dovegreyreader scribbles

Not all those who wander are lost...

I've been on some amazing journeys to far off places (from my armchair) so far this year.

Underland (with Robert Macfarlane),  Doggerland (Time Song by Julia Blackburn), Antarctica (Erebus by Michael Palin) and I'm currently in the middle of a really surprising and very exciting journey through the audio book of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien and Middle Earth are synonymous with the Tinker. It was his most favourite book alongside anything by Charles Dickens, and which he had read at least twenty times, and though I've read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring several times I've never made it onto the other two. I famously took one in my rucksack on our Silver Wedding Eurorail trip and deserted it in Barcelona (along with The Secret History by Donna Tartt ) as a completely wrong holiday reading choice. Then we went to see the films with the Tinker and I really didn't feel the need to bother with more...until recently.

Robert Macfarlane mentioned that he was going to start reading The Lord of the Rings to his six-year-old son and I suddenly remembered how much my dad had also loved his cassette version. I think it may have become a shared escape when my mum's confusion increased and their social world narrowed down; they could both listen to it, and whilst my mum would be soothed by the cadence and rhythm of the words, my dad would be enchanted and deeply engrossed in the story, as am I. Every time I see this box on the shelf, because it's become a family heirloom that none of would ever part with, I think of them.

I am listening to a newer version (via Audible) narrated by Rob Inglis and have nothing but praise and admiration for the joy, excitement and sensitivity he brings to the book. He sings the songs, he does all the voices superbly and creates the characters much as I imagine them to be. Tom Bombadil, larger and jollier than life, Strider/ Aragorn as serious and measured as he needs to be, Gandalf, wizard supreme and all the lovely hospitable hobbits, always ready for their next meal. Together we have some exciting adventures ahead and I am making any excuse I can to listen.

All that is gold does not glitter

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

I suspect the entire Lord of the Rings 'thing' might be adored by some and loathed by others and that is entirely understandable, but I would still be interested to know of your encounters with the book or the film, and your thoughts about it...for good or ill.

 

 

Summer's Lease...

I've been reading, in step with the year, The Wood by John Lewis-Stempel. I love his writing, his observations and above all, as a farmer, his pragmatism about life in the countryside. It's an outlook that chimes with mine. much as Juliet Blaxland did with The Easternmost House. However John and I had a minor disagreement on August 1st.

Having pointed out that it was Lammas Day, the day when traditionally the hay is safely gathered in and the cattle are allowed out on the newly-shorn grass, and my having duly noted that, whilst the owlets slept snug in their branwolery, the cattle were indeed out in the back field, and in all the twenty-five years we've lived here I had no idea that this was a done thing specifically on August 1st...

and then, having expressed his dislike for the 'lassitude' of August, John said this...

'On the lane-side hedge, the ladders of goosegrass are still in place, but grey with weariness and dirt. The cow parsley and hogweed, dry and gone to seed...

And you just know summer's lease is finished.'

'Noooooooo....' I cried before shifting into complete denial that it was so. In fact that very morning I had opened the curtains to see the particular mist that somehow heralds not sweltering heat but a pivotal point in the year, that sense that the year is turning its face to autumn, but I had decided to ignore it. 

I love August, wonderful memories of bringing our firstborn home from hospital and realising she wasn't a puppy and we were now parents. My first batch of terry nappies fluttering on the line, that sort of thing...

The greenhouse full of scarlet geraniums and glowing marigolds...

The swallows busy feeding their second brood on the front veranda...

Enjoying our share of the Painted Lady butterfly once-every-ten-years hordes that have arrived across the UK...

Lazy days when it is perfectly allowed to spread the quilt on the grass behind the summer house and be a little bit idle...even read a book all morning...

Anyway I'm refusing to believe that summer's lease is finished, or that the evenings are getting slightly shorter, because I want a lot more of summer yet before I am prepared to surrender. I'm all for a bit of lassitude me.

That said we are very happily busy with Tinker's Cott bookings through to October (a few vacancies in early September if anyone fancies a few days in the country, when I declare it will still be summer)

and, as the garden loses its early shape, the dahlia bed with its hedge of cosmos in the cottage garden (god bless the Tinker, my Dad, for starting us off on this dahlia craze) is coming into its own and looks beautiful from the Tinker's Cott kitchen window (that's the shed behind....not Tinker's Cott). I added another six new dahlia varieties this year along with a crowd-planting of those I had grown from seed and a row of sunflowers along the back. The bed is bursting at the seams with flowers and buds that will hopefully see us through to first frost, maybe even some first prizes at the Village Show because we have two trophies to defend. 

I'm majoring on pom-poms this year...here are Wine Eyed Jill, Genova and Little Robert 

In the Owlet Department we have had our first sighting of all three owlets peeking out from the box together and have been watching them learn to fly. I'm also in denial about the fact that eventually they will leave to find new homes (though the parents may stay) or be prey to any number of hazards out there. Can you believe that we take the rotary washing line down every evening for fear of finding a tangled owlet trapped in it the next morning, and my current concern is wondering how they learn not to get their feathers wet, other than to get their feathers wet, survive and think 'I won't do that again.'  So we are just enjoying them for as long as they decide to be here and as I am writing this, it is dark and I can hear them 'talking' to each other across the garden...

In fact, living here, along a beautiful country lane miles from the bustle, it's quite easy to be in denial about just about anything, so I'm making the most of this eternal summer and will be ready for autumn at a time of mine own choosing.

Over to you, how is the lassitude of August shaping up where you are...

Anything you particularly like (or loath) about August...

Have the Painted Ladies arrived with you yet...

 

 

 

 

Owlets & a summer intermission

My apologies for not catching up with replies to all your comments on 'Sisters'. I will, I will, because there is so much I want to add to all your suggestions, and thank you for them, but this Owl Watching lark is all-consuming right now because the owlets started to emerge on Sunday. This seemed very apt because we had been reliving the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing all weekend and being sixteen again when suddenly there it was...one small step for owlet, one giant leap for owlkind (sorry, we just couldn't stop ourselves) and we've almost called it Apollo, or Buzz, or something, except we promised ourselves we absolutely wouldn't name and claim them...but all the same...

It's become a habit over the last three months, to glance up at the pole box wherever I am, either indoors or outdoors, so knock me down with an owl feather when I just happened to look up and there it was...

 

We reckon this must be the oldest and largest owlet so they've made great progress towards fledging in the three weeks since they were weighed and checked..

If all goes according to age and size the next one to find itself able to jump up and out of the box should be the one I held...

I'll stop by with owlet updates and brief posts through August but am going to put book thoughts on hold until September when you are all back from your holidays.

I have a fabulous stack of books read, enjoyed and to share with you including...

Under the Rock by Benjamin Myers

King of Dust by Alex Woodcock

The Remedies by Katharine Towers

Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters by Sarah Watling

Constellations by Sinead Gleeson

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Photographer st Sixteen by George Szirtes

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

They will all come with a recommend but On Chapel Sands is the one that had me gripped start to finish, so if anyone else reads it we will have plenty to talk about. This summary from You Know Where...

"In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them at home. It was another fifty years before she even learned of the kidnap.

The girl became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet of the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. So many puzzles remained to be solved. Cumming began with a few criss-crossing lives in this fraction of English coast – the postman, the grocer, the elusive baker – but soon her search spread right out across the globe as she discovered just how many lives were affected by what happened that day on the beach – including her own. 

On Chapel Sands is a book of mystery and memoir. Two narratives run through it: the mother’s childhood tale; and Cumming’s own pursuit of the truth. Humble objects light up the story: a pie dish, a carved box, an old Vick’s jar. Letters, tickets, recipe books, even the particular slant of a copperplate hand give vital clues. And pictures of all kinds, from paintings to photographs, open up like doors to the truth. Above all, Cumming discovers how to look more closely at the family album – with its curious gaps and missing persons – finding crucial answers, captured in plain sight at the click of a shutter."

I was awake into the wee small hours finishing it.

Meanwhile I hope you all have lovely summer hols.

Anyone off somewhere nice, or are you stay-cationing like us...

And what are you planning to read...

I am now reading Scoop and maybe more by Evelyn Waugh after the surprise that was Brideshead Revisited, and can't resist when respected Twitterati declare 'a book of the decade' so will be wading into Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

How about you...

 

 

 

 

 

Invitation to the Waltz ~ Rosamond Lehmann

Susan Hill has been urging me to read Rosamond Lehmann for months now and I can't quite believe that I had never read her before when I finally picked up Invitation to the Waltz. Published in 1932 but set in 1920 it has been a hugely enjoyable read, the perfect foil to some uber modern novels of late.

It is her birthday and seventeen-year-old Olivia, woken by her sister Kate the svelte natural beauty, prepares for her day...the family breakfast at The Lodge with her parents, her sister and her young brother James. The table, the presents, the good wishes, the slight self-consciousness about opening gifts and appearing delighted with them even if not,  and all set against the backdrop of the house so perfectly described by Rosamond Lehmann.

Olivia's parents give her a length of startling red dress fabric (chosen by Kate) which she takes round to Miss Robinson the dress maker to be made into something suitable for the dance. Both sisters have been invited to the evening at the Spencer's grand neighbouring estate. Themes of class, the vulnerability of women and the instability of their lives quickly become apparent, and with it the unspoken sequelae of the war... a dire shortage of available men. In contrast there is a surfeit of grieving needy women along with gentlewomen; spinsters living in reduced circumstances and scraping a living. Everyone is struggling in their own way, especially the mothers who are frequently portrayed as both selfish and possessive, controlling their daughters by various means, whether through illness or emotional blackmail, in order to keep at least one of them nearby. Yet still no mention of the war.

There are splendid contrasts between the social classes. Olivia's family have clearly fallen on harder times and a rather creepy uncle lives with them which adds to the difficulties, whilst nearby live the happy-go-lucky Wainwright family, the chimney sweep and his wife with eight children and counting. And then I remembered that I had read another book by Rosamond Lehmann, a novella entitled The Gypsy's Baby because the Wainwrights are surely the trial run for the Wyatt family.

The dance becomes the focal point for Olivia and Kate and it becomes apparent it is one of the few social opportunities for the girls to meet and socialise with men, but with it comes the trauma of Olivia's unfilled dance card and the misunderstandings with the men. It begs the thought that those men who have survived the war are damaged both emotionally and physically, and as this becomes increasingly apparent through the evening so Rosamond Lehmann slowly filters in the details about the war. Allowances are made for the men's unusual and exuberant behaviour whilst the women must adhere to the rules. Suddenly the unspoken is unleashed as Olivia remembers her own version of the war.

I knew very little about Rosamond Lehmann but more urging from Susan and I ordered the biography by Selina Hastings which I can't wait to read.  Born in 1901, the Oxford DNB has Rosamond down as tall, beautiful with almond-shaped eyes, a firm mouth and a warm impulsive manner, which all sounds like a green light for trials and tribulations to come. A lengthy affair with C.Day Lewis, who then goes off and marries Jill Balcon leaving Rosamond deeply traumatised, suggests I am not wrong.

Lots more about Rosamond Lehmann to come but if you have read her books, which I feel sure some of you have, please do share thoughts in comments.

I'm very late to this particular party but what a fine discovery. 

 

Sisters

I'd have loved a sister and spent a good proportion of my childhood praying/begging for at least one. I grew up with a brother, male cousins, male sons of my parents' friends and had to go out and find a girl-friend to swap Judy and Bunty comics with. That said, if there was a single upside to losing my brother when I was twenty-one it was that I gained a very lovely and special sister-in-law who I am still very lucky to have in my life. Mind you, I'm sure there are plenty of people who may not be as close to their sisters as they would wish, or as the rest of us sister-less folk might assume happens naturally.

But a new book came my way via the Literary Review and a trip to Waterstones and it's all made me think how many books I have on my shelves about famous sisters. The book in question is Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters, Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. This from the 'blurb'...

'From the beginning of their lives, the Olivier sisters stood out: surprisingly emancipated, strikingly beautiful, markedly determined, and alarmingly 'wild'. Rupert Brooke was said to be in love with all four of them; D. H. Lawrence thought they were frankly 'wrong'; Virginia Woolf found them curiously difficult to read.

The sisters seemed always to be one step ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought by some to be damaging to ovaries. Noel became a doctor; Daphne a pioneering teacher; Margery's promising trajectory was shot down by mental illness; Brynhild, the great beauty of the four, excelled as a Bloomsbury hostess yet gave it up for love and a life of uncertainty.

In this intimate, sweeping biography, Sarah Watling brings the sisters in from the margins, tracing lives that span colonial Jamaica, the bucolic life of Victorian progressives, the frantic optimism of Edwardian Cambridge, the bleakness of two world wars, and a host of evolving philosophies for life over the course of the twentieth century.

Noble Savages is a compelling portrait of sisterhood in all its complexities, which rediscovers the lives of four extraordinary women within the varied fortunes of the feminism of their times, while illuminating the battles and ethics of biography itself.

I've finished the book (splendid, more thoughts soon but I definitely commend it to the house) and it has all got me thinking just what a fruitful source sisters are for biographies. A quick run around my shelves and I'd found these without really trying and I'm sure there are more because I haven't even gone near Bloomsbury Corner or the Bronte Shelf...

A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders : The Macdonald sisters ...Alice (Kipling) Georgiana (Burne- Jones) Agnes (Poynter) and Louisa (Baldwin) who all started life among the ranks of the lower middle classes but would marry a poet, a painter, the President of the Royal Academy and a Prime Minister. I haven't read this but I will soon.

The Sisters - The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary Lovell. Jessica, Debo, Nancy, Diana and Unity.

Four Sisters - The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport. Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and Helen's book breathes light and voices into their world. 

The Wild Wyndhams - Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton. Mary, Madeleine and Pamela, surrounded by the work of the Pre-Raphaelities, a family famed for its 'Bohemian closeness and whose lives 'were intertwined with some of the most celebrated and scandalous figures of their day.

If I looked harder I could probably find more but I'm going to leave further 'sisterly' reading suggestions to you...

Meanwhile just to balance things up I thought I'd put together a pile of books off my shelves about brothers...

Perhaps you have some suggestions there too...

 

 

 

Gallimaufry of life (mostly)

I don't know where to start...cricket...tennis...Grand Prix, but wasn't Super Sunday just what the doctor ordered if you are lovers of sport, as we both are. We've only just recovered having not watched cricket since it went to pay-per-view. My Dad taught me all I ever needed to know to get by at a cricket match but this was something else.

I'm not that into the car whizzing around the circuit however many times but Bookhound is. We had two TVs going and I kept guard over the tennis while he did the Grand Prix and the cricket and we just kept shouting 'Come and watch this...' or ' It's all going Pete Tong' in here'. There were probably easier ways to do all this, like the Kayaker who had all the screens open on his computer at once, but we don't have neighbours so shouting is fine. Anyway, by the end of the cricket we were both chewing the kitchen table and congratulations to England for that win and huge commiserations to New Zealand.  Offspringette was watching in Christchurch too so it felt like the olden days when we'd put the tele in the garden on a summer's day and all sit and watch some great sporting event as a family, except on Super Sunday we were about 40 miles and 12,000 miles apart. 

To cope with the stress through the afternoon I set up an indigo vat...as you do. It's a fair-weather, outdoor occupation and the day was too good to miss. 

I set one up last week and had a lovely time exhausting the blue with some Japanese Shibori and, having since found some good-enough quality cotton in Ikea (54" wide £3 a metre) I was keen to see how it performed. I donned the mask and gloves, measured my five litres of water (three cold, two hot is roughly the right temperature) mixed in the soda ash and the hydros and then sprinkled on the indigo granules and watched the magic happen. The secret to indigo is agitating as little as possible because oxygen is the enemy of the vat, so stirring very gently with a stick and then quickly covering the surface with cling film to let it stew in the sun for an hour before running in to see how Roger and Novak were doing. I think I was rooting for Roger because I wanted to see his two sets of ecstatic twins at the end, but all hail to Novak.

Doesn't that shade of blue make your heart sing, so the answer I think is that the vat and fabric performed splendidly and was well worth the blue grass and the blue hands. Mind you, this is the joy of spring water and garden space I thought as I spread the dripping dippings across the grass to oxidise from green to blue.

I now have a lovely stash to see me into winter projects and lots of ideas as to how I will use the pieces.

On the owlet front all I have to report is that they wake up at about 9.30 pm and start their wheezy calls for food. The parents start to fly in at about 10pm, winging back and forth with delicacies and savoury morsels which ups the noise levels considerably. If this routine holds up we reckon we might see an owlet emerge in a couple of weeks, but meanwhile it has been perfect barn owl weather (warm and dry) and the grass fields have just been cut, so lots of varmints on the loose.

On the garden front it's all gone berserk and we are loving it...

We decided no more weedkillers on the gravel and no more slug pellets and the result is beds of clover buzzing with happy bees and poppies everywhere. We're having some success with coffee grounds on the slug front, which is probably because they don't get a wink of sleep and are too tired to eat anything. The Bee Friendly Meadow seeds from Higgledy Gardens are the success story of the summer, especially now the cornflowers have appeared, along with the 'Solstice' variety sweet peas from The English Sweet Pea Company which I've been picking daily since April, and the dahlia bed with the new Peter Nyssen additions, and the sunflowers, and the ...oh it's all a glorious riotous muddle of flowers.

This is 'Genova', a new and particularly pleasing pom-pom..

On the cat front. I made a 'thing' for the sofa...a sort of log cabin 'thing', out of some Jinny Beyer fabric strips I had cut out about thirty years ago, and spent the years ever since wondering what to do with them. I machine quilted the 'thing' onto a fleece backing and we had bets on how long before Magnus claimed it as home territory.

It was about an hour...

Now I need news from you...what happenings and occurrences do you have to report...

 

 

 

 

 

The Easternmost House ~ Juliet Blaxland

The shortlist for the 2019 Wainwright Prize was announced last week. This the book prize which celebrates the best books about nature, the outdoors and UK travel 

 

Time Song by  Julia Blackburn
The Easternmost House by  Juliet Blaxland

Our Place by  Mark Cocker

Thinking On My Feet by Kate Humble

Underland by Robert Macfarlane
Wilding by Isabella Tree

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

 

It's a list I always look forward to not least because it's my favourite genre, so perhaps there's a chance I'll be ahead of the game on the reading...I never am. With Time Song by Julia Blackburn and Underland by Robert Macfarlane under my belt, but none of the other five, I turned to The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland. In a way it connected seamlessly with Julia Blackburn's book, set as they are on the East Anglian coast and concerned as they both are with land disappearing under the sea.

 

By rights it has to be a source of great anxiety when you know your house is on the brink of disappearing into the North Sea, but Juliet Blaxland quickly puts this into the wider perspective of a husband serving in Afghanistan and I would also suggest the fact that the house is rented not owned. The financial loss of the house will ultimately be someone else's burden which perhaps allows Juliet Baxland to focus more on the spatial and emotional losses instead.

 

'The portrait of a place that soon will no longer exist. It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has gone.' 

 

It's as if the house has been fostered until of an age. This felt like a studied emotional attachment that knows its bounds, will know when to let go and thus comes with less baggage, anxiety, worry or fear allowing for a clearer-eyed look at it all.

 

And I loved it for that.

 

Living as we do in the countryside, away from mains drainage and water, in the middle of farmland and a lot of wildlife, and with a son who is a gamekeeper, we have also come to learn, as has Juliet Blaxland, that it is all a question of balance requiring a breadth of understanding, pragmatism, compromise and common sense along with a realistic outlook, and The Easternmost House has it by the shovel-full. Juliet and I agreed on just about everything from living with inclement weather...you just have to accept and brace for it which we do. From foxes to pheasants, from restrictive diets  to hay-fever, the impact of 'ecological bad news', the sirens of doom and the vested interests involved in its dissemination, just how useful rural skills might be one day and what we would be both do when confronted by mile after mile of sawn timber 'unloaded' from a cargo ship and washed ashore on the beach as far as the eye could see... Juliet and I were in complete and generally optimistic and hopeful accord.  

 

Each month begins with a poem, each a perfect choice, some I knew, some I didn't and one in particular that I didn't know and now love, an extract from God of the Open Air by Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)...

 

These are the things I prize
       And hold of dearest worth:
       Light of the sapphire skies,
       Peace of the silent hills,
 Shelter of forests, comfort of the grass,
 Music of birds, murmur of little rills,
 Shadow of clouds that swiftly pass,
       And, after showers,
       The smell of flowers
   And of the good brown earth,—
And best of all, along the way, friendship and mirth.

 

 

Month by month the bounty of the land is recorded...the wildlife, the natural resources, the weather, the local traditions and way of life, and the practicalities, of which there are many. And also recorded the measurement of cliff loss. Both elegy and eulogy, Juliet suggests that living with erosion has been a life-changing experience. As the land shifts so do perspectives, tolerance increases and what rises to the surface are the things that really matter and, in a less urgent way, I can understand that.

 

It's been an interesting year for us with our resident barn owls. Suddenly no spraying of weeds on the path, not even an organic slug pellet in sight. This year, thanks to a local establishment I have used buckets of coffee grounds. It smells like Costa around the garden and the slugs seem to hate it. Either that or they can't sleep a wink and are too tired to even bother with my dahlias. We've allowed much more of the garden to go semi-wild rather than flogging ourselves over immaculate edges and 24/7 weeding (this is harder than you might think) mowing a path through the grass and daisies in the orchard,  keeping the lawns in shape and leaving the rest. We have been rewarded with the sight of the owls swooping from the nest box into the long grass and returning with dinner and one less creature for Magnus to catch. Poppies, borage, nigella and aquilegia are springing up on the paths along with islands of clover that the bees adore. Juliet Blaxland sees something similar on the cliff edges, as once ploughed land is allowed to naturalise, and in doing so ably achieves her aim of making the cottage on the cliff and its surroundings as familiar to the reader as it is to her. 

 

I understood this conclusion exactly...

 

'This place has quietly taught us how to carry its still small voice of calm within us, always and wherever we go...'

The Easternmost House an excellent read and one most deserving of its Wainwright Prize short listing.

 

And oh alright, here's another picture for you...one very clever Mrs Barn Owl. Wild and free and very busy feeding her noisy brood.