dovegreyreader scribbles

A Garden From a Hundred Packets of Seed ~ James Fenton

I'm sitting here at my desk staring out at this...

B

The greenhouse swaddled and bandaged up in a valiant attempt to protect it from Storm Erik and any more Big Freezes, us having been a little too late to defend against the ravages of Storm Whatever-The-Last-One-Was. The door shunted ajar and the gale took out several of the back windows, now repaired. It's not so much the repairing, nuisance though it is, it's more the equation of number of pieces of glass x distance travelled across the grass = infinity. 'Someone' puts the gloves on and goes over it with a fine tooth comb and a bin liner whilst thinking about the twelve paws that live here and the vet's bill for their repair.

Anyway, before this late night bandaging session I sensibly nipped in and watered my sweet peas, sown in October because they are streaking away...

I've discovered something called a Solstice variety, apparently less reliant on hours of daylight before they will flower so I'm hoping for some early joy. I'm a martyr to them mind you, pinching out, staking, covering with thermal fleece and generally cossetting them along into spring. But it will be worth it won't it...

A Garden From a Hundred Packets of Seeds by James Fenton, and published by Notting Hill Editions in one of their beautiful linen-bound pocket-sized books, arrived at exactly the right moment and I am very grateful to them for sending it along for my perusal.

Do you know the moment...

The one when your mind suddenly starts thinking about garden plans for the coming year. 

Whilst the perennials are doing nicely and plenty is now self-seeding I have a long herbaceous border to fill and there's nothing like a few annuals.

Remember my endeavours to persuade Aquilegia to like it here. Almost at weed-proportions in the cottage garden we left behind to move here twenty-five years ago, but somehow a little reluctant to set down roots again. My diligence paid off, in fact James Fenton may have hit the nail on the proverbial with this...

'What really gets a regular garden going is not so much a plan as a craze, or a series of overlapping crazes. And when we are in the grips of a craze, we want to know everything there is to be known about a plant...'

You have all been at the mercy of my flower crazes over the years... Chrysanthemums, Marigolds, Poppies, Sunflowers, Sweet Peas,  and I am grateful for the indulgence and the advice, as well as the seeds that arrive in the post (thank you Lesley for the dahlia seeds recently).

Last year saw my love affair with dahlias and which I fancy is not yet spent should the Peter Nyssen catalogue arrive in the post. The dahlia bed, established by the Tinker, is currently swathed in a very thick layer of mulch and we hope enjoying the rest. This Arbatex won a first in the Village Show, we have standards to maintain.

The Aquilegia are now hither and yon, though as predicted some of the special varieties ( a result of the craze) have morphed into also-rans, But they are still the prettiest flower and a joy to see in April and May.

Likewise Honesty which flatly refused to do anything where I sowed the seeds, but mysteriously appeared across the other side of the garden, around the steps to the summer house, where I hadn't sown any at all, and then colonised with no help whatsoever... 

Incidentally, the summer house (and the breathtaking views from same) will be available for our Tinker's Cott guests to book out for an afternoon at no extra cost. It's an idyllic spot with a seating area behind and uninterrupted views of the Tamar Valley, and it would be sad not to share it. 

And so I settled down with A Garden From a Hundred Packets of Seeds and started making lists. Nodding my head sagely in agreement with James Fenton at the plants I recognised and had grown...

No 71 : P.somniferum, which comes in so many forms, single and double. 'Black Peony' is the one I would choose...'

Maybe you remember that single packet of  'Black Peony' seed I bought at the Lost Gardens of Heligan a few years ago...

They were bloomin' marvellous. The best thing was watching them unfurl from their buds each day. I collected seeds from the dried heads, shared them around with friends in their Christmas cards that year, but sadly my sowings came to nought the next year. I'm going to try again because I discovered a better method with poppies last year. Seeds randomly strewn around the garden as usual, but I also grew some in pots and planted them out. A good slosh of water in the hole first and they all thrived.

Forget "bones". Forget "structure". Forget trees, shrubs and perennials.' says James Fenton.

'This is not a book about big projects. It is about thinking your way towards an essential flower garden, by the most traditional of routes : planting some seeds and seeing how they grow.'

As well as the hundred seed suggestions, there is much to hearten here...

'A garden is not a canvas...'

'Design has become a terrible, stupid and expensive tyrant. The emphasis here is all on content. Such a flower garden should have the same beauty as an allotment. It says : This is what I feel like having this year.'

Excellent, if you come to visit us expect to see 'what I feel like having this year' along the borders.

On my list of seeds from Ben Ranyard at Higgledy Gardens will be the Earthwalker sunflowers (yes I'm going to be fighting the slugs and snails again), Cosmos in all varieties because they were stellar last year and I'd like to see drifts of blue Cornflowers too. And I’ve just sent for Ben’s Bee-Friendly Wild Flower Meadow mix (£15 post free until Sunday) because I have a hankering to create one again. 

Any more suggestions very welcome... 

And one more thing while I am on the subject of Notting Hill Editions...

Am I the only person not to have discovered their notebooks...

Linen-bound, ribbon marker, pocket-sized, a lined page opposite a plain page with an occasional literary quote to suit the theme of each book, because they come with a stamped cover too ...'Voyage', 'Nostalgia' or 'Epiphany'.

But back to flowering annuals...what do you recommend...

 

 

Munich ~ Robert Harris

When the Gamekeeper broke his leg back-along, and was eventually whisked off to the operating theatre for some running repairs requiring the contents of the Screwfix catalogue, I nipped into Plymouth for a book browse...as you do whilst under duress. I chose a couple of what I would call Easy Readers, which is not to demean the quality, but I reckoned I needed page turners, and one of them was Munich, the other was Force of Nature by Jane Harper. As it happens, what followed, in terms of support, keeping company (we did a lot of summer bird watching, happy days) and six x dog walking x twice a day, didn't leave much time for reading, so I have only just read Robert Harris's book.

I was an early adopter of Robert Harris, reading Fatherland on publication back in 1992 (how long ago?? Only twenty-seven years) and swooping on Enigma and Archangel in 1995 and 1998. I was back on full time case-load health visiting, work and family meant limited reading time, but I remember all three as being excellent reads that did the rounds of the community nursing office, so can recommend them if Robert Harris is new to you.

Then everything went Roman in Harris-World and I lapsed... and you are all now going to tell me to read them I just know it.. Pompeii, Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator anyone...

I caught up last year with the audio version of Conclave a terrific listen, about the choosing of a new Pope, and which I see is the Number One Best Seller in the 'Catholic Popes' category on You Know Where...

'They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals.'

and goodness me did they,

But, though I still have a few gaps, I'm now up to the minute with Robert Harris and Munich.

I relish a fiction read that takes a known historical event and giving an imaginative but entirely plausible outing for what might have been happening behind the scenes. I enjoyed Every Man for Himself recently, Beryl Bainbridge's fictional insights on the sinking of the Titanic, and in the case of Munich, Neville Chamberlain's negotiations with Hitler in September 1938. Two former friends, old university acquaintances, Legat and Hartmann are supposedly batting for opposite teams in their respective diplomatic entourages, except one of them knows much more than he should, and the consequences of sharing that information could change the course of history. 

Meanwhile Neville Chamberlain is portrayed in a certain sympathetic light too, which I don't think has generally been the case (certainly not in the recent film Darkest Hour), though historians out there please correct me if I'm wrong. It's at moments like this (among many) when I miss being able to nip into the Tinker and ask my primary source for his considered opinion.

A Prime Minister stuck between a rock and a hard place...

Neville Chamberlain doing his level best to avoid the carnage of another conflagration, though sadly it seems he misread Hitler's appetite for exactly that, whilst failing to see that the Fuhrer wasn't a man of his word either.

There is much tension and intrigue until a quietly triumphant and trusting Chamberlain returns, waving what proved to be a meaningless piece of paper with the famous words...

"Peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.”

 Czechoslovakia has been sold down the river and Hitler has plans for Europe, so we all know what the next sentence might be if there was another chapter in the book,

Churchill's legendary riposte...

"You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”

It seems harsh now that I have a different perspective on Chamberlain, but that's politics for you, little room for sympathy.

Along the way plenty of intrigue and tension and I particularly liked the insights (fictional or otherwise) into Mrs Chamberlain, clearly a source of great support to her husband. So a book that started its life here on the scribbles as part of the regular Reading Gallimaufry round-up of recent good reads, and ended up demanding a post of its own.

If you have read Munich, or Conclave or any of the others mentioned I would love to know your thoughts...

And there's the Roman trilogy...should I go there when I am currently holed up in Greece with The Iliad . Lordy lordy, you did warn me, the killing and many ways of... entrails all over the place...

 

We need to talk about... Journals

...journals / diaries, I'm not sure when one word became more fashionable than the other, and now there's something called 'bullet journaling' which is very big business. I'm envious of those who sketch each day or event (and here are some brilliant ones on Instagram) or create beautifully artistic entries. It isn't quite what I strive or have the time for, though I have now succumbed to the joys of washi tape for a bit of added interest.

But hold on, I'm feeling a bit smug because 2018 was the first full and complete year that I have EVER written a journal entry every single day.

2004 /2005 don't really count. They were the as-and-when years, but both include everything I read alongside life events, and I note there was a lot of testing of fountain pens and inks various (Diamine a disaster of bleeding through Moleskine pages). There are pictures of afternoon tea in the Pump Room in Bath, a visit to Sylvia Plath's grave in Heptonstall, I was on Open Book talking to Mariella about fiction written by and for women of a certain age (it was all very controversial at the time) , Newbooksmag published a piece I had written on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and all of this I would have forgotten.

Then of course 2006, dovegreyreader scribbles happened and things seemed to end up on a screen, not handwritten on the page, and before I knew it another eleven years had flown by with a succession of failed journal attempts. I've had some help this last year mind you, in the form of Robert Macfarlane's Word of the Day over on Twitter.

7am on the dot there it is, a new word with its meaning, source, application and variable contexts and an image to illustrate, and the 'likes' rack up with astonishing speed. It would seem I am not alone in grasping the word and applying it to my day, or a moment I have known. Tweeters various and many will add their own understanding or experience of the 'word' and fascinating threads will follow, often with images from their own lives. 

Lacking the early-morning wherewithal to know quite how to start my daily diary entry...

'It's a bit gloomy outside...'

'Really nice sunrise...'

Or the discipline to return to it at night with a report on the day, I started to use of the Word of the Day as my first entry, pondered it, often found a memory surfacing, or stumbled across an example of the word through the day, or threw it into a sentence and realised I now had the spring board from which to build the sort of things I wanted my daily journal to be for. 

Nor are the words all 'primroses and otters' , no indeed, there is plenty of meat on the word bone to stop any downward descent into sentimentalism or nostalgia. Many in recent weeks have been extremely pertinent to the political treacle through which we are wading; a word will often tell it slant, reflecting an event or a moment, and the inference is never missed over on the twitter-sphere.

That said I've pulled out a word from last year because it demonstrates perfectly what so often happens..

"kusumashayaripaatin" I don't actually think I've quoted this Word of the Day since April 5th 2018, but I well remember they day and the image that flew unbidden into my mind...

It was the Tinker's birthday and I thought of this...

And then that sun halo happened...

And I noticed it because I was looking, and maybe because I was looking for meaning and signs too. I went for a wander across to the village church and noticed a whole lot more along the way. I think what I'm trying to say is that the 7am diary entry habit, and the thinking that follows, has all made me more perceptive and in unexpected ways.

Of course it could all have gone off the rails each time Robert Macfarlane took a well-earned Twitter break, but on those occasions, minus my prop, I realise that by now I have trained myself well and used my own Memory of the Day instead and have quite surprised myself with the innovation.

All this might seem like terribly over-wrought and introspective angst about something that should be so simple, I mean Virginia Woolf made it look so easy and so fascinating, whilst I have long struggled with the spectre of the Deadly Boring Diary which might be why I have lapsed repeatedly. The crunch comes now, sitting here at my desk and daring to read back through 2018, and I am pleasantly surprised to find how much more attentive and observant something so easy as thinking about a single word has made me.

There are quotes from poetry I've enjoyed, a lot of Mary Oliver, RIP Mary, how thrilled I am to have found you...

Details about books read or in progress until I decided to ship that all across to a Reading Journal...

Details about flowers, arriving swallows, walks on Dartmoor, walks to the woods, amazing skies, moments, events, occurrences, but all bolstered by that daily word.

I know we've talked about this before but please do share your journalising (made up word) tendencies if you want to...

And which journal do you use ...I still use the small, lined Moleskine for day-to-day even though the paper quality seems to be deteriorating. The Kayaker bought me my current bright yellow one for my birthday, for winter cheer. A large page requires large thoughts and that phases me a little too much, but I'm on the brink of going across to the plain version. I have suddenly discovered the unfettered joy of the plain page.

 

 

 

 

Before Wallis - Edward VIII's Other Women ~ Rachel Trethewey

First things first, I must now confess to a complete blank on the lineage of the House of Windsor.

What a disgrace.

Well, the early days of the House of Windsor that is, created in 1917 to break with any prior associations with Germany... but who exactly were the brothers and sisters, the children of King George V and Queen Mary?

I've sorted it out now but I can't believe I had never really paid attention and understood the place of Dukes of Gloucester and Kent in the grand Windsor scheme of things. To save anyone else the embarrassment, though I feel sure you all know this, here it is ...

The Major Players...

Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David (known as David) born in 1894, the eldest son and heir to the throne. Edward VIII and the one who would abdicate.

Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George born in 1895, known as Bertie, second in line. The man who would be King George VI after the abdication.

The Minor Players...

Mary, the Princess Royal, born in 1897 

Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester born in 1900.

Prince George, (how confusing) Duke of Kent born in 1902.

Prince John, born in 1905 and died in 1919. The 'afflicted' prince and the subject of that brilliant 2003 TV drama, The Lost Prince, by Stephen Poliakoff

Right, so having sorted that out, we can now proceed to Rachel Trethewey's latest and excellent book, Before Wallis - Edward VIII's Other Women. 

From knowing so little beyond Wallis Simpson - divorcee - abdication - bad news, I now know it all thanks to Rachel Trethewey's meticulous but accessible research presented in this completely absorbing read. 

 At just 5ft 7ins tall and weighing nine stone the Prince must have cut an almost diminutive figure but the women of the land fell over themselves to be in the same room as him and he was never short of a mistress or three it would seem. Freda Dudley-Ward and Thelma Furness, along with the lovely Rosemary Leveson-Gower, are the three women whose lives Rachel Trethewey examines in detail and I was fascinated by each one.

But what a sad sort of jack-the-lad Edward was. In the words of his private secretary Tommy Lascelles, who knew him well...

'Edward was so isolated in the world of his own desires that he never felt ' absolute objective affection' for anyone, even his lovers or family.' 

And me, well, I'm in the mood to blame the parents...

Childcare delegated to a nanny who cared obsessively (never taking a day off) for the young prince for the first three years of his life but was revealed to be a cruel and spiteful abuser. Covered in bruises it was discovered that the young prince was pinched mercilessly to make him cry whenever he was taken to see his parents so that he would seem to need his nanny. And who can know what else may have been inflicted on him at such a crucial stage in his life.

And then, when the one and first love of his life, Rosemary Leveson-Gower seems on the brink of accepting a marriage proposal, she is deemed unsuitable because of a taint of unsavoury behaviour and perhaps mental instability within her family (the Duke of Sutherland of Dunrobin Castle) and the King and Queen forbid the match.

Rosemary, a front-line nurse during the First World War. Level-headed and a stabilising influence on the wayward Prince, who can know how different his life might have been had the marriage been approved?

Rosemary would eventually marry Lord Ednam, but how tragic her ultimate demise. Jettisoned into an orchard in the village of Meopham in Kent in 1930 when the plane in which she was travelling home from France disintegrated in mid-air, her pearls poignantly strewn across the ground. Ironically Rosemary had been heading back for a meeting with the architect who was designing the memorial garden for her child Jeremy, who had been killed in a road accident . Reading of such tragedy stayed with me for days, along with all the what-might-have-beens of her life and ultimately the House of Windsor. Rosemary was buried alongside her son at the family home, Himley Hall in Dudley near Birmingham.

Now an events venue I wonder if anyone knows whether the graves are still there somewhere...

Freda, married but frequently conducting a troika of relationships at any one time and definitely the one holding the reins. She would become more of a counsellor and confidante to the Prince as the years progressed and marriage seemed increasingly unlikely, but would be dropped like a stone when Wallis came on the scene.

Thelma, perhaps the most superficial of the mistresses in the Prince's eyes, with limited intelligent conversation but clearly plenty of other desirable attributes. One half of the American Morgan twins, the other, Gloria, would become a Vanderbilt and therein probably exists another complete book.

I was so riveted I didn't take detailed notes, but the narrative ranges far and wide and fascinatingly across 1920's and 30's life for the upper echelons with plenty of intriguing connections of which I knew a little, but not, for example, of the Prince's involvement with the African Happy Valley set. The book's focus is not on Wallis Simpson or the abdication but on the years, the women, and the choices that led up to it and indeed sheds some light on the three women in their own right.

Highly recommended if like me you have a bit of a lacuna about all this, and for those who follow it all in every detail plenty more to discover. 

Meanwhile, I wonder if there is still the appetite out there for reading around the Royals ...

I certainly wouldn’t have considered myself a fan of anything about them from the twentieth, or heaven forfend the twenty-first century so this has been a pleasant surprise, and now I hear mutterings of a good book about Queen Mary...what say you...

 

 

Reckless Daughter - A Portrait of Joni Mitchell ~ David Yaffe

My love for all things Joni has been well-documented on here down the years so I couldn't think how on earth I had missed Reckless Daughter - A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe, published in October 2017, 

And then I knew exactly how, because I had been here with my lovely and completely un-reckless but very adventurous daughter...

I had spent October 2017 in New Zealand with Offspringette, and missed all the articles and publicity. By the time I arrived home it was all about Philip Pullman and The Book of Dust, and it was La Belle Sauvage that would see me through those weeks of jet-lag and the pain of saying au revoir, not Joni. On reflection this is probably a 'good thing' because I was emotional enough at 3am back then without the added layer of listening to Blue.

This time though, Offspringette was here and we had a shared Joni-fest as we sat curled up in the Book Room reading and chatting in the evenings over Christmas and New Year. I'd share some golden nugget about Joni and we'd work our way through some of our favourite tracks.

Born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7th 1943, Joni has ten years on me, and it was this I kept in mind as I re-envisaged my own life in comparison to hers. Ten years my senior, so when I was seventeen and wallowing in Blue, having been desperate for the long straight blond hair, the peachy skin, the voice and the guitar skills, Joni was already twenty seven and had seen plenty of life.

Famed for her legendary open tunings on the guitar (where the guitar is already tuned to a chord) I had no idea this had its origins in Joni's childhood brush with polio. Hospitalised for a year, and visited by her mother only once, the consequences emotionally must have been huge, whilst physically it placed some limitations on her ability to hold down complex guitar chords.

Joni's circle of influence was vast and came as something of a revelation to me, judged, as it would have been at the time (and was) with rather a critical eye and accusations of 'getting around a bit.' How times and attitudes have changed...now I hope we'd be much more inclined to point out that it takes two, so Joni certainly wasn't the only one 'getting around.' Relationships with Leonard Cohen, Dave Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Jackson Brown and then we get to Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty....

Didn't we all think at the time that Carly Simon wrote You're so Vain about Warren Beatty?

It was the world's worst kept secret, hints at the truth finally revealed by Carly Simon in her memoir Boys in the Trees (which I have borrowed from the library for a different perspective on these years) and also about Joni's relationship with Carly's then-husband James Taylor...

'...he told Joni, " You shouldn't call here anymore." Yes, I was relieved that his relationship with Joni, his most recent love before me, was over, but at the same time, how could anyone ever be "over" Joni Mitchell? Joni was brilliant and enchanting...'

It is clear that Carly Simon idolised her new husband but also clear that many women saw Joni as a threat. There were famously prickly encounters with Joan Baez and others, but Joni as brilliant and enchanting is exactly what shines off the pages in this book, though I'll confess I'm too far gone with my lifelong adulation to be objective about this.

But back to Warren and Jack, both tried to woo Joni, both apparently failed.

Reading of Joni's romantic, cultural and musical collaborations was however like reading a catalogue of the music and musicians of my own lifetime...

Bob Dylan...

Eric Clapton...

Mama Cass...

Jose Feliciano..

Joan Baez...

Judy Collins...

Gordon Lightfoot...

and later...

Jimi Hendrix...

Paul Macartney...

Prince...

The list is endless, the connections forming a matrix of mid-to-late twentieth century music with Joni, the 'reckless daughter', at its centre.

As Joni's life is recounted so each album features along with its background story, and this I loved. I have them all, every one, from Song to a Seagull in 1968 to Shine in 2007 and more recently Love Has Many Faces and how good it was to revisit certain tracks.

I Had a King (Song to a Seagull and written about Joni's brief marriage to Chuck Mitchell)

A Case of You (Blue and written with Leonard Cohen in mind)

And of course Little Green (Blue) written about the baby born to Joni and her lover Brad McMath in 1965, and eventually given up for adoption when she realised her lifestyle precluded any pretence at motherhood. This story has an interesting sequel because eventually the 'baby', Kilauren Gibb, would be joyously reunited with her birth mother, though sadly the euphoria of that honeymoon period would fade into disharmony. But Blue remains top of my list of all time favourites. One copy (not mine) did the rounds of the sixth form common room in 1971 and forty-eight years later I still never tire of listening to it.

On that subject...did anyone else hear the programme about River, the track from Blue, on BBC Radio 4 before Christmas...

Perhaps my slight parting of the ways with Joni comes after Hejira.

Maybe I didn't feel quite so in tune with her music after that 1976 album, and for reasons unknown until I read this book. Joni deserts the stage minutes into an 18,000 ticket concert suffering a sort of breakdown, but more of a confrontation with her own dysfunctional self, taking to road trips and anonymity whilst coming to terms with what her life had become. Along the way she tries to resolve her growing drug addiction and turns to a form of Buddhism. Hejira was the result and with its meaning  'escape with honour' seems entirely appropriate. Nothing however would stop Joni's smoking habit of four packets a day, leading to the inevitable alterations in her voice and the loss of several octaves, none of which went unnoticed by the critics.

What emerges is a woman redoubling her efforts, taking no nonsense or direction from anyone, often difficult to work with but forging her own path into the future. There would be more collaborations with the likes of Lionel Richie, Billy Idol, Willie Nelson, Peter Gabriel, Sinead O'Connor and Bryan Adams, and tours with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. Financial worries, a devastating miscarriage, and to some extent what has been revealed as a penchant for reinventing her history in her own eyes would follow, often to the detriment of others along with the onset of mysterious illnesses, all of which David Yaffe attempts to address with a range of interviews in what was for me a fascinating read.

Most recently, and perhaps the most distressing news as time and life march on, was to read that in 2015 Joni had  suffered a brain aneurysm and was discovered unconscious on her kitchen floor, where she had been lying for three days before she was found. After an intense treatment and recovery period  it would seem there have been some improvements but it was all a terrible shock to our systems...to those of us who believe Joni will live for ever.

But as David Yaffe points out in the final paragraph of Reckless Daughter...

'We're captive to the carousel of time,
We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came.'

All Joni fans...you've waited long enough since the last time I asked you, time to declare yourselves once more, and of course your favourite memory, track, album...

 

 

 

Journeys...

Thank you for all the kind and encouraging comments about the Tinker's Cott / dovegreyretreats endeavour...we already have some bookings which is very exciting, and we are really looking forward to our season. Included in any visit is some time to chat about books (and quilts) with me should anyone want to do so (and so far it seems they would like that) and as a separate venture I am hoping to offer a few 'dovegreydays' for small groups in the future.

I envisage a day spent in and around chez dovegrey, with bookish chat in the Book Room, walks along the lane and around some of the places that I have been writing about on here for so long...to the woods for the bluebells, across to the village church for bells of a different sort, down to the Tamar. Maybe an afternoon pot of tea in the summerhouse and a Show & Tell of quilts... just a chance to get away from it all, escape the world and recharge the batteries. Hopefully we will have a very simple website up and running dreckly with more details, but if you think a dovegreyday might be in order please do make contact with us on dovegreyretreats at gmail.com and we will be in touch once we have firmed up plans and dates.

Meanwhile more reading journeys beckon for 2019 and with two completed already I thought I would share those trips I have booked from the armchair.

January has seen me head underground with an advance reading copy of Underland by Robert Macfarlane. The book is under strict review embargo until April 30th but suffice to say I think the world is about to be stunned by the heft and power of this book. When we heard him speak at the North Cornwall Book Festival, Horatio Clare suggested that Underland had the potential to be a latter-day equivalent to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and I am looking forward to hearing Horatio interview Robert at Hay Festival in May. I have Team Underland out here busy reading the book too, so we are going to gather in a cave somewhere for our discussions and will report back.

I surfaced for some fresh air and sky and puffins, yet still beguiled by an acute awareness of what lay beneath, and with my Sea Bands in place set sail for the Shiants with Adam Nicolson and Sea Room (more of which dreckly). I have had a wonderful time there.

Incidentally, do Sea Bands really work?

Feeling hopelessly sick over Moscow on one of my return flights from New Zealand, the very kind woman in the seat next to me said ' Try these,' and immediately slipped them on my wrists. Was it my imagination or did the nausea slowly subside. Anyway, I now wear them as a matter of course, even if it's all in the mind, because I can think of nothing worse than being as sick as on a long haul flight.

My first February journey is Last Train to Hilversum - a journey in search of the magic of radio by Charlie Connelly and published by Bloomsbury. 

'Despite the all-pervading influence of television ninety per cent of people in Britain still listen to the radio, clocking up over a billion hours of listening between us every week. It's a background to all our lives: we wake up to our clock radios, we have the radio on in the kitchen as we make the tea, it's on at our workplaces and in our cars. From Listen With Mother to the illicit thrill of tuning into pirate stations like Radio Caroline; from receiving a musical education from John Peel or having our imagination unlocked by Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; from school-free summers played out against a soundtrack of Radio One and Test Match Special to more grown-up soundtracks of the Today programme on Radio 4 and the solemn, rhythmic intonation of the shipping forecast - in many ways, our lives can be measured in kilohertz...

Part nostalgic eulogy, part social history, part travelogue, Last Train To Hilversum is Connelly's love letter to radio, exploring our relationship with the medium from its earliest days to the present in an attempt to recreate and revisit the world he entered on his childhood evenings on the dial as he set out on the radio journey of a lifetime.'

I bet I'm not the only one who can instantly conjure up the sight of the huge wooden box with the mesh of very tactile golden beige fabric on the front, the crackle and glow, the dials and the little red line that twiddled along the strip of light across the bottom, past all those mysterious words and places, Light Service, Home Service and I'm sure you could go to places like Reykjavik (Rakejarvik to 6 year old me) Warsaw and Prague (Pragyew to six-year-old me) too and of course Luxembourg. Doubtless there will be  reminders of Billy Cotton's Band Show while the Sunday roast was being served, Two Way Family Favourites with Cliff and Jean, and then Sing Something Simple on a Sunday evening with the Cliff Adams Singers (I didn't even have to look that up), the melancholy moment when you knew the weekend was almost over and school beckoned again.

And despite best intentions, nor did I ever get around to reading Attention All Shipping - A journey around the shipping forecast by Charlie Connelly, so what do you think...on with the Sea Bands and set sail on that one too?

 

 

Normal People ~ Sally Rooney

I'll be honest and say that I was all set not to like this book....

Don't ask me to explain it beyond the hype, the wall-to-wall adulation everywhere, the 'new voice for the millenials' tag lines (which frankly made me feel a bit ancient and out of touch) and the fact that my Reading Friend and I had set against it from the off. In her defence I have to say Sally Rooney always sounds slightly bemused by it all when interviewed, maybe even faintly uncomfortable and embarrassed by what (to me) must feel like an enormous burden of responsibility when you're just out there writing books and trying to write another one.

Call us open-minded readers? 

Well we are, and game for a read of anything before we cement the opinions, so, having grimaced and acknowledged our ambivalence, my Reading Friend and I agreed at our last meet-up that we would both read Normal People by Sally Rooney. We don't communicate in-between so I won't know her thoughts for another few weeks, but for what it's worth here are mine.

I started it that same afternoon, this for about the third time having previously baled out over the present tense of the first few pages...'he says'....'she turns'...you know the sort of thing that really annoys us avoiders of present tense fiction unless written by Hilary Mantel, but of course I'm sure you all know what happens next. 

I couldn't put it down, read late into the night, finished it the next day and it's going up on my top shelf as my first Best Book of 2019.

I was subtly and very cleverly drawn into the lives of 'posh' Marianne Sheridan, the studious outsider and 'non-posh' Connell Waldron, the insider, child of a very down-to-earth single mum who cleans for Marianne's family. As Connell arrives at the house to collect his mum so he and Marianne start to talk and the relationship blossoms, though very much in secret. Marianne is the oddball at school, attracting ridicule and a victim of bullying, and Connell must wrestle with his own sense of embarrassment (verging on shame)  at their romantic association. 

Everything is exaggerated by the insecurities of adolescence, the self consciousness, the self-constructed person waiting for the confident adult to emerge, along with that  inbuilt sense of inferiority to peers, all seep through into an addictive and compelling narrative arc that jumps ahead and then fills in what has happened. The time lapse may be four weeks, it may be two days, it may be five minutes but all enough to have me second guessing and keeping me hooked, whilst making the use of present tense both valid and essential (permission granted). It is all so artfully constructed and executed that is seems quite simple, but I doubt it was so simple in the making and ultimately it is beyond clever, because Normal People very quickly insists on reader investment along with the desperate need to know what will happen, how will life treat this young couple so compelled to be together in the mind of the reader, if not themselves.

And the cover image resonated in my mind too...the pair of them scrunched up in a sardine tin, claustrophobic, compressed, concealed, the lid peeled back to reveal two lives being lived.

Yet when you boil the book down to its plot essence maybe not a lot happens.

Boy meets girl...

Opposite side of the tracks...

Relationship begins...

They go through school and exams...

Move onto university and the next stage of their lives...

Meet new people...

Go in different directions...

Of course Sally Rooney adds more detail, and aspects of Marianne's life especially have the power to both disturb and explain, whilst Connell's struggles with the emotions of his emerging masculinity make for enlightening reading. Yet interestingly, when I thought about this afterwards, I had formed only a scant visual image of Marianne and Connell. No composite picture in my imagination of what they looked like (though I'm sure Sally Rooney must have laid it all down), yet I could (and still can) hear their voices and see their actions with crystal clarity. Dialogue, superbly well-written, rendered any attempts to create an image unnecessary. I even think I know how their minds work, which to me seems like a major accomplishment for any work of fiction, especially for someone like me who is always busy on the visuals, and for a book I had to be dragged screaming and kicking to read.

So there you have it, eating a big slice of reading humble pie and I would be very interested to know what others who had read Normal People think...

Has the hype been the book's demise for you to...

Or did you leap on it with gusto...

If you haven't read it and hadn't planned to might you give it a go now...

Do you find yourself setting against a book for no good reason...

Also, I baled out on Sally Rooney's first novel Conversations With Friends so I think I'd better revisit that one too, and of course I will now read anything else that she writes.