dovegreyreader scribbles

The Lane in November

I've been doing a bit of moon-thinking lately.
It was Karen over at Cornflower who started me off with her heading Gibbous Moon for her thoughts on Richard Burn's book A Dance for the Moon.
As they do, someone had asked in comments why 'gibbous'?
This then set me off on a little trail of Moonology type investigations.
I sort of knew what a gibbous moon was but not quite.
We've been witness to a brilliant full moon recently and wondrously clear starbright skies which with no light pollution we treat like our own private planetarium. Yes, we have been known to lie out in the garden and watch meteorite showers in mid-winter.
Everything has most certainly been illuminated and if my camera could only have captured the lane at midnight you would have been very impressed, but it's a bog-standard little Olympus thing that I point and press and night shots seem to be just an ask too far.
The lane in November is certainly looking a bit bleak and mud-coloured but a good deal neater for a visit from the hedge trimmer so I dug these out and off we went. You will notice I belong to the blue wellie brigade.

There's no point in trying to edit the pictures into something bright and cheery, this is how it is right now but somehow it still has that undeniable beauty.

 

as does Book Hound collecting his kindling as we walk, he just can't bear to look a free wooden gift horse in the mouth.
 

Hedge trimming has cut away all the deadwood revealing the holly awaiting its entrance patiently in the wings.A morsel of colour in the garden but not much from the...er...thingy plant...someone will diagnose it...is it Mahonia?
But here is Book Hound's favourite wood-pile corner now earning its keep and all that summer work paying off, it's his pride and joy in the true sense of another lovely Mary Azarian woodcut for which I'm convinced Bookhound posed. Mind you I have taken some responsibility for woodshed-raiding and fire-lighting in recent weeks and I think I'm getting almost as fond of it as he is. The logs just used to miraculously appear in the basket but now I realise someone has to go and get them. The day a rat jumps out I might become less fond of it, in fact unlikely to go near it for years, but for now I'm bonding quite nicely with the woodshed.

 

If it's Saturday, we're Knitting

You could be forgiven for walking into Chez dovegreyreader and asking, as did the Tinker, whether we were having trouble with the TV reception and was this contraption perhaps a new aerial?

No, it's my temporary skein-to-ball winding chair because I'm doing a lot of skein-to-ball winding right now. The Colinette Prism is frogged for the tenth time, skeined, washed and re-balled and already hopefully being lovingly melded into its final and permanent creation, a shortish but lovely little waistcoat affair from a lovely little Noro pattern book, Designer Mini-Knits. Great value at £7.50 because it's full of quick but beautiful patterns for gloves, socks, leg warmers, jumpers and hats a plenty.
Talking of patterns, has anyone else discovered Ravelry? Free online knitting patterns galore, you have to sign up for an invite which takes about four days to be authorised but then it's like knitaholic's in paradisum when you are allowed in through the pearly portal.
I'm also busy knitting up a plain jumper but in a new wool; baby llama is a first and I hope there isn't  a little llama out there shivering, but it's divinely soft and the picture doesn't do justice to the depth of the petrel blue or the perfection that I have discovered in the Brittany wooden needles. At £4.50 a pair,no more expensive than plastic or metal, light, sleek and slidey, great to knit with and long enough to tuck comfortably under arms for us peasant knitters, I'm a convert.
Meanwhile another new discovery this week, and why has this one taken me so long?
I can knit in the car...while Bookhound drives of course, but this sock just flew along as we flew up to Book Barn and I'm loving the way the self-patterning has fortuitously worked itself out around the heel.
















 

Someone has to go there...

About twice a year we brace ourselves, pack up flask and sandwiches and head up to fight our way through the five million books at Book Barn near Midsomer Norton in Somerset because someone's got to do it.
The Book Barn discovery was quite by chance years ago on a return trip from Bath and we've been devotees ever since, what's not to love about five million books?
On the way we stopped at the Cathedral city of Wells for coffee and a mooch and apart from another wool shop to die for, there in the Oxfam shop book bounty for my Women's Social History shelves.

 

There are however secrets to a successful Book Barn visit and mostly that involves going with purpose and intent, trained as if for a marathon and armed with a list of authors or topics to search for. I have also found it helpful to take along Bookhound or a similarly well-trained trotter suitably shod for speed and mountaineering with long arms and a head for heights.
Books are shelved alphabetically under subject but only A-B-C and within each letter it's a free-for-all, you have to pick up a shelf map, commandeer a ladder on wheels of your own and just knuckle down and scan.
Firstly place your trotter in Fiction with a list and whisper 'Fetch' while you head off on a reconnaissance around the rest of the shelves.

 

There's always a Virago corner worth a peruse and then shelf after shelf of Letters & Diaries, then wall to wall Biography. Meanwhile your trotter may have completed their trawl of Fiction and returning to heel you can add in further book-specific commands.
I have been searching for months for a copy of The Chalk Garden, Enid Bagnold's play missed at the Donmar, and now that I'm into play reading I think I could probably manage all ten parts myself.
Bookhound returned for orders and so I set him off on the scent,
'Drama - The Chalk Garden - Enid Bagnold'
He was back within about ten seconds...yes really, he's pedigree.
'Do you mean this one?'
My jaw was agape with astonishment.
So we did well on all my odd selection of current chosen subjects and some chance finds too and we've left plenty of books behind for everyone else, miles of aisles (to quote Joni) just like this one.
Oh it was all a very glorious day.
 

Thanksgiving

I had planned to write a post about Thanksgiving today and the search for pictures revealed an oddly similar theme to this one, people looking fondly and adoringly at turkeys. So I hope all U.S. visitors have got the feathers off them and have them roasting nicely in the oven this minute and a Happy and Peaceful Thanksgiving to you all, have a wonderful day.
Then I'm sorry but I'm going to be shallow and give thanks for a book which has arrived this week.
That might be against the rules. However it's such a covetously wonderful book, one that I have been yearning for so I'm hoping you can see it in your hearts to forgive my fickle nature. I doubt this day is about giving thanks for material possessions but a book like this is hardly so easily categorized.
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield  Volume 5 1922-1923 edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott and published by Oxford University Press.
I go a bit woozy round the edges just looking at them.
I bought Volumes I & 2 in this series at a book sale several years ago, 3 & 4 are on their way to me but meanwhile 5 has arrived.
There is of course a Janet Frame connection to Katherine Mansfield too, apart from the obvious New Zealander one. Janet's mother Lottie worked as a maid servant for Mrs Mary Beauchamp, Katherine's grandmother in New Zealand and Janet also benefited from a year-long bursary from the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship which enabled her to travel abroad for the first time.
Then there's the Elizabeth von Arnim connection to Katherine as cousins, and so there are some obvious watering holes ahead for this particular reading journey.
I've been dipping into Katherine Mansfield's short stories again with a certain amount of awe and wonder, and reading the volumes of letters is a perfect route into reading the stories almost contemporaneously as she mentions their progress in letters to friends,

' Im deadly tired tonight. I wrote & finished a story for The Sketch. The day after that happens is always a day when one feels like a leaf on the ground - one can't even flutter. At the same time there is a feeling of joy that another story is finished. I put it in such a lovely place, too, the grounds of a Convent in spring with pigeons flying up in the blue and big bees climbing in and out of the freezias below.'

The story was Taking the Veil.

'A big bee, a golden furry fellow, crept into a freesia, and the delicate flower leaned over, swung, shook; and when the bee flew away it fluttered still as though it were laughing. Happy, careless flower! '

Unsurprisingly, being terminally ill with pulmonary tuberculosis seems to have offered an extraordinary focus to Katherine Mansfield's writing. This letter to Elizabeth von Arnim, written in January 1922, in what would prove to be the final year of her life, reveals the depths of her incapacity,

' And the idea of being well - haunts me. Ever since I have realised this possibility I dream of it at night - dream I am alone - crossing streams or climbing hills or just walking. To be alone again. That is what health means to me; that is freedom. To be invisible, not to be offered chairs or given arms! '

In her quest for health Katherine Mansfield is about to embark on what will prove to be a futile and expensive year of dubious and very uncomfortable treatments. First stop from Chalet des Sapins at Montana Crans in Switzerland to Paris, where Katherine will live an invalid's life in a hotel whilst placing her faith in seances. It will all culminate in her tragic and horrific death a year later and much of it likely to be conveyed in this final volume of letters. I think I have a truly memorable reading experience ahead.
And finally, on reflection, I think there's a great deal of genuine Counting Blessings and Thanksgiving to extract from all that.

Clifford Fadiman suggests...

" Above all give me Trollope, from whom I have received so much pleasure that I would willingly call him another St. Anthony, Trollope who breaks through the time barrier and teleports the horizontal reader instantly to a divinely settled, comfortable, income-taxless vanished world. His half-a-hundred novels are good for five years of bedside reading. Of those who minister to the tired, night-welcoming mind, Trollope is king. He never fails to interest, but not too much; to soothe, but not too much. Trollope is the perfect novelist for the bedside."
Er, no excuses here.

Reading in Bed

One distinct advantage to this whole 'not working' thing apart from ten tons of anxiety being lifted from my shoulders is that I now stand as much chance of finding the gems in the Oxfam bookshop as the next person.
So a few weeks ago I discovered a book called Reading in Bed Personal Essays on the Glories of Reading edited by Steven Gilbar and published by Godine which I snapped up instantly and  what a worthwhile snatch it has proved to be.
For a start I know exactly where the book was bought and when because handwritten in the front, Borders Express, Monday 11th July 2005, Somerset Mall, Troy. I suspect that is here so quite a journey from Detroit to Devon to dovegreyreader.
The book is a gloriously good and uplifting read with a selection of essays spanning the ages from the 16th century Michel de Montaigne, and working towards the present day via William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Henry Thoreau, John Ruskin thence to Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, Herman Hesse, Henry Miller, Eizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Italo Calvino. Joseph Epstein ( of Fred Astaire fame last week) and countless others and I have loved every single one. There's nothing to surpass the well-written literary essay.
Back in 1995 Steven Gilbar was suggesting that

'I envision the reader to be someone like myself...one who is made up in part of all her or she has read, who can be moved by good writing. We may be an endangered species in this age of non-books and aliteracy but we endure.'

Heavens that left me dumbstruck, were things really that bad in 1995?
Embryonic very newborn internet days?
But my favourite entry is from Clifford Fadiman. You may recall that his daughter Anne is one of my best friends (Anne doesn't know this and may be worried about stalkers if she did) but Anne's books Ex Libris, Rereadings and At Large and Small grace my little Books at My Right Hand shelf on my desk (currently Anne is cheek-by-jowl in the esteemed company of Penelope Fitzgerald's House of Air, The Paris Review Interviews and The Poems of Emily Dickinson) In an idle moment when Typepad is on one of its go-slows I will reach for any one of these and read.
Reading Clifford you can see where Anne picked up the talent and here Clifford addresses the issue of 'pre-slumber reading' most specifically, and that means we must add in Mary Azarian's beautiful wood etching (for which Bookhound is convinced I posed)

'Hence the wise bed-reader, rendering unto Morpheus the things that are Morpheus' will shun any book that appears too interesting.'

But nor should books be used as an opiate because

'dull books soothe only dull brains.'

Clifford urges us towards middle of the road reading, definitely not newspapers because all newspaper readers furrow their brows,

'the enemy of the settled mind...with its unkillable obsession with the actual... the systematic generator of worry'

Nor should we be entertaining a misery memoir,

'Problem novels (usually produced by problem children) should never companion your pillow; midnight is no hour to worry about the time being out of joint.'

Likewise stay right away from political arguments and plenty more, finally Clifford leads us to his best pillow books,

'...those that deny the existence of tomorrow. To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains...a bridge between the sharp fact of daily existence and the cloudy fact of the dream life...removed in some degree from my current time, my current place...
The books that do the job for me may quite well bore you to a catalepsy or infuriate you to a raging insomnia.'

Firstly Clifford likes to

'roam around in the general catalogue of the Oxford University Press...rich with peculiar treasures.'

Then he hits the novels,

'Give me no profound Russians, no overlucid Frenchmen, no opaque Germans, give me solid Englishmen of the nineteenth century...'

So who do you think does it for Clifford?

'Breaks through the time barrier and teleports the horizontal reader instantly to a divinely settled, comfortable, income-taxless vanished world...never fails to interest, but not too much; to sooth, but not too much.'

So who exactly is his 'perfect novelist for the bedside?'

The Believers by Zoe Heller

I have arrived at Planet Zoe Heller far behind the rest of the world and so opened her latest novel The Believers, published by Penguin Fig Tree, with little knowledge about the author beyond a hugely successful second novel in Notes On a Scandal (which I haven't read) and which was made into a hugely successful film (which I haven't seen).
But ignorance is often to my advantage as I then read with no pre-conceived ideas or expectations, could make no comparisons with previous reading and so in I jump.
 Immediately I was reminded of one of my best reads of 2007, When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson.
Forgive me for saying it but there is no dysfunctional family I love more than a Jewish one, there just seems to be so much material to work with.
So much dysfunction to elaborate on in fact, that the Anglican dysfunctional family just can't hold a candle to it all, and like the London Rubins of Charlotte Mendelson's wonderful novel, the New York Litvinoffs of Zoe Heller's aspire to dizzying new heights of family angst. Now I'm also reminded of the memorable Glickmans in Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson, (which I loved but everyone else I know seemed to loath) and there must be plenty more you can all add.
Joel and Audrey meet at a party in London in 1962 and on the spur of a very brief and momentary acquaintance, Audrey agrees to travel back to New York with Joel, a lawyer, and marry him. That's about all we know because the novel moves swiftly on forty years to 2002 by which time there are daughters, Rosa and Karla, an altruistically motivated adoption resulting in n'er do well son Lenny, and the dysfunction is rife.
It's hard to manage an ounce of sympathy for the acid-tongued, self-destructive person that Audrey has become and her views on motherhood sum it up, this is the complete antithesis to the archetypal Jewish mother as we know her, Audrey has in fact perfected the art of being the non-Jewish-Jewish mother

' Audrey had never evinced the slightest sentimentality about children...she had tended to think of them as trainee humans. Inadequate adults. She loved her own daughters well enough - wanted them to be happy and so forth - but they had failed to inspire in her that mad lioness passion to which other mothers so preeningly testified.'

Just as I thought I was getting to know Joel, building up a picture of the working man, husband and father, circumstances which I won't reveal silence him, and thereafter the picture is painted only through the eyes of others, so when the skeletons start rattling in the cupboards it becomes far too easy to jump to wrong conclusions based on what we think we know of Audrey. You'd give the man a sainthood at least for coping with her vitriol, forgive all misdemeanours in an instant, but I had all too-easily and quickly forgotten early misgivings about Joel in the face of Audrey's ghastly behaviour until Zoe Heller eventually called me to order. Audrey incidentally vile to all except poor Lenny, the drug-fuelled "kid" (prepare to catch your jaw when you eventually find out how old he is)  who somehow extracts a rather late-flowering and misguided maternal instinct from his presumably guilt-ridden adoptive mother.
Interestingly at her talk last week Elaine Showalter asked if anyone had read The Believers and in the context of Fidelity by Susan Glaspell. I wanted to jump up and shout ' ME ME, I HAVE' but am glad I didn't because I don't think I was meant to; posed more as a rhetorical question in order to make a comparison between two books, which as
"Showalter elaborated " both examine issues of  fidelity to a set of values and to a faith in those values, and in an instant ...*ping*...I had a good handle on Zoe Heller's book.
Clearly professors know these things better than the rest of us.
The three women in the immediate Litvinoff family all have a set of values to be challenged, and this in strong contrast to other women outside the family who all seem to know their own minds. Audrey must confront the state of her marriage, as must the plump, well-nourished daughter Karla who finds herself wedlocked into a sad state of misery, whilst sister Rosa finds her atheist upbringing weakening and crumbling under a late-onset attraction to Jewish orthodoxy.
Finally perhaps Audrey unwittingly and slightly wishfully puts her finger on the very intrinsic Biblical Jewishness of this seemingly very un-Biblical Jewish family,

'ours was a joyous tribe.'

I'd question the 'joyous', but the 'tribe' seems about right if you regard it as a group of people related by blood or marriage who do their best to get along rather than inflict all out war on each other.
It's all beautifully woven together, moments of unaccustomed poignancy when each woman faces up to the reality and inner truth of her situation as events unfold, all making Planet Heller a friendly, welcoming place.
Having arrived and found the air much to my liking I'll stay a bit longer and catch up on those I've missed.

The Home Maker v The Home Wrecker

Overnight trips to London for events like this can be very expensive from Devon, so they have to be justified in this new economy and only planned when the billing is so alluring that I couldn't possibly miss it, but this was easy, anything on either Susan Glaspell or Dorothy Canfield Fisher falls into that category.
Both on the same billing and it's a must.
I've read just about all I can find on the life of Susan and I'm fast catching up with Dorothy, but there's nothing like hearing the spoken word from an authority like Elaine Showalter on favourite subjects to inspire.
Both women born in the American Mid-West, both attended university at a time when only 2% of women did so, both travelled to Europe and thence to New York. Self-supporting, independent women who transcended the era of the Woman Problem and were moving towards the newly-fledged realms of Feminism. So though  Dorothy and Susan were contemporaries with a great deal in common there is no evidence to date that they ever met.
Elaine Showalter offered interesting details about the influence of British women writers like Virginia Woolf and New Zealander Katherine Mansfield (next on my hit-list, Volume 5 of the Letters has arrived, can't keep my hands off it for long) on both Dorothy and Susan but gradually the similarities between them are effaced by huge differences.
Dorothy embraces a happy marriage and children, a farm in Vermont, war work and the educational ideas of Maria Montessori, whilst Susan, embarks on a trail of self-destruction, the high life (and the bottle it would seem), finding herself embroiled in the troubled life of self-absorbed playwright Jig Cook and his obsession for all things Greece. Jig it was stated 'lived passionately and failed passionately' and in many respects Susan followed.
Reading again Barbara Ozieblo's biography of Susan Glaspell, she asks,

' Why the rebel in her chose so often to acquiesce to convention...Glaspell constantly ceded centre stage to the men she loved...Glaspell shows just how difficult it was for women to rebel.'

and suddenly you recall the huge and gaping sadness that existed in her life and now I want to read all those books about Susan Glaspell's life again.
Both women however no strangers to tragedy and ensuing grief, and it cannot be denied both gifted and prolific writers who have largely faded from the public eye, with just a handful of books in print despite having written forty or more between them.
Elaine Showalter gave interesting accounts of both The Homemaker and Fidelity, and I was delighted to confirm with her afterwards that my recent reading of A Montessori Mother by Dorothy Canfield Fisher has set me off on the right track to explore just how this influences her writing on children, parenting and the family. I've sat through more work-related parenting training courses than can be good for anyone over the years, dished up enough suggestions to anguished parents, so I'm interested to see just how Dorothy's ideas hold up in comparison to what we spout today.
Have the Montessori principles of self-education, independence and self-reliance been incorporated to such a degree that we now take it as a given?
Or have we lost it all, suffocated beneath fears of 'stranger danger', child protection, government-led educational targets and Ofsted reports ?
Elaine Showalter's closing words on both women were poignant .
Arguing that by the 1920s feminism was being seen as a failure, women were deemed incapable of coping with home, marriage, work and children combined and still no framework for the notion of the 'stay-at-home' husband, yet whilst the sadly childless Susan Glaspell may have been unencumbered by much of that, she was among the first to discover that free love for a woman was never free; in fact it was proving the most costly way to organize your life.
Applause, some very interesting questions and deliciously interesting news of Elaine Showalter's forthcoming book from Virago, A Jury of Her Peers : American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, 600 + of them and the very first definitive book on the subject to be written. The title appropriately that of Susan Glaspell's short story version of her play Trifles, mentioned here least week.
America, you get it in February, we have to wait until May.
Then it must be admitted, I for one was very happy to get my presumably rush-embossed gluteals off that very lovely chair, but with my interest piqued and inspired for a great deal more in-depth reading of the writing of these two amazing American women, and doubtless at least 598 more when I finally get hold of this book.
Meanwhile Virginia and Katherine beckon too.

The Art Workers Guild wherin we must talk about the chairs.

Elaine Showalter's event for Persephone Books was held at the Art Workers Guild in Queen Square last week and a rather select and lesser-known venue it is too.
Hard to believe that as this building has been in the possession of the Guild since 1914 how many times must I have walked past it in the 1970's and never even noticed it?
Established in 1884 in an effort to bring together the disciplines of art, sculpture, architecture (and probably knitting now) it's a bit like a very exclusive club and in a way that is what it remains. Artistic work submitted for approval by a committee, even William Morris had a job to get in back in 1888 and, if membership is forthcoming, names inscribed in white on the wood panelling that surrounds the room. Names then converted to gilt after death  and the walls lined with sombre looking portraits of Past Masters of the Guild. I was delighted to be seated within the beady eyeline of my old friend Edwin Lutyens, that garrulous chap of the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme who visited us here a few weeks ago.

The issue of women members was a thorny old chestnut and it seems they weren't admitted to the ranks until the 1960s when wood engraver Joan Hassall finally chipped her way in through the door and hopefully complained vociferously about those chairs.
The seating?
Well I'm very sorry but I must mention it.
Beautiful ladder-backed, rush seated chairs based on a design by Ernest Gimson according to Gavin Stamp (who also visited us here with Edwin a few weeks ago) and I must agree with Gavin, though magnificent works of art in their own right they are mightily uncomfortable to sit on, even with the little cushions provided.
So there I perched, daintily and literally on the edge of my seat in this very atmospheric venue wondering just who else had sat there likewise down the years...C.R. Ashbee,( founder of the Chipping Campden Arts & Crafts movement and where I found myself recently)  Walter Crane, Edward Burne Jones, Sir John Betjeman, George Bernard Shaw,  Frederick Leighton, Basil Spence, Arthur Rackham...and yes, scouring current membership lists, there is just one knitter in there,
Congratulations to Rachael Matthews of Prick Your Finger.
Now there's sensible progress for you, and yet another London shop for someone to go and visit on our behalf.

Is this legal?

It's Saturday, time for us knitters to indulge.
Currently I am still wondering whether it can really be legal to sit and knit in daylight hours?
Mind you, would you just look at this miserable, wretched, depressed feline?
Rocky's had a very busy time of it, fireguarding. Finding it glowing nicely much earlier in the day than he is accustomed to he has taken it upon himself to dutifully keep watch and I think the stress is painfully evident.
 

I've thrown in the towel and just surrendered to the startitis which has all gone hopelessly and recklessly over the top.
Some odd-shaped freestyle socks, on the brilliantly lovely bright and shiny and very very pointy Boye's 2.75 needles, socks to invent as I go along, so they will not be a matching pair, in fact fraternal socks according to Crafty. Incidentally check out what Crafty's up to with the Remains of the Sheep while you're there, "Rome wasn't spun in a day".
Love it.
Meanwhile I'm using the remains of the Wensleydale Sheep Shop wool-alpaca mix so I'm feeling virtuous, and at least have half-forgiven myself for the first pair I made which inadvertently went through a hot wash and felted up far better than I could ever have managed to felt something had I been intending to.
Age old Fair Isle tension issues abound, it's impossibly tricky to gauge and thread the wool loosely on four needles (any tips?) but in socks I find this doesn't seem to matter, once on the foot it all seems to sort and settle. There is something quite exciting about free range sock-knitting and I should go there more often.
But something equally pleasing about self-patterning wool, the knitting just flies along in anticipation of the next surprise colour change so I've dug deep into the stash and found this. It's Schoeller & Stahl Fortissima Colori 75% wool 25% polyamide and, knowing I had Socktopus wool on  the way I decided to get this on the needles too....well I don't just read one book at a time so why be any different about knitting.

This all proved to be in the nick of time as the little order from Socktopus arrived. Don't miss Alice's blog  I've been discreetly drooling over those pictures of the new shop, we can but hope for a Devon branch. So my little bit of the shop arrived beautifully wrapped in tissue paper and suddenly I find myself effortlessly making new and instant woolly-attachments.
This is Bearfoot by Mountain Colours , all the way to Devon via Chelsea from Montana's Bitterroot Valley, hand painted wool, mohair and enough but not too much nylon. My colour choice, Mountain Lake, sits very comfortably within my happy-knitter colour zone.

But I've also been doing some finishing off. I'm pleased enough with the Tank Top V neck, though even with just two pieces it was like wrestling with a lap full of fluffy heavyweight kittens. Big wool on 8mm needles always seems to equal big gaping 8mm holes when I reach the 'pick up and knit' bits, but a little judicious weaving in of ends seems to have plugged the worst of it. I'm also throwing caution to the wind and following the Stitch and Bitch advice to forget all that rubbish about pressing and blocking before making up.
Just join the thing up and then dunk it in water, it all feels like a merciful release.

Oh Canada!

Joy is unconfined here as, just in time for the freezing cold arctic spell of about eight hours duration that is forecast this weekend, a huge parcel arrived.
Kevin really did mean it...yes he has sent us this and a million thanks from Family dovegreyreader.
Meet our very own Hudson's Bay Company Point Blanket.
 

 

 

A lovely piece of Canada now graces our Devon home and we have fallen instantly in love with it, Bookhound thinks it may well save a fortune on the gas bill.
I can't tell you how long I've coveted one of these, can hardly believe it, look, honestly, it's a real one.
Bring on the big freeze and thanks again Kevin, we'll send along the beaver pelts when we have enough ...would ferrets do?

 

London day

London was, well wonderful London, and it's always good to whisk around on the tube and walk the pavements, pretending to be a local, playing at living there again and then head back to Devon.
I used to know exactly where to get on a tube train to then step off at the 'Way Out' sign at the other end but have generally lost the knack, however I did manage it for Russell Square which is my 'best known' tube station. I glanced at those 175 emergency stairs and half-thought of challenging myself as of old, but then realised I'd need oxygen after about thirty or so and resus after about fifty these days and sensibly headed for the lift as usual.
I was on my way to a talk given by the inestimable Elaine Showalter at the Art Worker's Guild in Queen Square. Her subject Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Home Maker and Susan Glaspell, The Home Wrecker and very good it was too. More when I have properly gathered my thoughts and placed them in the context of current reading, but old hunting grounds always hold that magic allure so I had to wander off along Great Ormond Street just to give the old place my fond regards.
I know quite a few ex God's Own Spot nurses now visit dovegreyreader scribbles, so please forgive us if we have a little nostalge together and for them especially some early evening pictures that reminded me of those dark winter evenings walking across Queen Square to go on night duty. Underneath the cape would be the basket holding the clean starched apron, a novel and the knitting/quilting for the quiet night that I don't think happened once in four years, but also the obligatory textbook which you always left open on the desk to impress Night Sister.
Me being The Hoarder found my 1971 Third Edition of Paediatric Nursing by Duncombe & Weller instantly. I see now that by 1991 it was into its Seventh Edition by which time it was probably time to pension it off and start anew.
Mine seems to have suffered from a surfeit of idle (fountain pen) doodling and still has patient notes tucked inside but heaven help you if Night Sister decided to pick it up and test you. Reading the diagnoses for the children that we were caring for that night on infectious diseases ward Cohen back in 1974, it's no wonder we didn't sit down; Tubercular Meningitis, Meningococcal Meningitis x 2, Post-Pertussis Vaccine Encephalopathy (remember the Whooping Cough vaccine scare?), Herpes Encephalitis, E.Coli Meningitis, TB and Epidermolosis Bullosa. Nor did we catch anything, it wouldn't have crossed our minds, masks, gowns, infection control and hand-washing ad infinitum were all second-nature to us.

 

I hate to remind anyone who lived here but yer 'tis, Guilford Street Nurses Home where pigeons were known to nest under beds and the entire cockroach population of London would gather to party in the kitchens at night.Then the glowing and glorious old Southwood Building and the sight that would greet us we turned the corner to walk up the drive and were we would be scurrying round for the next twelve hours.

 

 

Gamekeeper Corner

A State of the Ferret update in a minute but meanwhile we're getting to grips with all those terrible corners in the house which have just been too terrible to tackle without at minimum a double gin, and possibly the worst it has to be said was Gamekeeper Corner. Holding the rest of the boot room to ransom, even getting to the door required a bosun's chair, something needed to be done.
So the troops were mustered reluctantly (it must be admitted) but suitably fortified (pot of Earl Grey, it was only 11am, about an hour too early for gin) and a battle strategy was devised.
No point in sidling up to this corner from the right flank and trying to outwit it, this just needed gloves and a head-on galloping charge, throw it all out into the garden and start again. So with reinforcements dispatched to the shed with the command not to return without shelves of some description, make a thousand tins of paint homeless if you must but do not return to this battlefield empty-handed, the onslaught began.
Did you think it was only women who collected handbags?
Imelda Marcos who had the National Shoe Collection?

And now let's turn to the State of the Ferrets.
You may remember those beautiful blond girls, Bubble and Squeak?
Well they both escaped a few weeks ago. Clearly bored with the decorative features in their quarters.Huge inquest with blame levelled at a faulty latch and sufficient sturm and drang to have Goethe popping his head around the door to see how it's done (in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in response to the confines of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements)
Yes much anguish in Gamekeeper Corner.
A fracas in the canine sleeping quarters the next day heralded the wanderer's return and dispelled some of the angst. One night on the tiles and Squeak the Weeny had come home, found sleeping it off underneath the kennel, tail between legs, looking rough as rats, ready to eat a horse, bit the worse for wear but Bubble the Bombshell had obviously been tempted by the bright lights and done a runner.
Much more sturming and dranging.
With Ferret Force One depleted the Gamekeeper bought in another pair... Ferret Force Two, a hob and a jill and as yet unnamed so there's a challenge for you and if it helps to visualise here they are. I'm Strictly up for Bruce and Tess or John and Kristina but they've been rejected as too daft to call out loud when on a serious hunting mission.

But can you believe it, Bubble the Blonde Bombshell then turned up about two weeks ago in a cage trap on a friend's farm a few miles away. Well all those nights out clubbing and a junk diet were never going to do a girl's fur coat any favours but she's been through rehab, therapy and grooming  and is now happily reunited with Squeak.
In-house breeding programmes are now being considered to create a good strong working stockline but of course in the meantime we have no knowledge of any dalliances Bubbles may have made whilst out on that frolic of her own, could have been prey to any old polecat out there.
I'll let you know of any Bubblets.

Dawn in a jiffy

I'm regularly sent audio books but I haven't added much to the Ears on Wheels list lately, and now I must review my audio-book-listening procedure, because of course I'm no longer spending half my life in the Fiesta.
You can see what a pleasurable time I had taking Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Patti Boyd and Clarissa Dickson Wright et al out with me for the day.Not all at once of course (and I didn't claim NHS passenger mileage either ) but the Fiesta was a very sociable place to be as I listened to the narratives of their lives inbetween visits and understood a great deal more about people who seem to have been public property for years. We think we know them, we even think we have a right to know them, but we don't and some have coped better with that fame and intrusion than others.
Now I'll own up, there has been one life I have been desperate to fall out of that jiffy bag.
The very minute I knew the book had been published I put in a plea and as the Donna Leon's and the Andy McNab's have flowed in regularly somehow I just knew last Saturday's parcel was the audio version of Dawn French's book, Dear Fatty.
Just four years my junior (that cheered me up and Madonna's not far behind me and Dawn) and somehow Dawn's career and comedy has tracked and tripped through the last twenty- five or so years of my life as something of a constant. As long as I've been a mother really and somehow those early days were a good if not essential time in my life to keep in close touch with my sense of humour if not my brain.
It happens, and doubtless for many other women too, I think there are funny women who you make sure you never miss, whatever they are doing; Jennifer Saunders, Victoria Wood, Julie Walters have never failed to make me laugh. Like favourite and respected authors, I can forgive all lesser moments in the face of all those supremely memorable ones.
Thinking Dawn and memorable what about that shadow dancing with Darcy Bussell in The Vicar of Dibley?
Then that memory of Victoria Wood's live sketch of the ante-natal class with the midwife demonstrating childbirth using a knitted uterus (woman gets to the birth moment, glances down in horror, design fault, no ribbing) still has me in stitches makes me smile.
Julie Walters in Acorn Antiques, how many countless times at work did one of us walk in stooped Mrs Overall-style over a tray of home-made sherry in mugs tea and macaroons and say ' here you are Miss Babs.'
I think, above all else, I relate to the idea that Dawn is very much her own person and she loves her man to bits, we saw a TV interview recently where Dawn said as much and said so very endearingly. To me, people's lives remain endlessly fascinating and I know Dawn's like most has been a life tinged with both great sadness and happiness so I'm interested to see how that narrative has created one of the nation's funniest, most self-deprecating yet most confident of women.
So with a London-by-train trip yesterday, an overnight stay and a home-again-by-train trip today it will still be Ears on Wheels and it's time for Dear Fatty read by Lisa Tarbuck. Too much audiology training makes me nervous about iPods, I'll have the thing on at a whisper, but for the sake of Dawn I'll risk flattening my cilia and report back.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher at my kitchen table

The kitchen table has looked like this through this week as I've indulged in some mellow, sun-dappled quilt-history reading, some knitting planning and general book-meandering to any warmth that may escape past the Aga-Hog, a sleeping - snoring Rocky. In the midst of all that I've strayed wantonly off into yet another exploration of the writing of Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
I also discover that Remembrance Sunday was the fiftieth anniversary of her death, November 9th 1958.
I have been re-reading The Homemaker for the zillionth time and each time I find a new and previously unseen perspective in that book to explore and more of that soon, but as you already know I have also found myself completely engrossed in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's book of short stories, The Bedquilt edited by Mark Madigan.
In his introduction Mark Madigan crystallises my thoughts on the writing of Dorothy (incidentally originally named Dorothea after her Middlemarch namesake) and perhaps now explains why hers is writing I return to with great frequency,

'Fisher brought to her short fiction a deep understanding of human beings and the world we inhabit. Above all else, these stories bear the imprint of her "special way of looking at things", a way of interpreting life as she knew it - with "her whole personality."

The story of the title has long been a favourite, as spinster relation and Elwell family drudge Aunt Mehetabel dreams up the superlative quilt pattern which she then proceeds to hand piece and quilt over a period of years. Eventually her skill and application win her the status of minor local celebrity and a previously unthinkable degree of inclusion into a family who have taken this maiden aunt for granted all her life. As word spreads of a masterpiece in the making and strangers arrive at the door to view her tiny stitches and immaculate seams, the family begin to realise her value, though perhaps still as a marketable commodity. Nevertheless Aunt Mehetable is given fabrics, a work table of her own and best of all, every quilter's dream possession, time away from her chores to sew.
The empowering 'completeness' this offers to Mehetable's self esteem, giving her a voice after a lifetime of silent disadvantage, makes for a far deeper read than the brevity of the story first suggests. Similar themes to those that always jump out at me from Susan Glaspell's brilliant play Trifles where, through the stitching of the log cabin quilt, Mrs Wright heart-breakingly but symbolically creates that warm, happy home she yearns for.
The metaphor of the quilt is a powerful and multi-faceted one wherever it is used
As well as a perceptive empathy in identifying the plight of these single, seemingly parasitical women,  there can be no better story than The Bedquilt for conveying the joy and thrill of creativity.
I'm convinced that any craft activity done at any level accesses a feel-good bit of the brain. Knowing and feeling those shafts of excitement that can pierce the day in day out-ness of life once that bout of startitis strikes, the idea is born, the mind-planning begins and the materials are required yesterday, which all justifies the existence in every knitting or quilting home of  the ubiquitous stash. Truly awful, I'm sure you'll agree, not to be able to respond instantly to those moments of pure inspiration before they are effaced by the sight of a full washing machine.
For Elaine Showalter The Bedquilt is no less than " a parable of the woman writer and her creative fantasies.'
Hmm, parable? Fantasies? So we might not quite have perfected the bouts of finishitis here yet, but we will, we will. But yes it is a parable ( I never argue with Elaine...'Showalter argues that...' has earned me many a good essay mark) and on so many levels.
Meanwhile lest you thought I may have finished it this week, no it's still a fantasy awaiting reality.

as is this one,
 

but for the hundredth time of showing, here is one I made earlier.

Strictly Come Hoofing.

I take it all back, Strictly lacklustre? Perhaps not and we're loving all the controversy here so talking of 'hoofers' like Fred Astaire can you believe the John Sergeant furore this morning and even worse the headlines?
John shunned by fellow Strictly competitors... (the rotters)
John not trying hard enough...( how very dare they)
John like wheezing Winnie the Pooh dressed up in sequins...( but we all adore Winnie)
There is national uproar and "Excuse me, wake up Britain you nation of idiotic klutzes, this is a dancing competition please take it seriously " statements from all and sundry.
In which case, why invite John onto the programme?
Just to make a fool of himself and provide a bit of entertainment before the real 'hoofers' strut their stuff ?
There's no publicity like bad publicity so, whilst being hoist with one's own petard, I'll wager Auntie Beeb is loving it all and of course don't they have John Sergeant on the payroll anyway?
Yes indeed we must advance sociological evidence, the nation has found its new Depression-busting  "Fred", here's Joseph Epstein's take on what happened last time round,

'..an audience whose lives were greatly stinted by economic depression was ready to entertain - more important, to be entertained by - the fantasy of easy elegance.'

That's us we're all economically depressed but this is 2008, we're not bothered about the dancing any more, we want something else and John has it in spades, an easy, unforced elegance and dignity and we just love a tryer so what's the betting John Sergeant at least makes the final because there's nothing Britain does better than what it's doing right now.

More Jitterbugging...Fred Astaire by Joseph Epstein

Sometimes exactly the right book for the right moment waltzes through the gate in the arms of Jim the Postie, I open the jiffy bag and start reading and that's more or less what happened with Fred Astaire by Joseph Epstein and published by Yale University Press in the Icons of America series.
Fred Astaire about whom I knew very little when I sat and thought about him; sang and danced with Ginger Rogers, made a lot of films...um...um.
So the truth is that Fred Astaire was such a private man that there isn't a great deal more to know.
Working-class roots and an ambitious mother, who having christened him Frederick Austerlitz II then chose wisely with the stage name of Astaire for Fred and his sister Adele when she upped sticks, left husband Frederick Austerlitz I and headed to New York to get her son and daughter on the stage.
Having made his name and fortune Fred did the unusual thing, married happily, had children and led by all accounts a dirt and scandal-free life, thus far nothing but nothing seems to have emerged to stain our image of him as the happy dancing man of the films. The sublime and seemingly effortless dancing acquired through hour upon hour of diligent practice, he was a perfectionist and also a talented singer which is often largely ignored as we focus on his feet.
But we're not supposed to focus on Fred's feet and he discouraged cameramen from doing likewise so there are important facts for non-dancers like me to know.
Whilst Gene Kelly's dancing power derived from his legs and Rudolf Nureyev's from his buttocks (say not a single word...anyone, the spam will be bad enough) Fred's came from his entire body and there is apparently a difference. Fred was short in stature but long in leg and this created exactly the right dancing proportions, which combined with an innate sense of rhythm and a lot more besides made for the perfect package. He was very aware of his lack of height and leading ladies had to be carefully chosen, whilst Fred was always very careful to ensure that, for viewers to appreciate the full impact of his total-body dance technique, he always appeared in full length camera shots when dancing.
The only revelations concern Fred's occasional ambivalence about Ginger Rogers. The partnership was not all it seemed and was mixed with a keen, but oddly misplaced, self-effacing sense of his own talent as 'just a hoofer' which didn't quite come across as true modesty as I read. Fred was acutely aware of his image and maintained strict control over it (would never have been photographed in an ancient old jumper toupee for a start)
Interestingly Fred Astaire was also a man in the right place at the right time as 1930s Depression-hit America looked to the movies for its solace, 90 million out of a population of 150 million went every week. Audiences were in the mood to be transported far from the daily misery and this, coupled with a wealth of fabulous song-writers at their zenith, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern all desperate to write for Fred, thus ensuring his success.
Perhaps a Dancing Fred for our age will emerge this Depression-time round ?
Perhaps he has, that's it, John Sergeant.
Joseph Epstein tackles his subject with a refreshing approach and the result is a book that reads like a series of intelligent and interesting essays as he examines all the many facets of Fred Astaire's success and along the way examines the social impact of this complex and slightly enigmatic man. Discovering then that Joseph Epstein IS an essayist would seem to explain this.
There is an excellent resume and critique of the film oeuvre and apart from the fact I really now want to watch them all again, Joseph Epstein makes a few sound ultra-appealing particularly Easter Parade, the only film made with Judy Garland. Had Judy been able to hold her life together Joseph Epstein suggests that Fred & Judy might have been an even greater partnership than Fred & Ginger.
Now proceed no further if you wish your Fred & Ginger dream to remain intact, we honestly won't hold it against you though it does mean you will miss startling new evidence researched and revealed here for the first time.

Everyone else fast forward 2 mins into this clip from Top Hat if you want to get to the Cheek to Cheek dreamy romantic dancing bit, but do bear in mind that Fred was absolutely livid with Ginger about those ostrich feathers. There had been the most almighty and terrible row, but Ginger had stuck to her plumage and refused to change the dress, Fred was not a happy bunny,

'Feathers started to fly as if a chicken had been attacked by a coyote. It was like a snow-storm. They were floating round like millions of moths. I had feathers in my eyes, my ears, my mouth, all over the front of my suit.'

Personally I think this is no more Mr Nice Guy.
At about 2 mins 51secs, Fred clearly has an idea about that plumage so don't whatever you do miss the moment at 4mins 32secs when I'd swear he holds Ginger just a fraction longer than necessary with half an ostrich up her nose.
At 4mins 46 secs I reckon Ginger has her revenge and whispers something pretty lethal in Fred's ear, and do they hold hands lovingly at the end ?
Well it's all so obvious now we know.

Doing the Jitterbugs

I am my own greatest and harshest knitcritic but very very occasionally all the planets seem to have aligned and I think ' hmm, the girl done not bad.' It doesn't happen very often but when it does Bookhound must be informed.
Firstly I must wave socks in the air, then and often without warning I tend to fling them across the room at him.
He's used to this.
He must then be alert to catch and examine while I elaborate on the finer detail.
Look, no ghastly holes around the turn of the heel.
Look at those Kitchener toes, they did what they were told
Phew, look, just enough wool.
He nods sagely and encouragingly in the way that I do when he catches a great big salmon...mmm, yes, lovely.
So here they are, the Colinette 'Blue Parrot' Jitterbugs off the needles at long last. It seems an age ago that this happened but abracadabra, beautiful 100% Merino Easy Care wool, Boyes 2.75 dpns and the Addi Turbo 30cm circular , my basic safe sock pattern (60 stitches and the rest is simple division) and I'm loving them.

But the wool stash seems to be reducing fast so yesterday it was off to a wool shop I'd heard rumours about and it was reported to be utterly butterly perfectly lovely gorgeous.
So back over the top of Dartmoor to Bovey Tracey, home of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen but also home to Spin A Yarn, specialising in exciting, unusual and natural yarns from around the world.
Off Bookhound went to the butcher's, the baker's and the candlestick maker's (very well trained) and in I went to hopefully feast on the wool.
Would I be met with a few balls of bri-nylon, some acrylic chunky and lots of matinee jackets?
Would I heck!
I was so sick with excitement it's all a bit of a blur because to be honest I went a bit light-headed on entry so judge for yourself, and more about my purchases when I've stopped the hyperventilating because seeing these pictures has brought on a relapse. I think the secret might be to start breathing calmly into the paper bag on approach and you might just want to have one to hand before you read any further.
I met Joyce of Spin A Yarn who writes an occasional blog here and I think reading that the knitters amongst us can instantly arrive at an accurate aetiology for my presenting symptoms.
A woolaholic in charge of a wool shop.
I have found knitter's heaven in Devon.


 

 

Hot off the press...

Possibly more than you may want to know about dovegreyreader in this morning's Western Morning News (sorry it's not online yet, you'll have to travel West and buy a copy for now,) but my sincere thanks to Jackie Butler for such a warm and sensitively written piece...and for that headline:-) Jackie came round a few weeks ago and has absolutely captured the essence of me and mine and dovegreyreader scribbles as have Steven Haywood's pictures...and look there's my ancient old favourite jumper.
Bookhound has been out and bought fifteen copies 'for his friends' and says he's got some blue paint and could probably knock up a plaque for the house.
I've said this 'literary legend' needs to go to the wool shop because supplies are running low and then can we please nip to Trago Mills.
PS Thanks for the link Diana, you can read all about it here.

Village Drama - Holiday Snap

Bravo! Bravo!
Well we didn't exactly shout that out because this is the Village Hall and we're restrained and British plus there was no time to waste, some rapturous applause, two quick curtain calls and I think everyone probably piled across to the pub.
But the Milton Abbot Players production of Holiday Snap provided a marvellous evening's entertainment and I can report that amateur dramatics is alive and thriving in rural Devon.
With the West End Whingers model of theatre criticism and analysis uppermost in my mind I was alert at all times (though must ask how they write in the dark) and firstly took a careful look at the auditorium as the audience poured in.
No discernible proscenium arch to worry about and the seats were a trifle tough on the derriere, but at least they didn't squeak and the art display on the walls from the pre-school was nicely in keeping.

So far so good.
I had chosen wisely with Row D so I had a perfect view of the stage, caught that wonderful moment when the curtains don't quite go right back and a hand pops out and does a bit of a gather in, and occasionally heard the dulcet tones of the prompt.
I was also perfectly placed for the tubs of local Rosemont Farm ice creams in the interval which we all agreed were far better than anything you'd get 'up London.' I was however less fortunate with the raffle but came very close, someone in my row won the box of shortbread biscuits.
Holiday Snap, written by John Chapman and Michael Pertwee (brother of John ' Doctor Who' Pertwee) was a classic comedy-farce set in a double-booked time share called Laryngina on the Algarve, with a drunken holiday company rep, two 'couples', some absent servants and the sudden unwelcome appearance of a mother-in-law and a wife. There was plenty of entering and exiting of cupboards and bedrooms and thankfully the very professional looking set coped well with the action. When things were supposed to fall down they did, when they weren't they stayed put which is always a bonus.
One liners and double entendres abounded and this rural farming community (me included) roared as illicit couple Leslie and Eve had to quickly hide in the cupboard yet again,

Eve  I hate being stuffed in a cupboard.
Leslie Well it doesn't bother you anywhere else does it.

and as things reached their frenetic conclusion I actually had tears rolling down my face.
I'm pleased to report for the Whingers that there was 'live' food and drink consumption on stage.
A chicken leg and a lot of gin, all achieved with panache and aplomb.
Hats off to all the cast who had clearly worked so hard for their sell-out run of four nights, looked to be about 150 of us cosily seated for £5 each and everyone had a great time. I caught up with plenty of people I hadn't seen in ages and also spotted a notice advertising the Ladies Village Choir, might it be time to start singing again?
Now I'm wondering how the chap from the garden centre and the nurse who takes blood in the doctor's surgery will talk their way out of those very amorous moments on the sofa.
 

Village Drama

Apologies if that title gave the impression that we'd had a flood or a big Act of God moment here in rural Devon, but with drama fever coursing through my veins after my solo run-through of The Pitmen Painters I'm awash with the overwhelming urge to go see a real stage production. There was me moaning at the lack of Tamar Valley theatreland and would you just look at what's on this week. Holiday Snap, a comedy by Michael Pertwee and John Chapman presented by the Milton Abbot Players.
Drama just three miles from our doorstep, so near in rural terms that in fact I'm sure I can smell the Leichner greasepaint from here.
I'm into plays now, even winged it outrageously through the Endsleigh salon evening this week with The Pitmen Painters despite the fact that the theme was Books into Films. It might make a good film I argued staunchly and it was all a very visual read I pleaded and there's a part for Kiera, so they let me get away with it. More about everyone else's selections next week and of course the inevitable Kiera discussions with some mention also of Colin,but not in that wet shirt...or that reindeer jumper. Ralph got a look in as did two Russells, Juliette, Kate, Winona, Kevin, Willem, Frances and the rest.
I'm hoping the Whingers won't feel threatened if I encroach on their theatre territory but I can't wait to do the squeaky seating and auditorium review, (the Whingers do have the power to get entire theatre seating systems changed...or is it coincidence?) and then there'll be the Village Hall proscenium arch to describe and stage set and the action, costumes, props. I've been watching how Andrew and Phil do it and I think I've got the general gist. I could have had a seat in Row B but I know the Whingers have often struggled when too near the stage so I've opted for Row D.
Apparently crucial to know the whereabouts of the bar and I'm desperately hoping for some live eating or food prep on stage because that's also something to be impressed by according to the Whingers.
Actually I'm really looking forward to it so please don't get the impression I'm just going along to ridicule. This year apparently the 60th anniversary of The Milton Abbot Players and where AmDram's concerned I take my hat off to anyone who can learn lines when I can't even remember a shopping list.
I expect the roads lanes will be very busy and parking at a premium so I'd better set off early. I'm so very excited, but what on earth shall I wear...I just can't decide and will I need my short-sleeved or my long-sleeved thermal vest ?

Don't miss this...

...in today's Spectator

Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden

I have been browsing Three Day Road again for my recent Remembrance reading because Joseph Boyden's first novel shines its bright and all-seeing eye on Canadian Cree Indians Xavier and Elijah who found their innate hunting skills so advantageous in the trenches of WW I. It is a tough, uncompromising but ultimately very moving book and immensely powerful for so many reasons.
Joseph Boyden is a brilliant story-teller with an intimate and immediate sort of wrap-around the-reader writing style, I have no trouble leaping in and wallowing because it feels strangely as if he's only writing for me. His ability to retain my  attention and draw me in seems to hold me there at a very personal level, nothing remote or distant and perhaps it's partly down to Joseph Boyden's consummate skill with interior monologue. I feel as I read that I alone am privy to and being trusted with the deepest most personal mind-workings of his characters, becoming closely acquainted with them through their thoughts and actions not description.
Am I back in the realms of literary showing and telling with that simplistic observation?
There is a continuity with Three Day Road as Will Bird, the grandson of Xavier and himself a Cree bush pilot who, for reasons unknown until the very end of the novel, is lying unconscious in hospital in Moose Factory, his hometown in Northern Ontario. Annie his niece takes up a bedside vigil and slowly through alternating chapters, Will and Annie first-person narratives, the story unfolds.
Will has inherited Xavier's innate native Indian skills as well as his gun, making his life one of traditional trapping and hunting all marred by old feuds, failed relationships and ensuing tragedy and fuelled to self-destructive excess by alcohol. Annie meanwhile is next generation and whilst retaining the instincts and perfectly capable of trapping a beaver has a foot in the modern-day and has been searching for her missing sister Suzanne, who left Moose Factory for the bright lights of New York and the life of a model.
My literary imagination has bought into all sorts of romantic notions about Canada since the discovery at about the age of eight that Anne "with an e" Shirley of Green Gables and I (as Lynne "with an e") were indeed kindred spirits and that Prince Edward Island was surely a far preferable place to live than anywhere else on earth.
In fact it's probably a lucky escape for our children that I didn't call them Marilla, Matthew and Gilbert.
But any pre-conceived assumptions I may have nurtured about Canada and its literature, the wilderness country, young girls quoting the Lady of Shalott in a runaway canoe and handsome chaps called Gilbert plus all that lovely snow, took a quantum leap into reassessment following a read of Margaret Atwood's book Survival, A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Now I approach with a very open mind, ready to be shown something new about a country I've never set foot in but somehow love from afar and it never fails.
In Through Black Spruce Joseph Boyden clearly identifies that Canada is not the only place where survival might be the ultimate challenge. Whilst undoubtedly the Canadian bush of Northern Ontario is the place where life and limb especially for the Cree still seems to be balanced precariously in a state of worried and persecuted existence, it is all cleverly and starkly juxtaposed to the equally precarious world south of the 49th parallel, revealing that in its own way life in Manhattan can be just as deceitful and equally capable of inflicting that fatal and terminal blow.
In Survival, first published in 1972, Margaret Atwood carefully examines the role of the First People in Canadian literature. There is much about the Indian as victim and Indians as the 'instruments of Nature the Monster, torturing and killing white victims as well as a striving to relate to Indians as ancestors'. Expect Joseph Boyden to leap right in and elaborate on these elements, making them 2008 compliant and some, thereby perhaps moving the entire First People debate onwards and upwards?
Like Three Day Road, Through Black Spruce occasionally requires a certain strength of stomach. There is nothing namby-pamby about Joseph Boyden's writing, as Jim Harrison quoted on the back cover suggests,

'Three Day Road is a brilliant novel. You will suffer a bit but it's overwhelmingly worth the voyage'

with further endorsements from Louise Erdrich and Isabel Allende, both no strangers to the No-Namby-Pamby school, the reader is warned but hopefully never deterred.
We house a gamekeeper here so nature red in tooth and claw is an accepted part of daily life, others may baulk at the thought of cooked beaver tail and I'll admit that hasn't been on the menu here lately, but apparently it's delicious. Now surely not that different to some of the recipes to be found in that Persephone reprint, They Can't Ration These by Vicomte de Mauduit, wherein you haven't lived until you've roasted a hedgehog or baked a squirrel (incidentally beavers and squirrels closely related and seemingly no need to waste the tails of either.)
We get very squeamish in some literary circumstances yet not others but whatever you do keep an eye out for Through Black Spruce. It's most deserving of Giller victory and be ready for the cleverest of endings which had me fooled for a while after I had turned the final page, brilliant and surprising.
Meanwhile, and I can't believe that this can have been Joseph Boyden's intention with his fabulously sparkling Giller Prize-winning novel so my humble apologies to him, but I am left with two outcomes.
Now I absolutely must have a Hudson's Bay point blanket and I also cannot suppress an overwhelming urge to walk over to my Lucy Maud Montgomery shelf.

Just wanted to say that...

You'll be pleased to know that I have no intention of becoming a regular commentator on news items on here but today I just can't stop myself.
If ever I sought vindication for making this soul searching decision it is this and there but for the grace of God etc.
Single-handedly managing a sprawling rural caseload of 350 children under the age of 5 on just 3 days a week (many health visitors have far greater numbers) it felt like it was only a matter of time before I missed something or made a wrong decision that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
I got out and have taken my 30 years of health visiting experience and expertise with me and probably a good 5 years sooner than I needed to and the relief here is palpable.
I don't know the details of Baby P's case but my heart goes out to the health visitor involved. Who can know what was expected of her in an average day?
Well I can guess.
I had an interesting discussion with one of the GPs I worked with before I left about the current state of  the health visiting profession and we agreed several things

• there would be a big incident
• there would be a big outcry
• there would be a big investigation
• heads would roll
• someone might just spot what has really happened to the health visiting service in this country
• health visiting would have to be resurrected somehow because this country absolutely needs it doing what it's best at

Given that this conversation was only two weeks ago today and we reckoned this might happen within the next ten years, it all feels scarily prophetic.

Congratulations to Joseph Boyden

I knew it, I should have had a flutter on the Giller, Canada's big literary prize. Chaired by Margaret Atwood and she and I always agree on things. Anyone who can remember the embryonic days of dovegreyreader scribbles will know that it was Margaret Atwood's writing that inspired me to begin this online bookish conversation with the rest of the world back in 2006. I even took the liberty of calling her Peggy, such good friends were we, though actually Peggy wouldn't know me if she trod on me.
So the only book I've managed to read from this year's short list Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden, finished it last week having made it last four weeks and not wanting it to end, and it's won and I am beyond delighted.
I do think it's important to train your children well and mine are all trained in the art of Buying Their Mother a Book Wherever They Are in the World. So the Kayaker knew to check his emails at Vancouver airport as he returned from his white-water Fraser river guiding summer. There of course was my shopping list and lo as he walked into the bookshop behold there was Through Black Spruce. The book even survived the journey home to Devon nestled in amongst a load of wet, smelly river gear.
Some things are just meant to be and surely not that many copies in the UK right now, but there will be because W&N have this one lined up for March 2009 publication.
Clearly Margaret Atwood and I are as always, in hearty and cordial agreement, Through Black Spruce has been an awesome read and my thoughts on it soon once they've crystallised into coherence, but meanwhile the Kayaker currently in Croatia, and I'm a bit confounded, which book do I ask him to bring back from there?

The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall

I think this might be a first for dovegreyreader scribbles but it most definitely won't be the last because I have enjoyed reading it so much, a play that is. I'm not sure, apart from the odd Shakesperean reference perhaps, that I've read and shared thoughts about a play on here before.
The first inkling I had of The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall came to me via those aficianados of the London (and occasionally suburban) stage, those discerners of the proscenium arch, Andrew and Phil The West End Whingers. I'm not sure if it's still in the running but The Pitmen Painters was topping their league table of favourites last I read.

"This is the most consistently enjoyable play the Whingers have seen in a long time, possibly the most engaging on stage in London at the moment. It’s the theatrical eqivalent of Monet’s Water Lilies, a real crowd-pleaser which deserves to draw in the punters.

Andrew’s now obsessed with lines such as “Art’s about you” (Andrew always believes things are about him anyway) and “everyone has a creative gift”.

In fact Andrew was so inspired he threatened to pick up his paint brushes again, and he hasn’t done that since his days painting along with Nancy. Expect to see Andrew sporting a rakishly angled beret behind an easel in the stalls near you very soon."

Now there are pros and cons to living in splendid rural isolation and one of the cons is the absence of Shaftesbury Avenue here in the Tamar Valley. Getting to a play, forgive me, is quite a performance  and recent attempts ( egged on by The Whingers after that Observer photo-shoot, The Chalk Garden, Donmar Warehouse, complete sell-out, ninety minutes standing in returns queue, number seven in queue, six returned tickets) have not been marked with success so I've resigned myself to Drama From the Armchair.
This is new territory indeed, really 'being' the different characters as I read and in this case putting to good use all those happy hours spent watching  Auf Wiedersehen Pet because The Pitmen Painters quickly demands good solid Geordie accents to cope with lines like,

Harry   'I wasn't ganna but I had to get out of the house, man. Wor lass is driving iz crackers.'

I was soon into character and playing all parts ye knaa what ah mean leik.
This is 1934 and based on the true story of the Ashington Miners. Under the auspices of the Worker's Educational Association, the miners have organised a class in Art Appreciation for themselves, they'd wanted to do Introductory Economics but couldn't find a tutor. Robert Lyon is the hapless Southerner destined to make inroads with the working miners George, Oliver, and Jimmy, Harry, ex-miner gassed on the Somme and now a dental mechanic, and an unemployed Young Lad allowed in by special dispensation ( and apologies for the asterisks, I'm not being prudish, just denying the zillions of spam messages that those words will attract, we have barely recovered from the162 after that post I did on the book Hubbub, Fi*th and Ste*ch)

Enter a Young Lad

George What are you doing here?

Young Lad I've come for the class.

George Yer joking, aren't you - oot ye gan.

Young Lad What's wrong with me coming? I thought yer wer supposed to be encouraging people to learn things.

George Aye, Worker's Educational Association. Not Skiving Little A***holes' Association. This is a place of serious learning so bu**er off.

As the group settle down to learn it quickly becomes apparent that they have far more to offer than Mr Lyon can ever have imagined and, once the group begins to paint, a real naive and raw talent emerges and one with commercial potential. Exploitation and the temptations of wealth lurk just over the artistic horizon and as Lee Hall suggests in his introduction,

' It's both a joke and a tragedy as the working classes who are denuded of political power and spiritual succour are excluded also from the system of culture so ravenously enjoyed by their exploiters...Culture is for living, not commodification, and art should be about taking part.'

Lee Hall knows a thing or two about social inequalities having been responsible for that amazing radio play that took us by storm back in the 1990's, Spoonface Steinberg and more recently the screen play for Billy Elliot.
Reading a play versus seeing a play obviously necessitates the imaginative but essential conjuring up of a set via the stage directions, and thanks to Lee Hall's clear guidance that was all much easier than I thought it might be and definitely added to the reading experience. Looking at the pictures I'm pleasantly surprised to see how closely matched my thinking is with the actual stage production.
The play is very very funny and then rapidly serious by turns as Lee Hall's themes of art, privilege and access seep through, and locating it in the 1930's whilst removing it a step from present day of course still allows for pertinent parallels, making its central tenets still completely relevant.

Harry ...Cos we're not deing it for anybody else, we're deing it for worselves; and s*d it, it's more than that - we're doing it for all those lives in the dark, who never had the chance. For the thousands of little pit laddies without an education, the blokes with their backs bent and their hands busted open, folk who've barely got the energy to get home, never mind start deing art when they get there. We're deing it for all of those lives unrecorded. All of that creativity unfulfilled.'

The Pitmen Painters returns to The National Theatre in January 2009 and it is still possible to see the work of the original Ashington Group in a permanent exhibition at The Woodhorn Colliery Museum, just north of Newcastle, and if ah wez a canny lass I'd be gunna both.

Armistice Day

Catching up on the Bugle Boy prize draw, congratulations to the winner, Becky. Anyone else who may have read the Tinker's book will know about Harold 'Podge' Overbury who joined the Royal Marines at the same time back in 1939. I think Podge is easy to spot in this picture and he and the Tinker remain friends to this day. It has to be said, they are mischief when they get together so as you can see I had a firm grip on them both as they lined up, medals-galore for Sunday's Remembrance Day parade.Then I couldn't stop myself welling up as they led off the Royal Marine contingent with another veteran, Tom in the middle. My mum would have loved moments like this.

For today and to end this year's Remembrance Read, an extract from Bugle Boy by Len Chester (aka The Tinker and father of dgr in case you have missed that bit ) Essential background to this story is that Hodge eventually became known throughout the corps as Podge and I won't be the one to say it was because his mum, Mrs Overbury was in charge of the barrack's cookhouse. Podge features in the film of The Cockleshell Heroes, he's the one barking out the orders on the parade ground, something for which he became legendary as a Regimental Sergeant Major and drill instructor at Lympstone Commando training centre.

Podge’s Mum
To illustrate the remark I made that Wren Overbury was
not to be trifled with, I will relate the tale of the complaint.
It must have been sometime in 1942 when it happened
as I had just returned to barracks after two years
on my first ship and the new mess hall had been built.
We had liver and onions for breakfast, ‘baby’s head
and guardrails’ as it was known in the vernacular. The
liver was like the soles of our boots and the onions looked
like bootlaces, most unappetizing. In comes the Officer of
the day, as was his duty at every meal, being concerned
about our wellbeing.
‘Any complaints?’ he asks, holding his nose twixt finger
and thumb.
‘Yes’, says Hodge.
Well you may have seen a cartoon where the Officer is
aghast and the Corporal swells with indignation; this is
where it originated.
‘Taste this liver and onions sir, we can’t eat it and we
are told we must have a good breakfast before going on parade.
‘Don’t talk to the Officer like that, son’, says the
Corporal.
Mind you, the Officer had to agree that it was pretty
gruesome and he was due for his own breakfast shortly.
‘Fetch this man another breakfast.’
Up comes a plate with egg, bacon and fried bread.
‘Do you withdraw your complaint?’
‘Yes sir’, says Hodge.
On the way to the washing-up space, in a corridor, he
is suddenly grabbed by a huge Sergeant in cook’s whites
and literally lifted off the floor by his neck.
‘Are you the little …… who just made the complaint?’
‘Yes Sergeant’, squeaks Hodge.
‘Do you realize that it was my breakfast that you have
just eaten?’
‘No,’ says Hodge, ‘and if you don’t put me down I
shall report you.’
‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ says Sergeant.
‘I’m Po/x3834 Boy Bugler Harold Overbury.’
At this the Sergeant turns a paler shade of pale.
‘Is Mrs Overbury your mum?’ he asks in a squeaky
voice.
‘Yes’, says Hodge.
‘God, you won’t tell her will you?’ he says, and gently
lowers Hodge to the ground, straightening his tunic and
dusting him down.
As far as I can remember, Hodge never had reason
to complain henceforth – that was the kind of fear
Hodge’s mum could instil. Bombs, bullets, even a draft to
a ship were not equal to the wrath of Mrs Overbury protecting
her young.

"Through Pity and Terror ..." by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

As you'll see later in the week I'm in the grip of a Dorothy Canfield Fisher revival with a re-read of The Homemaker et al and also this book The Bedquilt & Other Stories which I thought I'd already done cover to cover until I came across "Through Pity and Terror...". It seems completely appropriate to mention this story here as part of my Remembrance Read 2008 . Another remarkable story in The Bedquilt, Memorial Day May 30, 1913 leaves me with a sense that Remembrance shouldn't be confined to just a single week of the year, but more of that another day.
Thank you too for all the comments and e mails about it all, you have all given me plenty of reading ideas to follow up.
"Through Pity and Terror..."  sees Madeleine and her husband, pharmacist Jules Brismantier, living a charmed and blissful married life in France thanks in part to Madeleine's serious attention to domesticity; the perfectly positioned furniture with well-matched fixtures and fittings in their home, the piano which Madeleine plays with exquisite grace, the immaculate and well-equipped kitchen, the elaborate meals never late to the table, even the pristine children dressed in white who only play with 'nice' children and wait for it, as a measure of her domestic wealth Madeleine has a currency of two hundred and twenty sheets in her linen store,

'in her heart, inherited from long generations of passionately housekeeping women, she took immense satisfaction in all the ample furnishings of her pretty little home. What woman would not?... a model wife and mother on the pattern of all the other innumerable model wives and mothers in the history of her family'

Well this is Dorothy Canfield Fisher so before we all descend into a bout of the inadequacies we know we'll discover that this could all be flawed, and when you then watch as Madeleine settles into another pregnancy (and you can only imagine that Madeleine could actually  'nest' for Europe) but you realise this is France in the summer of 1914, the alarm bells start to toll,

'Drenched in sunshine and peace, their little barque was carried rapidly along by the Niagara river of history over the last stretch of smooth, shining water which separated them from the abyss.'

Jules heads off to war and Madeleine, the birth now imminent, is left to cope alone as the Germans advance on the now deserted village. Children Raoul and Sylvie quickly have to shake off their cotton wool upbringing and embrace those Montessori skills of independence and self-reliance so beloved by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, rapidly having to pull above their weight and assume adult responsibilities as the base and truly vile terrors of war invade their beautiful home.
By diverse and Aristotlean means of both pity and terror does Dorothy convey that covert message in the title; that domesticity and an immaculate home may not be the most trusted or essential of assets and that in times of war it is an indomitable human spirit that will survive,

'The walled and sheltered refuge in which she had lived all her life was cast down and in ruins...her mind came back with a mortal sickness to the knowledge that she now had nothing, nothing to depend upon except her own strength and labour - just like a poor woman. She was a poor woman.'

 Like several other US women writers, and not content to sit back home in America and just conserve food for Europe, Dorothy Canfield Fisher headed to France to help with relief operations during the Great War and also to be near her husband John who had volunteered for ambulance duties.

' Like nearly all of my generation I'm terribly tragically bewildered by the complexity of the situation'

wrote Dorothy to a friend, but they were a family who couldn't bear to be apart and Dorothy saw no reason to let a European conflagration of great magnitude stand in the way of their togetherness.
Browsing Dorothy Canfield Fisher's book of letters, Keeping Fires Night and Day, (and much more on these to follow too)  I came across this letter written in 1917 in response to hints of longevity for her writing from US literary critic Dorothea Mann, 

'I don't think I'm such a great writer! I do my honest best but doubt that anybody will read me fifty years from now as Miss Mann prophecies - it'll take more than her say so to make me do anything but laugh at such an idea.'

and how fortunate we all are that Dorothy was for once proved entirely wrong.

A day to Remember

I'm thinking plenty of people may have missed the Jo Brand programme on Vera Brittain this afternoon because of a BBC rescheduling. We only caught it by chance because we'd lit the fire and had planned to have a lazy TV afternoon and evening after this morning's local Remembrance muster, more of which on Armistice Day which will be the final day of this year's Remembrance Read.
Points of View, now looking like a much more serious affair with Jeremy Vine at the helm made reference to the poor BBC scheduling of Little Dorrit and it has certainly left me flummoxed and out of the loop with the series which I was so looking forward to. Then Jeremy suggested we might all enjoy the programme to follow on Vera Brittain, which of course we'd just watched.
Anyway food on laps and pots of tea and suddenly there was Jo Brand.
If you did miss it and can catch it on Iplayer it's worth it because I felt it offered such good explanations for the woman that Vera Brittain became. The losses built up to almost unbearable proportions as one by one the men closest to her were either slaughtered in the trenches or died later of injuries sustained in battle and Jo Brand pulled together all the various strands with clarity as she spoke to Vera's daughter, Shirley Williams and her biographer Mark Bostridge. Interspersed with scene re-creations which worked well in this context and added huge impact to the moment when Vera heard of Roland's death.
Last night's Festival of Remembrance also excelled for its much upgraded content, no more PE teams vaulting over horses, this was Katherine Jenkins, Blake, Russell Watson and some very jazzy Royal Marines band-playing all linking into footage of the troops now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The poppy petal drift was as emotional as ever and all in all I think we continue to honour the promise
'at the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them' with huge gratitude, pride and sincerity.

Beyond the Home Front - Edited by Yvonne Klein

This has certainly been an enlightening week of Great War reading, much to ponder and reflect on, pre-conceived ideas to challenge and reshape and this book has added much to the mix. On Remembrance Day it seems like a good idea to remember the women again too.
Beyond the Home Front, Women's Autobiographical Writing of the Two World Wars, edited by Yvonne Klein and published by Macmillan in 1997; a book with the most arresting of covers and which has lurked long on my shelves patiently waiting its moment. A very readable book of two distinct halves and, whilst in keeping with this week's theme I have concentrated on the Great War half, I suspect had I ventured into the Second World War half I would have been able to make some fairly clear comparisons between the roles of women in each conflict.
There is an early acknowledgement by Yvonne Klein in her introduction that the Great War has become the subject of a vast mythology and this alone has given me almost too much to think about and reconsider, because like many I've bought into that mythology unwittingly down the years,

'disillusion,the lost generation, the slaughter of the innocents, the deaths of the best and brightest, all have entered the common consciousness as the truth about that conflict.'

Another more disturbing suggestion emerges,

'Along with this collective nostalgia for innocence lost exists another, more sinister idea...that on the whole women benefited from the war at the expense of men.'

and it is this assertion that Yvonne Klein explores, extrapolates and subsequently gently explodes with her selection of women's writing from the likes of Sylvia Pankhurst, Gertrude Stein, Enid Bagnold, Vera Brittain, Helen Thomas (wife and subsequent widow of the war poet Edward Thomas) and many more lesser known names whose writing I must now seek out.
Some interesting ideas emerge on the role of the nurses which obviously hold a particular fascination for me.
Mary Borden is one, Vera Brittain another and though I had sensed as much in previous reading I had failed to really think through Yvonne Klein's suggestion,

'Cut off from whatever sustenance might be found in a sisterhood of shared experience, the nurses are left to themselves to numb the guilt they feel for surviving at all and for their inability to provide comfort commensurate with their patient's suffering.'

On reflection now I can see it clearly.
It's true, I've been browsing the book again and there is little sense of nursing camaraderie in Vera Brittain's life as a VAD in Testament of Youth. Vera frequently seems isolated and alone. Mary Borden in The Forbidden Zone does seem to be the only woman working on her wards and other writing nurses express open antagonism towards other women in hospitals. Enid Bagnold levels accusations of 'condescension and indifference', whilst Florence Farmborough finds the English nurses 'arrogant and brutal in their methods.' Florence can barely give voice to the excruciating pain that she witnesses (and I too am wincing ninety years on) at their insistence on pouring salt into open wounds.
But who can even begin to imagine the trauma faced by these women? The courage and personal sacrifices made by so many of them must have largely faded into the background at the time given the in-extremis situation of the men at the front, so this has been a good re-balancing read offering new and revealing perspectives, whilst an essay by Vera Brittain in this week's Telegraph filled in even more gaps. It has all opened up new lines of thought which will continue to inform anything and everything I read on the subject and that to me is the sign of a book worth its space on the shelf.
Florence Farmborough incidentally, who was teaching English privately in Russia in 1914, immediately offered her services as a nurse in Moscow and her diary With the Armies of the Tsar, A Nurse at the Russian Front in War and Revolution 1914-1918 was eventually published in 1974. I'm envious of one item of uniform, 'a thick sheepskin waistcoat for winter wear, whose Russian name, dushegreychka, means 'soul-warmer'.
Makes me want to put one on right now.

S(Six)Y(Year)O(Old's)K(Knitting)S(Society) newsletter

I can't tell you what a relief it was to know I was not alone.
Nothing worse than thinking you are the only sufferer on the planet, so it's been a comfort knowing that all you Six Year Old Knitters are out there lashing and lassooing the wool around the needles clutched snugly in armpits.
Six episodes of Strictly X Factor Come Dancing (both incidentally feeling a bit lack-lustre this season, X Factor might as well stop now and just give the thing to Diana and not an ounce of fun or charisma on Strictly this year) and I've got a bit of a backlog of garment component pieces to press and block and stitch together, the Rowan Big Wool cardigan and the Rowan sale wool sleeveless thing which I've now stopped calling a Tank Top because everyone looks at me a bit strangely.
So two whole things "finished" which means as a reward surely I can start loads of other things?
All that wool is suddenly demanding to be used, this Colinette Prism ( Toscana) has been half-made, frogged, washed and half-made again more times than I care to confess. Such a divine colour that I can never quite make up my mind what I want it to be, it's most recent incarnation as half a cardigan stymied by the fact I can't remember which pattern I was using, then one sock which came out at a Size 12 men's.
Talking of socks could someone living near SW10 0RJ please consider making the ultimate sacrifice for the rest of us and go and visit this new shop and report back? Socktopus looks like very dangerous territory for all SYOKS-ers and we need a reconnaissance mission first. Don't worry to check out the mail order, I've taken that arduous research upon myself and until that "research" arrives I'll just be glad to get this Colinette converted into a permanent and wearable feature.
Meanwhile here's the first SYOKS gallery and some members' work in progress and pretty impressive it is too so if anyone else feels praise-needy, or would like to be shamed into completion the advice and encouragement of all those other SYOKS members, just send in the pics.
Next week I might pluck up the courage to show you my Alafoss Lopi pink elephant.
I think we can all agree Louise has been socking it big time and I think Alan Bennett will be thrilled with these, is that called entrelac and are those the nice Brittany Birch needles? Oh yes and can you name that rainbow wool Louise? We like that here.
And I love those conkers and pom-poms, nice touch.
 

 

Now we come to Janice.
Right then, just LOOK at what Janice has been up to. Heavens to betsy, it's happened to us all, beguiled by the temptations of instant pattern-gratification wool Janice has been knitting socks thus deflecting from the needs of that genuine heirloom standard Fair Isle jumper .
Now we all love and adore socks here but what do we all say to Janice?
We say WE WANT SLEEVES...WE WANT SLEEVES...

A Dance for the Moon by Richard Burns

It's doubtless completely unfair but I have high expectations when poets turn their hand to fiction. I unwittingly set the bar high on their ability to choose the right words and get them in the right order, assume beautiful cadences within a sentence and generally expect to be moved by the writing above and beyond the norm. All uncalled for but to read Richard Burns is thankfully to know you are in the hands of a very accomplished wordsmith.
As Mike has pointed out A Dance for the Moon first published in 1986 predates Pat Barker's Regeneration by about five years yet it still holds up remarkably well in 2008, timeless subject matter and writing style.The opening pages give voice to the strange living death that is the life of David Goodchild, the shell-shocked and traumatised poet, whilst perfectly expressing the utter embarrassment of his family coping with something they know so little about. David's mother seeks out Winfell, a private nursing home and the all-powerful resident psychiatrist using the latest analytical techniques and David is admitted for treatment.
Random events ambush David unexpectedly,

'Doors slammed the length of the train. A whistle blew. And David, hearing these sounds, shivered and turned pale.'

Moments of acute pathos and extreme gentleness ensue as his mother, escorting her son by train to the nursing home, is faced with the child she once knew and strives desperately to contain David's excruciating and debilitating anxiety in the only way she knows how,

'Mrs Goodchild turned from the window, and was shocked by what she saw...she had to fumble one of his hands free before she could hold it and reassure him.
    'There, there,' she said, made vulnerable by the inadequacy of her own response, 'There, there. It's all right. There, there...gently, gently,' she murmured. 'Everything will be all right. You'll see. Everything'll be fine.'

Richard Burns displays impressive narrative skill slipping imperceptibly from third to first person to cleverly offer multiple points of view. Amongst those points of view, that of the station porter, a working class war veteran nurturing a growing resentment of Winfell and all it stands for,

'Jack Brough loathed Winfell. He loathed what it stood for. Officers got shell-shock; privates got drunk. Jack Brough had been a private.'

Suddenly the social class divide temporarily bridged by the war yawns like a gaping chasm once more and with it comes a renewed understanding of just how deeply embedded were the scars of this conflict.
Interspersed throughout the book, David's poetry and of course it is here that Richard Burns excels, not least with this idea,

'What is snow? Frozen water, but water that has frozen in a special way. Water that is frozen, yet it is not ice. A poem is like that; it is an idea that has turned into a crystal of delicate beauty; it is something that can transform a landscape or smother a man, yet something so fragile it can be moved in a single breath.'

There is too much in this book to notice and admire on a single read and I will certainly read it again but prepare to find yourself completely caught up in the whole as it works towards the eventual discovery of exactly what happened to David in the trenches and how that all plays out during his stay at Winfell.
There's so much I could comment on about this fine novel but I will give not another thing away other than to say expect the unexpected, the different, the unusual with this plot and by the denouement I was squinting from behind closed fingers because I couldn't bear what I thought was going to happen actually happening. I was all over the place, compassioned up to the eyeballs as Richard Burns carefully placed me on an emotional knife-edge with my sympathies rocking precariously on the brink, tipping who knows which way. I think I know where I stand but I do keep changing my mind a fraction now and again.
The final cruel irony is agonisingly and excruciatingly painful to witness and left me quietly stunned verging on deeply shocked, all making this one of those books that glint and glimmer in your mind long after the final page. Trust is breached every which way you turn, but my hasty early judgements on the characters seem to have given way to an altogether more measured consideration.
Richard Burns has cleverly shown me both sides and left me to make my own mind up.
If that's not breath-taking emotional engagement with a novel then I don't know what is and what more could a reader ask?
Now I'm completely in shreds but just don't miss A Dance For the Moon whatever you do.

One comment leads to another, a book and Richard Burns (not that Richard Burns)

Comments have always been the oxygen of dovegreyreader scribbles and the benefits hit home last week with this suggestion from Mike Petty,

"I wish you would seek out A Dance for the Moon, by Richard Burns, about the travails of a shell-shocked poet. Published 5 yrs before Regeneration and superior to it IMHO."

As always I don't need much encouragement to seek out a book that one of you recommends, and Mike's wish felt so urgent I was onto Amazon Marketplace in a flash and had purchased a copy for 1p before the minute was out.The book arrived within days and was read within days because then Carol came on here and said,

"Also, thanks to Mike Petty's comment on your post of last Sunday, I'm half way through Richard Burns' A Dance for the Moon. It's as good a novel about WW1 as any I've read, and doesn't have that deliberately shocking element that I thought Regeneration slightly suffered from - but is no less powerful for that."

How good is all that to know and how near might Carol and I have been to remaining clueless about Richard Burns but for Mike's timely recommendation? Well me anyway, Carol's probably well on top of all this.
Information is hard to come by now that any trace there may have been of Richard on the internet has been supplanted by both a rally driver (also very sadly deceased) and another writer sharing the same name. I am therefore very grateful to Mike for scanning the newspaper obituary that he wrote for this Richard Burns, and also for sending over other articles published following Richard's early death.
On the day before his 34th birthday, August 31st 1992 and on the brink of taking up the post of Head of Creative Writing at Lancaster University, Richard Burns took his own life. Every tragedy conceals a sad narrative of its own and Richard's harbours a terrible disillusion with the fickle world of publishing in which he found himself mired.
Described by Philip Hensher as 'one of the most varied and interesting novelists writing in England', Richard had been cited back in 1987 among a list of young writers to watch out for, and in the company of Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro and Caryl Phillips you can only only imagine that like them his star may have been in the ascendency still.
Perhaps pressure like that coupled with a keen sense of his own worth ('ungraciously immodest' has been mentioned) and a highly cynical and suspicious approach to the integrity of the realms of publishing made Richard Burns his own worst enemy, but it was also seemingly sufficient to kill the spirit of a promising but fragile writer.
However placing supposition and that highly-charged emotional baggage aside, now that I've read the book I'm truly very hard-pushed indeed to understand exactly how A Dance for the Moon has faded into such complete and utter obscurity. A prizewinner in the Jonathan Cape First Novel competition and first published in 1986 as part of the prize, it attracted great critical acclaim,

'...remains one of the best novels about the effects of the first world war upon its most sensitive participants. In it he showed a remarkable grasp, aided by much painstaking and sympathetic research, of the way such poets a Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney and others felt, both as writers and as victims of months and even years of continuous violence.'

Plaudits surely making it deserving of ongoing recognition, especially given the Pat Barker novels some five years later which this would sit alongside very comfortably?
Like Carol, I'd make it a sure and certain inclusion amongst the best of the Great War fiction and yet who has even heard of it?
Mike's obituary is strangely prophetic in saying this of Richard Burns,

' He was angry and cynical about what he saw as the publishing business's pursuit of the fast buck, but he was fiercely proud and protective of his work and it is to be hoped that it will remain in print as the best memorial to him. "That'll be the day," Richard would have said.'

Even more poignant and quoted from Xandra Hardie's obituary to him, Richard Burns' own self-fulfilling and equally prophetic perceptions of death, written as an outline for a book never written,

' Suicide is the mark of the minor artist: it is a way of drawing attention after the art has failed...to kill oneself whilst in charge of one's destiny; it is to shout loudly, though in an empty auditorium : "I am here, I had something to say, and look what you lost when you failed to listen!" Above all, though, it is an act of vanity, and a way of conceding defeat, whilst pretending victory. For to continue to work the artist must survive.'

I know fiscal times are tough and there's much anguish and fingernail biting in the world of publishing right now, but there must be a publisher somewhere who could just perhaps give JKR or Wayne and Colleen or Peter and Katie a little less money (they really wouldn't mind surely) and get A Dance For the Moon out of mothballs and set up a little print run ?
My thoughts on this incredible novel tomorrow but in the meantime, if you haven't read it head to the library or grab your copy for 1p off Amazon, I think I can promise that you won't regret it.

The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse's Impressions of the First World War by Mary Borden

Pictured here, one of Grandad's medals, and how haunting that engraving now seems with our revisionist approach and doctorates in hindsight.
It's almost beyond comprehension even to consider the British casualties alone for that first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916.
19,240 dead
35,943 wounded
2,152 missing
585 taken prisoner.
In the words of Gavin Stamp ' That dreadful day ended in chaos and confusion, but it soon emerged that a catastrophe had occurred...it was the greatest loss of life in British military history.' It is also estimated that perhaps a third of those who died could have been saved if help could have reached them in time. many lay wounded on the battlefield for days afterwards.
So expect little escape from the trauma if you decide to read Mary Borden's book The Forbidden Zone, A nurse's impression of the First World War published by Hesperus Press but don't be deterred. This little book packs the hugest of punches, gives such a stark and sharply contrasting account of humanity at both its worst and yet also at its most glorious. A microcosm of thoughts and emotions about the Great War crystallised into just over 100 pages. I'm not sure I've read a more moving and terrible account yet all rendered in great swathes of understated almost elegiac narrative. Somehow this doubles and redoubles the power of this little book.
Wealthy Chicago-born Mary Borden took herself off to the Western Front . With no nursing experience and a spare command of the French language she had written to General Joffre offering to fund and manage her own field hospital and faced with over half a million wounded troops the General was hardly going to refuse. During the Somme offensive of the summer of 1916 Mary located herself at Bray-sur-Somme, uncomfortably close to the front line, doubtless much closer to the action and the terror than the Generals themselves, according to Gavin Stamp, holed up in a luxury chateau.
In six months it is estimated that the hospital received 25,000 patients and at any one time cared for about 800 wounded men, and with no nursing experience Mary must have had to adjust dramatically. Each nurse will have developed her own way of dealing with the less palatable aspects of the task in hand and somehow Mary did and quickly.
Her descriptions are matchless the imagery beautifully juxtaposed for maximum impact,

'The daylight brightened, painting the surfaces of the buildings with pale rose and primrose...the pattern of the town spread out on the earth, with its neat edges marked by walls and canals, gleamed like a newly varnished map.'

then a bombing raid destroys all before,

'Scars appeared on it like the marks of smallpox...it seemed as if it were being attacked by an invisible and gigantic beast who was tearing and gnawing it with claws and teeth, Gashes appeared in the streets, long wounds with ragged edges. Helpless, spread out to the heavans, it grimaced with mutilated features.'

Believe me, if this is how Mary can breath life into an inanimate sight, then expect more to follow and it does,

'There has been a harvest. Crops of men were cut down in the fields of France where they were growing. They were mown down with a scythe, were gathered into bundles, tossed about with pitchforks...scattered by storms and gathered up again and at last brought here - what was left of them.'

' Real, splendid, ordinary men' now 'mew like kittens' and though the stories are brief, often just centred on snatches of moments or events which must have crowded into Mary Borden's life on a daily basis, they are perfectly pinned down on paper for our examination. With her now well-developed nurse's-eye-view for the grim realities don't expect to be spared the harrowing nature of what she was experiencing, but it's all wonderfully written. There was no need for exaggeration of emotion as Mary recounts the story Rosa.
Brought in from No Man's Land with a clean shot through the roof of his mouth, it is clear this casualty has attempted to take his own life rather than wait for the enemy to do it. Strong as an ox he has miraculously survived this court-martial offence for which the punishment is execution. If his life is saved it will be for him to face a firing squad.
Try and sift the ethics out of that moral maze, Mary does and acts decisively.
There's dark humour too, watch out for the knee that resembles a ragout of mouton and almost ends up on the menu.
But it's the pain that Mary Borden conveys supremely well as the men lie in its grip,

'Pain is the mistress of them...you can watch her plying her trade here any day. She is shameless. She lies in their beds all day...she never leaves them...she lies there to spoil their dreams.'

The metaphor extends and develops and moulds finally into the death of a soldier and somehow there is a profound grace in amongst all this dying and putrefaction,

'Listen! The whimpering mew of the wounded cat has stopped. There's not a sound except the whisper of the wind in the grass. Quick! Be quick! In a moment a man's spirit will escape, will be flying through the night past the pale, beautiful sentimental face of the moon.'

An essential book for any Great War reading shelf.

Vera Brittain

 Wednesday July 14th 1915

'I am coming to the conclusion that practical ability is of much less importance in a nurse than psychological fitness. Adaptability, sympathy and magnetism of temperament count for more than the ability to bandage and make foods.' 

Chronicle of Youth, Vera Brittain's War Diary 1913-1917

Vera Brittain has been a heroine here since that first all-consuming read of Testament of Youth. I dashed out and bought the diaries, biographies, fiction, anything I could find and they have graced my shelves ever since, but now I'm grateful to Yvonne Klein and her book ( which I'm now officially calling excellent and more about it later in the week) Beyond the Home Front for offering a much greater depth to my understanding of her.
Like so many of the women of her time Vera certainly seemed to know that not to have taken part in the war effort would have created a huge and insurmountable divide afterwards; to understand and communicate with the returning men it would be necessary to somehow have suffered too. Nursing therefore the single most effective and available route for women to feel most needed and to approach the vicinity of that suffering and in Vera Brittain's case to occupy her time,

'Nursing is a great rest to my brain...I began to ask myself  "What do I think about when I am doing my work at the hospital?" I came to the conclusion that I thought of nothing at all except the thing I was going to do next...this kind of thing enables one to keep more cheerful & therefore more brave.'

Yet emotional anaesthesia must have also surely become a necessary option for survival. Vera feared losing Roland to his war experience almost as much as she feared losing him in battle and her anguish is palpable at receiving no letters from him in response to her own regular correspondence,

'Still no news of Roland. If it were not for the nursing I don't know how I could bear this - but nursing takes all one's energy and occupies a great deal of the time that would otherwise have been spent on sad thought.'

'The war I began to feel was dividing us as I had so long feared...was it I wondered because roland had lost interest in me that this anguish of drifting apart had begun - or was the explanation to be found in that terrible barrier of knowledge by which the war cut off the men who possessed it from the women who, in spite of the love that they gave and received, remained in ignorance?'

How anyone emerged from this conflagration and carried on with any semblance of life I am hard pushed to imagine right now and this has all made for profoundly reflective reading, but I do feel fully geared up for the forthcoming BBC programme on Vera Brittain to be presented by Jo Brand. In a previous pre-comedy life Jo was a psychiatric nurse so I'm very interested to see just where her focus rests on the life of Vera Brittain, and whilst we are on the subject of Jo Brand it's worth noting that she is also to chair a new £25,000 literary prize up for grabs in 2009.
The Wellcome Trust Book Prize is open to outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine and finally signals an official meeting of the minds of literature and medicine. At last the discipline of Medical Humanities gets the long-awaited seal of approval from the literary world.
I can almost hear the chorus of groans, that we hardly need yet another literary prize, but I think we absolutely do need this one and I for one will be slavishly following longlists, shortlists, sharing book-thoughts and making predictions from my own forthcoming reading. Anything published in the year from October 1st 2008 is eligible.
Meanwhile I will be in front of my TV at 17.45 on Sunday November 9th and I expect a lot of you will be too.

Meet Grandad

  Let me introduce you to Bookhound's grandad.
William was born in 1896 and was one of the lucky ones, he came from Bethnal Green in the East End of London, served with the Royal West Kent Regiment and was eighteen when he found himself on the front line.
He survived the Battle of the Somme and lived to see his 100th birthday and get his telegram from the Queen. In this week of Remembrance reading that seems like a fact worth noting because William must have been a rarity.
The first time I met Grandad (and yes he was as cheeky and cheery as he looks) in 1975 he was already almost eighty and there he was jumping up and down outside the closed doors of Royal ward, men's surgical at the London Hospital where Bookhound was a patient. Read that story here but on this occasion I was the nurse sent by Sister to please tell the little old man bouncing around outside the ward and waving at us that he would have to go away and come back at normal visiting time like everyone else. Grandad was a cook extraordinaire and, convinced (rightly) that there would be no food worth eating in a hospital, had baked a tin of cakes for his grandson's sustenance and begged me to just let him sneak in quickly...please...which, incurring the wrath of Sister Royal, I did, because he'd come on the bus and would miss the next one home.
For Bookhound he was a very special man, everything and more that a grandad should be, lovely, kind, warm, funny and caring and Bookhound remembers hearing about the Great War in their conversations.We have a few photos and Grandad's medals and we don't know much more, but we can imagine.
Reading Soft Words Butter No Parsnips, The Life and Times of John Iliffe Poole by Lynda Franklin, John's grand-daughter, I suddenly realised how important these records are for individual family histories and the important stories behind the names and faces, so often left unsaid, unrecorded, perhaps never even heard.
Fortunately, as we all know,  the Tinker (father of dgr  for anyone who still doesn't know him) has saved us the trouble of second-guessing by giving into our nagging and writing his WW II memories down for us in Bugle Boy.
Lynda Franklin has had to unravel, puzzle and piece together her grandfather's memories and documentary evidence, add in historical background to locate John's life in its time and, knowing the campaigns he was involved in, has built up a picture of what life might have been like for him during the Great War. When firm facts such as injuries emerge it is possible to be more specific and here some remarkable facts do emerge. Having been exposed to a gas attack during the war John developed a malignant growth on his larynx and was one of the first patients ever to undergo a radical laryngectomy and subsequent tracheostomy in 1924 and was given just six months to live. It's all quite remarkable because he actually lived with that tracheostomy for the next fifty-five years and in that time provided tireless support and encouragement to other laryngectomy patients as well as a 'home from home' for over 70,000 Service personnel from all over the world during WWII.
So as my profoundly moving week of Great War Remembrance Reading continues it seems meet and right to begin by remembering all those ordinary people who did such extraordinary things.

An extraordinary week

What an extraordinary week it's been and thank you so much for all the kind wishes.
To add to the drama I had to do a photo shoot on Friday to go with an interview I did a couple of weeks ago for a feature on dovegreyreader scribbles to be in the Western Morning News on November 15th.
I had erroneously thought it would be just a couple of quick snaps, so an hour and a half later when I was still pouting and posing, by the shelves, near the shelves, holding books, getting books off the shelves, glasses on, glasses off, sitting at my desk facing left, facing right, typing the blog, reading books while leaning on the shelves with atmospheric back-lighting, leaning on the front gate, leaning on the field gate holding books with Tamar Valley in the background, standing in front of the house et al, I began to wish I had taken slightly more trouble than a pair of jeans and my ancient sloppy and pilled Boden jumper circa 2001.
That's me though so the South West might as well see it like it is.
Anyway, the house is full of flowers, lots of lovely things said to me and a line now drawn under the NHS bit of my life.

Well almost, except then something even more extraordinary happened.
Thirty six years notched up and not a hint of a strike ever mentioned, although I've often fancied a good one, so just look what arrived in the post two days after I retire.

I mean how unfair is that?

I think it's about pay, though I'd add in a lot more to strike about, and now I'm going to miss all the fun; picket lines, passing motorists beeping their horns twice in support, all that taser gun excitement when three the serried ranks of health visitors charge the police lines cowering huddled in testudo formation (Latin, I remember that) under their riot shields, food and clothing parcels arriving from well-wishers and roasting chestnuts over that bonfire that all strikers gather round.
I'm really really upset.
As you can see I've voted 'Yes' because the union have phoned me up personally ( yes honestly, automated but nice of them to think of me) and asked me to, so I must stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with the sisters fighting the cause.
So yesterday, to draw a definitive line under my career and any disappointment at missing out on a strike, Bookhound and I did what we always do, headed out across high Dartmoor. Deserted roads, perfectly lovely and gorgeously cold, pewter sky glowering down on us, a fine pub lunch at The Ring O'Bells in Chagford (highly recommended for good food, atmosphere, the day's newspapers and a lot of steaming walkers and their steaming dogs) and just drank in with awe and wonder the majesty right on our doorstep and did that count your blessings thing all the way there and all the way home.

Knitting Madness

I think perhaps we'll declare it officially lest there be any doubt, though it has been frequently thus.
Books are mostly for weekdays and I'm setting weekend space aside on dovegreyreader scribbles not only for rambling tours around rural Devon and Cornwall, but to indulge in an unbridled craft-fest.
It's inevitable now that I have more time, I'm just going to jump right in and indulge and if you want to come along or offer advice please do.
Now for starters there's a spinning wheel here somewhere. Perhaps, once I've found me a sheep and persuaded it to stand still, if I can find the loose end I might start unravelling it and turning it into a jumper...that's all I have to do isn't it?
But firstly we must be clear about a few things.
Don't for one minute think you're in the hands of an expert here because I have news. Leaving sock-knitting out of the mix (for which I had claimed world domination with my nicely ordered 5 dpns heel-turning technique) I have been outed by the Girl's Night In crowd as a completely cack-handed knitter which to be truthful has all come as a bit of a shock.
I thought stupidly that I was quite a 'good' knitter, the tension comes out nice and even and eventually, given a fair wind and sail and a couple of years on, expect a garment which OK I'll admit may have long gone out of fashion and which I then frog and start knitting into something else, but it was reasonably presentable. In fact the half-made skinny rib jumper in the loft has been in and out and in and out and in and out of fashion many times since it's inception in 1975, next time round I plan to finish it and find someone who's a skinny size 10 ( US 12 which I was in 1975) to give it to.
Before we go any further is everyone clear about frogging?
It's caused a good deal of mirth here let me tell you with dark hints of amphibian abuse but it's all easily explained on Planet Knit and is derivative of the rippit sound a frog makes.
Rippit...rip it...undo your knitting...get it?
But ever since I can remember (i.e. since I learnt to knit with a cardboard basket of rainbow wool and some 6" plastic needles) I've always tucked the needles under my arms and just gone all out for the kill, flailing my hands over the top and around and admittedly I've been told by the family that I've needed a bit of air-space around me, and it's all very distracting, but now apparently I discover that's not grown-up knitting.
I'm distraught because Girl's Night In seem to hold their knitting very sedately underneath, like a posh knife and fork and delicately loop the wool in minimalist fashion with a quick flick of the index finger, so they looked on aghast, in fact with such undisguised horror as I started lashing the wool around the needles with my armpit clutch technique that you'd have thought I was eating off my knife or something.
What's the matter I said, because they were all staring and then they broke the news as gently as they could,
You knit like a six year old.
Attempts to re-style me failed miserably (but thanks for leaning over my shoulder all that time and trying Jen) so I'm going to have to knit in secret from now on because apparently I'm an embarrassing disaster to watch.
But I take hope and gather heart because I bet Stephanie would tell me it was all fine as long as I came out the other end with something wearable. So thankyou everyone for funding two books (craft books are allowed at weekends by the way) written by my new friend Stephanie 'Yarn-Harlot' Pearl- McPhee. Even better I think Stephanie is based in Canada and we love the whole Canada thing here. I've ordered a couple of Stephanie's books with the Amazon Associates money that trickles in each time anyone clicks from a book on the sidebar here and then places an order. Trickle is about right because it takes about fifty sales to earn a books-worth but I've been letting it accumulate for a treat and this week I decided I had earned two, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off, The Yarn Harlot's Guide to the Land of Knitting and Things I Learned From Knitting whether I wanted to or not.
I'm off to cast on...in secret of course.