dovegreyreader scribbles

Faces From Far Off Places...

Flagrant nepotism, please forgive...

Those of you who have been visiting the scribbles for a year or two will know him as The Kayaker, may even have read the occasional post here about his travels, and exciting things are happening for this son of ours through December. 

Firstly 'Faces From Far Off Places', an exhibition of Tommy's images at The Wharf Arts Centre in Tavistock from December 3rd until December 28th 10am - 4.40pm daily, and obviously during any evening events being held there.

Tommy will be there on Saturday 8th December to talk about his pictures and his work to anyone who strolls in, and he's also doing a couple of workshops too. For ages 11-104 (!) getting to grips with a digital camera of your choice (I really should go, can't keep phoning him up.)

I know some of you went to see Night School during its sojourn in the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Taylor Wessing Prize exhibition last year (and thank you) and it will be on display again for this exhibition, along with a  wonderful selection of his other pictures. 

And one of those events at The Wharf will be an evening talk on Monday December 10th,  so if you are nearby please do come...

Bookhound and I, having heard a version of the talk (I'm bound to say it's good, but it really is, we were immensely proud)  and seen the film footage, are billing it as 'Come & Find Out Why His Parents Went Prematurely Grey'...the kayaking the White Nile and the bike ride down the Indian mountain perhaps just two examples. It's getting a very good reception out there so if you know of a group or a school or any organisation who might be interested in booking him for an illustrated talk, photography workshop or even a photographic shoot, please do make contact with Tommy. There's a contact form here. He's out and about around the county and the country, working very hard at it all and is very keen to inspire others.

Oh yes, and one more thing, the 2019 calendar is ready too,  £10 plus p&p and available here. Lots of you bought one last year (thank you and hope you've enjoyed the year of pictures) 

 

 

 

Reading Gallimaufry

Here it is again, a brief gathering of a few books I have read recently that don't make it into longer posts. No reflection on the quality of the book in any way. I just don't have quite as much I want to say about them. Notes taken from my notes as I read ...

Transcription ~ Kate Atkinson

'In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'.

The quote at the beginning of the book by Winston Churchill is a fair indication of what to expect in this novel of espionage and undercover agents in wartime London, and I was on the alert for things to watch out for. 

What to believe...

Who to believe...

Keep an eye on the timelines..

Expect to be duped because this is Kate Atkinson after all and things are never what they seem...

Expect red herrings and the rug to be pulled from under my reading feet...

Expect a surprise and unpredictable denouement other than the certainty that something unexpected will happen...

I wasn't disappointed, I didn't see it coming even though there were plenty of clues and warnings along the way ... 'We believe what we want to believe'...'Never take anything at face value'... and so yet again, another excellent read from Kate Atkinson.

  

Wild Woman Swimming ~ Lynne Roper

Lynne Roper and her family are well-known locally, indeed Bookhound did a lot of work for them back in the 1990s. Sadly Lynne, a paramedic. died of a brain tumour in 2016 and this book is a tribute to her, and to her passion for wild swimming. The book takes the form of a journal logging Lynne's regular excursions (often with her dog Honey) to many of the most exciting wild swimming places on Dartmoor and around the south west coast. Here's a flavour...

'It's December, the air temperature is 7 degrees, and the water half a degree less. Honey and I stride through the woods, dead leaves squidging underfoot like soggy cornflakes...I dive forwards and the river slashes me like a blade. In her winter guise she has lost her silky, peat-scented enchantment and become a steel-hard witch with the taste and texture of bootleg vodka. My hands, face and neck burn with cold and I feel my blood freezing. A flock of kayakers zip by, one of them shours " People think we're mad!"'

It is 2011. That could so easily have been our Kayaker who regularly paddled the Double Dart in winter. 

If you love swimming you will love this book. If you love Dartmoor you will love it too. So many of the places favoured by my Walking Friend and I...Spitchwick, Foggintor, Sharrah, Tavy Cleave, though maybe not always to swim.

'It's a spiritual experience, sliding through wild water. Worries dissolve, my mind is liberated; thoughts flow and glide and play like dolphins. My souls swims wild.'

Here meanwhile is the necessary proof that I did actually get wet this summer, and with my Walking Friend's collie on stand-by as lifeguard...

 

Bluets ~ Maggie Nelson

240 numbered observations. Snippets about blue embracing both the end of a relationship and a friend's serious injury, Maggie Nelson examines  her obsession with the colour and its many connotations. The cover alone will make any blue-obsessive buy the book.

Bluets, visceral in places, touches something deep and often unrecognised by the Blue Obsessive and this (and the cover) may have been why I was drawn to it so immediately. Grief, loss, love and learning are all explored via Joni (Mitchell) Leonard (Cohen) Bille (Holiday) and Andy (Warhol) amongst others and in small increments that create a whole. I need to read this book many more times to really grasp the full extent of its reach.

'And so I fell in love with a colour - in this case, the colour blue - as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.'

 

The Children Act ~ Ian McEwan

I am way behind the curve with this one. In fact about four years behind. But my Reading Friend and the recent film both reminded me that I needed to catch up. Everyone is saying that the film is Emma Thompson at her finest, and I can't go and see it until I've read the book, so I did.

There must be few jobs in life that have the potential and the power to skew perspectives and mess with your personal life as much as Fiona May's as a Judge in the Family Division. Surrounded by conflict, abuse, violence and having to regularly exercise the wisdom of Solomon, it is little wonder that Fiona's marriage is flailing and she is emotionally susceptible to the fatal mistake of becoming too personally involved in a case that comes before her. 

I'm still not sure how I felt about the ending...but it did make me realise that I still have a few unread McEwans from his oeuvre to tackle... The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Saturday, Solar, Sweet Tooth, Nutshell...

Your thoughts...

 

If Cats Disappeared From the World ~ Genki Kuwamara

One of those little Japanese gems of the philosophical variety that make you see the world at a slant.  Entering into a pact with the devil is never going to end well, and when a young man is given months to live  and the devil appears in a Hawaiian shirt and makes him an offer it is too tempting to refuse so the consequences become apparent. In return for each extra day of life he must choose to make something disappear from the world. Phones, clocks and movies go and with it come all sorts of previously unconsidered outcomes. It's a bit like the Un-Creation, the creation in reverse, as the consequences of  each absence are explored. But then on the Fourth Day it is cats who must disappear and this obviously needs much more careful thought. There is the most delightful insight into a cat's real thoughts...you know when we talk to them and think we know what they are thinking or want. No, we don't have the first clue..

'And what you realize when you've lived with a cat for a long time is that we may think we own them, but that's not the way it is. They simply allow us the pleasure of their company...'

Of course Magnus was completely in accord with all of this when I discussed the book with him...

The Otterbury Incident ~ C.Day Lewis

Last but definitely not least. The Endsleigh  theme for October was 'Tribes' and I could think of no better book than one of my childhood favourites, The Otterbury Incident by C.Day Lewis. Published in 1948 this is the post war England of bomb sites and children having plenty of freedom whilst being in awe of authority. The boys in rival gangs play war games and get themselves into all manner of scrapes, but when a crime is suspected they join forces to defeat the baddies and end up heroes. 

I read my ancient copy, sent by one of those unofficial aunties we seemed to accumulate as children. This one was a teacher at Delabole Primary School and knew just the right books to send us. Neither the story nor the writing dims with time, though as the years progress I become slightly more incredulous with each read that when it came time for the boys to head home and arm for the battle they all reappear with air guns and sheath knives. Ah yes, 'twas a different world.

 

 So there you have it, your thoughts on any or all of these most welcome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Light in the Dark - A Winter Journal ~ Horatio Clare

'Thank goodness for this journal. To have somewhere to put this small story, something to do with it, is a salvation.'

Under a lowering winter sky how much darker and intractable the problems can seem. The fog and mist and cold and and damp ensnaring the worries, refusing to resolve or dissipate the anxieties, and finding himself seriously compromised by winter SADness Horatio Clare decides on light-seeking and journal-writing as a way through the winter of 2017-18...

'I will pay attention. Depression kills your power of vision, turning you fatally towards yourself, but I will practise looking and looking outwards like an exercise, as though I am training for an expedition.'

Now published by Elliot & Thompson as The Light in the Dark - A Winter Journal. Elliot & Thompson that rare but precious breed these days, an independent publisher.

He chose the right winter to put it all to the test; the Beast From the East earlier this year had me rushing for my Vest in the West, but, based in the more northerly Calderdale town of Hebden Bridge, and with the backdrop of the often dark and forbidding Pennines, the challenge for Horatio Clare was bound to be even greater.

The book is searingly honest about the vissicitudes of depression.

'The past is a guilty place, the future a hanging threat, the present a humiliation. Stop it, you want to shout. Just stop it. Let me be.

Depression for Horatio Clare and for many is debilitating and de-skilling and the impact on work, family and friends is apparent along with acute crises of confidence and self-esteem...

'Last night was deep winter, freezing starlight over the valley and Rebecca warming the whole house as she banked up the fire. I looked at her and loved her and felt I had let her down so utterly, not saving enough, not planning enough, not loving and cherishing enough, worrying too much, changing too little, being away too much...'

But, and here's where the book triumphs, there is balance. 'I will embrace this winter like a summer' moments of despair are leavened with moments of insight, hope and grace, a sense that 'things will and do get better', and with ways of facilitating that...

Walking...

'This! This! I thought. How did I let myself fall so far from this? All I had to do was hold it in my heart, take it as love. It is not so hard.'

Paying close attention to nature..

'Beware that glaze which creeps over the inner eye, blinding you to the vision of moss in the rain...'

Paying close attention to and spending time with his son, and let it be known that the account of Aubrey's birth some five years previously one of the most moving I have read...

'To hold him, so new, so small, made me feel like a tentative giant. The tiny mole-like utterness of him, and the feeling of a compliment greater than any you have imagined when he sleeps in your arms, and the sheer impossible vastness of everything ahead of him mantles your shoulders over him.'

I sensed the Book of Common Prayer often returned unbidden to Horatio Clare, exposure to it as a child often ensuring that it rests somewhere deep within ready to surface. The Evening Collect flits into my head regularly on a cold winter's evening..

Lighten our darkness we beseech thee O Lord and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night...

The Nunc Dimittus never far behind in my mind...

LORD, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace :
according to thy word.

For mine eyes have seen :
thy salvation;

Which thou hast prepared :
before the face of all people;

To be a light to lighten the Gentiles :
and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

But the moments of grace shine through for Horatio Clare and for the reader too because he has a lucid and lyrical turn of phrase, and having read this book through to get a feel for it I will now read it slowly, by dated entry.

February 19th, and the first sighting of the snowdrops is 'hope incarnate' and suddenly so much more becomes apparent, there to be noticed, the first bee flying into the attic, the thrush calling at twilight, ducks flying up the valley. 

It is that day in February that Kathleen Jamie writes about in Sightlines when the light shifts noticeably...

'Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky.

I've written on the page in my copy, '2013 - Feb 14th'. Maybe we get it a little earlier further south and west.

And for Horatio Clare with that light comes real illuminating vision, describing the paralysis and inability to see with honesty, seeing the cloud lift, the promise of hope and the decision to seek help. So much to commend The Light in the Dark. It's a book I'm very pleased to have invested in (I bought it at the North Cornwall Book Festival). Incidentally, knowing how carefully some of us choose bookmarks, this postcard was mine...

Last winter was a shock to the system here in the south west, even the stalwarts rated it as the worst they had known since '63. Maybe it’s because we're getting older we wondered, even though we are fit and well (deo volente) but still enough to make you a little nervous about this one. Yet, like Horatio Clare 'winter suits this house' too...

'...with the fire going, the clothes hanging on the drying rack, the door curtain pulled across and the key turned in the lock, a fractional attempt to stem the freezing draught from the keyhole...'

Yes, yes, yes and yes except this year, suddenly realising that we never open the north-east-facing French windows in the Book Room from the outside, I have taped the keyhole over outside and hung a new, thicker and much-improved layer of insulation on the rail inside.

On a sunny winter's morning it's like having our very own quilted wall of stained glass. 

In fact I may actually have over-compensated this year...we have draught-proofed every last breezy inch around the windows, the fleece linings have gone up on the curtains, the logs are stacked high, I've stocked up on Vitamin D and fleece-lined leggings, the electric lap blanket is at the ready, but above all I am very pleased to have The Light in the Dark in the toolbox too.

Hat tip to Dan Mogford for the beautiful cover artwork. I always check out who has designed the cover of a book and this one speaks to the contents beautifully. Checking out Dan's website I see I unwittingly have quite a few 'Mogfords' on my shelves...

Meanwhile I wonder if you have any suggestions for more books that will cheer through the winter...

And of course all tips for staving off the cold gratefully received...

And as always with apologies to all Southern Hemisphere readers basking in the sunshine.

 

 

Poppies ~ Mary Oliver

The loss of the gardeners of the Heligan estate in Cornwall during the First World War, and the garden's subsequent dereliction is a story that is well-known here in the West Country. Resurrected and restored some years ago, the gardens are now a very popular tourist attraction and this field of poppies was sown in commemoration of the lives that were lost.

I thought long and hard about a poem for today, a hundred years since the cessation of hostilities, so many war poems to choose from, oft quoted at this time, but in the end I settled on this. It seems to speak not only of loss but also of optimism, the triumph of light over darkness.

 

Poppies
Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

Peaceful Reading :: A Month in the Country ~ J.L.Carr

Another peaceful read...

I've recently helped establish a new book group that has started to meet in the church that we can see from our home. This village has no meeting place and so our new churchwarden is injecting a new lease of life into the building with an art group (Bookhound has joined) and various other groups and events.

I love to open the bedroom curtains to this view in the winter...

and this view in summer...

Not our parish, but as we are right on the boundary this our nearest church. I walk across there a lot and it is a church I have written about often here and which I love.

Small in size thanks to a rebuild after a disastrous lightning strike and fire in 1956 which decimated all but the fifteenth century tower...

St Mary's a church that always reminds me of the one in George Eliot's Adam Bede.

We are running the book group on a monthly theme rather than a set book, and for 'The Village' I decided to read (for the umpteenth time) A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr.

As soon as I open the book my spirits soar because I know I am in for something special, Oxgodby in 1920, and each time I read that 'something special' will be something different.

I first wrote this about the book here in 2006 ...

'War veteran Tom Birkin reflects, almost 60 years later, on the summer of 1920 he spent uncovering a medieval wall painting on the wall of a village church.He sleeps just below the belfry and spends his days high up on the scaffolding inside the church. Meanwhile outside another war veteran, Moon, is digging in the church grounds for some archaeological remains.

There were real and very obvious analogies for me of Tom reaching to the heavens for the healing he was searching for after the grimness of the war, and Moon conversely digging in the opposite direction and so much more.It is a reflection on times and loves lost.

"We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever....they've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass" says Carr's narrator towards the end of his account.

Was there ever a more realistic description of grief in so few words?

In her introduction Penelope Fitzgerald adds her own thoughts...

"The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in one's own independence and to do only what we are expected to do. At the same time, it is a mistake to expect anything specific from life, life will not conform"

She was the wisest of women and J.L.Carr most certainly a writer with the "magic touch to re-enter the imagined past".

This time around my mind was focused on that summer we have just had and so like the one that J.L. Carr describes...

'The summer day of summer days - a cloudless sky, ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars...'

and this...

'Deep red hollyhocks pressed against the limestone wall and velvet butterflies flopped lazily from flower to flower. It was Tennyson weather, drowsy, warm, unnaturally still...'

The contrast between the bucolic idyll that village life seemed to be (though of course in reality far from) comes in stark comparison to the horrors of war. This is the country that Birkin and Moon fought for and the village knows it. The debt to these survivors of the trenches is in part repaid with acceptance and kindness, with shelter and work, hospitality and inclusion. It was all the more poignant to sit and talk about the book (by chance chosen by two of us) in a church that must resemble the one that features in the book, and in the run up to the forthcoming Armistice commemoration. 

On the evening of November 11th, Peter, one of our number, will (or maybe because the weather forecast is terrible) be playing Last Post from the top of the church tower before nipping down to the belfry to join the ringers. Throughout the day  bells with ring out across the country to mark the 100th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities, and St Mary's, with its tower of five bells, will be joining in the great peal. In Tavistock there will be a half muffled peal followed by a full peal of over 5000 changes...for the campanologists out there this will be of the method known as Grandsire Caters, apparently one of the oldest of all ringing methods, which will last for three hours from 2.30pm.

Meanwhile I would rate A Month in the Country as one of my top ten essential reads. Now I've said that I'm wondering what the other nine might be... any suggestions...

And is this one of your most treasured books too...

The River in the Sky ~ Clive James

'....................................Books are the anchors
Left by the ships that rot away. The mud
The anchors lie in is one's recollection
Of what life was, and never, late or soon,
Will be again.'

I'm not sure whether The River in the Sky emboldened me to try reading Robin Robertson's The Long Take, or whether it was the other way around. Suffice to say, I started Clive James epic poem, a grand tour of 'the fragile treasures of his life,' and took about a month to read it...

'At the opening of The River in the Sky, a book-length poem, we find James in ill health but high spirits. Although his body traps him in his Cambridge house, his mind is free to roam.

... Animated by powerful recollections, James presents a flowing stream of vivid images. He moves from emotionally resonant personal moments, such as listening to jazz records with his future wife, to unforgettable encounters with all kinds of culture: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sits alongside ‘YouTube’s vast cosmopolis’.

In some ways I was reminded of Tony Judt's remarkable end-of life book The Memory Chalet for its collection of memories and revelations, alongside wisdom and insight, in that way I'm guessing the approaching end concentrates the attention like no other. The difference is that The River in the Sky takes the form of an epic poetic elegy, and in the case of Clive James the end has been a long time in the offing.

Diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia in 2010, and with little hope of a remission or a cure, Clive James had already accepted that the disease had beaten him and the end was nigh. Now, in 2018, expressing some embarrassment that he is still alive and thanks it would seem to an experimental drug treatment...

I had thought this ship was sailing
Across the river in the sky towards
Andromeda, but in the night, it stopped
Quite close to home, and on the quay
Boxes were swung ashore that indicated
Another destination altogether.'

For a man to live under the shadow of imminent death for so long, and for me as a reader to see that the time hasn't been wasted is the most encouraging and uplifting thing, though possibly for very personal reasons.

I have mentioned it many times before so it is well-known here I think, that my brother died of acute myeloblastic leukaemia when he was twenty-four and I was twenty-one. Treatments in the early 1970s were mostly experimental, harrowing and painful, but after his death Malcolm's consultant at the Royal Marsden (Dr Ray Powles) wrote my family a very moving letter which included these words...

'At present it is impossible for you to think of anything but sadness, but I must say to you that we learned a great deal about the management and ultimate control of this very distressing disease from Malcolm's case, and I hope that his loss will not be wasted, and he may ultimately have contributed to the cure of leukaemia....'

Dr Powles won't know how many times I've read that letter over the years and wondered, even hoped that this was true, and so when I hear of any progress, or of successful leukaemia treatment trials, as in Clive James's case, that are extending life, I feel a real sense of gratitude for the short life that we knew, but also for the contribution that might have been made and for the hope and better prognosis that now exists.

So, you see, I bring a lot of baggage to a book like The River in the Sky which may all have added considerably to its impact, I loved the way that threads of a whole life were picked up, woven in and dropped again, only to be re-threaded some time later. Subjects and themes to which I can barely be privy, can only watch as an outsider, but which offered windows into a life well-lived.

One minute dancing the tango in Buenos Aires the next listening to Thelonius Monk playing After Midnight...

Watching The West Wing with his daughter or remembering his childhood and the loss of his father, who having survived the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp would die when the plane returning him to Australia crashed.

There is indeed sorrow, sadness and regret but Clive James is not a wallower; there is a vast amount of uplifting joy here and with so much gratitude to so many people, often perhaps addressed for the first time...

.....A terrific teacher,
So why, till now, have I always left him out,
Except for the occasional fleeting name-check?
The answer is too easy and still too daunting.
The ideal father figure, he raised the question,
Simply be being there, of what life would have been
Like if my father had come home.'

Mr Leonard, who had navigated Lancasters over Germany and had returned.

The River in the Sky an accumulation of deft flights of wonderful memories, whose paths cross like contrails across a summer sky, and once I got into the flow of the writing at each sitting I was transfixed.

Clive James did a radio interview recently. By his own admission failing physically, but his voice, though frail, still had those dry laconic antipodean tones with which I associate him, and with it a mental acuity that allows the memories to flood in and be translated onto the page. He seems deeply philosophical and accepting of his condition and determined to keep the flame burning to the very end making this a moving and in many ways energising read. It has all propelled me into another of his poetry collections, Injury Time. There’s even talk, with my Reading Friend, of a shared plunge into Clive James’s translation of The Divine Comedy.

Maybe though, the abiding message to me from The River in the Sky was something about not wasting a minute...

And perhaps about writing it down when the time feels right..

'In this most fruitful chapter of my life
I swear that I can hear the light...'

 

Clothkits is 50...

I’m sorry I just HAVE to inflict one more bout of nostalgia on  you before I cease and desist this self-indulgent behaviour (for a while) because how could I let the fiftieth birthday of the inimitable Clothkits pass by without mentioning it. The DIY clothes company where the pattern pieces were pre-printed onto the fabric and all you had to do was cut and sew.

Founded, I now discover, at a kitchen table in Lewes in Sussex in 1968 by Anne Kennedy, though really not a big part of my life until the 1980s. I suspect that decade might have been the company’s heyday and I certainly did my bit to aid their profits. The colour catalogue would arrive and there would always be something irresistible and completely reliable when you cut it out and stitched it together. Seams would match, patterns would match, the cotton would match, the buttons were their own, the instructions were crystal clear and the finished garment would fit, no messing. I was a devotee of their dungarees for grown-ups but the piece de resistance (or pieces) were the three padded jackets (farm and jungle designs as I recall) I made for three very delighted children; the ones with matching stuffed animals that fitted into specially designed pockets, and in our case attached by long ribbons.

There nestling in the pattern box I inherited from my mum were all the originals...

Now might be the moment to confess too that I made 'one or two' paper patterns from the Clothkits kits, but then I made patterns from everything from Mothercare and M&S too. A heinous practice and probably now a retrospectively imprisonable offence, but times were hard, interest rates on a mortgage were running at 17% and this was the era when childcare was sparse; none of the women in my circle of friends returned to work for several years after having babies. We were stay-at-home mums, careers forcibly on hold and existing on one salary. I'm hoping I can be forgiven. 

Bought out by Freeman’s catalogue in 1990, the Clothkits brand lay dormant until a revival in 2008 and I gather it is now up and running again and as strong as ever.

Go on then, I can't be the only one who loved them...

Happy Birthday Clothkits.