dovegreyreader scribbles

Stopping by...Checking in...

I must confess, sitting in front of a computer for hours has been the hardest thing to accomplish these last few weeks, but I’m still here and I did want to stop by and check in with you all. 

Having had to sort out and clear Bookhound’s family council home from 350 miles away,( following the death of his dad at New Year) the experience has spurred us on to Sort Out the Loft and Clear Out Cupboards here. It’s become our mission for this latest siege, and that sees us knee deep in stuff that we don’t quite know what to do with...

I mean how long do you keep it for...

Who might ever want it...

But it’s all memories that have demanded our shared attention and reflection and before you know it a day has passed with just one box done. It’s been all-absorbing but well worth the effort.

We’ve done five trips to the tip and it seems we are not alone, nor unique in the detritus. I’m not sure how we accumulated a stack of ring binders other than assuming they had been breeding of their own accord, but there was much hilarity as the people in the car next to us opened their boot to reveal...a stack of ring binders. 

Watching world events seems to be more involving than reading a book right now sensing that, whatever happens next, somehow we are at a real turning point in history and not wanting to miss it. But we have both ‘read’ Frostquake by Juliet Nicolson. Bookhound listened to the audio version and I read the book, and we’ve had great fun remembering how cold our knees were in the winter of 1962-3.

And how did we keep warm in houses without central heating or double glazing?

It perplexes us daily as we wrestle with the vagaries of the newish boiler and its controls akin to a space station. It was my degree in Quantum Science (joke) that finally twigged that the clock for some reason (one of us randomly pressing buttons without glasses on) said 2am when it was actually 11am. No wonder the heating was coming on at the strangest times. As far as I can remember our life revolved around two paraffin stoves in 1963, supplemented by a fairly inefficient coal fire.

Music features large in Frostquake and we had an interesting coffee time session at the kitchen table one day as we checked out the list of number one hits (the Hit Parade, remember?) for 1963 and found ourselves to be worryingly word perfect on almost every one. More fascinating has been seeing events that surrounded us then as children through our now adult eyes. So much that we missed but our parents must have known and worried about and yet they spared us that fear. I'd like to think children have been spared fear in the same way through this last year too. In a way it all feels joined up, this perspective on the past as we head into the future, and this last year feels like a dividing line, a watershed moment between the two. 

I’m now moving onto fungi and Entangled Life How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.

Heaven knows the diversionary trails this will lead me along. We get outside as often as we can each day, taking dogs and hot chocolate to the woods and the Sitting Log where we can wonder about the tangled world wide web of life, both above and below ground.

Oh yes, and I've made marmalade too. Sevile oranges at the farm shop begging me to oblige.

I'll bet some of you have too.

And please do let us all know your latest reading triumphs. Bookshops will be open again soon and we'll all be rushing in with lists.

The Book of Fame ~ Lloyd Jones

‘There was no holy water
No one spoke of fame
There were no reliable works
We were left to figure out things for ourselves’

Having mentioned it I've been down to the basement to find this post from 2015 about The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones. Rugby was very much on our minds back then.

On the 8th August 1905 twenty-seven men boarded the SS Rimutaka in New Zealand bound for England and a punishing series of more than forty rugby matches against the home nations; small clubs, larger clubs, the English Counties, the well-established names and thus the All Blacks were born and it is all recounted in The Book of Fame which came in just on my 200 page limit and really kick-started my reading again.

Now I didn’t really know I was that interested in rugby.

I have grown up watching it on TV rather than on the touchline, neither sons nor daughter took to playing it and for that I think I am grateful. The recent world cup and its proliferation of cauliflower ears and off-centre noses can only hint at the potential for damage. England’s early exit from the contest solved a dilemma and we rapidly switched our allegiance to the All Blacks in solidarity with Offspringette busy setting her alarm for crack of dawn in order to watch the matches…because it would seem you have to embrace rugby if you live in New Zealand. I am also reliably informed that I won’t be allowed past customs if I can’t answer All Blacks’ questions.

After forty days at sea and much training on the decks of the ship, the 1905 team landed at Plymouth, breakfasted at The Duke of Cornwall hotel (still there the last time I looked) and one perceptive squad member astutely sums up the smell of England…

‘England’s old official air – something like leakage from a five pound note.’

It’s true, five pound notes do have a certain aroma to them and off they set on a train journey across the West Country towards civilisation…

‘We lined the carriage windows and gaped at the thatched cottages, at the tidy figure in the paddock, the tame hedgerows. There appeared to be little in the way of landscaping left to do.’

And the unknown underdogs trounce every county team with their new and innovative style of play, fleet of foot doesn’t come near…

‘Why don’t our men tackle ‘em?
‘My son if you read the rules you would know you are not allowed to tackle a man until you have caught him.’

These are the days of no film, no action replays and no match analysis and the British are flummoxed by this magnificent team display of sporting prowess..

‘Think of us as fifteen sets of eyes, pairs of hands and feet attached to a single central nervous system,’ says Freddy Roberts and the obvious parallels with the 2015 All Blacks team are obvious.

For one who didn’t really appreciate the finer points of the game there is nothing more likely to concentrate the attention than the All Blacks performing the haka, and there I was shrieking ‘Forward pass,’ and ‘Line out’ and ‘Go Ritchie’ with the best of them through this recent series.

You don’t have to like or even watch rugby to enjoy Lloyd Jones’s book because it is about much more than the game.

It’s a book about teamwork and looking out for each other, about prejudice and pre-conceptions, about generosity of spirit and likewise meanness of spirit. It’s about winning and losing… because in amongst the 830 points ‘for’ and the 32 conceded there is defeat, but there are lessons to be learned and the All Blacks learn them. It’s about grit, determination and adversity, about cultural difference and sportsmanship, dedication, commitment and loyalty.

It’s also about the birth of the celebrity. Hailed as ‘the greatest team ever to visit England’s shores,’ the men are soon recognised wherever they go and as result hunt down deserted monasteries and castles to visit on their rest days rather than face the adulation.

And world events are woven into Lloyd Jones’s narrative too along with remarkable first sights for the men from the Southern Hemisphere. The team share column inches in the press with the Russian oppression of the Jews in Odessa, the tide of refugees attempting to cross to America… they see their first black man, the Atlantic ocean for the first time, they take afternoon tea up the Eiffel Tower.
There is humility and modesty (and didn’t we see that in the All Blacks team this autumn) and some relief as they head across America and sail for home from the west coast, soon finding themselves beneath the Southern constellations..

‘Our arrangement…our sky …at a glance the mountains can suck up all knowledge and render you speechless.’

I could quote for ever from The Book of Fame, it is astonishingly poetic, and sometimes laid out as such and I loved it.

Published in 2008, I am surprised that this one wasn’t it piled high in bookshops for the duration of the World Cup?

Maybe it was and I missed it, but when I asked for it in several it was blank looks all round.

The book is based on fact , with ‘imagination slipping into the gaps’ and there is one fact that still reigns supreme…

‘The quickest road to fame is to play the New Zealanders.’

If you have read The Book of Fame I would love to know your thoughts…
And did I miss it piled up in bookshops in recent months… if not then the booksellers missed a trick with this one.
Any converts to rugby out there…
Does anyone honestly understand the rules…

A game of chess

It was my dad who taught my brother and I to play chess.

Old fashioned board games were the games I remember us playing as a family. We had my mum’s old Ludo and Snakes and Ladders sets and honestly, give us a cup and a dice and we’d turn anything into a competition between each other. Even listing the football teams of the day and pitching them against each other with the throw of the dice. Little gamblers in the making so imagine our delight when someone bought us a miniature roulette set complete with croupier’s rake. My parents definitely frowned but didn’t intervene and hours of pleasure followed. It probably allowed us to get it all out of our system at a young age because I’ve never had the urge to gamble beyond the odd lottery ticket. 

Once draughts had lost its appeal my dad sorted us out with chess. We had a lovely wooden set, and also a tiny travelling chess set in a tiny maroon box with all the pieces pegged in place on a perforated base. This would serve us well on the long train journeys down to Devon and Cornwall from London for holidays.

I can’t pretend I was ever any good at chess, or mastered any of the openings or strategies. It was my brother who had the little grey handbook and had perfected all those, but I’d limp along whizzing my rooks up and down, and my bishops along the diagonals and hopping my knights up two and across one.

Having watched some of Queen’s Gambit (thank you Netflix..)

I was tempted to open a book I’d been sent Game of the Gods by Paolo Maurensig. 

Set in 1930’s India, a tiger has been terrorising the village. People are fearful, trapped inside their homes as the beast wanders and attacks indiscriminately. During a lull in attacks, and feeling safer, the village emerges and starts to relax only to find they are plagued again by this relentless and largely unseen enemy. I’m thinking, oddly, virus and Lockdown One and Lockdown Two. It is the landowner, Sir Umar Khan, who rides in like the cavalry and queels the fear.

As a reward to the village for its period of hardship Sir Umar Khan offers to grant everyone a single wish. A lowly servant asks to learn the ancient art of chaturanga, the Eastern and original game that would become chess.

‘Chaturanga, then, was a game, of course, but also a philosophical text. It embraced the arts, the trades, the religious hierarchy, the social order, and the division into castes...’

It’s a small leap mentally to see the analogy with kings and pawns, and wars and the class system. The pawns sent out to do battle, protecting the king and Queen, attacking the enemy, often sacrificed but also often saving the day. Chaturanga is after all ‘as close to war as one could imagine’. 

Not unlike Queen’s Gambit...

...the genius quickly masters the board and takes on all-comers, winning multiple games played simultaneously. In response to a bet, the Prince enters his charge in competitions around the world.

British arrogance is not in short supply along with bad sportsmanship as Malik deafets all-comers and I was reminded of another book by Lloyd Jones, The Book of Fame, where the first team of All Blacks travel by sea from New Zealand to the U.K. for a series of rugby matches. Very much the underdogs, and treated as such by their hosts, the inevitable happens and successive  British teams get a real thumping. Honestly, when will we ever learn... or maybe we have.

It’s quite the treat when a good book appears out of nowhere, especially when its themes fit the historical moment as if meant. First published in Italian in 2019 Game of the Gods feels almost prophetic, as a metaphor for our times and I will definitely seek out more by Paolo Maurensig.

In the meantime I’ve been hunting down more chess-related fiction and could only come up with The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig. As I recall it concerns a particularly ferocious game of chess on board as trans-Atlantic liner. I’d love some more chess fiction suggestions if you have any.

Also, how about chess the game. Anyone else mastered the art, anyone else still playing...

And if not chess then what...

My brother and I actually wore our Monopoly set to shreds and my parents regularly confiscated Risk because it caused so many arguments and tantrums (me probably). Who would ever have imagined that world domination could cause such a thing when ‘playing nicely’, as we were urged, seemed barely compatible with the task at hand.  

So many board games available now...we have a new shop in town where you can hire them for £5 a week. What a clever idea. Three weeks in New Zealand a few years ago and I had almost mastered the rules of Settlers of Catan, almost, but I’d love to know what else you play.

 

 

Where did...

...that month go?

Thank you for all your lovely comments and for chatting to each other too. If there’s one thing I love about this place it’s that...if I disappear off for a while you’ll all keep the conversation going.

We are of good cheer here.

Bookhound has made excellent progress with all the post-bereavement bureaucracy from afar, following his dad’s death, and one lovely thing is the arrival of a box full of old photos. Not only those he’d sent his parents of our family but plenty from his childhood too. We’ve had some lovely reminders of days we’d almost forgotten about and it all makes me realise how vital real photos are. I hope we don’t lose the art of that in the world of digital. Remember how exciting it was when you picked up your folder of photos from the chemist, or they arrived in the post. I’ve started getting photos printed again this last year as well as doing a couple of photo books. 

Watching world events and reading fiction don’t seem compatible right now. History seems much more prescient and interesting, so I have happily slouched towards Bethlehem with Joan Didion’s essays from the 1960s and found myself wondering  whether she had a crystal ball. So much still seems so relevant. I’ve also preordered Frostquake by Juliet Nicolson, about the seismic winter of 1962-3, because it’s etched in my memory as a nine-year old, and I’m interested to revisit it almost sixty years later. I can’t think why because reading the synopsis it sounds far grimmer than I remember, but nevertheless we all survived that upheaval in the same way we’ll survive this one...

On Boxing Day 1962, when Juliet Nicolson was eight years old, the snow began to fall. It did not stop for ten weeks. The drifts in East Sussex reached twenty-three feet. In London, milkmen made deliveries on skis. On Dartmoor 2,000 ponies were buried in the snow, and starving foxes ate sheep alive.

It wasn't just the weather that was bad. The threat of nuclear war had reached its terrifying height with the recent Cuban Missile Crisis. Unemployment was on the rise, de Gaulle was blocking Britain from joining the European Economic Community, Winston Churchill, still the symbol of Great Britishness, was fading. These shadows hung over a country paralysed by frozen heating oil, burst pipes and power cuts.

And yet underneath the frozen surface, new life was beginning to stir. A new breed of satirists threatened the complacent decadence of the British establishment. A game-changing band from Liverpool topped the charts, becoming the ultimate symbol of an exuberant youthquake. Scandals such as the Profumo Affair exposed racial and sexual prejudice. When the thaw came, ten weeks of extraordinary weather had acted as a catalyst between two distinct eras.

From poets to pop stars, shopkeepers to schoolchildren, and her own family's experiences, Juliet Nicolson traces the hardship of that frozen winter and the emancipation that followed. That spring, new life was unleashed, along with freedoms we take for granted today.

New craft projects have eluded me for now, but I’ve settled down with the hexagon quilt and a determination to get it finished. There is a flow to hand quilting to the accompaniment of the radio (I’m still enjoying Scala) which somehow sends the world and the weather (rain, mud, ever such a lot of it) packing for a while.

And so here we are, almost into February, the day when the light floods back is on the horizon. All the bulbs I planted are peeking through and the snowdrops are up and running out along the lane...doesn’t seem five minutes since we stopped at that little church on Dartmoor last year, St Raphael, Huccaby, to look at the drifts of snowdrops.

Please do keep the conversation going in comments...

What you are reading, making, eating, writing, sewing, sowing, planting or doing generally...

Recommends for others...

And take heart, I think we’ll all be back out in the world soon.

 

Pleasings...

'Relentlessly Optimistic of Devon Here', let's focus on good things shall we.

Do you know whenever I look at this picture I can still feel that little owlet's plumpness and its heart beating, and the softness of those downy feathers. Our barn owl is still in residence and has taken to perching on the summerhouse verandah where we have a delightful spattered sea of white guano and heaps of pellets.

I hope you are all keeping chins up and looking upwards too There's a big sky to be seen out there, and the sun is making its way back to us (sorry Southern H. it's our turn next) though truth be told it's been freezing grey fog here all week so a lot of imagination and pretending required.

This was ages ago. I hope it's still there...

Firstly, a huge thank you for all your wonderful messages this week. I can't say its been easy dealing with so much from afar, and I suspect if Bookhound spends one more hour on the phone trying to sort something the thing will become welded to his ear. Everyone is working from home so access is limited, and as you can imagine there is a mass of 'stuff' to sort when someone dies 350 miles away.

Forgive me if I'm not around much for a week or two more...I've barely picked up a book but I am listening to Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (loving it) and I am making myself settle down with some sewing each day.

And it's time to think about the other sort of sowing too.

Did I say I'm going large on sweet peas this year? The autumn sown seeds are already up and growing in the cold greenhouse.

Father-in-law was a great gardener in his day, a real expert at sweet peas and a member of the Sweet Pea Society.  I have benefited from inheriting a couple of electric propagators from his greenhouse so I plan to get my next batch of seeds started any day. I discovered Roger Parsons and the National Collection at Bracklesham Bay online and ordered a variety of seeds from his catalogue. I also treated myself to his book so I'm not messing this year...straight stems and lots of blooms.

I fancy a dedicated trench with cane supports and will enjoy watching Bookhound dig it while I supply tea and cake...he doesn't actually know about it yet, but might do now.

So now I'm realying on ALL of you. At least one Pleasing each if you can possibly manage it to cheer us all along. Among the other great achievements of my life at the moment are ...

Getting dressed before 11am...

Being bothered to wash the kitchen floor...

Not falling asleep in front of the fire before 4pm...

Hold tight everyone, we're getting through this. All will be well eventually.

Now over to you...

 

 

 

 

Farewell 2020...

Well all I can say is goodbye 2020 and please 2021 will you be nicer to us. I want to say good riddance but in a way I also want to say, well, thanks for the life lessons. 

I suspect we've all learned a lot through these tough times. Not only the value of treasured friendships and taking nothing for granted, but also recalibrating the things that matter, sifting them out from the things that matter much less.

Maybe we've got things done that we never expected to, maybe we haven't. 

Maybe we've just stayed afloat and that's plenty to be proud of.

Maybe we lost loved ones...

Bookhound's very independent father, aged ninety, died of Covid, 350 miles away from us, on Wednesday afternoon after a torrid month of worry in the run up. Bookhound and his brother couldn't be there, and can't be there now, making the sadness of what so many families have been through very real for us too. All you can do is be incredibly grateful to those NHS staff who cared for him and fought for him on our family's behalf. This has been devastatingly sad for so many and our hearts go out to any of you who may have found yourselves in a similar situation. 

But the vaccine cometh. and I'm predicting that by the time my sweet peas go in the ground things will be perking up nicely. We are doing our bit as part of the 150,000 homes ONS Household Survey, chosen randomly by postcode, and have been tested about eight times so far which makes us feel we are playing our own small part. 

I've planted tubs (and more tubs) of bulbs for spring loveliness and already first shoots are appearing. If I could remember what I bought that would be good, but as I can't we have surprises in store. I remember thinking back in the autumn these green shoots would be more important than ever and I wasn't wrong. 

So anyway, a huge thank you for your company this year gone by, thank you to those who kindly donate to me here (very much appreciated), and thank you for your support of the Think People Think Story Christmas fund raiser. Thanks to Covid restrictions Ugandans have found themselves without work, living day to day and without NHS, savings or back up, so this has made a real difference. From March through to December Tommy's projects have funded 33,756 meals overall... astonishing.

'The sale of 37 BOREHOLE TINS in our shop originally budgeted for 185 Christmas dinners but in true African style over 400 children arrived across the two teams and enjoyed rice, beans, cabbage and soda'

Here is the village enjoying their Christmas dinner...

And congratulations to Sally, owner of tin four who won the prize draw.

I know plenty of you enjoy visiting here, but this has always been a wonderful place for me to come too, and, as I scribble, to feel in touch with a friendly and populated corner of the world. We live in a very beautiful real corner of the world but safe to say it's sparsely populated, not a lot of passing traffic or neighbours to go out and clap with, or sing with, so at times it could feel lonely were we not used to it and happy with it. And we do know how fortunate we have been this year. 

And then we have books.

My reading seems to have been all over the shop this last year but I've reined it in for the New Year with a biography of Rosamond Lehmann and I shall follow it up with more of her fiction soon. My last read of 2020 has been The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham...what on earth was I thinking. Last read when I was about fourteen but still a brilliant book, and so much that resonates about threats and panic and human nature, the ability to deny danger and how people cope when that danger becomes real. Written in 1953 this is a book that has certainly stood the test of time so I shall revisit more by John Wyndham...Chocky, The Midwich Cuckoos et al. I'm also listening to The Owl Service by Alan Garner (in the bath) and Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith while I sew. I'm back on hexagons, have a small sampler wall hanging on the go, and larger hexagon quilt to finish hand quilting and the Knot Garden is also finished and ready for quilting, so plenty of projects to see me through to that day of bright light in February.

And so here's wishing you and yours blessings a-plenty for 2021. I think we all deserve a surfeit of them, don't you.

FOOTNOTE: Due to this week's events I might be a bit out of step here for a week or so. My apologies if comments go unanswered for a day or two, please do talk amongst yourselves as usual. I'll be back in the swing of things very soon so don't go away.

Wishing you...

...a very Merry Christmas and the best of days that we can have given the constraints. 

I’m so sorry for those who have had plans curtailed and changed at the last minute and if anyone is going to be alone rest assured you’re not and we’re here. Please do stop by and chat in comments if you want to, I’ll be dropping in during the day as usual as it gets me out of the washing up...just got to go and check the scribbles etc.

Meanwhile the twinkly fireplace (and clome oven) in the kitchen has been a triumph and we plan to keep it going (minus the Christmas deccies after Twelfth Night) until the light proper returns.