well, so it's packed lunch for me and I've installed tea-making facilities in the boot.
So far so wet, though the sun did shine long enough for the Launch Party to happen in the garden of the Great Hall. Avoiding the Pimms (gin-based at lunchtime not a good idea for an alcohol fairy-wimp like me) I happily snapped away picking out a few speakers for you.
Martin Bell in customary white suit talking to James Long author of Ferney and nearby Penelope Lively deep in conversation.

I can never tire of Dartington I've decided, or of taking photos of the same view, expect more of these but you'll note enough blue sky to make a good-sized pair of men's trousers today and the forecast is hopeful.
Kay Dunbar opened proceedings and urged us all to appreciate the slowness that is possible at Dartington. It's a wonderful sentiment, so true and very easy to achieve because this is a festival with the atmosphere, of a bookish retreat, relaxed and unstressed, though I may feel differently at 5pm next Tuesday.
Sam Leith, Literary Editor of Festival sponsors The Daily Telegraph also welcomed everyone. Sam is here for the entire ten days (and probably doesn't eat lunch in his car) so doubtless blog posts (probably has functioning, unfluctuating mobile broadband too) from him over at the Telegraph website and he does have a very witty turn of phrase. Apparently he's looking forward to the Festival because last year he found himself swimming in the River Dart with a selection of lady authors. Have no fear, if it happens I'll be lurking behind a tree to capture that moment for you all because I don't actually know anyone who's been in the River Dart in anything less than a winter wetsuit.
But let's haste away, I must emerge from my cosy Fiesta cocoon and head off to test out my Festival pass on the first event, Martin Bell.

Ways With Words

It's the old but justified chestnut again, and I came across this article on Indie publishing on The Guardian blog via the US and Douglas McClennan's daily Arts Journal update which arrives by e mail and it made me stop and think. I'm very aware that I've been chasing the big hitters on here lately, mostly reading the top of the tree in the publishing world and I must return to my humble roots and redress the balance very soon.I've always loved to read and share the books that no one else is reading and finding them was always the big difficulty. 3 for 2s and Richard & Judy, Orange, Booker et al means that it's all too easy to read what the publishers and the hype dictate. I used to moan it was almost impossible to track down the hidden treasures, but I really do have no excuse now, Jim the postman brings them by the armful; books from small publishers and authors and once the dust settles on forthcoming literary festivals and the Bookerthon I shall be turning my attention to them in earnest. Who can resist a book called Soft Words Butter No Parsnips after all?
Meanwhile Dartington beckons.
I've handed over my caseload at work and I have the next two weeks in which to play so just a few minor in-house domestic arrangements to share.
Things will be a bit different at dovegreyreader scribbles for the next fortnight. Posts will go onto intermittent as and when and perhaps several shorter posts per day or a longer gap depending on the technology as I trip around Dartington. I'll be listening, scribbling, snapping and generally soaking up the atmosphere to transmit your way.
I even got really carried away and stupidly thought I could cope with super-techno and move into mobile broadband, silly me, what on earth was I thinking?
I don't hold out much hope of success, so far I've been on the phone to India for longer than I care to think about trying to sort it out. It's all a terrible palaver as they ask for the 300 digit number on the reverse of the dongly modem thingy each time and that happens to be just underneath where I've stuck the exceptionally sticky bit of velcro thoughtfully provided to attach the dongly thing to the laptop.
Then there's an awful lot of 'now please shut your computer down'...'now please restart your computer' and we hum for hours while it all slows itself down to a crawl.They are unfailingly polite but obviously can't deviate from the script and keep telling me to

"Try it out in an area that is red on the map because mauve means fluctuating then ring us again and we will help you."

"But mauve and fluctuating was deemed good enough when I conversed with you at length prior to purchase."

"Try it out in an area that is red on the map because mauve means fluctuating then ring us again ...."

"But the nearest red place seems to be Birmingham"

"Try it out in an area that is red on the map because mauve means fluctuating..."

"In other words this is rubbish in Devon."

"Try it out in an area that is red on the map ..."

Bless them all.
It'll be cancelled and going back, I just know it.
Instant posting often prone to more typos and hideous grammatical errors than usual so apologies, but I am on holiday so I hope the Truss-ites can see their way to cutting me some slack.
If you are going to be there do stop me and say hi, I'll be easy to spot, like a carrier dove carting around books, laptop, camera, snoozing out on the terraces over at the Tilting Yard, you know the sort of thing.
Events kick off with the Festival Launch Lunch tomorrow followed by Martin Bell talking about his latest book The Truth That Sticks followed by James and Ben Long talking to Penelope Lively about The Plot Against Pepys. It's true to say I'm raring to go and thrilled to be taking all of you along too.
First things first though, go and find your tartan blanket and small head pillow for our daily siestas here.

My Grandmother by Fethiye Cetin

It's another tear-jerker I'm afraid, yet another book with a page-blurring moment so either I'm going soft in my old age or getting blepharitis or these books are touching a chord.
My Grandmother A Memoir by Fethiye Cetin and published by Verso is a little book with a huge heart and an even bigger theme. As Fethiye recounts her grandmother's life, and in this beautiful translation by Maureen Freely, you realise that you are witnessing the struggles of a selfless and most extraordinary woman. A life that you can rejoice in for the sheer depth of fiesty determination to survive and the compassion for others born of that experience.
For most of her life Seher a Muslim, has concealed her true Christian Armenian identity from her family. Having watched the massacre of those closest to them, Heranus ( Seher's real name) and her mother and brother undertake the forced death march in 1915. Seized from her mother by a Turkish gendarme Heranus is then adopted into his family and separated from her own for ever. It is many years later that she divulges this truth to Fethiye and reveals that she thinks some of the family may have escaped to America all those years ago and might it be possible to trace them?
Acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide remains a very dangerous and difficult topic to write about within a country that maintains it never happened and, whilst not wishing to even speculate on something of which I know so little, it still becomes essential to acknowledge the courage and conviction of Fethiye Cetin to write and publish this book. Fethiye is a Turkish human-rights lawyer who campaigns fearlessly for the ongoing advocacy of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and there is little doubt of her commitment to the cause when you read My Grandmother.
The facts as told to Fethiye are presented rationally and unjudgementally, she does indeed cut right through any bitter political territory to tell her Grandmother's story, and it is left to the reader to make the call.
It is not difficult to hear the voice, in fact the heart-rending cries of those who were silenced.
In her excellent and informative introduction Maureen Freely clearly outlines the political situation in a way that Fethiye Cetin for obvious reasons cannot, it's chilling to read and illuminates in stark reality the depth of Fethiye's courage in the face of great danger but also great hope in writing this book,

'Despite the dangers it (ie the democracy movement) faces from what she has called 'obscure forces', she remains confident that democratisation, though slow, jagged and dangerous, cannot be checked.'

Now I recall that excellent account of the genocide in Prince Rupert's Teardrop by Lisa Glass and I will read that passage again in the light of this book. My Grandmother is one of those important books, a brave account of a remarkable and formidable woman, a life which is, despite the early sadness, a joy to read about and one which truly deserves to be remembered.
Maureen Freely will be speaking about Fethiye Cetin's book My Grandmother at Ways With Words, Dartington on Saturday July 12th at 12 noon and of course I'll be there.

The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams

Poppy Adams is on the bill to speak about The Behaviour of Moths alongside Rebecca Abrams speaking on Touching Distance at Ways With Words on Monday July 14th at 5pm. Having now read both books I'm intrigued because the common denominator is not there on the surface, but dig a bit deeper and there you find it, the place science and research play in both these excellent novels.
It all leads me to ponder what makes a good novel for me and to be honest I'd probably give a different answer depending on my mood, the day of the week, whether there's an 'r' in the month or whether it's raining or sunny.
It's all quite the moveable definition but both these books did the trick, drew me in and kept me there, plenty of interesting strands to hold my attention and whereas Touching Distance was to a certain extent known territory for me, The Behaviour of Moths was not.
I know as much as would cover about a quarter of a wing of a Feathered Footman but will admit this book made me get The Observer's book down off the shelf and look something up. Mulleins grow in our garden and I know we checked it out years ago when we found huge caterpillers on them, but I couldn't remember the moth. Innovatively they attract Mullein moths and now I'm waiting and watching.
It must be getting increasingly difficult to find unexplored fictional territory these days, I remember Ways With Words a few years ago and by chance two authors had written novels with the central theme of seahorses. Obscure indeed so how galling to find that someone else has done the same as you? They gamely shared the platform and we all emerged completely in the know about the genus hippocampus and all associated metaphors.
Moths feels like a new and original theme, bees and butterflies seem to have been done to death but not moths in my albeit limited knowledge. The literary metaphors and allegory abound now I consider them , pupae and chrysalis, moths to a flame.
Now I expect you all to give me a list of hordes of moth-fiction.

A slowly unravelling thread of mystery is played out throughout the book as a past emerges predominantly through the eyes of a narrator who feels far from reliable. But there is little else to fall back on as the aged Ginny awaits the arrival of her sister Vivien to the crumbling but expansive family mansion. The two sisters haven't seen each other for forty-seven years and you immediately ask yourself why and I carried on asking myself that question right to the end of the novel.
Ginny, obessessive, compulsive, a seemingly poor judge of character, detached from reality and lacking in social skills after living the life of a remote recluse as her father's apprentice in his moth research. It's tempting to place her somewhere on the autistic spectrum but where?

'I'm a scientist and I'm afraid I don't work with intuition...I'm a scientist. I need hard evidence'

says Ginny about herself with her frequently remarkable insight about faculties she doesn't seem to possess.
Vivien the vivacious sociable sister who escaped and has now returned but why?
The book is full of uncertainites and perhaps that's one aspect to pin down about a good novel. I was constantly questioning situations and assumptions because I'd only viewed them through Ginny's eyes and I wasn't altogether sure about Ginny. Ginny's eyes had seen things in Ginny's way, Vivienne would have been wearing a completely different set of spectacles and it is only very latterly that we are allowed to see through them, this gives a book double value as you write the other story yourself.
Ginny by the way is the first to admit her shortcomings.

'I know memory shouldn't be trusted, that two people's recall of the same event can be unbelievably different, that even their perceptions at the time can be paradoxical, so I accept that my own recollection may be heavily distorted.'

Reader sympathies waver all over the place, one minute poor Ginny, the next flashes of sadism in the name of scientific research as moths are trapped and pulled apart at the seams. Is she mad, bad and extremely dangerous? Is she deluded and psychotic or completely in possession of her faculties?
The ending reveals all and it's good. Very good.
Another reason not to miss The Behaviour of Moths is to find how best to capture twenty-five thousand virgin Brimstones, because you never know when you might need them, and the recipe is a tricky treacle mix of wine, fermented banana and rum that will take some practice to get right.

The Three of Us - Julia Blackburn

Was there any doubt?
Of course I'll be taking us along to Julia Blackburn's talk at Dartington.
It's 5pm again, Thursday July 17th in the Great Hall and I've already suggested that anyone foregoing the talk and snoozing out on the lawn instead might regret it.
Firstly the book itself. The three of us - A Family Story and published by Jonathan Cape is a book well worth having in the hand. Production values, which we all know matter, are high. Good quality paper proving that environmentally aware needn't mean Bronco toilet paper standard, and the book is of an unusual dimension, 17cms x 21.5, most hardback books seem to average 14cms x 22 and all these sizes probably have proper names (is it Foolscap Quarto?) but this is one is squareish and it feels really good. The bigger pages haven't been crammed with text right into the margins to save on paper either so it's beautifully spaced with Sebald-like photographs woven in, making it all an easy-on-the-eye delight to read. Somehow the binding allows the pages to lie flat too without committing irreperable damage to the book's spine, all proving that it can be done and making this a book that feels worth the money.
So is it a misery memoir? Well if anyone's childhood and adolescence had the ingredients for the most miserably miserable misery memoir it's Julia Blackburn's, yet somehow it doesn't read like that.
Family Blackburn teeters on the edge most of the time as alcohol, drugs, sex and violence proliferate in young Julia's life in the midst of what seems like an understatement to describe as this high-end dysfunctional family. Both Julia's parents brought a disturbed childhood to their marriage and having been subject to poor parenting models themselves it was obvious that as two very emotionally needy, egocentric people in their own right they might make a bit of a hash of things.
Her father Thomas Blackburn was a poet, a heavy drinker also addicted to sodium amytal but eventually popping any pills that came within his reach from contraceptives to anti-histamines. Julia's mother Rosalie de Meric a painter, 'sociable, sane and flirtatious'. The constant battle between the two of them for the emotional lower ground...well my life was much worse than yours, makes for an unusual ambience around the house.
Writing as an adult and using her copious diaries as reference Julia has captured and bottled that childlike understanding of her situation, it must have been tempting to invest it with the wisdom and hindsight of an adult but she doesn't.
The power of the book rests in its degree of understatement, what lies beneath doesn't need to be said and when symptoms do surface, as when Julia takes to prolonged episodes of screaming, it's quite matter-of-fact almost normalised. This was all day to day life for young Julia, she knew no different. There is not an ounce of self-pity nor a hint of attention seeking as young Julia accepts this as the norm and struggles through, hence as a reader you build up and apportion the layers of guilt and responsibility on her behalf. I was also yearning for Julia to find just one single person she could talk to who would listen and understand her. There seemed to be one or two but by this time Julia, herself prey to the inevitable law of diminishing insight as this maelstrom of life carried her down in its vortex, seemed less and less able to indentify her own needs or make sound decisions.
Healing comes many years later in the unlikely form of her mother's final illness when Julia takes the dying Rosalie into her own home to live out her final days as the leukaemia takes its toll. Mother finally realises what she has missed in her daughter's life, daughter finally receives what she has searched for all her life, a mutually reciprocated and uncomplicated, unconditional love. No matter how brief the healing is complete.
It seems corny to say it is a story of redemption but the book blurb doesn't hesitate to say so and it truly is a remarkable book, humour and lack of blame do prevail and in its final pages it is completely uplifting. It conquers and soars above all that has gone before in Julia's life and the final twist of happiness will leave you feeling on cloud nine for Julia.
So there you have it. I've survived as 'them as know' told me I would.
I didn't feel in the least bit miserable as I turned the final page of The three of us which is surely a fine testament to the non-misery-ness of this potentially miserably miserable misery memoir.
We're in for a fine time at Julia's talk I'm sure.

Ferney by James Long

I'm not sure how I missed Ferney fever during the first epidemic but I've caught it good and proper this time round. Bit like chickenpox I suppose, which I didn't get until I was thirty-five, the older you are the more it affects you and perhaps the same could be said for Ferney which has definitely brought me out in a florid rash of enthusiasm.
Written by James Long, who I discover is also a Devon resident, the right chord is touched before I even begin the book because it's located in Somerset and there's something about Somerset that gives a book a head start with me.
Black Dirt by Nell Leyshon, The Various by Steve Augarde, and my favourite art book of all time (since the last favourite art book of all time) John Caple's beautifully simple but symbolic Somerset. John's raw and naive yet highly imaginative artwork basks in this magical and slightly extraordinary setting which has cast my spell in gold for ever. Don't ask me to try to pin it down or analyse it because I can't, perhaps it's because Somerset is the first county we enter as we drive out of Devon and that first landmark, the much-loved Willow Man, our Angel of the West.
Then we cross something called King's Sedgemoor Drain. You'd barely know but for the sign saying so, but something about that name conjures up Somerset Levels and heaven knows why but thoughts of The English Civil War. There's probably no historical basis for my connection but it just happens and I wonder whether anyone else makes these odd and irrelevant and unfounded connections as they travel ?
So thanks to all that and James Long's meticulous writing Ferney and I somehow bonded very quickly, and I was rapidly installed in this book as Mike and Gally move to their derelict Somerset cottage with a history they couldn't possibly know of but somehow local wise man Ferney does. Mike the historian, logical evidence-based thinker, scholarly and scientific in his approach and not one to let his imagination play any part in the history he writes and lectures on. Gally quite the opposite, slightly ethereal, disturbed by nightmares and it rapidly becomes evident that there is an unspoken and mysterious bond between her and Ferney.

' Gally was a poem with a missing line a symphony with a discordant phrase.'

The plotting is so so clever, and it's tricky to say much without lessening the impact, but all making it one of those unusual reads. The 'deep puddles of memory' connect Ferney and Gally to time immemorial as Gally realises the life she is living now is the tip of the iceberg and startling questions of history and authenticity reared up as I read. Mike cannot possibly believe anything Ferney says and as Ferney recounts events surrounding Monmouth's rebellion, which we as readers believe him to be telling as primary source truth, Mike sees memory as a palimpsest and must verify it all in a textbook.
My thinking got quite tangled in that chicken-egg way as it can and I can't explain more without ruining, but if you read the book I think you'll discover the episode I mean, it's about horses and oats and it's clever, and then you'll have your own chicken-egg moment too.
Now I'm really looking forward to hearing James Long speak on The Rebirth of Ferney at Ways With Words on Monday July 14th.
Out of print for ten years Ferney is back and deservedly so, there's something ultimately comfortable about a book that may have tapped into just one way of recounting the mysteries of eternal life but this one's an unputdownable page turner too and I can quite see how it achieved cult status. Ferney taps into something primeval that you'd like to imagine was posssible and by the time you finish the book you almost believe it might be.

Swotting up for Dartington

Bookhound and I had a fine lunch with Ernest Hecht of Souvenir Press up in London a few weeks ago when Ernest commented that I didn't read much non-fiction. He was right then, but just a few weeks later things have changed and now he's wrong!
I'm very busy swotting up for Ways With Words Dartington 2008.
If I'm taking the blog and therefore all of you along with me I want to be sure I'm well-prepared so that we get the best out of it all, and the reading has redressed the non-fiction balance in spades. I'm reminded how easy it is to get stuck in the fiction rut when there's plenty of real-life stuff going on out there too. I'm reading some jaw-droppingly good books which I might just have missed because...well just because.
Not to put too finer point on it I avoid misery memoirs.
Once I'd read about a few miserable Irish childhoods, quickly pursued by a few miserable Chinese childhoods that was me done for and I started evasion tactics when I saw the books coming. Show me one of those books with a headless child (usually a girl in frock and ankle socks) holding a teddy by the ears and I just groan because I know what's coming. Whilst I can appreciate that for many these books will be sought-after reading and for their authors they will have undoubtedly been life-saving cathartic therapy they are rarely for me, probably because I spend my days dealing with the real thing in peoples' lives.
So when I heard about The Three of Us by Julia Blackburn, I did the usual avoidance thing and ignored it. Then I saw she was going to be at Dartington and I was in a quandary.
Julia Blackburn is unwittingly responsible for one of my finest and most memorable Dartington events ever.
It was a Sunday, July 10th 2005 according to my notebook, one of those hot, lazy, sun-dappled late afternoon events in the Great Hall. It had been a good day.
I'd heard Clare Bertschinger the Red Cross nurse in conversation with Michael Buerk talking about the famine in Ethiopia. Tim Collins, ex of the 1st battalion Royal Irish Regiment talking about the war in Iraq , Lucy Hughes-Hallet talking about Heroes and in the evening to follow it was Alexander Waugh. The trick is not to fall out of your seat laughing when Alexander Waugh talks.
It was 5pm, the air felt heavy and drowsy and it was odds on I might doze off so I sprawled myself comfortably in an end seat with the rails to prop my elbow and thus my chin on. When the long blink became a zizz I had scaffolding in place and no one would notice and hopefully I wouldn't progress to dribble and snore stage. Someone did that very loudly sitting behind us watching Hamlet once, which I suppose is inevitable and forgiveable.
Julia was talking about her then recent book With Billie on the life of singer Billie Holiday about whom I knew little beyond the word tragedy. Fat chance there was of falling asleep or even taking many notes because Julia's talk was spellbinding and then she did something quite amazing, read a passage from her book to a backdrop of Billie singing. As Julia talked gently in a voice quivering with emotion over Billie's plaintive and husky singing everyone moved right to the very edge of their seats, and to say shivers went up and down every spine in that room would be an understatement. The song might have been Laughing to Keep From Crying, I'm not sure but that's one I wrote down, but it all created an eerily magical moment and I've never forgotten it.
It also gives rise to one of those fine Dartington after the event moments.
There hadn't been that many people there and so you come out and tell everyone (because at Dartington you talk to everyone) they've just missed the very best event ever and they then gnash their teeth and regret that snooze on the lawn.
So how on earth can I possibly ever miss a talk by Julia again? I'll just have to read the book and having been assured by 'them as know' that The Three of Us was definitely not a misery memoir I tentatively plunged in...
I've just turned the final page, so was it a misery memoir?
Was I right?
Did I wish I hadn't read it?
Will I go to Julia's talk?

Sisters In Arms by Nicola Tyrer

It's been a bit of a nursey beginning and end to the week on here and brace for more next week because on Dame Margaret Drabble's recommendation I've just read The Squire by Enid Bagnold. An astonishingly frank and perceptive novel about childbirth and motherhood, published in 1938 and one that segues nicely into my current read of Dream Babies by Christina Hardyment in preparation for chairing Christina's event at Ways With Words.
But today it's British Army nurses and if we've been talking about the unacceptability of second best then it was certainly beyond the ken of the nurses that Nicola Tyrer features in her excellent book Sisters in Arms. As I read I couldn't help but wonder just how my training might have equipped me to deal with the trauma that the wartime Queen Alexandra Nurses had to face. We certainly learnt to be innovative and creative as paediatric nurses back in the 1970's as we cajoled, persuaded and encouraged the children in our care, and often we had to steel ourselves to some terrible traumas, but that all seems as nothing and in sharp contrast to nursing war wounded out in the field of battle.
No detail is spared and often told in the voices of the women themselves, on the front line, in the field hospitals but most poignantly at the liberation of Belsen and assisting the return of the Japanese prisoners of war.It's obvious that stoical bravery and acceptance often made these patients model ones, undemanding and long-suffering. For a start just the mention of burns and saline baths in the same sentence, and with no mention of massive doses of pain relief, all spells excruciating to me, for both patient and nurse who had to assist.
But the QAs were 'women of character' as Nicola Tyrer elaborates,

'the stiff upper lip generation...service far more important than personal fulfilment and that to complain was unacceptable. Self discipline was paramount and they put up with hardships unimaginable...when things got really bad, in the best British tradition, they turned the nightmare into a joke.'

I know we certainly shared their sense of humour and the eye for the ridiculous seems to be a necessary nursing attribute, when lives are at stake suddenly only the important things matter. Likewise I too would have laughed at the suggestion that I could access my emergency rations without the say so of my commanding officer ONLY after I had been in the sea for twenty four hours and  ONLY if I was absolutely sure there was no commanding officer floating around with me to give the say-so.
The QAs also knew how to switch off and have fun and relax and it never ceased to amaze me that likewise we were pretty good at that in the 1970's too. We were only nineteen and, like the QAs, for us it became an essential survival mechanism,.
The distinctive but highly impractical QA's uniform cost a fortune and had to be bought made to measure from Harrods no less, even down to a white parasol with a red lining which must have had a thousand and one uses of which I can think of about three.
But parasol or no there can be little doubt about the courage these women displayed in the face of great human suffering, tragedy and hardship rightly earning the respect of all around them and Nicola Tyrer's book does these forgotten women a huge service. It's well-written and revealing in its detail and read alongside Grey & Scarlet Letters From the War Areas by Army Sisters, that beautiful little book with the Robert Austin drawings, this has been a truly rewarding reading project.
Nicola Tyrer will be speaking at Ways With Words, Dartington at 9.30am on Thursday July 17th... as will Jenni Murray, more difficult choices ahead.

The Bolter: Idina Sackville by Frances Osborne

As usual it's all passed me by, all the Out of Africa - Happy Valley - White Mischief reading that I've never quite got around to. Somehow none of it appealed, the wealthy whooping it up in Africa just didn't interest me.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Frances Osborne's book The Bolter - Idina Sackville - the woman who scandalised 1920's society and became White Mischief's infamous seductress.
That said, isn't it good when something makes you read around a subject that you've pre-judged years ago and consigned to the ntbrnscs pile? (never to be read next stop charity shop pile)
Frances Osborne will be speaking about The Bolter at Ways With Words on July 12th and thankfully worked very rapid magic on me with her book about Idina Sackville, her great grandmother. Frances has in fact produced an unmissable and magnificently readable book.
Goodness, those Edwardians didn't give a fig and hardly wore a figleaf either when the parties began, and my word did they know how to party...

'It doesn't matter what you do in this bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses'

famously declared the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell and the culture of adultery blossomed under such endorsements. In fact adultery was rife,

'along with hunting, shooting, fishing and charitable works, one of the ways in which those who did not have to work could fill their afternoons.'

The timing of  the day was for convenience because already in a state of deshabillee it was quicker to get dressed for dinner which probably makes sense.There were however a few rules of engagement which I suppose is heartening,

'A married woman was expected to wait until she has produced two sons for her husband (and heir and a spare) before risking introducing somebody else's gene pool among those who might inherit his property.'

Well there's thoughtful.
Divorce however was still frowned upon and quite a rarity so Idina Sackville set off as she meant to carry on as the child of divorced parents. Already marginalised there seemed little left to lose as Idina threw herself with abandon into the life she chose, a good deal has gone awry by the time she's twenty-five.
By page twenty I was nicely esconced on a sofa at the Ritz or was it the Savoy, so you can see how cleverly Frances Osborne entices her reader in. The book steers a careful course through very choppy waters indeed as Idina notches up an unheard of five marriages, but the fall out and any implied social disgrace seemed like water off the proverbial duck's back to Idina who knew what she wanted and needed and made sure she got it.
Setting any colonial misgivings aside, Africa seemed the perfect place to settle with its liberating and boundary-less wide open spaces and sense of complete freedom, where Idina famously walked barefoot most of the time.She worked hard managing her farms with varying degrees of success, dependent largely on the quality of the available distractions or lack of them.
All this in stark contrast to the stiflingly claustrophobic London society life. Not that Idina wasn't happy with both because each served her needs accordingly.
But it's very difficult to be judgemental, even when I expected to be, as Idina leaves her sons behind and heads to Africa for the first time.Within this 'infamous seductress' is a living breathing human being and Frances Osborne treads a very fair and objective pathway, frequently getting to the very heart of Idina in the process, identifying the sources of her insecurities and emotional neediness. There are some teribly sad moments, not least the separation from her children which had me yearning for some degree of reconciliation, and an ultimate and seemingly unjust sadness when I discovered exactly why Idina was barred from attending her own daughter's wedding.
Now so many literary avenues have opened I hardly know where to begin.
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford and The Green Hat by Michael Arlen (recently republished by Capuchin Classics) both  feature characters based on Idina Sackville. Out of Africa by Karen Blixen seems like another must-read too and I suppose if I want to know more about the scandals, White Mischief by James Fox. This the book which investigates the murder of one of Idina's several ex's and father of her only daughter, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, Jossyln Hay.
The Bolter reads very much like a page-turning novel in its own right, a great read and  I shall be hanging on  Frances Osborne's every word too and will report back.

Courage

More bookish synchronicity as I start reading Courage by Gordon Brown alongside Sisters in Arms British Army Nurses Tell Their Story by Nicola Tyrer and that in turn makes me get Grey & Scarlet : Letters From the War Areas by Army Sisters on Active Service back down off the shelf too. Quite a nice matching set now I look at those covers.
Gordon Brown (yes that Gordon Brown) 'explores the lives of eight outstanding twentieth-century figures, in order to better understand courage' and the list is part predictable and part eclectic and unusual, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Cicely Saunders, Aung San Suu Kyi and the one I was immediately interested in, Edith Cavell.
Edith Cavell trained at The London Hospital in Whitechapel, as in part did I, and where I had the dubious pleasure of living in Cavell Home in East Mount Street. It was ancient back in the 1970's, tiny rooms, lifts with metal cage doors, all men signed in and removed by the Home Sister at 10pm sharp. I knew little about Edith Cavell beyond the film version (Anna Neagle?) but I now see that she was made of very stern stuff indeed and to be honest you'd expect nothing less of anyone who trained under the formidable Matron Luckes (Luckes Home was yet another spartan nurses' billet)

'Her courage at the moment of death, when she forgave her executioners, is perhaps the best-remembered aspect of her life, yet everything beforehand can be seen as preparation for that one moment, her courage springing from a dignity and strength of character demonstrated again and again through a life lived in the service of her principles.'

Edith Cavell born in 1865 certainly following in the still visible footprints of  Florence Nightingale, Eva Luckes had been in correspondence with Florence and continued to maintain the high standards now being established for nurse training.
I feel certain 'uncompromising dedication to duty, vocation and pride' in the profession still echoed around us back in the 1970's and perhaps that's why I still strive but struggle within the constraints of NHS 2008 to adopt anything less than best practice. We were trained in the unwavering belief that second best was most certainly unacceptable and would be potentially damaging somewhere along the way if not life-threatening.To this day I just can't do it.I always imagine Sister Beech is waiting round the corner to swoop and come in for the kill.
I've tried to forget that Gordon Brown is the Prime Minister and may be trying to offer any covert message or ideological stance about his own governing principles with this book, cynics might argue that it's an attempt to gain more gravitas, reap some political kudos by association, but I'm not quite a hard-boiled cynic yet and so am reading the book on its merits alone.
Royalties from the book go to The Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory (the Brown's first child who died soon after birth) and I am trying to extract the essence of what Gordon is saying. Indeed I think it will be along the lines that second best wasn't good enough for any of these lives either and courage was and is about standing up and saying so and staying true to your principles along the way.
More soon about Sisters in Arms where second best most definitely would not do, and don't miss Romanov Day on here all day tomorrow, with Helen Rappaport chatting in comments about her latest book Ekaterinburg.
It's blinis I've got to cook apparently... where's Cornflower when you need her?

Selective Memory by Katharine Whitehorn

I'm not a huge fan of autobiography given that you know as you read that the content is exactly as Katharine Whitehorn's title suggests, Selective Memory, and the source for her quote from Jim Fiebig is the epigram for the book.

'If you can look back on your life with contentment, you have one of man's most precious gifts - a selective memory.,

It clearly becomes the privilege of the author to tell us as much or as little as they want as honestly or otherwise as they see it and Katharine Whitehorn has done exactly that and in the process has actually told us a great deal.
I think I was part of the post-Whitehorn era or again was so busy trying to sleep after a long shift back in the 1970's or coping with the three-babies-in-four-years in the 1980's that I sort of missed her. I'm beginning to feel a bit of a dullard about the 1970's feminist revolution or was it all being played out on centre court whilst I was involved in a minor match on the outside ?  (Wimbers coming up, time to get tennis-y)
The book is a laugh aloud read as well as offering some serious commentary on the titanic battle being fought on Centre Court and Katharine Whitehorn was most certainly volleying up at the net and sending down those blistering forehand drives as she took on all-comers in Fleet Street, but also embraced a much wider sphere in her quest to get a woman's voice heard and more importantly listened to.
The battle undoubtedly had its casualties and it seems remarkable that through it all Katharine and her husband, the thriller writer Gavin Lyall, sustained a marriage of forty-two years before his death at the age of seventy. This must have been a marriage forged in the maelstrom of change and to their credit they negotiated a path and raised a family which Katharine recounts unflinchingly. Despite a successful writing career, alcohol and the ever-present spectre of failure were Gavin's demons, but Katharine paints layer upon layer, building up a picture of him as a lovely man, not without his faults, but with a wickedly quickfire sense of humour and well able to manage her fiery outbursts. Katharine is no slouch in citing her own faults either and you sense a couple who accepted each other for better for worse and everything else inbetween and honoured it. The book is a tribute to their tenacity and sheer bloody-mindedness and rings true as a consequence because it was most certainly not all a bed of the proverbial roses; on one occasion it was in fact a bed concealing a melon so make of that what you will.
Katharine and I agree about a great deal it would seem. I am of the firm belief, as you know, that canvas is for painting on not sleeping under, Katharine goes a step further pointing out that

'the main point of camping is to remind one why they invented the house.

It could also hardly be imagined that Katharine and I might even vaguely know the same people but a name cropped up in her book, a journalist and editor (and previous girlfriend of Gavin Lyall's) by the name of Suzanne Puddefoot.
Talk about selective memory, I knew this name, it's memorable as were the circumstances.
There followed a fair old rummage around the archives and finally I found it. A very yellowed copy of the Tavistock Times dated February 15th 1980 (told you I never throw anything away) and there it was, me starring in a centre page spread on a day in the life of a health visitor for the local newspaper, and the reporter I took out for the day?
Sue Puddefoot.
Could it be the same one?

More to the point what about that terrible picture of me, twenty six and kneeling by a buggy chooking a baby's chin while a proud mother looks on (I can even remember the baby's name!), I'm looking slightly worrying and even worse I'm wearing, oh good grief, the embarrassment, a tartan-lined duffle coat.
I'm sure there's no way you want to see that picture, but you absolutely do want to read Katharine Whitehorn's book which has much nicer pictures and shares many moments that add up to this poignant one in the final pages,

'What does happen is that the good memories become a source of pleasure and comfort tinged with the same autumnal ache, the same regret one feels about having once been young, of the unreturning years.'

Touching Distance and touching hearts.

A Ways With Words pre-read and the health warning today is that this post might make difficult reading if you are either pregnant yourself or by proxy as it were, perhaps with grandchildren imminent, but on the other hand to be informed is to be aware and in this case, as you will realise, awareness is everything.
Here's also yet another fine example of that synchronicity in reading. I bet I'm not the only one who does this, spreads out an old newspaper for something and then starts reading it, but I did a double take this week  when I glanced at the front page of the Guardian Family section from Saturday June 7th.
The feature is headlined After Jessica and shows a smiling couple, in the snow, a chubby rosy-cheeked babe-in-arms and altogether a happy family scene, but the headline quickly dissipates the happiness,
'Jessica Palmer had an easy labour and a healthy child. Five days later she died from a treatable infection. Her husband Ben talks about anger,guilt and life alone with two children.'
Surely this can't be what I think it could be?
Puerperal Sepsis?
I'd just finished reading Touching Distance by Rebecca Abrams and so I now have an excellent fictional account of the devastating impact of Childbed Fever before anyone had the first clue as to its cause.The book is based on the actual outbreak that occurred in 1790 in Aberdeen and I knew something of this already.
It being one of my 'subjects as it were, I have quite a collection of books ancient and modern on childbirth and one of the most fascinating is The History of Childbirth by Jacques Gelis. Again, don't stray within a mile of this if there is a baby imminent, but for a fascinating look at 'the system of practices, belief and taboos which surrounded conception, pregnancy and birth in early modern Europe' this book cannot be bettered.
With something now so well accepted it seems nigh on impossible to imagine that the theory of contagion had yet to be recognised in 1790, and when Alexander Gordon finally realised that the doctors and midwives were largely responsible for the spread of infection it was obvious he was dealing with one very hot potato.

'I have evident proofs that every person who had been with a patient in puerperal fever, became charged with an atmosphere of infection, which was communicated to every pregnant woman, who happened to come within its sphere.'

Thus spake Gordon's Treatise and for his discovery he was villified and rejected, his marriage broke down and he returned to sea as a ship's doctor while his work went largely unrecognised almost to the middle of the nineteenth century.
I love fictional medical history and in Touching Distance Rebecca Abrams has woven a fascinating and highly readable story around her factual foundation with added undercurrents of what I felt sure rippled towards  Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, if I'm underlining by page six this bodes well. The sights, sounds and smells of the unpalatable are essential to the story and Rebecca Abrams graphically conveys it all, the ignorance of the 1790's compounded by an unwillingness to listen, enmities and rivalries between the professions and all in the midst of the agonisingly painful deaths endured by the women some five to seven days post delivery. The research feels thorough and impeccable yet rests lightly on the book, facilitating a good page-turner of a read rather than a slog through a thesis. There's no doubt it's shocking but somehow you tell yourself this is history so you feel one step removed, surely it's unheard of in these days of antibiotics?
Except that in areas of the world where hygeine and access to medicine are seriously compromised, up to 250,000 woman a year may still be dying from puerperal sepsis...but not here surely?
Then I read that Guardian article, and it all hits home. As Rebecca Abrams elaborates, childbirth remains one of the riskiest events in a woman's life and as Ben Palmer says

'I don't want to scare people by adding to their worries, but as part of a normal pregnancy, mums are aware of a lot of things that can go wrong, but not this.'

and he's right.
I haven't read it but I suspect Ben's book, Friday's Child : The Heartbreaking Story of a Mother's Love and a Family's Loss may well make for very emotional and uncomfortable reading. From the moment Jessica's labour began (while she was sitting on the sofa reading Daphne du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek) to the the quick and normal delivery of daughter Emily and early discharge home, followed by the fulminating course of the unrecognised but lethal streptococcal infection. It sounds like a catalogue of terrible errors, the stuff of nightmares, overworked medical staff, an acute lack of awareness, the faceless anonymous bureaucracy as Ben fought for compensation, the tough climb back from the mire of grief which engulfed him. But one comment from Ben unwittingly encompassed not only his own experience and Rebecca Abrams' book, but also the centuries, and the silence that greeted Alexander Gordon's discovery, suddenly you wonder whether we've actually learnt that much since 1790,

'Childbed fever is not a new illness, it's as old as the hills, but nobody seems able or willing to say it still happens.'

Final word to Jean Giraudoux,

"Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom."

Bookendipity

Sometimes bookendipity works mysteriously and randomly to the power of ten when you least expect it, but to the point where it actually sends shivers down the spine, and that happened this weekend.
Picking my way around the stack of books arriving for Dartington Ways With Words I decided I needed a bit of a method. One huge and seemingly insurmountable Mount Everest of books reaching to the ceiling and waiting to be read within the next month can induce anxiety even in me, and so I created ten little walk-up-able Dartmoor Tors. One for each day of the festival and the events I'm hoping to go to, just to help contain my eye and organise my reading over the next few weeks.
It's been difficult to drag myself away from The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift  and my lovely tactile ribbons, but Ways With Words calls and I picked up two quite different books, Selective Memory by Katharine Whitehorn and Ferney by James Long.
Off went the chaps to start clearing the river bank in readiness for the season's salmon fishing and I settled down to one of those dreadful afternoons; you know the ones, where I'm on my own and the house is completely quiet and peaceful, a terrible sea of calm and tranquillity when all there is to do is read...can you imagine how I hate it?
The shivers started as I opened Ferney and I surfaced about a hundred pages later realising that if ever there was a novel that sat in the palm of the hand of The Morville Hours then this was it. Not in a monastic way but in that indefinable passage of time way.
As Mike and Gally move into their derilect Somerset cottage, the presence of Ferney, an old man who seems to know far more than it can be possible to know about the house, appears to sooth the troubled Gally whilst completely unnerving her history lecturer husband. As the past begins to impose on the present I realised I was reading a fictional account of so much that I have imagined happening recently in my reverie about those invisible footsteps of history.
If you plan to read The Morville Hours you could do no better than slot Ferney in alongside, the two complement each other perfectly in a strange way and I'll share more thoughts about Ferney soon. I learn that James Long also writes as Will Davenport, his writing style sits very comfortably with me, I will certainly be reading more.
Katharine Whitehorn's excellent and very funny memoir Selective Memory then got a look in with this,

' The memory makes its own selections, its own decisions about what is fun, interesting or even excruciating to remember, and what is simply too boring to store. The brain apparently sees thing A and thing C, and if it is puzzled by the gap, officially fills in what it thinks should be there, thing B; then you remember that, and when you've recalled it two or three times it's a genuine memory - but of the last time you ran this construct past your consciousness.'

but Katharine and Ferney seemed to have made a connection too as Ferney recalls,

'Next up were the familiar big events, the ones he'd been over a thousand times, and they were like a painting to him, but a painting that was covered in layer after layer of old varnish, so that he had to take great care that what he could still see was the original and not the retouching of memory because every time he took them out to look he added another layer.'

I was hyperventilating by this time as those fantastic arcs of light sparked and connected across the pages, and was only returned to earth by the sound of four dogs barking like crazy out in their kennel. This is the signal for the Land Rover to have turned in at the top of our lane, far too distant for me to have heard it but good advance warning that I am becalmed on the sea of tranquillity no longer and it's time to return to shore and put the kettle on.
Aren't books amazing?

www homework

The books are starting to arrive in the run-up to Ways With Words at Dartington and I think this weekend must see me on the starting blocks and ready for the off. I must chip into this reading mountain if I'm to get the very best out of the Festival and share it all here.
Don't miss Kay Dunbar's blog about life behind the scenes either, it's fascinating.
Huge and varied selection of books and authors on offer and it has been a dilemma, with events going on simultaneously at two venues, to decide which one to go to when there's a clash.
I expect about three people at the dgr event because I'm on at the same time as Diane Athill in conversation with Penelope Lively. What a cracker of an event that promises to be and what a dilemma because personally I'd rather listen to them than listen to myself.
I don' t think that's what I'm supposed to say but perhaps I'll benefit from the disappointed returned ticket queue especially if it's raining.
So far, in the 'yes' pile
Sashenka by Simon Montefiore (has the Sebag got lost along the way?) author of Young Stalin and this a novel about three generations of women in a Russian family from the time of Nicholas and Alexandra to the present day.
Bring that one on.
In Simon's own words

' I have always passionately wanted to write accessible but well-researched history for the widest possible readership and thought fiction would take this a step further...a novel about a woman who'd lived through privilege, revolution, war, terror; a novel that would bring to life more forcefully than any history what this would have been like.'

The book is huge at 540 pages but this event holds much promise. Fiction events can often be difficult ones to pull off to an audience's satisfaction and I've been to a few in my time that have had me...well...er, had me dozing off.
You know what it's like.
Hot July day, nice picnic lunch out on the grass, soporifically mellow atmosphere and that gentle fragmented sunlight that washes over the magnificent Great Hall can all prevail as author embarks on lengthy reading from novel in monotone voice (the exception is Hilary Mantel, impossible to fall asleep when Hilary reads)
The eyes get leaden.
Just taking an extra long blink quickly becomes a slightly deeper zizz and before you know it your head's jolted off your shoulder as you wake with a start and look around in the hope no one's noticed. If you've plumped to climb up into one of the window seats and are on full view to everyone you're sunk and may also have pitched off the narrow bench in the process.
I flick to the programme and see that Simon Montefiore has the 2pm slot on Monday July 14th.
But there are good omens, it's early in the week and I'm passionately interested in the subject before he even begins. One of the most memorable events I've been to in recent years took place on just such an afternoon and I'll tell you about it soon.
A novel which describes the terrible price paid by ordinary people in Stalin's Russia should keep me on the very edge of my seat and will segue perfectly into Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport a few days later.
On at the same time over in The Barn Theatre, oh dear, The St Ives Artists, A Biography of Place and Time, an illustrated talk on his book by Michael Bird.
But I adore the St Ives artists and everything about the Newlyn school and Lamorna Birch.
On the other hand I do already know quite a lot about them having read all the books, walked in the footsteps and been to the galleries.
Should I go to an event where I'll learn something new or one where I can nod sagely and knowledgeably, perhaps even pluck up the courage to summon the roving microphone and ask a question?
Decisions, decisions, not a Libran speciality and even given the best possible choices life's never straightforward is it?

Ways With Words - Dartington

So what's all this Daphne madness in aid of then?
Well I will be taking part in a Daphne event with Justine Picardie at Ways With Words at Dartington in July this year. The event is to be chaired by Rachel Kiddy (nee Trethewey) so that's another delight in store for me because Rachel wrote Mistress of the Arts , that excellent book on Georgina, Duchess of Bedford. Georgie (we like to think we would have been on terms, so adopt the familiar locally). Georgie, the lady who had the common sense to realise she needed a holiday home in Devon, almost next door to dovegreyreader, and had Endsleigh built for the very purpose. I'm sure Georgie also had it in mind that there would be a lovely reading group looking for a home on the second Tuesday each month 200 years later.
There is to be a dovegreyreader event at Dartington too.
Me on my own, with bookmarks, talking about all things dovegreyreader-ish on Sunday July 13th.
Then I shall be chairing a couple of other events too. One in particular is already keeping me awake with excitement because it's a book I knew I was exactly the right reader for, Dream Babies Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford by Christina Hardyment. I'm reading the book thoroughly at the moment and formulating my hopefully fascinating questions to ask Christina.
So that's probably enough excitement for one blog post, except I have to add the best bit.
Fear not all you far- flung blog readers who pine for the lanes and hedgerows, the lush and verdant pastures of leafy Devonshire for ten days in July and a setting so gloriously and breathtakingly medieval as to take you on great flights of fancy every time you enter that elegant courtyard...where was I?
Oh yes, I've booked two weeks away from the NHS and Ways With Words have very kindly given me a ticket for the entire festival, launch party to closing event and all things for the ten days inbetween, start to finish.So I will be taking the blog along too and tip-tapping on my laptop inbetween events each day to bring you up to the minute reviews of as many talks as I can manage to get to, with of course glorious pictures of the idyllic setting, so you can all enjoy a vicarious virtual festival and won't feel left out. The programme is now available here and it's stunning, we will all be spoilt for choice.
We'll be driving across here

To get to here

And will probably occasionally sit in the shade here.

Thank goodness someone was prepared to make the sacrifice and do it.