dovegreyreader scribbles

Swotting up for Dartington

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

Sunday Salon - Enid, Dame Margaret and The Whingers

When two disparate, far-flung and seemingly alien planets mysteriously align and extol the virtues of the same author it really is time to sit up and take note.
It's Enid Bagnold whose star seems to be in the ascendant and first into orbit Dame Margaret Drabble writing in The Guardian a few weeks ago. Beyond National Velvet I have to admit haven't really made Enid's acquaintance. She had reached her zenith in my mind with that book, which as a child resolved all my issues about hating horses but feeling I should really adore them like all my friends, this way I could indulge vicariously on the page, gather the right words, hocks and numnahs, and not have to go anywhere near the real thing. Plus you have to feel sorry for any girl whose brother collects spit in a bottle tied around his neck.
Then, well I'll go to the foot of our stairs, right into the same hemisphere, a loud and fervent proclamation on the brilliance of Bagnold from the West End Whingers.
Now I had the good fortune to meet Phil and Andrew, the West End Whingers, albeit briefly and in very unusual circumstances a few weeks ago, and the outcome of that encounter may yet make the pages of a newspaper magazine, I'll keep you posted. Theatre bloggers par excellence and to be honest the guys who can save you a whole lot of time, trouble and money going to the theatre. It's a thankless task as yet unrewarded by honours; sitting through the turkeys and telling us the bald and naked truth so entertainingly, and they are my latest blog addiction. No more gnashing of teeth at living so remotely from the thespian portals or should I say the proscenium arches so frequently whinged over. If the Whingers pan it then I can carry on gazing out contentedly across the Tamar Valley and look forward with eager anticipation to the next Milton Abbot Players production in the village hall.
But the Whingers had been to see Enid's play The Chalk Garden and were sufficiently impressed to fall at her feet and worship, and if the Whingers emerge, heaven forfend, wanting to read the text and insisting on a National Bagnold revival then surely I must pick up the baton and run with it? The production stars the enticing duo Margaret Tyzack and Penelope Wilton so no wonder it was a night for the Whingers to remember, they even thought the frocks were excellent and completely forgave the incongruity of a twenty-first century salad in a 1930's set.
So now you have the reason for us driving across tor and moor yesterday.
I had blatantly ignored Enid Bagnold's autobiography sitting on the shelf at The Dartmoor Bookshop for at least the last ten years. That very minute I wanted it and thank heavens everyone else had ignored it too as I dashed in with my £4 and grabbed it off the shelf.
Champing at the bit for more Enid I had picked up the book that Dame Margaret decrees her best, The Squire. Bizarrely this was mysteriously already on my shelf and not a horse in sight, just babies and midwives, much more my department.
My thoughts on The Squire later in the week and I shall be doing me best to aid the Whingers' Bagnold Revival campaign.

Sunday Salon and soap

Sunday Salon reading later today but having mentioned Odds & Suds, our very own soap shop and it's oh so pretty pannier market shop in Tavistock, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they've also opened a branch in Ashburton.
When we're weary of the delights of our home town, Bookhound and I often motor across high Dartmoor to Ashburton and that's what we did yesterday. There was a book I wanted, it's been on the shelf in The Dartmoor Bookshop for the last ten years at least and I've left it behind every time, would it still be there?
I'll tell you more later this week.
In fact Ashburton is now starting to resemble Tavistock for charm and unusual shops, definitely worth stopping off if you are Devon-ward on holiday. The place to browse for second-hand books, marble fireplaces, affordable (and astronomically un-affordable) antiques, unusual vintage textiles and accoutrements for that 'Odds & Suds Look' and now a new vintage clothes and quality bric-a-brac shop which was an unexpected emporium of delights.
Does anyone else get nostalgic and feel slightly overcome at the sight of a rail of vintage clothes?
It used to be a stock phrase when we were little, 'don't touch that you don't know where it's been' but I do want to know where these clothes have been. Then a Victorian photo album, page after page of posed photos; beautiful (and less beautiful ) couples and family groups all wearing fascinating clothes but with no names?
Somehow  I want to know their lives and hear their story, and then you wonder whether there will ever be such a thing in generations to come?
Who sticks photos in an album these days?
We could have spent hours and a fortune in there but instead we nipped across to Odds & Suds and I had two blocks of soap instead, I'm very low-maintenance.
But this is no ordinary soap, it comes beautifully gift-wrapped for a start.

It was all a delicious dilemma and Bookhound went and did The Mare & Foal Sanctuary (or the Fare & Moal as we call it) charity shop slowly, while I deliberated over the heady blend of scents. In the end I fell for the lavender which is sitting wafting very soporifically across my desk, and far too nice ever to get wet, and the grapefruit with embedded loofah which smells delectable and is great for gardeners' hands or lizard legs, whichever bother you the most.
I shall be both soothed and smooth.

Market Day

Every day seems to be Market Day in Tavistock these days, Farmer's, Craft, Dickensian, Antiques, Collectables et al, but 'twas not ever thus.
The Market Charter was granted by Henry I in 1105 and traditionally there has been a weekly market ever since and for as long as anyone can recall, on a Friday. In the words of Penelope Fitzgerald who visited often,

'I suppose it was a great place then as now for cheese, gingerbread, bacon and dress lengths.'

Friday is what you could call a Big Knicker Market, in fact some of the stock could date back to 1105 now I think about it. You know the sort of thing, stalls laden with crimplene frocks, polyester blouses, initialled hankies, socks ten pairs for £1, leatherette handbags with short handles and clasps, binoculars, carpet slippers, luminous sweets shrieking e numbers, and always shrink-wrapped gammon somewhere. Plus now mixed in, all the trendy up-market craft things too like shopping bags made out of recycled cement sacks.
It's always good for a browse and I went for one yesterday.
Firstly we have a new busker in town and he's the best we've had in ages and we can only hope he likes it and stays. Phil de Glas so his CDs on the pavement say, a real troubadour of the highest order and he sings my sort of songs.The ones I learnt in those C-F-Em-G days of my first guitar, Dirty Old Town, Early Morning Rain, probably Leaving on a Jet Plane if I waited long enough. He parks himself on the main street outside Superdrug and you can see people stopping up and down the street to have a listen.

The flower stall was looking its best

and the handmade soap shop induced a complete stranger and I to strike up a conversation along the lines of 'why don't our gardens look like that?' We decided we both lacked suitable accoutrements to garnish the simple flowers and resolved to be more creative with old watering cans in future.

Right next door Country Cheeses, our world-famous (probably) prize-winning (definitely) Cheese Shop

Advertising a very unusual wedding cake,

Inside the market one of my favourite corners

Then you realise that even though this is the heart of rural Devon we do at least try to acknowledge that the rest of the world is out there.

And lest there be any doubt look who I found on the way back to the car...

Sisters In Arms by Nicola Tyrer

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

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

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

Gardens of Water - Alan Drew

Gardens of Water by Alan Drew billed as 'a major summer read for 2008' and apparently  'perfect for fans of Khaled Hosseini and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie', one of whom I love, the other, well, only half a Kite Runner flown here.Something interrupted that read and I never returned, please convince me because then perhaps I'll read A Thousand Splendid Suns too.
But yet another excellent book to emerge from my recent reading broth of three contemporary books in one go. I was on a roll as I read fifty pages from one, forty from another, seventy from the next and just rotated until I'd finished them all, the secret is certainly to masochistically put a book down when you reach a really exciting bit. I love doing that.
From India post-partition in The Age of Shiva to Turkey post-earthquake and turmoil of a similar nature, one politically man-made the other an Act of God, both having devastating effects on the lives of the people. In stark contrast to Meera in Manil Suri's book, Gardens of Water is a story of strict religious convention and a forbidden love as a Kurdish family struggle to survive something which has torn their known world apart. As Sinan and Nilufer's daughter Irem falls in love with the son of an American aid worker, the earthquake is readily mirrored in the Richter scale emotional aftershock it creates in everyone's lives. Whilst other boundaries may have crumbled and dissolved, Sinan's Muslim faith must hold fast under huge pressure, but for how long?
The analogy of the magma, which eventually just has to rise to the surface with explosive force through the broken crust of Sinan's world, was never far from my thoughts as I read.
Would the foundation of his faith be sufficient to sustain the onslaught?
Alan Drew handles his material with evident ease, flowing writing and a sense of place and faith gathered from living in Turkey for several years and obviously with his eyes open to the nuances of the country and its people his notebook handy to log it all. The book held me completely spellbound, plenty of gripping moments at which to torture myself and put the book down and with a mounting tension that left me with a growing sense of dread and unease as I read.
I couldn't figure what might happen but I knew something would and I sensed when it did it might be as catastrophic as the earthquake itself, was I right?
You'll have to read and find out, great Summer holiday reading indeed, but perhaps not if you're going to Turkey.

The Bolter: Idina Sackville by Frances Osborne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The English Year

Is it Midsummer's Day today? I think so and as tradition would have it I'm considering going back into thermals. Forget that stupid saying about not casting a clout 'til May be out and then the debate about whether that means the month or the blossom.
Just don't bother to cast a clout at all, it's folly.
One of the things about regular church attendance used to be the way it grounded you in the year, all those  festivals like Rogationtide and Whitsun, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi.
Conversely lapsed church attendance means you lose track of them all and their significance. It was my good fortune in that case (being lapsed) to stumble across The English Year by Steve Roud. A month-by-month guide to the nation's customs and festivals, from May Day to Mischief Night.
Now I don't remember Mischief Night in the Anglican church, other than my mispent teenage years in the church youth club, but it is certainly of note how much of our tradition here in England did revolve around the church as did life.
I'd forgotten that Rogationtide for example is the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday immediately preceeding Ascension Day which is the fortieth day after Easter. It's all clearly proscribed and it's when we should be Beating the Bounds of the Parish boundary. The origins were completely unknown to me but tradition had it that boys were turned upsidedown, bumped on stones, whipped, beaten, or otherwise mistreated. Clearly all a case for social services involvement, equal opportunities litigation and counselling nowadays.
Mixed in with festivals are all the customs and traditions that have their origins obscured in the mists of time and Steve Roud has done some major detective work to unearth it all making this book one of those little treasure troves of information.
June being high summer (supposedly) there's quite a lot going on.
Trinity Sunday, eight weeks after Easter has been and gone in May this year but there should be plenty more to look forward to.
Abingdon should have elected the Mayor of Ock Street on the 20th and he will be the squire of the local Morris team and they'll be carrying a pair of ox horns mounted on a pole. Mock mayor ceremonies used to be quite common and in Exeter the mayor was easily recognisable by the chamber pot on his head, removed when ladies were present.
In Kidderminster anyone lucky enough to be born in Church Street can apply for the Brecknell Bequest on the 21st and take home a farthing loaf and twopenny cake each year for life, apparently people in America apply.
Midsummer on the 24th and things get very busy, and Amity Bonfires should be abounding which used to be a means of making peace with your neighbours (try it everyone). Churches should be bedecked with birch,everyone must make a Dumb Cake and there must be a lot of processing as in marching, Girls must also be tossing hemp seed over their shoulders to see the form of their future husband. Midsummer Cushions must be woven from flowers and if you're anywhere near Appleton in Cheshire they should be Bawming the Thorn and singing

Up with the fresh garlands this midsummer morn
Up with the red ribbons on Appleton thorn
Come lasses and lad to the Thorn Tree today
To bawm it and shout as ye bawm it 'Hurray'.

In Warcop they'll be Rush-Bearing and so it goes on.
July's looking busy too, Stagshawbank Fair, Wahlton Baal Fair, Duck Racing, more Rush-Bearing,Straw racing, the Pretty Maid's Charity handout in Holsworthy and more.
It just all makes me want to go and put on a pair of clogs and strip a willow or two when I've gathered a peascod, a lovely lovely book

Friday's Child by Ben Palmer

It was inevitable that I would have to read  Friday's Child by Ben Palmer after my post about Touching Distance by Rebecca Abrams last week. It had all been one of those strangely-meant serendipitous connections as I read in the Guardian about the tragic death of Ben's wife Jessica from puerperal sepsis just six days after giving birth to baby Emily, at the same time as I was reading Rebecca Abrams fictional account of the 1790's epidemic of Childbed Fever.
I knew this would be a tough emotional read and I suspect, like many people, I studiously avoid books like this because I don't want to be upset, but also because I work for the organisation that was culpable. As an employee it gives books like this a There But For the Grace of God factor and wouldn't it be nice to just bury my head in the sand?
Be warned this book will make you cry (seem to have had a few of those lately) and even tough-as-old-boots me spent half the book reading through eyes blurred with tears. The book leapt clean across all of my carefully placed professional boundaries and right into my heart.
The impact cannot be overstated and I think it's all down to the way Ben has written Friday's Child. It's searingly honest and he writes in an amenable, down to earth style and intersperses e mails throughout which give the book an intimate personal quality. There is ample opportunity to get to know Jessica well too, she had a vibrant and bubbly personality, loved motherhood and she and Ben made a great team. This all makes the reality even more shocking and palpable, that in this day and age of knowledge and advanced medical science Jessica died of an entirely treatable infection.
But as her death proves, time and observation is of the essence.
The window of opportunity for effective treatment between diagnosis and complete organ shutdown in puerperal sepsis is frighteningly narrow, it's one of the reasons midwives used to visit twice a day for ten days and do old fashioned things like check pulse and temperature. In Jessica's case had she received treatment just eight hours sooner her chances of survival would have been far greater.
But Friday's Child feels like a book that should be read by all health professionals and not just those of us involved with childbirth.You can't be a registered health professional of any description without carrying some burden of responsibility for assessment and decision-making and thereby accountability. A book like this is a stringent reminder that there is no room for complacency or short cuts, even given fewer staff and increasing workloads, you can't afford to take your eye off the ball for a second. This involves being at the top of your game every single working day, nothing less will do and most certainly not second best.
I think I'd like health service managers to read this book too.
The people who in times of financial constraint have to juggle budgets and yes, I know they all tell us it's difficult and we don't understand how difficult, but in my experience we do understand all too clearly. It is staffing levels and staff training and updating that are the first casualties when budget deficits are on the agenda and more often than not the buck stops with the person with the NMC registration. Plenty of you will know that there's nothing quite like that to really define and focus your thinking and coincidentally I've just written the £76 cheque for mine this weekend for the coming year. After reading this book my hand didn't feel quite so light as I wrote.
I wasn't entirely sure whether there was a manager standing shoulder to shoulder alongside (alongside, not behind) Jessica's named midwife who I think very bravely and honourably took responsibility for her mistakes in court, but if not there should have been.
This must have happened on someone's watch and they are equally accountable.
There were a disastrous chain of errors and lapses in communication but amongst them all it will not have been the community midwife's preference to have had to prioritise the workload as she was forced to on that fateful day. Many lives have been changed tragically and irrevocably as a result of Jessica's death and hers will be one of them.
The legal battle that ensued makes for very uncomfortable reading indeed. Ben delineates his struggles with a transparent honesty and openess as he copes with life as a single parent to Harry and Emily. Whilst Emily is a developing little person Harry knows a great deal more and some of his 3 year old out-of-the-mouths-of-babes observations will have you biting your lip and fighting back the tears.
Ben's resources are tested to the very limits of human endurance as the grief and anger rage and he descends into depression and alcoholism and then, depleted and exhausted, has to take on the mighty and seemingly heartless behemoth that is the NHS. I was overwhelmingly relieved to see the name Havers in Family Palmer's excellent legal team.
I emerged from this book and encountered an unexpected whirlpool, a swirling mass of disturbing and uncomfortable emotions. Firstly because few books make me really cry, to the point where my voice falters if I talk about them, but also because I of all people could see this tragic situation from both sides, but what happened was indefensible and by admitting liability the NHS clearly agreed.
So why read a book that's likely to have such a profound impact?
Isn't life upsetting enough sometimes without adding to the grief ?
Well that's a decision you will have to make for yourselves. I am so glad that I've read it, I was deeply moved and humbled by Ben's experiences and as a health professional it makes you consider some very unpalatable evidence.
Clearly the time has come to admit that we can no longer afford to be complacent about puerperal sepsis and it is an illusion to consider it a problem consigned to history. Ben is now campaigning widely via Jessica's Trust to raise awareness. If you decide not to read the book at least follow the link to Ben's website and familiarise yourself with the symptoms. Like many Ben had no idea but assumed that the health professionals would, and that fact has caused him undeniable anguish and heartache since. I sense a subtle irony to that title given that Jessica's trust was placed wholly in the care she thought she would receive from the NHS.
Ben and Jessica's children depended on his survival, he has survived and Friday's Child and Jessica's Trust are a magnificent testament to that.
Emily will be four years old tomorrow, and the memories will doubtless return through this coming week for Ben, and having read Friday's Child I can assure him hand on heart that Jessica would have been rightly very proud of her lovely family.

Bonsai blog

No sooner do you wave one off to Canada than another one follows.
The Kayaker is out there working on the Fraser River as a white water river guide for four months, he's done Vancouver and Victoria apparently and is now up there in the mountains testing out conditions before the rafting begins.

Yes of course that's him in the front victory saluting, and praise be, that's his third lot of front teeth since birth and they still seem to be there, fingers crossed.
Rafting? Offspringette's ears prick up...rafting you say?
An update for those who've requested it.
Firstborn Offspringette you may recall chucked in safe secure job at the Beeb to go off and do a charity skateboard trip across Australia.
This was apparently our fault for bringing them up to be free spirits.
Returning jobless and penniless she then decided to opt for degree number two in Marine Studies (thankfully fully sponsored or the student loan would be starting to exceed the national debt) and train to be an officer in the Merchant Navy.
Please don't ask me what we've done to deserve all this.
Off to sea in a few weeks for her first proper voyage wearing a uniform (I'll issue warnings if she's the one parking the boat in your harbour) Offspringette decided she could just squeeze in a quick trip to Canada and a rafting trip or two if her brother was out there to welcome her.
So those two little people who used to fight like cat and dog and tell us from the back seat of the car that they hated each other because 'she's looking at me', or 'he's spat on my shoe' or thought up every which way to wind each other up down the years are suddenly friends, there's hope you see for any of you out there watching scrapping children and wondering whether it's ever worth it.
But the purpose of this post is more specific.
I have been given sole charge of Geoffrey in Offspringette's absence and with dire warnings should any terrible fate befall.
Geoffrey is a bonsai as you can see and looks to me like he needs a trim.
Dare I?
It's sooooo tempting.
But I am usually kiss of death to anything green and potted.
Is there an art to it?
Should I water it?
If so how, total immersion or gentle drip?
Advice please and quick, my life may depend on it.

Sunday Salon eventually

Sunday Salon posts today...what I'm reading knitting or quilting in real time as and when, or perhaps it'll be about washing the kitchen floor, who knows. Meanwhile here's that very lovely Maureen Minchin bowl to feast your eyes upon.

Laissez-faire gardening

I was recently asked to supply a picture from this blog for a Canadian TV programme on messy gardens. The garden in question wasn't ours but it could have been. No money changed hands but they have kindly sent me a book which by chance arrived yesterday, The Outlander by Gil Adamson published by Anansi Press which I've been mad keen to read since I heard about it.
This time of year we just let most of the garden grow and have its own way, Bookhound mows a path through and around and we love the garden when it looks like this.

The vegetable garden has been allocated as set-aside since building my library created something akin to the Somme, but it's all settled down now and those daisies appeared from nowhere, a packet of seeds I sowed years ago which did nothing until the earth was shifted.

However order must rule in the vegetable garden and it does, Peter Rabbit style and how odd that surrounded by thousands of rabbits as we are, we have never seen a single one set foot in the garden, do they know a Gamekeeper lives here?

Currently leaf salad in profusion, but watch this space because this year we attempt brassicas for the very first time, purple sprouting broccoli, savoy cabbage and brussel sprouts.
How does your garden grow?

Wimbledoves...blogging it out across the net.

We don't do a lot of sport on here, not compared to all those blogs where they jog and cycle and things and don't worry that's not about to change, but it's time for Wimbledon again, we must all find our plimsolls, don our whites, gut the cats, string up the Dunlops, get the balls out of the freezer, find an umpire and take to the court....from the armchair of course.
Some years I'm engrossed in Wimbledon, some years I'm not. This year I feel a bit tennis-y and so if anyone wants to sign up to the Tennis For Free dream team, fritter away for free a virtual £50 million in choosing their players and then join the Wimbledoves group mini-league before next Monday then please please do.
If not I shall be looking a right wally here in these frilly things bouncing a ball around on my own but there's more at stake.
I've very rashly volleyed out a virtual challenge so I'm hoping you'll stand by me. I just couldn't stop myself, the bright young things over at Scott Pack's  Meandmybigmouth will probably be flaunting their carbon fibre racquets and a lot of lycra and rear-facing peaked caps and they are going to blog it out across the net with us.
So Scott and I need at least five participants each to get into  the inter-mini-league and compete and he's got his already, all eager, bouncing around on the baseline and slamming down their practice serves at 132mph.
Can we raise at least five here?
I was in Scott's mini-league last year and contributed to my own demise with some very unwise purchases and I'll also put it down to those sleeves (handy for storing spare balls) which got hopelessly in the way when I was going for my blistering double-handed cross-court backhand drive .
Choosing your players is the best bit, especially if like me you only know about four of them, spend 40 million on those and then have a pittance left and end up buying players you've never heard of because the names sound quite nice. In the absence of John Newcombe I'm pinning my hopes on Fabio Fognini who only cost me 2.5 million.
This year I've also very generously and patriotically splashed out 3 million on the three British girls for my women's team having already been a bit extravagent with the Williams sisters.
It's all a bit of fun and fun is good and the fun begins with registering and choosing your players, it's easy to do, then join Wimbledoves and the Tennis for Free website does the rest (oh yes and the real players of course) aggregating scores throughout Wimbledon.
Next bit of fun is the site-generated password to join Wimbledoves which is utterly ridiculous and you'll have to do a whopping great big bit of cutting and pasting on this one but here goes
a066ad79b48d5b12e8ee0cb36cd7b454
So fellow Wimbledoves our pride is at stake, I'll meet you in the armchair locker room for some strawberries and cream high energy protein drinks and then I've booked Centre Court for our first stroll around five set practice match and a team gossip motivational talk.
I think we must slay the opposition with our sartorial elegance on the virtual court so fashion will be high on our list of match priorities and I might go and dig out a Teddy Tinling or two.
Does anyone remember Peaches Barkowitz? I always wanted to be her.

Ekaterinburg - Helen Rappaport

Welcome to Romanov Day and  приветствия и спасибо (with any luck that's greetings and thanks) to Helen Rappaport who will be our guest in comments throughout the day. Sparing no expense I have also brought in outside caterers.
Cornflower is very kindly providing us with Russian-themed refreshments, isn't that brilliant? So you can all nip over there when you get peckish and my grateful thanks to Karen for taking up the eleventh hour challenge.

But now to Ekaterinburg and firstly we'd better brush up the pronounciation as we'll have a Russian speaker in our midst,
Ye-ka-tyer-in-boorg.
I knew from reading No Place for Ladies The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War that Helen writes my sort of history books; eminently readable but still fastidiously researched, no compromising on scholarly or evidence-based investigation and one look at the references confirms this.
Helen travelled to Ekaterinburg whilst researching the book and it shows.There is a very powerful sense that you are reading the words of someone who is witnessing the sights and sounds of the place first hand, is returning to primary sources and conjuring up the atmosphere with an accomplished writer's eye.
The trouble with reading any book about the Romanovs is the sure and certain knowledge of how it will end, yet despite this the book feels fresh and spell-binding.The background fascinated me as Helen set out the geographical location and the political turmoil surrounding the final imprisonment of the Romanovs in the Ipatiev House of Special Purpose. The suffocatingly claustrophobic Ekaterinburg July heat will send you off to fling open your windows in a way that the family were forbidden to do. But what made this book most special for me were the beautifully detailed character studies of each member of the family.
Tsar Nicholas, the man never equipped to lead his country, inadequate in authority, happiest when pottering around at his country estate Tsarskoe Selo, and married to the beautiful but domineering Tsaritsa Alexandra. Alix, Queen Victoria's granddaughter, largely misunderstood by the Russian people and the carrier of the haemophilia gene that would blight the family's life, her body wrecked and wracked with pain after giving birth to five large babies.
The four stunningly beautiful and serene-looking daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia who have lived a life trapped within the parameters of their mother's continual poor health, yearning for her attention, seeking constantly to win her approbation, serving and helping her wherever they could and all in the shadow of the much-wanted youngest son, the Tsarevitch Alexey and his debilitating illness.
Who can know the agonising pain of the Tsarina's medical conditions mitigated to some extent by regular and strong pain-killers and then we can only begin to imagine the excruciating agony endured by Alexey without them. Denied morphine presumably for fear of addiction, Alexey at every exacerbation of his haemophilia suffering swollen bleeding joints for weeks and months on end and no pain relief.
Yet no hint of jealousy emerges, this was a loving and devoted family and for that I was grateful as I read Helen's day by day account as their fate drew near. In their final days, hours and moments they would only have each other and a sickening feeling started to rise in my throat as July 17th 1918 approached.
The trouble was I liked the family in a way that no book about them had ever made me feel before. It became impossible to remain detached, I warmed to them all, felt I knew them, sensed I was in the Ipatiev House alongside them.
For all Nicholas and Alexandra's faults they were good parents and by the time I approached the final pages I did indeed want to cover my eyes and ears in order not to witness what I knew must happen, but by this stage I also knew I had to see it through with them.
It's truly gut-wrenching but utterly compelling reading and you desperately don't want it to happen; if ever there was a moment when you'd like history to be rewritten it's on page 184 of Ekaterinburg. The full horror when the family are gathered together as if to have their picture taken is writ large on the page. I could feel and smell the fear, it was tangible and the whole episode so movingly written I was choking back the tears and had to go out for a walk when I'd read it.
In the end Helen left me with the heady scent of the lilies which flower each year at the family's burial site (with grateful thanks to Helen for this photograph) and I closed this book with an overwhelming sense of grief and loss. I railed against the circumstances, the ineptitudes, the brutality and the humiliations meted out everywhere along the way and nothing convinced me that anyone, no matter the misdemeanour, could ever be deserving of the awful fate that befell the Romanovs.

dgr @ tbd

Many thanks to Mark Thwaite for this on The Book Depository today, it's always good to sit down and think about why I write this blog.

Courage

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

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

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

Fire up the samovar...Russian day is coming.

I've just wept my way to the final page of Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport such a good read and there was me thinking I'd read all there could possibly be to read on the subject.
My thoughts on the book will be up here this Thursday and Helen has very kindly accepted my invitation to be a blog guest for the day and chat with you via comments about Ekaterinburg, the Romanovs, Russia, the research, her visit to Ekaterinburg and plenty more.
I hope you won't be offended if I keep the Faberge eggs in the glass display cabinet, but I will be firing up the samovar and cooking some whatever it is that Russians eat for tea and we can have a repetition of the Daphne party we enjoyed with Justine Picardie.
Just what we all need on a chilly June Thursday.
We have to let Helen out briefly at lunchtime to do a live radio interview but I've booked a troika to transport (feels like it might snow) so she'll be out and back in a trice.
Here's to a fascinating Russian day and my grateful thanks to Helen for agreeing to visit.

Selective Memory by Katharine Whitehorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touching Distance and touching hearts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final word to Jean Giraudoux,

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

Talking of splashing...

The day couldn't have dawned finer

and as the grass-cutter moved in to the back field last Sunday we braced ourselves for action.

At moments like this I always think it's handy to have a Gamekeeper stashed away who can plunge into the pen and emerge with a handful of ducks in one go, where Bookhound and I would have been chasing them around one at a time for hours. I think the pictures tell their own story and Julian, Dick, Ann, George and Timmy were off so fast I only caught a shot of one, probably Ann. Reconnaisance during the week and we hear they are still swimming around and they are still five.

The first splash will be the worst...

'You're off the hook' I said to Bookhound as I walked in the door from Port Eliot, 'theirs hasn't been decorated since 1896'.
I suppose at some point you have to make a decision, right that's it, no paint for a century, which would save a whole lot on Farrow & Ball but would be a long wait for the patina to build. You couldn't replicate what time has achieved at Port Eliot and to be honest I'm not sure I can live with the slow decline into faded grandeur that would be required, though I am often tested to the limit.
So I wasn't on the whole that disappointed to arrive home on Wednesday to find that the clutter started at the back door and worked its way in a trail towards the laundry room/cloakroom/ dumping ground for everything room. This is the engine room of the house, up-pipes, down-pipes, in-pipes, out-pipes, boiler, timeswitches, stopcocks and laundry plus a large Belfast sink that will hold a good sized salmon (deceased).
I'll admit the Do-It-All  Jacobean Blue had been a mistake ten years ago and nor had I done the best of paint jobs on it over an Easter weekend, but I have been made to live with it ever since because no one could face the umpteen coats it would take to cover the walls and all the pipes which I had also painted Jacobean Blue just because I found I could. In between we had the flood when the ceiling and many gallons came down on Bookhound's head with that fateful prod of the bulging plaster and since then I've had to suffer flood-damaged Jacobean Blue.
Every single last thing removed and two coats of safe-as-houses cream (despite my hankering for Folly Green or Ointment Pink) beautifully applied by Book Hound who is quite good at this sort of thing.
Instantly a depressing North-facing cave transformed into a bright, light clean and shining grotto. Slowly and deliberately any item that went back in had to justify its existence and this is where I've had to part with ten years worth of quite nice flower bulb containers, a lot of those round washing liquid balls (one can never have too many,) the container of gatherings from the washing machine ( fish hooks, airgun pellets, screws, nails, old keys, cartridge cases, £4.50 in loose change) a hundred and one very old hand towels but I did keep, because I couldn't part with them, the very last two Harrington's terry towelling nappies.Twenty-seven years old, still white and with a thousand and one uses. I sat and folded them and had a minor reminisce from which I quickly recovered when I remembered the nappy bucket that used to accompany them.
I've now issued instructions that I'd like all purchased cleaning products to be in blue or teal containers...is that being fussy? I couldn't bear anything to clash, I'm already fretting over that red tub of Swarfega.

Then I HAD to make new curtains.

Two windows, only needed little cafe-style half somethings but the watchword here is Haste. Leave it a day and the novelty and the incentive have moved on elsewhere. So at 3pm we headed off to town, Bookhound parked and waited while I dashed in and grabbed some very pretty, delicately flowered voile, and by 4.30pm they were cut, stitched, ironed and hanging at the windows.
A record perhaps and it'll look nice for about a week but pretty, delicate, flowered voile is folly.  Someone will hit the sink with filthy hands and turn the tap on full and splash the walls or gut a salmon and then grasp the window handle through the pretty,delicate flowered voile and we will have to wait 112 years before we can justifiably say it looks fine as it is.

Bookshop Mooch

Nothing like a good mooch around a second-hand bookshop and we know plenty.But there's one in a nearby village that we are drawn to only infrequently and reluctantly and the reasons for that are various.
Firstly there's no point in going in clean clothes and if you go in the winter you need Arctic clothing.
The shop used to be a mecca for a bargain and it was worth the grime, the occasional clouted knee or the odd dead mouse to fight your way through it all. However now, and who can blame them I suppose, making most of their profit from internet selling and so not that worried about humans who walk in the door. I'll happily pay a book's worth and often more if it is in good condition and looks content on its shelf and it helps considerably if a bookseller is nice and friendly and interested in what you are buying, but few books look very happy on these shelves and there is no welcome as you walk in.
This is the sight that greets you and your heart sinks a fraction as you start to clamber.

Undaunted we plunged in.
Now everything priced at very the top of its range and not a bargain to be had, it's a business after all, but there was little fun to be found here.
These books are not loved, they are commodities and the whole place oozes an odd feeling of undisguised kleptomania.
On the way round you see some strange sights.

This breeze-block garage room yielded nothing but over-priced, tatty damp stock so we headed into the paperback shed department. I think it's pretty clear that not even Stanley looking for Livingstone had found his way to the back of this jungle since 1871.

We hadn't thought to take a set of secateurs so hacking through the undergrowth with bare hands I was pleased to find a few treasures, though all a bit grubby, very damp and curled.
No worries, 50p or so each and an hour on the Aga and the afternoon would have been worth the effort.
But things did not go well when we reached the till.
Flurry of internet price-checking, then £1 each and one, Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford instantly priced at £8 'because it was rare'.
Perhaps it was and perhaps £1 each is the going rate, but suddenly I felt my heels dig in and Bookhound and I exchanged 'the glance'...you know those symbiotic glances that after 32 years of marriage require no words.
But the books are really damp and tatty, I've rescued all those from a fate worse than death in your shed, I'm covered in cobwebs head to toe and no one else has looked in there for years.
Good humoured bartering met with a stony silence and now my heels were dug in too far to budge and so were theirs, by this time it's clear I'm going to cut off my nose to spite my face and leave empty-handed rather than pay. Perversely, had the books been warm and dry, lovingly catalogued, priced and shelved, I'd have paid whatever was written inside.
They missed a sale, I doubt we'll go back and those books will doubtless sit there in that damp old shed unloved and rotting for another hundred years.
Something strangely sad about it all.

The Story of Forgetting - Stefan Merrill Block

The third in my contemporary reading fest and I'm going to issue a health warning with this book and perhaps I shouldn't but I think it's only fair.
Be prepared to feel slightly unnerved by it in the first instance but completion is rewarded in manifold ways.
Working in a doctor's surgery you build an immunity to thinking you've got every illness that you hear discussed at coffee time. In they come, GP's hot-foot out of the consulting room to tell you about a patient who's been in with symptoms a,b and c and the doctor thinks they might have disease x,y or z. Gradually you learn to ignore it, but for while you have yourself diagnosed with everything by lunchtime and you're terminal by tea time.
So I was able to read The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block in a reasonably objective way. That's not usually how I read at all, I love a good subjective wallow but I sensed it might be risky on a book about early onset Alzheimer's disease.
Suddenly remembering (good sign) that I'd lost my Fiesta recently (bad sign) or that suddenly I lose the track of a conversation...what was it I'd started to say and why was I saying it..could all be very unnerving in Stefan's scheme of things. I put it down to that certain age-ness and like most people holding an awful lot in my memory at any one time, which all takes up the valuable space now required for remembering where I've parked my car.
But having issued the health warning I now have to say this is one very remarkable book especially given that its author is a mere snip of a young twenty-something and this is his first novel. Find some of the background here.
As fifteen year old Seth Waller begins to investigate his mother's slowly disintegrating memory he unearths family connections and a fable that has resonated through his own life and been handed down through the generations. The land of Isidora, a 'fantastical land free from the sorrows of memory' and a story that his mother has told him since childhood.
Slowly Seth pieces together the jigsaw and makes sense of what has gone before as themes of genetics, inheritance and memory blend with the realities of people's lives in a book that eventually raises the spirits and lifts the world of memory loss onto a new and beautifully delineated plain. Somehow Stefan turns it into a far less fearful place to be and gives renewed meaning to lives so often discarded as spent once Alzheimer's has set in. In many ways it is a book which removes the terror and replaces that with something completely natural and acceptable. He writes with a heartfelt intuition for his subject and with a sensitivity and depth of understanding that somehow belies his age.
It is in the end a profoundly moving book, one which has taken the US by storm and I also hope that my health warning has equipped rather than deterred, because it's a book that deserves to be read and probably put onto medical school syllabuses (or is that syllabi?)  reading lists.
Watch out for Stefan Merrill Block, he is a writer who promises much, a name to remember, in fact I've written it down.

The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier

Confronted with accent and dialect when I open a novel may well be the quickest way to make me put it back on the shelf. I did this with Adam Bede countless times before I got a grip and within a matter of pages I was immersed and helplessly hooked into George Eliot's rural world. Likewise I struggle slightly with Wuthering Heights because of it.
The Colour Purple comes to mind as a modern-day equivalent, where would that book be without it? Then perhaps a lesser known book , Marriage by Susan Ferrier. It's possible to emerge the other end of that as a passable Scot,  and read aloud you will convince all around you of your acquired ancestry. I have a delectable old edition of Susan Ferrier's book along with a matching volume of her letters picked up as cheap as chips in a second hand bookshop but both inscribed by Humbert Wolfe, October 27th 1929
Having tried my hand with a mere morsel of Brin Swll speak a while ago, it's actually very difficult to do but, when written with an unforced ease and proficiency, accent and dialect the very things that pitch a narrative into  the precise territory an author wants it to go; to my mind 50% of the time and place location dilemma is sorted if this all sits comfortably as I read.
If dialect well-done is half the work completed then descriptive sense of place must fulfill the rest, so how does Daphne fare on both counts?
Daphne was legendary for her mastery of the opening and closing lines of her books and when you consider that The Loving Spirit was her first published attempt at fiction in 1931 this all surely bodes well for the future.

'Janet Coombe stood on the hill above Plyn, looking down upon the harbour. Although the sun was already high in the heavens, the little town was still wrapped in an early morning mist. It clung to Plyn like a thin pale blanket, lending to the place a faint whisper of unreality as if the whole had been blessed by ghostly fingers. The tide was ebbing, the quiet waters escaped silently from the harbour and became one with the sea, unruffled and undisturbed.No straggling cloud, no hollow wind broke the calm beauty of the still white sky.'

That feels like a perfect Cornish morning to me and the conversation which follows as Thomas proposes to Janet sets the scene firmly. Daphne had clearly listened carefully because it's littered with West Country-isms
"Where you'm been"..."Where are you to?" the latter an expression used to ask where someone is and heard daily around here. The vernacular sits comfortably within the whole and I was completely at ease and convinced as I read.
Nothing jarred and slowly I also sensed something else, perhaps Daphne's search was on for a style of her own and she explores a great many in this book. In many ways it reads like a potted legacy of all that's gone before, not only George Eliot's Adam Bede and all things Bronte-esque for the dialect and there are definite nods towards Wuthering Heights in the plot. As Michele Roberts elaborates in yet another excellent Virago introduction, Daphne takes up the permission of the gothic to go where angels fear to tread as she endeavours to

'reveal some of the bad things that go on in seemingly respectable houses.'

When the action moves to London there are clear elements of Dickens and then the most Flaubertian - Madame Bovary hansom cab drive around Regent's Park, it's all a wonderful literary rattle bag to tempt in a  Daphne devotee like me.
The book itself is based on the real life of Jane Slade of the Slade ship-building family of Polruan which all adds grist to the narrative mill and I have been reading Jane Doe's book on her family alongside The Loving Spirit and to great atmospheric effect. The carved figurehead of Jane Slade which guided the ship bearing her name across the oceans of the world, and features so strongly in Daphne's book as Janet Coombe, now resides proudly on the wall of Ferryside at Bodinnick, where Daphne wrote the book between October 1929 and January 1930, and is clearly visible to all who use the little ferry across the River Fowey there.
The Loving Spirit has most certainly continued to cast the Daphne spell on me, every one I read becoming a favourite until the next one that is.

The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri

Scouring the shelves to feed the howl of the contemporary I also felt the need to get travelling again last week. With apologies to all antipodean visitors I haven't settled in Australia at all, I'll be back but I need to move on. So looking for some new cultures to explore I chanced upon The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri...India in the 1950's after partition, Gardens of Water by Alan Drew...Turkey after an earthquake, and don't ask me why, The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block...Alzheimers in the USA.
Then I started them all at once.
Could be a right old mix up and mish mash, a recipe for chaos, especially given that one of those books is quite an unnerving read when I frequently seem to forget where I've parked my car these days. Well I might lose track of my Fiesta, but I don't seem to have a problem keeping stories seperate in my mind so instead it's been a brilliant bout of reading.
Beautifully be-ribboned, The Age of Shiva, the 450 pages that Kiran Desai read in one sitting, took me slightly longer but one of those hefty all-absorbing, total immersion in place and time reads. More gaps in my political and historical knowledge exposed and with it the reality, I can't know everything but what I pick up along the way is invaluable if it presents something previously unknown in a memorable way.
Manil Suri subverts expectations and sets out a very different father-daughter relationship to the one I, in my mind, might associate with the Indian sub-continent. Times may well have changed and that could all be down to my ignorance but I was surprised to find a father offering his daughter complete freedom from an arranged marriage and religious ties and encouraging her to seek a good education. Meera has other ideas and so an oddly distorted picture of a father's control and disempowerment of his daughter emerges as Meera actively seeks marriage and thereby the traditional constraints of religion.
Married in haste to Dev, a singer, Meera submits to the orthodoxy of his family and a life verging on imprisonment. Giving birth to a son, Ashvin becomes the shining star  of Meera's life and a more claustrophobic mother-son relationship it would be hard to describe as the family move to Bombay for Dev to seek fame and fortune.
At times, I'll admit, this all made for slightly uncomfortable reading, like most mothers I am more than happy to see children fly the nest, Meera's relationship with Ashvin felt completely alien and beyond my understanding, suffocating in order to fulfill her own needs, but it would all offer much fruitful discussion at a book group.
As is often the far-fetched case I was reading another book with a similar central theme, that of an intense and over-bearing mother-son relationship. You'd hardly expect Cornwall in the 1800's to have any similarities to India in the 1950's but The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier does. Age-old themes of love and possession, conflict and an exploration of women's lives all cross literary boundaries with ease.
I wondered whether a book this long might sag in the middle, have a rickety bridge moment, and looking at the reviews I now see that The Age of Shiva has had a mixed reception and stands accused of not being enough of a page turner. I'm not sure life's a page turner either and perhaps the skill of the storyteller is to keep me turning the pages just the same, Manil Suri certainly managed that for Kiran and me and I expect for countless others too.
I'm now looking forward to a retrospective read of Manil Suri's Booker longlisted The Death of Vishnu and will anticipate with interest the final book in the trilogy which you can hear the author talk about here.

Bookendipity

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

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

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

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

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

No to Age Banding - a message from Steve Augarde

One of the treasured corners of my little library and probably libraries and bookshops too up and down the land, the children's section, and there's meddlin' afoot. I've had quite a few e mails about it all and so have handed over to Steve Augarde to tell you more and how to use your voice if you wish to.

For those who might not be aware of it, children’s books are now to be ‘age banded’, ie each book will be prominently labelled with the age of readership for which the publisher intends it. 7+, 8+, and so on. Note that I say ‘publisher’, because I’ve yet to hear of any author, teacher, librarian or reader who thinks this a good idea. I suspect that it’s a scheme that has been hastily hatched between publishers and large bookseller chains, in a lazy and ill-advised attempt to boost sales.

Children have differing reading ages, and tastes, and no child of, say, 10 years old is going to want to be seen reading a book that has a big label saying 7+ on it, no matter how much they might love that book or how appropriate it might be for their reading ability. Conversely a 7 year old who has been told that he has a reading age of 10 (and whose parents are certainly going to let people know it) may struggle with the content of a book labelled 10+ even though he is capable of reading it.

Some sort of guidance is both helpful and necessary, but surely books already speak clearly enough for themselves? How do we as adults choose what to read and what not to read? We study the cover, we read the blurb, maybe look at a few sentences from the text, and we listen to the recommendations of others. This same process is perfectly suited to children’s books. Age banding can only stigmatise developing readers and restrict the more confident.

Big name authors are refusing to have their books labelled in this manner, and have enough clout to be able to threaten publishers with revolt if such a scheme goes ahead. Fortunately their names head the list of the hundreds who are protesting against the practice. If you’re interested in adding your own, then go to: http://www.notoagebanding.org:80/index.php?home

Steve Augarde.

National Freedom for Ducklings Day

The day has arrived.
Today is Freedom for Ducklings day and the big release into the wild. It's like Bill Oddie's Springwatch here as we prepare for the moment; Julian, Dick, Ann, George and Timmy will be transported to their designated secret but lovely new home nearby, and I'm going to be Kate Humble and be on hand with camera and will probably blink and miss it all and shed a tear as they shoot off.
Here's a final farewell picture.

Don't they look grand and what a credit to the Gamekeeper and Bookhound who have kept them fed and watered and safe from predators. It's been eight weeks since they arrived home orphaned and shivering with fear in the bucket looking like this.... aaaaahhhhhhh.

Now I'm getting all emotional.
Even though we haven't allowed them to bond with us it has been a treat to watch them grow and paddle about in their garden pen, but now they have wing feathers and it's time to learn to fly.
So be free little ducks and woebetide any fox the Gamekeeper spies eyeing them up a l'orange.
And if we find they all waddle back into the garden tomorrow we'll know we got it all wrong and we'll be stuck with them forever.

The Vows of Silence and the mysterious wedding guests.

I think it's a bit much when you know an author like Susan Hill as I do (I pitch up for the Long Barn Books editorial board meetings and eat the free lunch) and offer them good solid plot lines which they choose to ignore, but then they still write a cracking good book, and thus has Susan dared with The Vows of Silence.
It was high risk because my suggestions for Simon Serrailler's future were good ones, of that I'm sure, and if taken up would surely have earned me the dedication of the book...'To dovegreyreader, with grateful thanks'.
As it is the book is dedicated to 'The Wedding Guests' and I happen to know which wedding guests.
Just because I am not royalty and don't live in Clarence House, well honestly, were their suggestions really as good as mine? I doubt it.
So having got all that off my chest and having decided that I wasn't going to be a wimp like Mariella Frostrup and cry I made a start.
Actually I did shed a little tear, so might you, there's one line that did for me and if you want an emotional crime-laden page-turner look no further. It's not just crime , it's people's lives under the microscope too and I've had two very late nights holding Simon's hand and mopping his fevered brow through this one as the gunman on the loose in Lafferton wreaks havoc amongst the local population. Shoals of red herrings led me up countless garden paths as I tried to pin down the perpetrator and there's tragedy nearer home too, and to be honest I don't know how Susan thinks all this up, plots it so minutely and then writes it so well. Intentionally or otherwise I spotted some tongue-in-cheek humour too and I think she has the makings of a really successful author and this will be assured if only Susan takes my advice for Serrailler number five.
He must get married and start work on triplets of his own or go to a monastery and become one of those monastic super-sleuths, nothing else will do. He could be called DCS Brother Caedfel or something, no one's thought of that yet, just think how popular that would be and it could all extend the series indefinitely.
Seriously, don't miss number four in the Simon Serrailler series and whilst we're looking at the work of a promising writer be sure not to miss Susan's novella, The Beacon out later this year. That one I have read and I can't recommend it highly enough, it's a book with an afterburn that zaps you about three hours later and will leave you tying yourself up in knots trying to decide the truth for months afterwards.
Meanwhile don't miss this promising author on Open Book on BBC Radio Four tomorrow. I've got my copy of The Vows of Silence ready for signing next time we meet and I fully expect it to earn a priceless comment after a 'review' like this.

Horsebridge

I keep wittering on about this tiny little bridge we use to cross the Tamar from Devon into Cornwall, and this week we went down between None and Vespers to have a proper dovegreyreader-look as opposed to a fleeting-from-the-car-window look.
It's only about a mile along the lanes and nicely downhill going, horribly steep coming home. In between the two journeys there's also the tempation of the little inn to resist, the one that used to be a nunnery.
I was sufficiently intrigued to spend an hour in the library this week trying to find out more, where might the monks who built the bridge have come from for a start.Then of course you get sidetracked and discover your house name dates back to 1276 (but not the house, though that's disputable given the sad state it was in when we moved here fourteen years ago) and the two young sons from the surrounding farm were killed in The Great War, and someone paid £1900 for half the valley in 1939 and before I knew it None was upon me.
Port Eliot and then The Morville Hours has suddenly made my acutely aware of the footsteps of time and the imprints left by those who've gone before, both the visible and the invisible. Now capable of getting completely carried away so I'm quite convinced we trod in the sandal prints of the monks as we wandered along to Horsebridge.
The approach is quite unimposing, this is the Cornwall to Devon side.

But when you look from a distance, how on earth did they build this in 1437?

The bridge so narrow that it has handy little recesses to squeeze into, this one looking downriver towards Plymouth (eventually) and it's not unusual to see cows grazing on that island of grass in high summer.

Always helpful to have a hand waving at you as you snap, does David Bailey have this trouble?

But it is an idyllic spot. Bookhound will soon be fishing for salmon a bit further upstream on a friend's stretch of river after June 16th, it would probably be a four figure sum per day here.

and here

But gliding along on the crest of my theme I felt sure I could spot a monk's fingerprints in that 1437 cement and here you are looking at it too, 671 years later. Is it only me or does anyone else get a strange sense of awe and wonder when they think about that?

I suspect Katherine Swift feels it too.

'Senses seemed keener in relation to the Hours, with their lesson of attentiveness. Theirs was a world where time was accounted for, each second precious : instead of hearing, one listened; instead of seeing,. one looked; instead of tasting, one savoured; instead of touching , one felt. 'Listen' said St Benedict,'listen with the ear of your heart.'

Spare the ribbon and spoil the book.

It's strange how I feel as if I know people who comment on this blog and e mail me off blog even though we've never met, and I'm sure Curzon and I would probably agree on a lot of things.
We are definitely in agreement about one omission.
Curzon recently recommended The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift in words that were far too enticing for me to resist. Abracadabra and a sprinkling of oofle dust and the book arrived the next day.
Every first edition hardback that arrives from Bloomsbury bears a ribbon bookmark, even cutting-edge contemporary fiction flaunts a ribbon, so if there was one book that Curzon and I agree could probably bear two if not three ribbons it is The Morville Hours. Perhaps this is the book with which Bloomsbury have decided we have all been unnecessarily spoilt because my copy is sadly bereft of a single silken addition.
That said I had to trundle off and find some ribbons of my own. This being me, and all things being truly equal, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that I can't bring myself to throw a single piece of ribbon away ever because it might come in useful. There is peril ahead in my old age, I have the makings of a spectacular bag lady.

The ribbon box is indeed a disgraceful portent of the chaos that could reign, but thanks to my magpie tendencies several pieces have emerged as clear front runners for The Morville Hours placement and have now been installed for the duration of the read and all eternity beyond.

The book is a flawless and poetic journey alongside Katherine Swift as she transforms her Dower House garden into a restored paradise, and it is a book that somehow asks to be read in that monastic tradition of slow, diligent thoughtfulness. Katherine makes this much easier by shaping the book around the Hours of the Divine Office.
The seven day hours together with Vigils the Night Office. Timings vary according to summer or winter but with Vigils at 2am, a time of study before Lauds perhaps three hours later, then Prime before work began. Three hours until Terce and on my day off, especially if it's raining and blowing a hoolie, the shame of it, I could still be in bed sipping tea and reading. Three hours later is Sext and the main meal of the day followed by None (rhymes with stone) and Vespers at sunset. Lastly Compline celebrated at 9pm.The writing is as perfect as you could wish for, rich and satisfying. This is writing that leaves a little indent of pleasure on your brain, even just a few sentences at a time and it all makes you examine your own little bit of earth in a new and refreshing light.
Like Katherine Swift,

'I am greedy for facts. I want to know who first tilled this ground, who first dug this earth. I am curious about them, my first nameless neighbours. It was the soil that brought them - us, all of us; the pattern of the village and the lives of its inhabitants, human and non-human, all pre-determined by the patchwork of soils left by the ice.'

We discovered in passing that the little Inn at our nearby ancient River Tamar crossing place into Cornwall was once a Nunnery and the bridge itself was built by French Benedictine monks in 1438, possibly at 5am in the morning. I'll take you for a walk down there tomorrow.
I wonder, did the monks ever wander a few hundred yards across the fields in our direction?
I'm only a fraction into this book but it's a book that will let me dream of something as fundamental as who has stood here, in this very spot, before me. Books with such power feel as rare and precious these days as an illuminated  Book of Hours itself, a book that is a touchstone to something deeply intrinsic and within.
More about The Morville Hours in the fullness of time.

Further sighting of big cat...

That's it, according to today's Tavistock Times I'm a marked feline. Nor do I appreciate the slur on my handsome profile...blunt head indeed, and as for any suggestion that my tail 'flopped around', well I refute it all.

www homework

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

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

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

Port Eliot : Episode Four - Below Stairs

There's something beguiling and compulsive about an opportunity to see a bit of a stately home that is not open to everyone else, which is why Bookhound and I could contain ourselves no longer and dashed into the Basement Haunting right after the evening talk at Port Eliot thinking we'd then saunter back in and have a good look at the archive and chat to everyone, say our thankyous and bid farewell.
Except it didn't work like that.
Once we emerged at the other end we were shown out to the car park.
We'd been below stairs and there was to be no return to the glamour and glitz of life above stairs, it felt quite as it must have done to those who worked in this strange world centuries ago.
The Round Room at Port Eliot with its legendary Robert Lenkiewicz mural was the locaton for the evening event and also a display of facsimiles from the du Maurier archive held at Exeter University. For me the most striking picture that of Daphne seated with her father Gerald, looking for all the world like a glamorous couple, he holding her hand firmly on her knee, Daphne looking uncomfortably away, not meeting his reverential gaze which is firmly fixed on her eyes.Surely we expect this gaze to be the opposite, daughter looking at father, making this a picture that told those thousand words and more about the strange relationship between father and daughter.
More fascinating discussion about the paper trail that underpins Justine's writing of Daphne and some very informative details from Jessica Gardner the curator of the archive, and all as the Lenkiewicz mural radiated its multiplicity of strange and complex metaphors down on us. Occasionally my eye wandered off to yet another Robert mystery and this mural is known to contain many, it is unfathomable but spectacular for its scale and artistic prowess, a mix of portrait, still life, trompe-l'oeil and imagery. In death Robert Lenkiewicz has certainly continued to arouse the interest and achieve the notoriety he constantly courted in his life.
Follow this link and get a flavour of the house and a virtual 360 degree tour of the Round Room for yourself, it's truly astonishing. I'm going to write more about the guide book when I get it back because it's a very entertaining and beautifully presented treasure. The Tinker snaffled mine eagerly, but I do now have the horse's mouth (or should that be the elephant's mouth?) explanation for the symbolism of the pachyderm.
Everyone I've asked has shrugged and said they hadn't a clue so in the end it made sense to ask the one person who'd know and the Earl has obliged. More soon on that.
But off to the basement we went ushered in by designer Michael Howells and we should have guessed when we jokingly said 'we might not be back ' and he replied ' you won't be coming back' that he was right.
Firstly the candelit cellars. Round so presumably beneath the Round Room and some stock in evidence.
'Anything worth drinking in there,' someone asked us as we emerged,
'all of it probably,' quipped Bookhound.
Then along to the Housekeeper's Room, the Gun Room, the Servant's Hall, everything dimly and eerily lit by candles, surprisingly spacious and clearly all as it had been seventy plus years ago. This was another complete world, a parallel community existing beneath the one it served, and with a dining room 100 feet from the kitchen they must all have been as sleek as that whippet Roo St Germans. Glimpsing shadowy rows and rows of servants bells all named by room and you begin to imagine the bustle and activity down here whilst life waited expectantly and demandingly upstairs.
The atmosphere was cold, chilled and yes haunting, we weren't expecting the figure in the rocking chair to come to life and get up to answer the phone either, nor to hear that it was Mrs Danvers on the other end.
A lasting image with which to depart as I finally head into that long-awaited re-read of Rebecca forty years on. It is certain in my mind now that Daphne had a house as grand as Port Eliot in her mind when she wrote Rebecca, so all a fitting end to a magical and unforgettable weekend.

Lunchtime

It's a lesser known fact that when I'm at work and the clock strikes one or thereabouts, I hang up my metaphorical work hat, head for my car if I'm not already in it, and whizz two minutes up the road onto Dartmoor. I have several favoured parking places where I can eat my lunch and read for about thirty minutes or so. This might seem acutely anti-social but to be frank  when I've been listening and talking to people all morning I'm a bit fed up with the sound of my own voice.
Time to give it a rest, make myself leave my desk and disappear off into another world.
I might listen to some of the news but it's all ever-so slightly depressing and seems at odds with the beautiful view, though I do like to hear Martha Kearney put someone on the rack and turn the screws. She does it so nicely and politely but to lethal effect.
The books need to be small and the reading has to be of a particular variety because my mind can only be allowed to descend into temporary respite before I have to crank it up again, the diversion can't afford to be too great, so a complex novel is hopeless. I don't have enough time to pick up the thread and proceed.
Barbara Pym is proving to be the perfect lunchtime companion as is H.E.Bates, and following his recent rehabilitation in my mind with The Triple Echo I have really enjoyed more in the shape of The Yellow Meads of Asphodel, a collection of his short stories.
Initially I had assumed they might be slightly Pym-like in their style and substance,but how wrong I was as things rapidly became darker and increasingly sinister and with an undisguised slightly risque edge. I don't associate risque with H.E.Bates, thinking Larkins, but perhaps I haven't read enough and am therefore guilty of pigeon-holing him very incorrectly?
There's that subtle dissection without anaesthetic going on as H.E.Bates strips away the surface layers and reveals those red-raw layers beneath which sting and smart when exposed to the air for the first time and the story of the title is one.
John and Virginia Claridge, more like man and wife than the seemingly devoted brother and sister they are, who have never argued and call each other darling until a suitor arrives on the scene to court Virginia and suddenly they both revert to type. The spats between the siblings finally begin and John's insane jealousy looks set to spoil Virginia's party.
Then the scatty Miss Shuttleworth, the bemused recipient of mysterious doorstep gifts of surplus garden produce, the cantaloupe melons, nectarines and asparagus. She too has a suitor but can he get the words out or do his exotic vegetables have to do the talking?
This is a tiny slip of a book full of great big huge surprises and I could so easily have missed it, but for anyone else who needs a little lunchtime escape or the short commute read, here's one perfect solution.

Port Eliot - Episode Three and my first ever link to a dog's blog

I suspect most people fall in love with Port Eliot at first glimpse. Even Napoleon it would seem.

'Napoloen, gazing at Port Eliot land from the sea as he sailed into exile, said it was the most beautiful place in England. Enfin cec beau pays',

so reports Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon ( and I cribbed that from the guidebook)

As Catherine St Germans explained, it is a house full of secrets and hidden places and, in the knowledge that Daphne du Maurier and her sister Angela were frequent visitors in the 1930's, it doesn't take too much of a leap in joined-up thinking to speculate on how Daphne's imagination would have been inspired by such a magical place as she delved deep to create the setting of Manderley for Rebecca.
If imagination be partly a composite of images and impressions, then Port Eliot spins a deep and strangely intricate gossamer web of them across your mind.
As we sat in the library on Friday evening and I listened to Justine read the opening pages of Daphne, though I'm now very familiar with the words, in every setting they say something new and different and I think more and more people are realizing that Justine has actually written a very important book. Not only contributing hugely to a Daphne du Maurier renaissance but also adding renewed impetus to the work of Bronte scholars searching for the missing book of Emily Bronte's poems. The loss of the Honresfeld manuscript, its whereabouts shrouded in mystery and intrigue, is now emerging as another important thread from Daphne and there are some literary super-sleuths back on the trail.
Justine's tenacious and diligent research has caused many a professor to sit up and pay attention because by returning to primary sources she has opened up new lines of enquiry. Indeed the powers that be at The Bronte Parsonage Museum may now be lying in a darkened room with cold compresses sprinkled with lavender water on their foreheads, so persistent were Justine's entreaties. Accessing the Symington letters file, forbidden to all who went before and therefore unopened for fifty years, must have been quite a moment.
Then you sit in a house like Port Eliot, where nothing has ever been thrown away, and suddenly you wonder what unknown treasures this house must hold? Now I've seen the basement, heaven alone knows what's in the attics, even King Tut would be impressed.

Daphne had her way with the weather yet again and the afternoon event moved from the garden to The Orangery (what a useful addition an Orangery is) as that very particular brand of West Country rain fell; it doesn't seems like it's raining at all but you will be soaked within minutes. Justine and Catherine engaged in a warm and fascinating conversation about all things Daphne and the audience was entranced yet again. The sun shone briefly for the slap-up Rebecca tea and so we were able to sit in the garden and cope admirably with the generous profusion of cucumber sandwiches, cream scones and chocolate cake.
With an eye for gates these days I espied this one leading into the Orangery and suddenly Catherine's words about a house and garden full of secrets never felt more real.

Everyone chatted to everyone else even if they didn't know each other, which is what you do at Port Eliot, or was that just me? It was a pleasure to meet Oxford Reader and it is also hoped the Port Eliot Daphne du Maurier day will become an annual event so must add this to my list of Essential Pilgrimages.
Justine chatted and signed books with her perfect blend of humour and enthusiasm and just take a look at the Devon designer footwear, note plain NOT flowery.
Meanwhile I dashed home before the evening event to get into passable cocktail and canapes gear (not moving in these circles this was a guess, but read here to discover the Unimagined and serious trouble a canape can get you into, poor Imran) , to find the Gamekeeper had caught a whopping great big sea bass down at Halton Quay and was busy filleting it in the kitchen.
Mess, ugh, fish, ugh, scales and guts everywhere, ugh, out again.
Much as I love the National Trust, of necessity the essence can be diluted whereas there is something quintessential about a house like Port Eliot, a much-loved home left completely alone and untouched. It's a house replete with a soul, unassuming eccentricities and a setting with a voice of its own; sometimes declaring loud, sometimes the merest whisper but a voice that you can almost hear, a voice that laughs too as you wander through, and one that echoes back in time across that sumptuous Repton parkland.
Then I think Port Eliot could also be unique in other ways.
Surely the only stately home in the land that has a dovegrey dog with a blog, don't miss Roo's thoughts on the general public and 'the bloody parrot'. This could catch on, imagine what the Royal corgis would have to say? If anyone gets a whiff of a Royal Corgi Blog please do let us all know.
The hundred opening days for 2008 will be up by June 10th but plan ahead for 2009. The litfest will be on again next July, check with the Estate about opening times for the house, make sure you come via the A38 and the Tamar Bridge and then divert off left to St Germans a few miles later. I can promise you a beautiful and magical introduction to any visit to this most enchanting and mysterious county.

Coming Soon : Episode Four - The Basement

PS If you haven't read Unimagined by Imran Ahmad please don't miss it, it was Ann Widdecombe and dovegreyreader's Best Non-Fiction Read of 2007 and it says so inside the book.

Duckling update - Sunday School