dovegreyreader scribbles

Edmund de Waal visits the dovegreyreader tent @PortEliotFest

It is no secret that Edmund de Waal's visit to the dovegreyreader tent had been the subject of much excitement for many weeks, and no surprise to have a packed tent, and there you also see that very Happy Camper perched on the arm of the sofa...it was a squash in the tent...Edmund said there's a space here...quick as a hare there she was.

I had chatted with Edmund very briefly beforehand about The Hare With Amber Eyes and asked if he would mind if we pitched right into the emotional heart of the book and then worked in either direction, talking about the netsuke, the collecting, the Ephrussi family and the impact of the book, which he very courageously agreed to do. And so after a brief introduction from me about this book as 'experience', and the impact that reading one particular passage had had on me very late one night, Edmund then read the extract for us.

It was the moment when the Nazis have arrived to clear the house and the desk is sent crashing through the glass roof ... and there was a silence as Edmund finished reading. In fact I could barely speak and there was little doubt that we were all instantly choked and very emotionally engaged as the most wonderful and far-ranging discussion followed.

Sometimes I'd like time to stand still in order to bottle moments like this, to keep them forever and make sure everyone can share them because it was pin-drop-electric. I think we would all agree with RevCheryl...

Edmund de Waal's gentle and unassuming manner and the depth and intelligence of his answers were a delight. He spoke of the shape of things, words for him have shape, texture and weight and so does a story. It was very moving to hear how the one he uncovered as he worked on The Hare with Amber Eyes was almost totally new to him. It made us all reflect on how refugees lose not just their homes but their stories and identities, perhaps because they are too painful to remember. Now this story has been restored and with it lots of new relatives for Edmund and his family. Clearly I was not alone in hoping that while continuing his work as a potter Edmund de Waal will write more. This will only happen, he told us, when he finds a story that has the right shape again, but at least he didn’t rule it out.

Edmund also talked about the design of the book and his resistance to, and the subsequent absence of a swathe of glossy photos halfway through, and someone commented that these seemed unnecessary. With such tactile descriptions of the netsuke every piece takes shape in the imagination of the reader and we heard about an edition that Edmund is working on that will contain some Sebald-like pictures that will have associations with the text. It was but a hop to talk about and extol the writing of W.G.Sebald, a real favourite of Edmund's and many of us in the tent... he recommends Austerlitz as a must-read.

We had some moments of levity too, as we moved onto to talk about his 'day job' and I asked Edmund whether he preferred to be called a 'ceramic artist' or a 'potter' . As he replied with a very definite 'potter', it seemed like the perfect moment to get an assessment of a piece of my early work. There was much hilarity as Edmund praised the shape and form and my delicate use of colour in this piece ( made aged seven) which, with its kidney connotations, clearly foreshadows my sensible career move into nursing, a serious loss to the world of ceramics. On the basis of Edmund's assessment I have taken the precaution of moving it from its place on the mantlepiece above the woodburner to a vitrine.

We could happily have listened for hours as Edmund talked about his work as a potter, the discovery of what he really wanted to make versus what he thought he should make, the repetition, the hundreds of casseroles in his early days and his pots and installations now, and how that repetition is mirrored in so many crafts...I was thinking of the millions of stitches in a quilt or tapestry. We also talked about the impact of reading and literature on his work and the thought processes that surround it, and touched on his revisionist approach to the work of Bernard Leach. Leach a potter greatly revered for creating a bridge between east and west but Edmund has explored the Japanese tradition in even greater depth thus exposing the myth of the 'appropriate', a premise not without its controversy and he was able to share that with us.

And then of course we had that memorable knitsuke moment of our own, Edmund was genuinely delighted with his little quilted homage to A Change in the Weather, and another hare with amber eyes to add to his collection.

And those of us who were there will never forget a very special Port Eliot event. I hope we've been able to share the essence of our Hare with Amber Eyes moments with you all, and my thanks again to Edmund de Waal for visiting the dovegreyreader tent and to everyone who came along and joined us.

 

 

 

The Happy Campers see Edmund de Waal twice in one day @PortEliotFest

The Happy Campers did a clever thing here... dashed off to see Edmund de Waal doing his main event at the Festival before rushing athletically up the hill ahead of him to be at the dovegreyreader tent for his conversation with us straight afterwards, and I am so pleased they did because I missed this, and now I feel as if I was there.

So handing you over to one very Happy Camper who I know is speaking for both of them, and for reasons that will become apparent I have decided to let Angela's words speak for themselves so no pictures...

Edmund de Waal

Some very personal reflections...

This was always going to be the highlight of the festival for me – hearing Edmund de Waal, who wrote my read of the year, The Hare with Amber Eyes -  and it is still only July! I was pleased to learn in the festival guide that we were being treated to a ‘special event created for Port Eliot’; a walk through the five cities of the book.

Edmund de Waal takes the stage and admits to feeling slightly daunted by the occasion.  He was here last year, but it doesn’t feel any easier, he says.

If anyone is expecting a conventional travelogue supported with photographs or other images they will be surprised but not disappointed. Staying true to his  convictions about how description can be powerful and evocative using only words, Edmund de Waal leads us all on a walk in the style of Charles Ephrussi, that accomplished flâneur.

We stop, we look, we loiter, we marvel, we ‘see all of human kind, meeting and having adventures’ in the streets of Paris and Vienna, Tokyo, Odessa and London.  Edmund de Waal takes us to each city in turn.  We begin in Paris, where Charles Ephrussi lives at No 81, Rue Monceau. All the families who live in this street have come from elsewhere, having made fortunes abroad, and wish to proclaim that they have arrived – they are newly minted, and want their houses to proclaim that they are here to stay. I stand outside the Ephrussi house, which practises the art of subtle display. Edmund de Waal calls it the art of being ‘invisible in plain sight’. I remember why I found The Hare with Amber Eyes so compelling. The author describes things so you feel you are there too; looking up at the five storeys, each eight windows across, and then over to the cast iron grilles at ground level with the E for Ephrussi forged into their design.

We can’t stay in Paris as long as we would like, on to Vienna. Here, you move even slower than you do in Paris. Crowds of demi - mondaines, the ‘pressed trouser brigade’, promenade along the Ringstrasse, which is full of yet more splendid buildings. Opera house, theatre, art gallery, parliament, city hall, university - I need to look up to appreciate these ‘adventures in architecture’. I laugh when Edmund de Waal calls the Palais Ephrussi a ‘terrible building’. Everything is gold, he explains, and I imagine what things inside are inappropriately gilded.  We leave Vienna  but not before we have been given a glimpse of Freud, in consultation with an Ephrussi great aunt…..

Tokyo now.  We go on a ten minute walk up a steep hill from the station. I don’t think Charles Ephrussi would be able to stroll up here as easily. The contrasts of Tokyo are evident – the frantic pace of development is all around, but alongside is the quiet temple and a great old wall, behind which there are pine trees. I can visit the best sushi chef in the area, who is next to the baker. I am thrilled when we stop outside Uncle Iggie’s apartment. He is one of my favourite characters from The Hare with Amber Eyes, but we must move on.

Dust, dust and more dust. To escape it I am now walking under the chestnut trees in Odessa. This is a city that doubles in size every 10 years but most successful people leave it to settle somewhere else.  The street where I have been transported to now is the main grand boulevard of Odessa which contains a whole series of grand palais, and of course the Palais Ephrussi is here too, next to the banking hall and trading house. We can peer around the back of the Palais, and notice that the back is constructed of rough stone, unlike the façade, which is much grander. Fur coat and no knickers, I giggle to myself. If I don’t want to rush, Odessan style, it doesn’t matter; Edmund de Waal reminds us that there are different ways of walking around cities.

Our walk finishes in London. The final part of the journey takes us back to the author’s studio which reminds me that although he has written this brilliant book he is first and foremost a potter.  My selfish hope is that the pots are put to one side every now and then to allow time for Edmund de Waal to spend time writing.

All too soon we are back where we started. The walk has been possible because we have had the best kind of guide; someone who knows where he has come from, who knows where he is going and who can point out all the fascinating sights along the way.

 

 

 

 

Knitting @PortEliotFest

In bringing a virtual space like dovegreyreader scribbles into reality for the festival it was clear we would need to embrace our creative side and have some knitting on the go and I wasn't quite sure how this would work, or whether we would get more than a few desultory rows done between us sitting in an empty tent.

Well how very wrong can you be.

I had gathered together a bag of wool from the stash and thanks to RevCheryl offloading her guilt stash onto me it included some posh bits too, Noro, Rowan and Colinette all feature and we had done some casting on to get people started, but nothing could have prepared us for how popular this would be. As people (men, women and children) arrived for one of our author conversations they headed to the basket to pick up some wool and needles and happily clicked away and chatted with the authors through each event. This has to be the fulfilment of my wildest dreams to be honest with you...to be allowed to chat with a favourite author and like-minded people and knit. I mean how many times have I sat at more formal literary festivals, all eyes glued on the platform and found mine own eyes drooping whilst thinking if only I was 'allowed' to get my knitting out.

Knitting is being used in therapy groups now after all, it relaxes the hands and allows people to talk more freely and it most certainly created a wonderfully informal atmosphere in the tent.

Then when each event finished there would be an influx of people ready for a sit, a knit, a natter and a cup of tea, and here I think we must laud the efforts of the tea boys...Bookhound (on the left) and the Weatherman.

Both married to health visitors and therefore the most tolerant of men who intuitively know the right moment to make a cup of tea. And what a great double act they were, as to and fro to the kettle in the cuddy behind the greenhouse they trotted, and hey presto trays of very welcome Earl Grey miraculously appeared. They reckon to have made several hundred cups of tea between them and washed up each time too so KnitAngel and I think we're missing a trick here and may hire them out with their own bunting for other events... weddings and Bar Mitzvahs no problem, we can train them accordingly.

I must therefore also mention Mrs Weatherman, the KnitAngel who as well as knitting the knitsuke and responding instantly to light-bulb moment requests for a butterfly, a gaggle of geese and a hare about a week before the festival, also displayed the infinite patience with which I know she is well-endowed as she taught people of all ages to knit as did Fran H-B, also part of the dgr crew.

So now we have this...

 

Watch this space but perhaps not drekkly.

 

The Happy Campers are too absolutely impressed with Lauren Child @PortEliotFest

‘The 1970s were a very long time ago!’

The famous children’s writer unleashes a softly spoken barb and it lodges in the breast of every festival goer who can remember buying proper Curly Wurlies (is that the correct plural?– help – maybe Wurlys looks better) and watching great TV like Banana Splits and White Horses chiz mone drone. Is rubbish dubbing better than subtitles from Italian? Oh dear, promised Dovegrey I would not mention The Leopard’s shortcomings any more except where they are properly relevant.

Back to the renowned author of the Clarice Bean books and Charlie and Lola.

When Dovegreyreader asked me to check out some of the children’s events at the festival she apologised and bribed me with a seat on her sofa near Edmund de Waal. ‘’I know it’s a busman’s holiday, she wheedled, but I’d really like to report on the Literary Provision for Young Minds and you are just the person to help me out here……..’ (translation...buzz around the children's bit would you Angela)

Even I am not immune to flattery, so despite it being my day off we happily settled back in our chairs to hear fascinating details about Lauren Child’s inspirations and the creative process which brings all her characters to life.  Clarice Bean was the first thing she wrote where she ignored the advice of publishers and trusted her own instincts. Wanting to come up with an idea for an animation, she visualised the story like a comic strip, where the text and pictures are interrelated. That is why each page is so different from the one before. Anyone in the adult audience who had mistakenly thought that writing books for children was somehow easier, or different, was made to think again. We also heard about the little girl Lauren Child saw on a train years ago who was the ‘real’ Lola, and what an engaging description it was.

The children in the audience asked the most interesting and perceptive questions, as children do, and one lucky little girl won a  Ruby Redfort T Shirt inscribed ‘ bored beyond belief’ and no, it wasn’t referring to an Abba tribute band but the redoubtable Ruby herself, who has a number of pithy catchphrases. Linda would have loved this for herself, to wear at screenings of The Leopard (oops!), but after I had earlier tried to wrest a gold inflatable Hermes horse balloon from a Fed Up Dad who had to carry it everywhere, we thought we would get thrown out if there was another such incident.

Needless to say the longest ever queue at the book signing tent snaked round and round the walled garden and the Lauren Child section looked like it had been consumed by the book eating dragon from the mural in the Round Room.

I looked at Lauren’s Princess and the Pea (where the illustrations were painstakingly constructed in 3D to make it look like the interior of a doll’s house) and thought of my confusion, when very little, upon hearing this story. Being a child of the 1970s, the  only peas I had experience of were marrowfat processed peas out of a tin, and I simply could not understand how such a pea could be felt through that many mattresses and feather beds. 

Even a princess must have squashed that soft and soggy pea flat, surely?

 

 

 

Daisy Goodwin visits the dovegreyreader tent @PortEliotFest

Right, so we've waved Justine off across to the Flower Show and there's Daisy Goodwin ready and waiting to sink into the now nicely warm and comfy sofa behind the increasingly messy and cluttered table, there's knitting happening all over the place and it's beginning to feel like home.

The Tea Boys are doing a grand job, back and forth with WI-sized teapots; trays of cups and saucers for washing return miraculously clean and dry ready for a re-fill (I didn't wash a single cup all weekend!) and I have donned my props well-concealed beneath my scarf for my conversation with Daisy. So all I need to do is wait for the talk of My Last Duchess to stray around to character and then to Mrs Cash and her lightbulb dress and 'ping' I can go for it...

Yeeeeesssss...

I think it's safe to say there was much hilarity at the switching on of my Blackpool illuminations, not least from Daisy who may have suddenly felt the urge to be back in London doing sensible interviews, but I quickly handed the lights over to our guest who gamely sported them for the rest of her talk and risked the 3 volts.

But we didn't just talk about My Last Duchess or the fact that Port Eliot had also benefited from the wealth of an American heiress, because Daisy is a TV producer and editor who has worked on some of our most popular programmes and we wanted the dirt inside info.

Bookhound will always watch old episodes of Grand Designs for tips on his How to Build an Extensionto Your Home project and, despite living there we have even been known to watch Escape to the Country.  I did confess to Daisy that it usually makes us smile and we say 'wait until you get here' to all those with stars in their eyes about the rural life. We want to talk spring water leaks and bore holes and septic tanks with them, and tell them about the cows taking out the electricity for four days, and we shout 'Don't Buy That' at the screen, but we do enjoy it.

Daisy was also the producer for the very first series of The Apprentice but we took a vow of secrecy so I'm afraid I can't possibly impart the information about how they tell both finalists they've won to get a genuine reaction and then say actually you haven't won at all and we won't know who's won for ages yet...nor can I tell you which tycoons Daisy interviewed as prospective candidates to head up the series and which one was unintelligible, and then having plumped for Lord Sugar guess what ....no I can't possibly tell you any more about that either...sorry, we took the pledge.

We had a good gallop through our thoughts on book prizes and in particular the Orange Prize which Daisy chaired in 2010. There was controversy when she said at the time that much of the women's fiction seemed intent on courting the gritty issues of the moment and that she had started to feel like a social worker, and we had a great debate about women and publishing and the romantic novel, the Booker and we may have sorted world peace had we had enough time.

Daisy's book choices for us were eclectic and wide-ranging from anything by Wilkie Collins and E.F.Benson's Mapp and Lucia books to the The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett to Gillespie and I by Jane Harris and King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher.

Daisy Goodwin is also a knitter and a quilter so I think she felt quite at home in our abode and my thanks to her for stopping by the dovegreyreader tent and for wearing those lights.

 

Justine Picardie visits the dovegreyreader tent @PortEliotFest

I'm always grateful to wake up to sunshine here in the Tamar Valley, but with five author visits and an event on the Five Dials Stage to do on Saturday I greeted the old fireball in the sky with an unusual amount of enthusiasm when I opened the bedroom curtains at 6am.

The eagle-eyed among you noticed that the tapestries were reversed in several pictures and I can explain that each night we took them down and packed them away to re-emerge for hanging the next morning. I could actually stand to lose the quilts if the worst happened but not the Tinker's tapestries, those really are family heirlooms and I couldn't bear the thought of perhaps a night of torrential rain having its way with them.

So off to Port Eliot bright and early to open up the tent, re-hang a few things and be ready and waiting for the arrival of Justine Picardie at 11am, which we were and along with a good crowd.

It's always a pleasure to talk to Justine and my only regret is that I was so pleased to see her and the box of silk camellias sent from the House of Chanel in Paris (and given free to everyone who bought a copy of the book ) that I completely forgot to create a cloud of No 5 as she walked into the tent. Madame Coco would always be greeted in this way. I remembered eventually and we had a belated dousing of the tent just before Lady Catherine St Germans stopped by to be presented with her camellia...

So we set to because we had an hour and a lot of ground to cover from Paris, to Chanel's interesting war, to clothes, to Daphne du Maurier, back to Paris again, and Justine had us spellbound as she recounted her stay at the Abbey where the young Gabrielle had been left by her father, to be raised by the nuns. Even more magical Justine's account of her visit to Chanel's neice and the unexpected invitation to try on Chanel's clothes. There were interesting parallels with Rebecca and that moment when Mrs Danvers lures the second Mrs deWinter in to try on Rebecca's clothes....'you know you want to'.

Nothing in the least bit sinister about Justine accepting her invitation and slipping on Chanel's own beautiful coats and jackets and finding a pair of gloves in the pocket. With that Justine showed us a picture of Coco wearing the very same jacket and holding the very same gloves and we were mesmerized.

I had also asked beforehand and was really pleased to be able revisit Before I Say Goodbye by Ruth Picardie, Justine's sister who died of breast cancer leaving a husband and very young twins. The book was published to great acclaim in 1998, perhaps one of the first to use e mails as part of its narrative, and a heart-rending account of a life cut tragically and very rapidly short.

I read this book frequently and have never forgotten one of Ruth's wry and immortal lines

'Still, it ain't over till the fat lady's thin. Or until her liver packs in. Or something. Watch this wig.'

Ruth's heart-rending observations about her illness, her family and the loss of her future all recounted in a series of articles for the Observer, gained a massive following over the few short months that she wrote them and this is a book that I can't bear to see forgotten, so it was good to talk with Justine about it all. It was also heartening to hear about Ruth's lasting legacy, The Lavender Trust established to provide ongoing support and information for younger women diagnosed with breast cancer.

By now I'm sporting my Chanel camellia too and like all our guests could have carried on talking for hours, but Justine had books to sign and an event in the Flower Show tent to get to, so with great reluctance and a lovely round of applause from a grateful audience we had to let her go, but my sincere thanks to Justine Picardie for her visit to the dovegreyreader tent.

 

 

Joanna Briscoe visits the dovegreyreader tent @ PortEliotFest

Joanna Briscoe had made a mammoth effort to get to the festival on Friday, travelling from London to St Germans in a day to do an event in the Round Room before heading for the dovegreyreader tent for a natter with us, and then home to get packed up for a holiday starting the following day.

After the torrential rain that had greeted Katie and Hari just an hour or so earlier there were hints of dryness and sunshine as Joanna arrived, and in fact this was the fine-weather turning point. The ridge of low pressure had run through, the high was coming and our resident Weatherman heaved a sigh.

Joanna sank gratefully into the sofa, we put a cup of tea in her hand, she picked up some knitting and we were away. I've decided this sofa thing is by far the best way to sit and talk with an author. It creates a calm, relaxed environment conducive to fascinating conversations and we had plenty of those over the weekend.

It was good to talk around Joanna's latest novel You. The plot twists (not all of them) and the location (Dartmoor) featured large, along with teenage obsessions and the relentless way that the spirit of the house that had so dominated her childhood and teenage years kept returning to haunt her. Stopping short of putting that thatch on her London home Joanna wrote the book instead. I had read somewhere that Joanna finds the process of writing a novel 'excruciatingly hard' so that offered great conversation fodder too.

Of course we couldn't extract any literary gossip but we did have a great discussion about the state of the publishing world and how it is impacting on authors.

RevCheryl pondering on how a writer's moment in the spotlight may dim, and in relation perhaps to our discussions about Bruce Chatwin with Katie Kitamura and Hari Kunzru thought this afterwards...

I wondered how this might tie in with Joanna Briscoe’s observation about publishers chasing after first books because they are always looking for the next big thing but not being prepared to cultivate more established writers who have not had a wham bam success. On the other hand there are a group of male writers in this country, contemporary with McInerney who seem to retain their position in the literary firmament.

Asked for her recommends Joanna pointed us in the direction of Thomas Hardy as her all-time favourite and also flagged up Patrick McGrath's Asylum for our delectation.

Our grateful thanks to Joanna Briscoe for visiting the dovegreyreader tent and by this time, the first afternoon of the three day festival, I'm realising that the knitting was a really good idea.

 

Bellowhead @PortEliotFest

So if you are going to a festival that not only does books but oodles of music too, you have to at least emerge from your literati world and go do something else.

Saturday was a huge day in the dovegreyreader tent. A succession of authors plus an interview on the Five Dials stage and I don't mind admitting that the preparation, though incredibly pleasurable, has also been like sitting a degree, with a great deal of information to hold in my head and in my notebook. I have been known to get slightly panicky if seperated from this notebook and pen for longer than ten minutes. I stuck the Angie Lewin on the front to make me think summer sun way back in February.

'Chatting' with authors belies the intense concentration required so 'tis true that after seven hours of that and by about 8pm on Saturday night, well I was about ready for slippers, cocoa and bed.

But no, I'm a grown-up after all and much as I may have yearned for a wheelbarrow to sleep in while Bookhound pushed me around... this we discover is the vehicle of choice at festivals, dozens of children curled up asleep in wheelbarrows whilst their parents enjoyed the evening, so we decided to brave it all. Having queued for freshly-cooked Thai noodles we walked down to the river and the outdoor Paradiso cinema to catch the beginning of a film, if only to sample the plein-air movie experience.

The Red Shoes was about to start to a backdrop of the darkening sky, the Brunel viaduct and the river  but we had dancing shoes of our own to get on and a 10.30pm appointment in the Big Top with Bellowhead.

Just brilliant as we knew they would be.

I'm a bit late discovering lead singer Jon Boden's A Folk Song a Day project but you can catch up with it here. Jon Boden has a wonderfully in-tune live voice as do those who sing with him, and the seemingly relaxed yet frenetic mayhem happening on stage belies an incredibly tight musicality. And everyone seems to play such a wide range of instruments, there's the brass section ooompahhing over on one side and the strings on the other. One minute Rachael McShane is cosied up with her cello and the next she's jigging around having a fiddle (if you see what I mean.) Then a couple of them pull tin whistles out of their pockets and let loose on those and then Paul Sartin drops his oboe and gets fiddling (oh dear, if you see what I mean again). I'll stop there because it'll only get worse but if Bellowhead are playing near you definitely don't miss them, we'll certainly be there if they come back to Devon.

Having been up since 6am our batteries finally ran down just before midnight, and fearful of turning into pumpkins we headed up the hill to the car and home, singing and jigging as we went.

It was a pleasant surprise to meet Paul Sartin from Bellowhead (that's him on the phone) who came up to the dovegreyreader tent for William Fiennes's event on Sunday, so we had a lovely chat with him and looooook, he sent me a Bellowhead picture for you all.

The Happy Campers & Simon Garfield @PortEliotFest

Well someone had to do it and with my 'canvas is for painting on not sleeping under' outlook on life it wasn't going to be me, so I was most grateful to Linda W & Angela, the Happy Campers, for accepting the challenge and running (literally) with it. They took their assignment to camp and to cover as much of the festival as they could manage very seriously indeed, planning with military precision and timing as you might expect from the combined forces of a teacher and a PA. So they ditched their husbands, blagged a tent and we'd see them as passing blurs as they dashed up to see us and then off to another event miles away. One half of them does that orienteering marathon fell-running thing up in the Lake District and they are both Hash House Harriers too, so the uphill trek to the Walled Garden to see us was but a stroll for them that left the rest of us (well me after carrying loads of bags up every day) needing oxygen.

I have this vision of them queuing outside the shower block in their PJs and wellies which may have been the only time they stayed still, apart from sitting down here ...

...to our end of festival dovegreyreader crew cream tea, and for which Bookhound had come suitably equipped...as we drove across on Sunday morning all he kept muttering was 'hope I've remembered the clotted cream' which thankfully he had.


So here's the Happy Campers first report, expect more over the next few days including I hope their take on the the now legendary Kate Winslet performance. I heard it from outside the tent and it sounded utterly hilarious.

Friday 22^nd July

Simon Garfield ‘Just My Type’  Bowling Green 2.45pm

It’s the first afternoon and Linda and I are feeling understandably smug after getting the (previously unseen) borrowed tent up without a hitch - just missing a deluge of biblical proportions.

Much anticipation – Simon Garfield is The Font Guru and before you could say Helvetica there he was on stage asking us to admit to the grate crime (as Molesworth would say) of misusing Comic Sans. Poor Linda had to raise her hand at this point but I’ve always been an Ariel girl, so avoided ritual humiliation for the moment.  On his T Shirt were the teasing letters

ex

ugs

veti

ld

cunningly sandwiched between the two sides of his cardigan. The talk, he said, had a dogs theme and we were then thrilled by salacious stories of that old reprobate Eric Gill’s sexual experimentation with anything that moved (not excepting man’s best friend). Never mind the quick brown fox, in this case it was more like ‘the bearded typographer jumps on to the helpless dog’.  Naturally the pangram most favoured by Dovegreyreader is ‘’zany eskimo craves fixed job with quilting party’………I hope to see Simon in her tent next year being presented with a suitable knitsuke.  Actually, she was terrified of Mr Garfield casting his expert eye over the Dovegreyreader bunting, as its homely letters were cut out by loyal Bookhound at the kitchen table.  But as TFG says, type is all about emotion, nuance, and finding the right thing for you. So yours is perfect, Dovegrey.

By the end of this thoroughly diverting romp through his best selling book – make sure you don’t pick up the one about hot sex at the beach and kinky online shopping – we had worked out the advert on the T shirt:

Vexed

Pugs

Veterinary

Holdings Ltd

that well known company, run by very clever…..dogs.

 

RevCheryl listens to Jay McInerney @ PortEliotFest

RevCheryl arrived ready to get stuck into bunting and nun-making on Thursday and then thankfully, along with Fran H-B, took all responsibility for setting up our Sound of Music flower show entry off my shoulders which were in fact still recovering from a long half an hour stooped in a sweltering loft looking for Lonely Goatherd puppets, a small guitar, an alpine walking stick and a cow bell.

RevCheryl enjoyed her share of knitting, and with wrapt concentration as you can tell and took in several events around the festival too, so my thanks to her for her take on Jay McInerney...

"Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair...

After a happy day spent mainly listening to authors in the Dovegreyreader tent it was off to hear Jay McInerney speaking in the Round Room neath the gaze of the Lenkiewicz mural.

The quality of McInerney’s writing is a seductive pleasure for me so I was delighted when the event began with him reading the short story which later became extended into his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City’. His wry, ironic delivery was perfectly suited to the prose as you might expect and all whilst seemingly perfectly relaxed, his be-jeaned legs twisted into ever more complex contortions on the chair, which was rather endearing.

The good news for fans like me is that he is working on a third in the series of novels which began with Brightness Falls. But I couldn’t help apply the words quoted at the beginning of that novel to him and to other ‘superstar’ novelists of previous decades. The day before Hari Kunzru and Katie Kitamura had talked about how Bruce Chatwin’s writing is hardly known among those under forty now that he has been dead over twenty years. McInerney is still very much alive and while maybe his range isn’t huge, neither was Jane Austen’s.  I wondered how this might tie in with Joanna Briscoe’s observation about publishers chasing after first books because they are always looking for the next big thing, but not being prepared to cultivate more established writers who have not had a wham bam success.

On the other hand there are a group of male writers in this country, contemporary with McInerney who seem to retain their position in the literary firmament.

Reminded of just how good McInerney is, I bought the books I’d previously read from the library in my more virtuous days and look forward to a glorious re-read."

 

 

 

The dgr bookerthon begins @ManBookerPrize longlist 2011

It's all go today but hallelujah, Sebastian Barry gets a third crack at the Booker, On Canaan's Side makes it through and now has some company on the book table, including a few old friends, some new chums and some real unknowns from small publishers. Just what I was ready for today, so I now feel quite invigorated at the prospect of discovering some of these if time and mood permits, and so far I have read precisely one.

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail - Profile)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)

 

 

First footers... Katie Kitamura & Hari Kunzru @PortEliotFest

If you are going to do a job do it properly might seem like a cliche these days, but once it has been said to you at the age of nineteen by Sister Beech (Ward 5AB Gt Ormond St 1973) in her very most sternest tones, and prefaced by a very clipped and starchy 'Nurse Chester come here please..' swiftly followed by a humiliating public dissection and expose of all the life-threatening short cuts that you thought you'd got away with...well trust me, it's no cliche, more a searing lesson branded in your soul for life. And I have always been grateful to Sister Beech for the admonition(s...there were more)

So no short cuts with my preparation and reading for Port Eliot Festival (or for any festival for that matter) hence my book table has been a permutation of this and little else for the last few months.

By this evening these will be back on the shelves, all with lovely signatures and inscriptions from their authors and to be replaced on the table with whatever I have from the Booker longlist to be announced later today. I'm way off the bookerthon pace and have no idea what to expect but, though I haven't read it yet, I am praying for one of these three to be there..

Watch that space and while we wait, we have nineteen Port Eliot books here and another heap off in the wings that, although I didn't read cover to cover, I browsed to get the gist. And I am so glad that I also headed Sister Beech's advice about 'being prepared...' and 'leaving nothing to chance...' and I expect 'the marmite should just say hello to the bread...' would have come in useful too had we needed it. I have spent hours browsing online, reading reviews and articles, finding out about author's lives of which I knew so little and now know much more, and all in order to try and be as informed as possible whilst avoiding any cringeworthy clangers.

I saw a cringeworth clanger happen at a recent literary event and it was as embarrassing for the audience as it was for the author, and as for the chair, well I think they were praying for a ground-swallow-me-up moment.

Intrepid first footer in the dovegreyreader tent was Katie Kitamura, and she and I persuaded her partner Hari Kunzru out of the back row to come and join her for our conversation. The Friday rain hammered down outside, we quickly realised that if the tent was going to leak it happened to be at a point right above our sofa but we put cups of tea in their hands and carried on regardless.

 
 
I have no notes obviously so this is all from memory (and I am now suddenly thankful for a career that relied on being able to recall with reasonable accuracy what people may have said to me at any given time...so I hope this will be fair reflection) but our discussions ranged across vast swathes of literary territory from Katie's decision at nineteen to give up a career in ballet to write, and to her novel The Longshot. We talked about the mixed martial arts and the incongruities of such a powerfully testosterone-laden world getting the 'woman writer' treatment...and as I talked to Katie, who is beautiful and delicately elegant, those juxtapositions and surface judgements that we make seemed almost more relevant and then entirely superfluous. Yes, Katie would fit the bill for some sweet little books about ballet school but she has a razor sharp mind and a robust intellect which made our discussions about her current collaborative writing project with Hari a fascinating source of discussion.

Katie and Hari are working on screenplay about the life of Bruce Chatwin and that led us all over the shop with our discussions, from the portrayal of a life that was itself often lived behind a smokescreen of mystery and misinformation to Bruce Chatwin's writing. I threw in comparisons with Sebald in that sense that you think you may be reading fact when actually you might be reading fiction, and how perhaps Bruce Chatwin was one of the early proponents of those blurred boundaries, and we picked that one up and ran with it between us.

Hari then talked about his new novel Gods Without Men, the story of a family travelling through the American desert whose autistic son goes missing. It is in some ways a fulfillment of the father's darkest hope...that somehow they might be relieved of this burden, but when that comes to fruition the consequences and the guilt would seem to be profound. We all wanted to read it yesterday and fortunately with the bookshop right next door, though at that moment coping with a bit of a flood of their own, we could at least read it today.

Before they left we asked them for some book recommends for you all, and here are Hari and Katie's suggestions..

Open City ~ Teju Cole
From the Mouth of the Whale ~ Sjon
The Land of Green Plums ~ Herta Muller
Mistaken Identity ~ Nayantara Sahgal

My sincere thanks to first footers Katie and Hari for a wonderful start to our festival.

 

 

 

The dovegreyreader knitsuke @PortEliotFest

The dovegreyreader knitsuke (please pronounce as knitski) are born thanks to the incredible KnitAngel who was part of Team dgr, and a few have been sent to their new homes at this year's Port Eliot Festival. Most importantly the very first one had to be placed in the care of Edmund de Waal...

I'm hoping better pictures of the inaugural knitsuke will emerge because in my festival haze I completely forgot to take one before we sent him on his journey.

But for Edmund de Waal there was no question, it had to be a hare with amber eyes and he was absolutely delighted (a picture will appear from someone I hope)

For Patrick 'Butterfly' Barkham we made a special trip to the very secret Site X in Devon to capture a Large Knitted Blue, with food store..

And Patrick was delighted with his knitsuke (with holes in the lid so it can breath and he's promised to look after it) because this brought his Port Eliot sightings tally up to eight species.

And our final guest of the festival, William Fiennes, and unbeknown to us word of the knitsuke was spreading. How fortunate that we had made a baggle of snow geese...

and I think we might just have made William's day too.

the dovegreyreader quiltsuke @PortEliotFest

Every author left the dovegreyreader tent with a small quilted gift and I am so grateful to RevCheryl for her hard work on the quiltsuke.

Beautifully designed little pieces of colour and contrast textiles, machine quilted and received with much delight by each guest.

Now I have to confess more photographic failing and I'm hoping some pictures from other cameras will arrive.

But I have managed to crop a photo to show the exquisite little piece that went to Edmund de Waal in homage to his installation A Change in the Weather ...

and here is Patrick Barkham's measuring 5" x 6"

and each with a label on the back.

 

 

PS Look who I found, sorry Seth Lakeman.. #PortEliotFest

I just couldn't stop myself ... well if Seth walked past your tent wouldn't you, and bless him for smiling.

Saturday @PortEliotFest

A quick resume of our fabulous Saturday with words to follow...

Justine Picardie...

Daisy Goodwin, and wherein I emulate the magnificent Mrs Cash with some lightbulbs of my own and Daisy possibly thinking...'Who is this mad woman from Devon'

A session with Edmund de Waal that I think may go down as one of those unrepeatable never-to-be-forgotten literary moments, beyond special, a profound and moving event but with some moments of levity as Edmund, one of the nation's foremost ceramic artists, assesses with much hilarity a piece of my early (aged 7) work and I think you can see he is impressed..

I then nipped off to do an event on the Five Dials stage and returned for another incredible hour talking to Gillian Slovo

We had wonderful audiences all day, lots of knitting, lots of questions, several hundred more cups of tea and glorious sunshine.

Back today for Patrick 'Butterfly' Barkham and Will 'Snow Geese' Fiennes and lots of words to follow here when I have had time to think about a weekend that has been truly amazing.

Guess what... the Flower Show @PortEliotFest

Firstly news from the Flower Show and please notice how we took advantage of decor in situ..

and in case you can't quite see the rosette..

My name on there under false pretences considering that my main contribution was to don the head torch and brave the loft on a sweltering day to find the Lonely Goatherd accoutrements, so congratulations to Fran H-B and Rev Cheryl for some inspired arranging.

Friday @PortEliotFest

Some pictures to give you a feel for what has been a fantastic first day in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival.

It's been about bringing the blog to life which means Bookhound and crew have made about 200 cups of tea and visitors have sat and knitted while they listened...

and authors have knitted while they talked about their books. I think Joanna Briscoe returned to London chilled and relaxed after her session.

We had a delightful and fascinating hour with Hari Kunzru and Katie Kitamura while the heavens opened this morning, but we hardly noticed the rain and we squeezed some great book recommendations out of them. Each visitor is giving us their reading suggestions so I'll post all those here eventually and writer more about each event soon.

Lots of Friends of dovegreyreader popped in to say hello including Alice and Christopher Biggins, who wasn't a friend but now is if I will mend his Kaffe Fassett jumper for him. BBC Spotlight came to interview us live for the lunchtime news, except we all thought the second rehearsal was the live one, so having relaxed we were a bit surprised to find we had to do it all again. You'll be pleased to know that both Carol and Linda W, who comment here, managed to pitch their tents without recourse to kicking and screaming.

I think you'll also agree that the flower show crew of Fran H-B and RevCheryl have done us proud with our Sound of Music installation...spot the nuns climbing a mountain, sew-a-needle-pulling-thread and brown paper packages overlaid with accents of Lonely Goatherd

A huge day tomorrow...Justine Picardie, Daisy Goodwin, Edmund de Waal, Helen Walsh & Eleanor Birne and Gillian Slovo. I'll Be Back Soon...oh sorry wrong film... So Long Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen Goodni-i-i-ght, the sun has gone to bed and so must I-I-I.

Friday dawns @PortEliotFest

The first good news of the day is as follows...

and our man from the Met Office (who gamely spent yesterday cutting out butterflies for the bunting) tells us a chance of showers later today but the rest of the weekend looks set fair. Now for once, if this is wrong the very good thing is we have him to hand and can slap him, as in yes, let's shoot the messenger.

In amongst yesterday's hive of industry were Flower Show deliberations around our entry depicting a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Now I won't deny that I have been eyeing up the wheat in the field and thinking..

..why not just choose the easy life, stick a load of it in a jar, say it was corn, add an elephant's eye, a fringe from Surrey and voila Oklahoma done and dusted, but no it has to be The Sound of Music.

An intrepid foray into the loft has found the puppets, the nuns and the bride have been made, as have the brown paper packages tied up with string, I'll chop the whiskers off a cat if I can catch it (joking, joking) and I have had a 6am text message from Fran HB "Head Arranger" asking for some blue ribbon, as in 'blue satin sashes'. Also sourced are a cow bell, Tyrolean hats and some Devon Edelweiss (new species)

and some miniature Devon Gentian.. another new genus...ahem.

So later today in the dovegreyreader tent we will be hosting Katie Kitamura (2pm) and Joanna Briscoe (3.30pm) and then getting ready for a huge Saturday starting with Justine Picardie at 11am.

Justine and I have masses to talk about, not only her Coco year and some interesting updates on her other books but I'm also hoping for some hot fashion tips... I mean maxi dresses, really??

All over again??

And what's with the shorts with tights??

Do they know we blazed a trail with Hot Pants and bare legs in the middle of winter??

Even better Justine has a very exciting surprise lined up... now I'll let you in on it if you promise not to tell anyone because it's a secret. Boxes of Chanel white fabric camellias have been sent from Paris and will be given away with each purchase of her book.

I'm also more than excited to have lent my tent out to Badaude for her talk at 3pm on Saturday and she'll be drawing things I expect.

Righto me hearties, it's now 07.19 and I smell the eggs and bacon...more later.

 

 

 

Port Eliot ~ On the subject of bunting.

So today we have been mostly making a lot of bunting...

Many miles of bunting in fact, and this evening, in glorious sunshine we made a start on tent decoration.

Tomorrow it gets the full works. 

This week's housekeeping arrangements

dovegreyreader scribbles is now entering two weeks of de-mob festival happy, no work, holiday mood, and who knows what will happen. In fact if yesterday is anything to go by... absent-mindedly walking into the cake-decorating shop when I was meant to be in the hairdresser's next door, nothing is certain and the sooner my helpers arrive the better. My brain is saturated with information about books and the authors I shall be meeting and I'm just hoping it doesn't all jumble up and I ask Gillian Slovo about her opinions on the pottery of Bernard Leach and Edmind de Waal about his childhood in anti-apartheid South Africa.

One of the Festival events I am more than looking forward to is Bellowhead on Saturday night so here's a taster to get your feet tapping, I shall be a-dancing for sure.

It's been amazing to see a tiny fraction of what is involved in organising a festival, the scheduling for a start, I mean it's like playing chess and it's taken a while to get my tent line-up settled and a few last minute changes, but the organisers have been unbelievably helpful, sorting out e -introductions for me, the tent, furniture for it, teacups, tables, WI sized teapots and I think we're there.

So here's the rough plan for this week with helpers arriving from distant parts, and I feel I might need one of those huge charts with colours and dots and arrows and things.

Bear in mind that in amongst what follows there will be live blogging going on from people off-a-wandering around festival events other than mine and reporting back on them for us... it could be bit of a white-knuckle ride on here for the next few days, hope you're braced and suitably dressed in whacky festival gear.

Wednesday July 20th

~ Rev Cheryl & Mr & Mrs Fran H-B arrive and we climb on board the sewing machine to start on the bunting whilst talking about books. Rev C has a direct line so is also going to sort the weather.

Thursday July 21st

~ Friends Liz and Mr Liz arrive (Liz is in charge of knitting)  and we make more bunting, raid the loft for essentials (puppets) for our Sound of Music Flower Show entry, make nuns out of something and hope I bump into my friend Izzy again as per last year for a garden raid, failing that...hmm, hedgerows. Mr Liz has just retired from the Met Office so he's going to help sort the weather too.

Mr and Mrs Kirsty from Other Stories were to join us but for reasons various now can't, but Kirsty is our official tweeter and we will be in contact with her in Oxford so that she can tweet our happenings for us through the weekend (dovegreyreader #PortEliotFest)

Late in the afternoon we will head over to Port Eliot with a van full of accoutrements, get the tent set up with quilts and socks and things various that will help bring the blog to life,

Friday July 22nd

Up early for a raid of the hedgerows and over to get the flower show entries sorted (why did I enter two) the teapots and cups and saucers organised, and then all sit cool and calm as cucumbers to await author visits as follows...

2pm Katie Kitamura

3.30pm Joanna Briscoe

Then we'll be taking in evening events accordingly.

Saturday July 23rd

~ Intrepid souls Linda W and Angela are happy campers both and will be out and about around the Festival and reporting back. Although children and books are her day job, Angela has gamely agreed to venture into the children's festival to have a look, and the perk of that assignment is that Lauren Child of Charlie and Lola fame will be in there somewhere too.

Back at the tent...

Time to be confirmed ~ Justine Picardie

12pm ~ Daisy Goodwin

1.30pm ~ Edmund de Waal

3.30pm ~ I will be interviewing Helen Walsh and Eleanor Birne on the Walled Garden stage

5pm ~ Gillian Slovo

6pm ~ All collapse in heap and after a quick meeting of minds and wellies drift down to the plein air Cinema Paradiso to watch a good film, probably walking via the stall that does the freshly cooked thai noodles.

Later ~ Stay awake for Bellowhead who I saw on the TV coverage of Glastonbury and I loved...like Seth Lakeman but more of them.

Sunday July 24th

2pm ~ Patrick Barkham

3.30pm ~ Will Fiennes

And for those who can't be there but would love to, be please don't worry, don that whacky festival gear and be with us in spirit...and we'll keep you in touch. 

You ~ Joanna Briscoe

I'm nearly there.

My mission to read around every author I will be talking to next weekend is almost accomplished, and for all the pleasure that reading brings under such circumstances I can't say it hasn't been tough some days for a free-range reader like me when I see what the postman staggers in with, because hard on the heels of Port Eliot Festival will be the announcement of the Man Booker longlist on Tuesday July 26th.

I'm way off the pace and not even going to hazard half a guess, though I will be asking all my Port Eliot guests for their predictions, but as the books arrive which I think could be in with a chance I've been stacking them on a table; that table now so ridiculously over-laden that all it does is gives a snapshot of the madness the judges may have been up against. So I shall be dashing around and getting my customary Bookerthon snapshot up on the day and doubtless reading a few that take my fancy before short listing.

But back to the book in my hand which thankfully has been no hardship (and I have to thank the very discerning taste of Cathy St Germans because she knows dovegreyreader scribbles well and has been spot on with her suggestions for me) because it has been You by Joanna Briscoe. Maggie O'Farrell rightly calls it 'dangerously addictive' and I like her I couldn't put it down either.

The funny thing is you don't ever meet an author down here in the back of beyond and then, would you credit it, you meet them twice in ten days. I nipped across to Dartington last Wednesday afternoon to catch just three events, and, though I had to miss Joanna Briscoe's because it clashed with Matthew Hollis talking about Edward Thomas, we did manage to say a very brief 'Hi see you at Port Eliot' over her book signing.

More about Matthew Hollis's talk soon and also Rachel Johnson of The Lady who was predictably very funny and then Blake Morrison giving the annual Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture, it was a good afternoon.

I knew little about Joanna Briscoe before she was added to my Port Eliot guest list and I have only had time to read You, but I do now know that she grew up in an ancient and isolated thatched Long House on Dartmoor, fled to London and university the minute she could legitimately escape, is now a literary critic for the Guardian as well as an author, and that this novel may be something of an exorcism of past ghosts that surround a home that Joanna Briscoe discovered had never left her consciousness.

I think we can all agree that the house itself, Jordan Manor, was indeed isolated...

You are unlikely to find a more tangled web of intrigue than the one spun by Joanna Briscoe in You as she explores the obsessive infatution that Cecilia Bannan has for her school teacher Mr Dahl. Mr Dahl unwittingly becomes Cecilia's 'complex and large-scale project' and all portrayed with an uncomfortable degree of accuracy, as you will realise if you too have ever have been an adolescent also prone to infatuation....weren't most of us.

The school is a progressive one, un-boundaried and lacking in curriculum or rules (and historically not without precedent in this area of the West Country) and Cecilia's bookish, isolated existence in her family's remote Dartmoor home offers plenty of scope for her adolescent imagination to run riot. But that's not all because infatuation is not the sole realm of the love-struck teenager, as Cecilia's mother Dora, the music teacher at her daughter's school, finds herself obessed by the art teacher, who happens to be Mrs Dahl.

It's a right old emotional soup very cleverly dished out by Joanna Briscoe because in writing that quick resume I can see it might seem to border on farce, when in fact You is very much a potent and potentially explosive mix that is handled with great care. Events are exposed through flashbacks as Cecilia, after many years absence has returned with her partner Ari and their three daughters to the family home to care for her mother, now diagnosed with cancer.

It had never occurred to me that there is really only one other novel that centres its plot around Dartmoor (I'll let you guess) and how strange that is given the wealth of natural elements to draw on, along with all the legends, the myths and folklore, so I was pleased to see Joanna Briscoe give a mention to the good old Hairy Hands and Jay's Grave.

I can't bear to give away the central plot theme as someone had done on Twitter recently...'oh that's the book where .....' because I didn't know that detail at the time, and I wanted to come across it for myself at the moment allotted by Joanna Briscoe, so that rules out some very very interesting discussion here about what comes next. And we'll have to tip toe around it in our discussions at Port Eliot too in order to talk about the novel's central and heartbreaking themes of lies and secrets and the loss and grief that returns to haunt Cecilia in gut-wrenching form, like a scab waiting to be picked and turned into a running sore throughout her life. But I love a book that draws me in and makes me wonder quite how I may have felt given this set of circumstances... a bit like the shock moment in Gillian Slovo's Black Orchids. Though not a shock, events here are every bit as profound and far-reaching in their impact.

However that's alright because Joanne Briscoe and I will be able to discuss the health visitor.

As Cecilia's mother gives birth to late addition Barnaby, the health visitor comes to call and you know how excited I always get when one of mine own appears in a book, especially given that huge swathes of Dartmoor were my 'patch' for some thirty years. After all Susan Hill has a nice, kind, understanding health visitor called Lynne in one of her Simon Serrailler novels, (The Shadows in the Street) and so this was surely going to be another one modelled on someone like me me me... preen preen...

'Each one is different, Mrs Bannan,' said the health visitor, a woman palpably past retirement age who organised the Widecombe WI childrens' Christmas parties...and who negotiated the precipitous hills of the surrounding villages by bicycle, her face grimly set and her white uniform remaining spotless while her stockings were mud-splattered on arrival.

'He seems to feed all day, but he's not taking much. ' said Dora, who had become yet thinner.

'He needs a bottle,' said the health visitor with a jaw movement that reminded Dora of her mother.

OK... so well before my time then.

There is a fascinating article by Joanna Briscoe in this month's edition of Vogue and you can read it via a link on the front page of her website here, so I am very much looking forward to talking to her about it all at 3.30 pm this Friday July 22nd and You Know Where by now I think.

 

Port Eliot reconnaissance mission...

Napoleon, gazing at Port Eliot land from the sea as he sailed into exile, said it was the most beautiful place in England. “Enfin, cec beau pays.” (As reported by Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon).

Well good old Napoleon for showing such discernment and he'd have loved to come ashore for a good festival too I'm sure.

So we're on the final countdown week and I'm thrilled to be named on this year's festival poster (keep looking, you'll find it)

Our man from the Met office, who also happens to be part of Team Dovegreyreader, will have the weather forecast for us by Tuesday but quite honestly are we bothered?? What's a bit of rain between friends, and in such a beautiful setting we thought as we set off yesterday morning for a meeting over at Port Eliot with Cathy St Germans, a ride around the estate on a golf buggy to see the preparations, and time to walk up in the Walled Garden and see my tent.

I'd heard the tent was perfect but hadn't realised quite how perfect, 22ft x 11ft (thank you Bookhound) so plenty of space for the chairs and if the weather is fine we can roll up the sides of the tent and spread onto the grass. Later we rummaged around in the basement of the house where nothing has ever been thrown away for some furnishings to create a Literary Salon like no other, and we'll be adding to it with bits from the loft of another considerably smaller house where nothing has ever been thrown away either.

More tents to go up around us including the Bookshop right next door, within leaning out and reaching distance and supplied by Ron & Co from The University Bookseller who also run St Ives and  Falmouth Bookseller.

The Production Office, mission control of the festival with the all-important wireless signal for some live blogging will be just to the right out of picture.

So Cathy took us on a tour around the various locations, including this site down by the river which will soon house a giant outdoor screen for Martin Scorsese's Paradiso Cinema with Isambard Kingdom Brunel's railway viaduct over the River Lynher in the background.

As soon as the sun has set (because we know it will shine down on us) we can all settle down to watch screenings of The Leopard, The Red Shoes, Murder on the Orient Express, North by Northwest, The Narrow Margin, All About Eve, Human Desire, and The River over the three evenings of the Festival.

Particularly exciting is that just over that wall to the left behind the dovegreyreader tent is another walled garden that will house the Fashion Department. There's a really nice yurt in here...

Barbara 'Biba' Hulanicki will be creating the now traditional and much sought-after space foil festival costumes ...I shall be in for a tutu fitting very early in the day, Bookhound is hoping for a waistcoat. I'm really hoping for a Meadham Kirchoff head dress with some help from milliner Nasir Mazhar who sorts Lady Gaga out for chapeaux so I shouldn't be such a problem.

There will be photography and screenprinting going on here too as well as some intriguing jewellery making with Vicki Sarge-Beamon. – 'co-founder of Erickson Beamon, one of the most respected jewellery houses in the world and a driving force in the fashion industry for over 20 years.' Everyone who was anyone wore EB to the Royal Wedding.

The plan is to turn up with all your old trinkets, beads, bracelets and those old Koh-i-noors that you've had hanging around along with the contents of the button box and turn your trash into treasure. Lady Gaga is a fan of EB too so I'm quite expecting to look like her by the end of all this.

Vicki says...

“We’ll have some tools and a hot glue gun and also starter kits for people who are unsure what they may need. I’ll also provide some trinkets and pieces to get people started such as old bits of frames, flower pots and so on. I want to encourage people to throw themselves in at the deep end and explore their creative side in an organic and spontaneous manner – the festival is the ultimate playground."

Well all this talk of fashion was enough to send me into a complete spin...

'What on earth am I going to wear??' I wailed as we headed back to the car.

'Shall we go home via Plymouth?' said Bookhound as we drove away.

Plymouth improving with the Drake Circus shopping centre but still not noted for its high fashion stores, except needs must and nearest.

'Er yes, better had, need a frock or two that will go with my wellies ' I said, as we most appropriately headed for Monsoon.

 

The Goosey Quilters 25th Birthday.

Back in those baby-laden days of the early 1980s I used to meet every Tuesday evening with two equally baby-laden friends to sit and drink tea and quilt.

This may not sound very exciting in this era of yummy mummies who may be much more likely to go to the wine bar and then clubbing, but this was the 1980s, we just didn't and in a rural Devon market town back then there were few child-friendly places to meet by day either. The idea was that we would create a sticky-finger-free oasis and the evening was sacrosanct. The preceding day was all geared around it. Chores done, nappies washed and on the line, children up on the moors for the afternoon to wear them out, tea at 4pm, baths at 5pm, bed at 6pm, no messing. Men left in charge and we would rotate around each other's sitting rooms and give vent to our creativity and attempt intelligent conversations about more than who sold Milupa baby food the cheapest. It was here that I first heard of Susan Hill's book The Magic Apple Tree for example, I should probably make a quilt about that book for that reason alone.

It is true, you do stitch what is happening in your life into a quilt and we could all remember what we had made in those years. I was working on a pastel pink and green Dresden Plate quilt (weren't we all in the 1980s) to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, which is about right as this year we celebrate our thirty-fifth, and I had suitably named it Tin Plate. Stitched over papers I could usually manage a couple of petals while the spuds boiled and the children were watching Blue Peter. I really should be working on something 'coral' now.

After about two years of Tuesdays and several quilts later we suddenly wondered whether anyone else might be interested and perhaps we could start a group. We hired the Guide Hall for the evening, put posters up around the town and an advert in the local paper, and when the evening arrived the three of us sat in the Guide Hall and waited nervously. We didn't have to wait very long. Soon the place was heaving, one of the three of us had a six week-old baby who slept in his carry cot on the windowsill and thus became the youngest member, but on that night Tavistock's quilting group, The Goosey Quilters was born.

The three of us belonged to the group for several years, organising visiting speakers and curating exhibitions until like all things it was the right time to let go and leave it in new hands with new ideas (that sounds ominously rancorous, it wasn't) and as friends we drifted apart as the children went to different schools and we all picked up our hard-won careers again. We've done Christmas cards and stopped to chat in town but that's about it.

Last Saturday the group held its twenty-fifth birthday celebrations and the three of us were invited back as the Founding Mothers to share in the party over at Cowslip Workshops in Launceston. There was lunch followed by the traditional show-and-tell that features at any gathering of quilters, and one of our three produced the tumbling blocks baby quilt that we had made for her right under her nose on those Tuesday evenings, making some flimsy excuse that is was a for a tea cosy ( heck of a big teapot but she never suspected).

It was really lovely to catch up with old friends and you realise how easy it is to lose touch, but also, having shared those years of small babies together, how easy it is to pick up where you left off. We agreed that it was definitely time to thread a needle together again, and that the value of those friendships as you get older just can't be quantified or over-estimated, and nor should they be allowed to lapse into non-existence.

There was  birthday cake with candles which the three of us were asked to cut...


and plenty of inspirational quilts to marvel over. One of the legacies of that group will be the hundreds of beautiful quilts that have been made as a result and quilts will feature large in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot next weekend. I owe a great deal of that lifelong love of it all to those years and those friends.

Black Orchids ~ Gillian Slovo

It's several years since I have read Gillian Slovo's novel Ice Road but I was quite relieved to see that it came under the auspices of 2005, a diligent and feverish year of book journaling that culminated in the abandonment of the hand-written in favour of dovegreyreader scribbles early in 2006, so there was a good chance I had some thoughts recorded and I did, except you'll have to bear in mind these were for my sole amusement...

'I often resist reading books on this subject - once the Leningrad siege victims are boiling up shoe leather to eat I'm feeling too wretched to carry on reading. I don't think we quite reached this level of cuisine in Gillian Slovo's book but the starving were eyeing up the flesh on each other all the same. That said I found this to be a compelling read.

Gillian Slovo has captured the slightly detached narrative style that you associate with the time and the place almost as if you are reading a translation, but you are not...'

What - on - earth- was - I - on - about??

My thinking descended into garble and I can't bear to reveal any more, but I do remember the book for that intense involvement that means you disappear in and forget the time of day. I still have the copy so it was obviously a keeper and I still gaze at that cover and love it for the intensity of the woman's pose.

When I knew there was a chance I would be meeting and chatting with Gillian Slovo (who I'm hoping isn't reading this because she'll probably be worried)  at Port Eliot Festival I dashed to the shelves to see what else I had by her and drew a complete blank, so have had to go on a begging and shopping spree.

 Black Orchids arrived from Virago along with a memoir Every Secret Thing together with a pile of other books from secondhand sellers various, many now out of print, in those distinctive Women's Press editions with the ironing logo. I knew a little about Gillian Slovo's background as the daughter of anti-apartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First but had little idea that she had also been a crime writer with books such as Death Comes Staccato and Death by Analysis.

So I made a start with Black Orchids and was immediately and thankfully transported to the lush green warmth of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as it was in 1946, in contrast to the frozen wastes of Ice Road. The Tinker always cites Ceylon, and in particular Trincomalee, as one of his most memorable and beautiful ports of call whilst on board ship during the war. A country rich in both natural beauty and natural mineral deposits and Gillian Slovo explores these assets to the full and to the point where even I fancied the idea of getting soaking wet in a  monsoon (my wish may yet be granted at Port Eliot) or watching the sunrise from Adam's Peak. Clearly sense of place is one of Gillian Slovo's fortes, but so is plot.

Down at heel Evelyn and her mother and sister are having to leave Ceylon and return to England after the death of her father has left the family impoverished and unsupported. This is womens' lives predicated on marriage in order to be 'looked after' and for the provision of financial security, so when Evelyn turns down a proposal from safe, staid, starchy Tommy in favour of  daring charmer Emil, the son of a wealthy Sinhalese rubber baron (that doesn't sound right but you know what I mean) it's clear her life may be about to follow a very interesting path.

The novel is set over a succession of  years from 1946, to 1950, through to 1957, 1963 and ending in 1972 thus embracing the era of seismic shift in attitudes towards mixed marriages. By moving Emil and Evelyn to England Gillian Slovo again maximises her plot potential as she explores discrimination in all its guises, and reader, prepare to squirm with embarrassment at the way things were. I remember the shame I felt when I read Andrea Levy's Small Island, well Gillian Slovo has captured that very same atmosphere. All the money in the world doesn't buy poor Emil assimilation and acceptance, and by association Evelyn is also shunned in her own country. Everyone of course very prepared to take Emils money whilst ridiculing him behind his back and there are some excruciating moments...one in particular will remind you how it may have felt (if this happened to you) to be the last one left when the teacher's pets, the sporty ones were choosing teams. Whoever invented that selection method deserves to be put in goal in hockey for evermore. No one ever wanted me in their netball team, too short when I was twelve, didn't know left from right, rubbish at shooting, always getting whistled up for stepping...the stuff of nightmares so I felt Emil's pain.

Two children are born and whilst sister Vanessa remains rather shadowy it is Milton, the oldest son who is the focus of the hardships that a mixed marriage would have bestowed on children in the 1950s, and it is heart-wrenching so prepare to squirm all over again.

Then prepare to be calmly turning the pages when you will suddenly get a great big huge enormous SHOCK.

I don't know about you but it's rare for an author to pull a gasp moment on me. Lionel Shriver's managed it, so has David Vann, but I often see them telegraphed pages ahead, however I didn't see this one coming at all. So shocked was I that I closed the book and considered the ramifications as if this was real life. How would this impact, were would Gillian Slovo take this one...I couldn't begin to imagine but I also couldn't wait to find out.

I wasn't disappointed.

 

The Longshot ~ Katie Kitamura

I sometimes think it's easier if I confess these things well in advance, get the absolution and then proceed to atone for my book-sorting decisions and move on.

I was sent not one but two copies of Katie Kitamura's first novel The Longshot back in 2009 when it was published. One copy went off in the twenty-eight bags that go to the charity shop every so often and the other sat on the shelf waiting to be read.

And it waited.

And it waited, until eventually it went to the charity shop in the next twenty-eight bag exodus (I'm not sure why twenty-eight but it's always about the same) and I thought no more about it. A book about a fighter of mixed martial arts surely not really my cup of Earl Grey. Then Cathy St Germans waved the book at me a few months ago and said how much I would enjoy talking to Katie Kitamura in my tent at Port Eliot, and I assumed that countenance at which I'm rubbish whilst thinking 'Heck which shop was it...I'll have to go and buy it back.'

In the event some lucky people had clearly bought both copies and hardly feeling in a position to ask for yet another review copy from the publishers I did my penance and bought one.

And now I've read it and feel I should assist it to a little resurgence because when I hunted around for reviews I could hardly find a thing about a book that I can't believe didn't garner some praise and recognition when it was published.

Riley and Cal ...trainer and fighter.. are driving down to Tijuana for a return bout with the legendary and fearsome Rivera, some four years after Cal took him the distance, eventually losing on points, and now the only fighter that Rivera hasn't knocked out.

The relationship between the two men is one of loyalty and trust. Cal trusts the decisions Riley makes on his behalf, Riley has belief and what slowly becomes apparent is that Cal may be past his prime, Rivera may be approaching his and Riley may well have misjudged this whole thing.

'Riley would believe when no one else would believe. He wasn't like some guys. He had no problem with believing. He'd believe in his fighters so that they didn't have to believe in themselves. He'd do it for them. He loved it, the believing. It was everything to him. But this time he was beat.'

I know enough about boxing from those years of watching the late Henry Cooper with the late Harry Carpenter commentating, and who both somehow made it all respectable enough for us to watch as children, and how we yearned for our 'enry to beat Cassius Clay aka Muhammed Ali.

And how we gasped when someone landed a low punch, and after the bout our 'enry's groin shield with dents would be waved in front of the cameras as proof of foul play.

And don't talk to us about the smelling salts and glove-ripping episode, and the way our gaze would be fixed on our 'enry's left eye and that cut which always sealed his fate. All this years before Katie Kitamura was even born, but I know about haymakers and jabs and southpaws and also the phrase 'Put your dukes up kid' when a play fight amongst father and sons is about to start in our kitchen, and usually descends into the lesser known martial art of teatowel flicking, and I say 'I've got to go and look at the blog' and this lioness leaves her pride of boy lions to it.

But The Longshot is boxing with a difference, and I was confused until I'd grasped it, this is mixed martial arts so it's fine to knock a man down then you seem to be allowed to carry on and kick him in the head, the knees the lot. Ribs are likely to crack and teeth will go flying..

It's brutal, it's frightening and such a testosterone fuelled world makes interesting subject matter for a woman author (though these days it's not supposed to matter and I'm probably not supposed to draw attention to it) and for which she has been likened to Hemingway, so I can see that Katie Kitamura and I will have plenty to discuss.... and I'm relieved to have really enjoyed this book or we'd have an hour talking about our wellies.

The themes are universal to the human condition not just the world of fighting... pride and confidence, fragility and the psychology of winning and losing, the glory of victory the ignominy of defeat along with the panic, fear and humilation that all mix into the soup of daily life. In The Longshot the challenges all huddled into a professional fighter's life with an intensity that had me sweating as they are played out in those three days that Riley and Cal spend together before the fight. They are the underdogs, the inferior, low-budget two-man team staying in the cut price hotel room whilst Rivera luxuriates in a gym of his own. Cal is not only the longshot of the title because the book is also a wonderful longshot of an interior world I only know of from without.

It's all about appearances too, reading the body language of the opponent, the aura that surrounds him, the mixed messages conveyed by concealment, what can be read into Rivera's no-show at his pre-fight sparring session. It all fuels the speculation and as the tension and anxiety rise uncontained, both Riley and Cal must face their inner demons before Cal finally steps into the ring.

And when there are things to fear, and that tension rises, Katie Kitamura's writing shifts in shape from the relaxed dialogue of the car journey or the diner, to short, clipped, jabbed sentences which cath you between the eyes and with the odd upper cut thrown in for good measure; the sort of writing that forces you to take short sharp breaths to match the pace and to hold your breath as you wait for the right hook to come flying in and land you on the ropes... and I won't tell you whether it did or it didn't.

190 pages of less is more, a perfectly constructed novel and Katie Kitamura the very first festival guest in the dovegreyreader tent at 2pm on Friday July 22nd and no throwing in of the towel on this one, The Longshot a great read and with a film in the offing Katie and I have much to discuss.

 

 

 

My Last Duchess ~ Daisy Goodwin

Well what a read, and to be honest I wasn't sure how this one was going to stand up... would it just be another variation on a theme or would it pack something different. I'd started it twice and on both occasions found myself reading other novels with Cora named as the female lead so I'd stopped, but Port Eliot and my meeting with Daisy Goodwin beckoned so I settled down and disappeared into My Last Duchess (Amercian Heiress in the US) and now feel quite bereft that I have finished it.

I've been trying to decide why I feel so bereft and why, when I turned the final page was I so delighted to read 'Not the End', because it isn't every book that leaves me wondering what may happen next or thinking how much I'd enjoy a sequel and want it yesterday.

I mentioned before that the book is a fusion of what I would probably (wrongly) call literary schema but it fits my need here... those patterns of plot and behaviour that I recognise as central themes in many of the writers I know and love, Edith Wharton, Daphne du Maurier, Frances Hodgson Burnett to name a few.

The book opens in opulent and appropriate fashion in fin de siecle Newport Rhode Island, as Family Cash prepare for the most spectacular ball of the season, to be held in their summer cottage, a mock French chateau and Daisy Goodwin wastes no time in setting the tone for her book. The humming birds that will be painted gold and released in a flurry of glittering but certain death against a backdrop of a Hall of Mirrors that everyone agrees far out-reflects Versailles. Glittering streams of flowing water run the length of each table with uncut gems, emeralds, rubies, topazes for the guests to prospect for with their little silver shovels, competition to find them would be fierce...

'There had been an unseemly scramble for the Faberge bonbons at the Astor ball the week before.'

Then there is the potentially flame-boyant combination of Mrs Cash in a self-illuminating dress, with added lightbulbs wired up to a hybrid akin to a car battery with notions of the National Grid and which she conceals about her person.

What a good idea.

A quick press of the rubber valve and Mrs Cash can single-handedly illuminate the whole of Rhode Island, but for no longer than five minutes before she and the dress will spontaneosuly combust....it's not too difficult to imagine already that Mrs Cash possesses no such restraint and will sparkle for as long as she jolly well likes.

Meanwhile it is the afternoon of the ball and naive and petulant daughter Cora is reading Jane Austen, whilst strapped into her spine improver before being block and tackled into her farthingale with a harness that shuts like a gate. Cora is wishing that she too could be motherless like Emma Woodhouse whilst still hanging onto her fortune of course, which somehow (God knows how) Emma seemed to manage without. Poverty unthinkable and unknowable for poor little rich girl Cora busy practising kissing with her maid in order to seem acomplished when beau Teddy Van Der Leyden makes his move during the ball. With Cora's dress three feet wide and already necessitating a sideways approach to all doorways I could see that Teddy was going to have to be agile, in fact may need to be thinking about a single pitch climb with chalk, rope and crampons to plant that kiss.

I think Daisy Goodwin is giving us all permission to smile sardonically here, we are to share in the wry thought that the rest of us (most of us) only do that river of gems thing on high days and holidays, not for every bog-standard party we throw.

In fact Teddy Van Der Leyden won't be good enough so it is to England that Cora and what's left of her mother (sorry PLOT SPOILER: think Towering Inferno) repair on their private steam-driven yacht the S.S. Aspen and with four horses as excess baggage, to seek a suitable match.

This is the classic fin de siecle scenario of the wealthy American heiresses who in exchange for their fabulous riches sought something money couldn't actually buy... but in fact it could; marriage into a down-at-heel English aristocracy clinging for all their worth to the vestiges of title, a crumbling heap of a stately home in which to invest their wealth, and passage guaranteed into the upper echelons of English society. Daisy Goodwin acknowledges the essence of this through the eyes of Cora Cash's wily and scheming mother...

It was something she saw rarely in New York but she recognised it instantly; it was the quality she herself most aspired to. She knew that unlike her hall of mirrors or the cedar-lined yacht, this was not something that could be acquired or even reproduced. It had to develop over time, like the patina on bronze.'

Ivo, Duke of Wareham is willing and seemingly available, has an air of brooding mystery about him, the requisite crumbling stately home at Lulworth Cove in Dorset the heart of timeless, unchanging rural England, and Cora duly emerges as a Duchess.

There will be faux pas of an artistic nature, mistresses, intrigue, the quest for the heir and spare and though this makes My Last Duchess sound formulaic and predictable rest assured it doesn't read that way.

Daisy Goodwin has created a cracking (crackling in the case of Mrs Cash...sorry) array of characters all very accomplished with their glimpses and glances, the louch and predatory artist Louvain with his 'pelt of silvery blond hair' , the Double Duchess Fanny ( mother of Ivo, killed off one Duke, not ready to be a dowager and so with indecent haste marries another) with her 'creamy smile'...yes makes you want to slap her doesn't it and I did until the very final pages when Duchess Fanny almost comes good.

There's a telling moment later in the book when someone is scraping the green slime off Lulworth's decaying fountains (at Cora's expense) which somehow reflects back on Mrs Cash's original observations about the patina of the English aristocracy,

'It was a coating that meant you had no doubts at all about your place in the world or concern about the world's perception of you.'

Money did buy a reprieve for the aristocrats but there was a great deal of slime attached to the status awaiting any poor rich American girl who found her way into this milieu. They could be a shallow, fawning and duplicitous crowd especially when in the presence of royalty, and Daisy Goodwin capitalises on every opportunity to display it in all its embarrassing glory whilst allowing Cora's character to develop, through her mistakes and naivity, into something increasingly steely and determined.

And woven through the book, those themes of Robert Browning's wonderful poem My Last Duchess, a real favourite and with lines from the poem occasionally used as chapter headings it was good to revisit the mood and the atmosphere of that...

'....She had
A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed: she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.'

Daisy Goodwin must be sick to death of Downton Upstairs Abbey comparisons though they are inevitable, but I can think of no better place than Port Eliot to be talking to Daisy about her book, sales of which are now topping 100,000 which means you get 'bunched' (with flowers) by your publisher...love it.

There are some fabulous paintings around Port Eliot by Reynolds and Van Dyke but one in particular in the hallway, by John Ellys, of a very fascinating woman, the dancer Hester Booth dressed as Harlequin (this is the similar one in the V&A). In about 1713 Hester fortuitously gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock by one James Craggs. Good choice Hester because Craggs had made his fortune from the scam that was the South Sea Bubble (even I remember that name from school history lessons) and baby Harriet inherited the lot, eventually marrying into the Eliot family and bringing her wealth with her at a time when it was much-needed. Eventually widowed having borne eight Eliot children Harriet re-married one Captain John Hamilton and thus allied herself to the lineage of the late Diana Princess of Wales, and I've had the most amazing afternoon tracing all this online here. Isn't this one of the joys of reading and the internet.

So if any of you have read My Last Duchess and can't be at Port Eliot (12.30pm Saturday July 23rd- the dovegreyreader tent) but have a question for Daisy please do let me know and I'll ask it for you... and do you like my Port Elephant stamp? The elephant synonymous with the house and the family for generations though no one is quite sure why or how, I found him in Tavistock Market, tiny but perfect and walking through all the books that I'm reading for this year's festival.

And if you are looking for more reading around this whole subject of American heiresses here are three books off my shelves, and I'm sure you can all suggest some more.

Butterfly diagnosis required...

Spotted about ten minutes ago, told it to stay still while I scrabbled for the camera, but is it a Ringlet or something else?

Where's Patrick Barkham when you need him... I shall be talking to the author of The Butterfly Isles, in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot two weeks from today, 2pm Sunday July 24th, but I can't wait that long to know.

A question of bookcases...

I love my Bookroom and already spend far too much time 'playing' with the bookcases in that quest for the Holy Grail that is the perfect shelving system, and the recent woodburner upheaval has fed the addiction no end because I've had to lose a run of shelves so its all been legitimate rather than me saying...

'I think I'll have translation all in one place',

and then moving it and not liking it.

Or coming over all Marylebone Road and saying

'I fancy doing that Daunt's thing and having literature shelved by country',

or all Germaine with

'I don't like the Viragos there'

and I move them to another corner away from 'Men's Lives' which happens to be next to 'War' and is separated from 'Women's Lives' by 'Death and Dying'. Then one week I have the Persephone as a wall of grey, the next week I don't like it at all and I mix them all in.

But I had a cathartic moment borne of crisis the other day that really does maximise the available space, so instead of all spines vertical, if an author or subject has more books than most I've gone for horizontal and it was all a bit new and different.

For the library-minded among you perhaps look away now, Dewey would be turning in his grave by several decimal points, but from the left is as follows

• All things Medical~Nursing~Disease (3rd shelf down, didn't realise I had so many books on plague and infestation)
• Translation by country Germany~France~Italy (Joseph Roth a clear winner on the top shelf, Stefan Zweig not far behind)
• Ireland~Canada (apart from Margaret Atwood who has a shelf of her own round the corner from Virginia Woolf) Carol Shields a winner here and seguing into UK Fiction where A.S.Byatt is an early front runner for supremacy swiftly followed by (to my surprise) Peter Carey.

I actually quite like it, the Bookcase as installation and pleasing on the eye, plus it has created masses more space and I can see my favourites instantly for indeed they have big piles, if you see what I mean.

But it still feels a bit momentous for someone who has spent a lifetime organising her books in a traditionally upright fashion, perhaps not quite the done thing though I'm not sure why....should I have done it??

Do you??

Team Tolstoy Troika Stop ...maybe nine...perhaps ten

'Historical events illustrate more clearly than anything the injunction against eating of the Tree of Knowledge. The only activity that bears any fruit is subconscious activity, and no one who takes part in any historical drama can ever understand its significance. If he so much as tries to understand it, his efforts are fruitless.'

Well a fine show this is going to be. It was always going to happen and if ever there was a month I was going to fall off my own troika it was this one. Careful reading and planning for Port Eliot Festival now at fever pitch, and then that thing called work which meant being away from home for two days and a bunch load of preparation to do for that.

But it will be alright I thought, have Kindle will travel, I'll read War and Peace on the train to Bristol, forgetting that I had a presentation to write and give the next day and a new camera to play with.
Not very good...


Better...


Never mind I thought, I'll curl up in my hotel room and read War and Peace in the evening, forgetting that I had a dinner with colleagues to attend and 3.1mb of Munro report on child protection and safeguarding to read in order to firm up the presentation on Tuesday.

No worries, I never sleep well in hotels, I'll be awake early I'll read War and Peace at 6.30am forgetting that 3.1mb of Munro Report = 174 pages and no way would I finish it after a late dinner or an early start.

But that's fine, I'll read War and Peace on the train home, forgetting that having been awake since dawn and concentrating hard all day I would also have been on a trip to Ikea and out for dinner with the Kayaker (who now lives and works in Bristol) before catching the train home, and I would just want to stare out of the window and process the work meetings, do a post-mortem on the presentation and guard my shopping whilst wondering how I was going to get it off the train. I sent Bookhound a text which put the fear of god up him.

' Arriving 22.45, in Coach C with Ikea shopping will need rescuing'

But surely all would be well, it's still only Tuesday evening, there's all of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to go, that's loads of time. And usually it would have been, but the new woodburner went in on Wednesday which involved dustsheets and cutting a hole in the roof of my Bookroom for the chimney and getting the roof back on before the torrential rain..


which meant I was too excited to sit and read so I nipped in to see the Tinker and had another play with the camera from his window..

and we were clearing up until late and staring at the new stove.

Then I worked all day on Thursday and we took off to the beach for the evening because the sunshine was glorious and we felt like going for a paddle.

In fact it was freezing by the time we arrived so we shelved the paddle idea and wandered around the churchyard overlooking the sea at Rame Head instead, and felt sorry for all the people who had drowned....we have real fun when we go out.

This inscription reads

"Thomas Spriddle, Seaman on board of HMS Euridice who was drowned by her foundering March 24th 1878. Aged 20 years."

which meant I had to come home and look up HMS Eurydice.

and below that this inscription

'Richard Spriddle, Brother of the above, Seaman on board of HMS Wasp who was drowned by her foundering off Tory Island September 22nd 1884. Aged 25 years.'

Which meant I had to find out about HMS Wasp too.

Then On Friday Something Funny Happened  (did anyone else read that book to their children? The week is chaos and then on Friday suddenly all is peace and tranquillity) it was cold enough to light the new woodburner and 'burn' it in...and I just sat and stared at the flames as the room warmed up to sub-tropical, and thought bring on next winter (just not yet) and, when we heard about the 18% hike in gas prices on the news that same day, verily we were a bit smug. But just look at the beauty of that Little Thurlow, small wonder I fell asleep with War and Peace on my lap.

And that was the week gone, vanished before my eyes. In fact I finished this month's instalment yesterday evening so I am up to speed, and I could have come along and pretended that I'd had time to think about it and here are my thoughts, but in fact I haven't had time to process it at all yet. So I'm being very honest and not doing the pretending thing, or the breaking a leg to do this this for the sake of having something to show for it thing because I want to enjoy this too, it must never feel like a chore and it doesn't.

This has been an awesome read and I think we are reaching really crucial moments in the book which I don't want to trivialise nor miss the nuances, I knew I was right to be worried about Andrei's intestines. So this month it's over to you. I'm praying hoping, in fact I feel sure those still on board can steer the horses in comments over the weekend, and I'll join in and cut and paste into a blog post so that we have them on the record.

And if you have a finer litany of excuses for falling off a troika please do share them, and we can keep each other company.

Adlestrop revisited..

So on June 24th Hilary retraced the Adlestropian footsteps of Edward Thomas (and we now discover his wife Helen was on that train journey too) by catching the train from Oxford to Malvern, here's her wonderful account and I particular love this very 21st century addition...

It was a perfect midsummer morning when I left home: blue sky, a few clouds, birdsong. I had reserved a copy of "Under Storm's Wing" at the library and stopped on my way to the station to pick it up.

Throughout the day I was conscious of what would have seemed strange to a time traveller from 1914, and what would have seemed familiar. The vapour trails which we now take for granted as features of the skyscape on a fine day would not have been there in 1914, but a train journey is an activity which - in its essentials at least - hasn't changed. Oxford is quite a small station with only two main platforms. Facing me on the opposite platform while I waited for my train was a young soldier in desert combat dress with his kit bag. This was the first of several reminders during the day of the extent to which images from the First World War now shape our perceptions.

The train was full of people escaping for the weekend (in 1914, June 24^th fell on a Wednesday). Sitting opposite me were a young couple going to visit his parents in Hereford.  The husband was very young, intense and bookish-looking, and it was impossible not to be reminded of how young Edward and Helen were when they married and how unusual it must have been for an undergraduate to have a wife and child.

Oxford is still a very rural county, and on leaving the station the train quickly enters open countryside. Between Oxford and Worcester the only significant cluster of buildings is the market town of Evesham. The stations that remain on this stretch of track are small commuter stations with car parks. I had imagined Adlestrop in its heyday to be no more than a small country halt, but postcards show it to be a proper little station like those that still remain at Kingham and Moreton-in-Marsh.

Between stations the view from the window alternates between open fields and deep banks of vegetation, all very green in that unique English way that you only appreciate when you return to it after an absence. There are still willows in abundance and masses of pinky-purple willowherb. Probably some meadowsweet, but it's less distinctive and I can't swear to it. Many fields edged with red poppies which in 1914 had yet to gain their symbolic significance. No haycocks – it felt a bit early for haymaking, but I'm not really a country person so I can't be sure. And I couldn't help noticing that there is still a hiss from the brakes and the automatic doors when the train stops at a station.

I travelled to what is now the end of this particular route at Great Malvern. You can still change here for Ledbury, but the line no longer continues on to Dymock. Great Malvern station was a revelation – a Victorian station restored to its brightly-coloured glory with an original station clock, and no modern intrusions apart from a discreetly placed electronic departure board. 

Here I had a cup of tea and a slice of bread pudding in the platform tea room, which really deserves a write-up of its own:

On the way home the weather was cloudier and the train less crowded, so I decided to dip into "Under Storm's Wing". Slowly I realised that I had not only been replicating the journey that had inspired "Adlestrop"; I was also replicating - perhaps more closely - a second journey that Helen had made.

Six weeks after the hot journey on 24^th June, Helen embarked on another train journey. She set off from Hampshire with three children (her two daughters and a Russian pupil from Bedales who was boarding with them for the summer holidays) and a dog. They were heading back to the Dymock area to spend a month on a family holiday with the Frosts. Edward and his teenage son had left earlier to make the trip by bicycle; it seems unlikely that they would have been able to take much luggage with them, so presumably Helen had the family's luggage as well. It was Tuesday, August 4^th 1914 – the day war was declared. Helen writes:

  "As we proceeded on our journey it was obvious from the crowds in the stations ... that people were in a state of excitement. Families on holiday were hurrying home, reservists were being called up and soldiers recalled from leave, and everywhere the stations were thronged with trunks, kitbags and other luggage and with restless and anxious people. However, very much later than our scheduled time we reached Oxford. Here we were told to leave the train which, in the ordinary way, would have gone on to complete our journey. The station was in a state of chaos. It was now late in the day and I asked the station master when I could expect a train to Ledbury. He said he could not tell me, and advised me to stay the night in Oxford when I told him I had three children with me. But even if I had been able to afford such a thing, all available accommodation was filled, I was told by a man who had helped me with the luggage.

     So we waited and waited, after sending Edward a telegram. At last a train came in and the station master told me it was at least going in the direction of Ledbury, so I and the children got in hopefully. After a slow journey with many stops between stations, we arrived in Malvern at midnight and here we were told the train would go no further. So out we all bundled, the children tired and frightened."

Helen eventually found a cab at Malvern and arrived at her destination in the early hours, having been stopped in Ledbury by an over-zealous policeman and asked to give an account of why she was travelling by night with three children.

So this was the counterpoint to the first Adlestrop journey – not quiet and reflective, but undertaken at night by a woman on her own, weighed down with weary children, luggage and a dog.

The two journeys seem to encapsulate the bright and dark sides of Edward and Helen's life together.

 

Go To Sleep ~ Helen Walsh

One of the exciting, seat-of-the-pants things about doing a literary festival, is not only the experience that is the toilets after three days of use by fellow festival goers... and Port Eliot does have posh ones with that gorgeous deep blue flush that are emptied regularly, though by Sunday afternoon the wear and tear is noticeable, but it's also about reading the books in advance of talking with the authors.

I will be talking with Helen Walsh and Eleanor Birne on the Walled Garden stage so I'm doing my homework very assiduously which has involved a read of Helen's forthcoming novel Go To Sleep and Eleanor's account of her first year of motherhood, When Will I Sleep Through the Night - An A-Z of Babyhood

Helen Walsh's book is billed as

'issue-led fiction...devastatingly honest and shockingly painful at times...heart-wrenching story about one woman and her newborn child...strips motherhood bare...the book that everyone will have an opinion on...'

None of which I pay too much heed to because I like to decide those things, but I really should have known better than to find myself halfway through and unable to stop turning the pages very late one night. It was one of those nights where you eventually stop reading because you're eyes feel like a gravel pit and refuse to stay open a minute longer, but the book is indeed harrowing and had my brain whirring away at the speed of light, so fat chance of sleep....which now I think on it seems very apt given the book's central theme of those days of relentless sleep deprivation following the birth of a baby.

Thirty year old youth worker Rachel Massey finds herself happily single and unexpectedly pregnant after a one night stand with an old infatuation. Initially ambivalent, it is an early scan, when she thinks she may have lost her baby and subsequently finds all is well, that sets Rachel on that ante-natal course of hopes, dreams and much love invested in her 'bean'...

'And the moment I saw it, that tiny pulse on the monitor, the struggling mass no bigger than a kidney bean, that was it. That was me, gone - smashed with a love more ferocious than anything I'd ever known.'

The book opens as Rachel, on maternity leave, is approaching her due date, now the size of a beached whale, and with the aid of flashbacks to fill in what has gone before, it was with some trepidation that I approached Rachel's delivery alongside her.

Trained to spot when expectations might be pitched high, and therefore the reality all the more bruising, I was braced ready to catch Rachel. The best laid birth plans frequently don't translate into actuality, mainly because the baby hasn't read them, but also because who can know what lies ahead twixt first twinge and eventual birth if you haven't done it before.

But, if you've been through it, who can ever forget the exhaustion with which most women embark on what follows. Frequently sleep deprived through a long labour, then that ridiculously magical night of awe and wonder when I for one lay awake wondering how did I do that, and how on earth had the baby lying in the perspex cot next to the bed fitted within, and where had everything else inside me gone while it did etc. And with hormones flying in all directions it's no wonder that someone only needed to look at me and say 'You look tired'  on Day Three for me to burst into tears.

And I was planning to stay in the maternity home for ten days as we did back in the 1980s and would be going home to masses of help and support; Rachel however is a twenty-first century mother, single, going home alone after a few days, fiercely independent and there's the shopping to be done.

What follows is insidious, visceral, disturbing and makes for very uncomfortable reading at times as Rachel's mental health becomes increasingly fragile and unpredictable, dissembling to all around her whilst slowly descending into a state as near to puerperal psychosis as you are ever likely to read, and the likes of which I haven't read anywhere else, or expressed quite so powerfully, but for The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

And in the midst of all this confusion is little baby Joe...who I wanted to airlift out when it becomes clear that Rachel isn't bonding with him at all, indeed thinks he hates and has rejected her in the midst of her seriously compromised decision-making skills and borne of complete and unrelenting exhaustion. Unable to contain her own anxiety Rachel is incapable of containing Baby Joe's and he screams his fear loud at every opportunity. And that stark realisation that I wanted to rescue him from that situation became a turning point in my reading of the book because this is where Helen Walsh excelled ... by forcing me to make the judgement as a reader that can be so commonly made about women who are suffering from post-natal depression...that somehow they are unfit mothers and their babies should be removed, and me who thanks to the day job most certainly knows different

In fact there were moments when all my safeguarding antennae were waving like crazy, Joe was definitely at risk, Rachel most certainly needed help, but it is at this point that it becomes most crucial that mothers and babies stay together and with good support in place to keep them safe, and all I was hoping for was that this would all come right on the next page...or the next one.

Of course I'm not going to say a word more about the plot other than to say, having worked with so many mothers with post-natal depression and several with puerperal psychosis, this book has added real insights into how the mind may be working in situations like this.

I have done some interesting new birth visits in my time and many where post-natal depression loomed. I once visited a mum who was holding her baby over the kitchen sink as I arrived and telling me it was a kitten and she had to drown it, another who opened the front door, handed me the screaming baby out on the garden path in the pouring rain and shut the door in my face. Tragically another who eventually several years later did commit suicide, and reading Go To Sleep has forced me to relive and rework those cases with a renewed understanding. It can be truly terrifying for everyone and Helen Walsh takes no prisoners, rooting her narrative in that terror and the mother's innate fear that this won't come right.. no wonder I couldn't sleep.

There is a beautifully telling moment for Rachel...

'None of it was my fault - I know that now...'

and the words 'this is not your fault'  the most crucially important ones anyone can ever offer to a woman with post-natal depression, because anyone who has suffered from it (and I haven't) will probably recognise that self-blame comes very high on the list of things to beat yourself up about, quickly followed by guilt over not bonding with the baby, guilt about not being able to sort the house, cook, shop and feed a baby at the same time, guilt about not wanting to go out, guilt about not being able to get ready even if you did want to go out, guilt that everyone else seems able to do all these things ...the list is endless and punishing and very very real.

So if I was going to sum this book up how would I do it...

'issue-led fiction...devastatingly honest and shockingly painful at times...heart-wrenching story about one woman and her newborn child...strips motherhood bare...the book that everyone will have an opinion on...'

...they were right and there will certainly be opinions on this one which I shall be looking at with interest.

Helen Walsh has written a brave and uncompromising novel that absolutely needed to be written.

More about Eleanor Birne's book to follow.

 

 

The Sunlight on the Garden - A Memoir of Love, War and Madness ~ Elizabeth Speller

So having read The Return of Captain John Emmett and knowing that I was going to be hearing, meeting and dining with Elizabeth Speller at the du Maurier festival in Fowey back in May, it seemed sensible to do some homework before I went. And given that I had discovered the existence of a memoir Sunlight on the Garden A Memoir of Love, War & Madness published by Granta, it then seemed like a really good idea. It's all about not wanting to put both feet in it with a pair of size twelves and then not have a leg to stand on really isn't it...and once you read a book with 'madness' in the title there's clearly plenty of potential for the giant faux pas.

Except Lizzie Speller is a delight, self-effacing, modest and hilarious. It was lovely to meet her in person and then choke on my dinner several times because she is very funny indeed, but we were also able to chat about this memoir and her intentions in writing it.

I love a good memoir especially if it's about a life that spans the same era as mine because I can indulge in a big nostalge over shared recollections, in this case that included AA Milne poems, Moonfleet (one of my favourites books and TV series too) Gt Ormond Street Children's Hospital where I trained and Lizzie was treated in the speech therapy department, music because we both loved Tubby the Tuba and Sparky's Magic Piano and remember Sunday evenings and Sing Something Simple on the radio with the Cliff Adams Singers. I went to see Aladdin on Ice at Wembley, whilst Elizabeth wasn't allowed to go for fear of catching polio and she screamed blue murder at the deprivation, and then who remembers wallpapered ceilings?? Was that not the most hilarious activity and wasn't the fashion for it to be the same as on the walls so a vast amount of pattern matching involved and much regret over buying striped wallpaper. I feel sure the Tinker was an expert.

And who else sang sunny lemontina? I'll leave you to think about that.

So I was feeling a real affinity with Elizabeth's life but for one big difference. We're not big on blue blood chez family dovegrey whilst Elizabeth's family nursed a descendency from two of Britain's noblest families, the Cavendishs and the Howards via her great-grandfather. The lineage went slightly off piste when Gerald Howard (1853-1945) sired eight children via his mistress, Ada Curtis descended from pork butchers and machinists. It quickly became clear that they couldn't keep giving the babies away and indeed one of them would become Lizzie's grandmother, so eventually Gerald made an honest woman of Ada and so the lineage dilutes a little more, whilst various branches of the family cling to the memory and try to keep up appearances, and this all recounted in Lizzie's very humorous style. The book darts hither and thither and in doing so reflects the complexities of this huge family, but for all the humour life is about to become a great deal more serious, and Lizzie can turn it on a sixpence so expect to feel awash with laughter one minute and aghast with horror the next.

It is child number seven, Joan, Lizzie's grandmother now married to Eric Edmonds and I hope I'm getting this right and hope you're following...it really is an incredibly complex and vast family tree (and I must digress to tell you that Eric's brother Stuart Edmonds was the love of novelist Anna Kavan's life) but it is maternal grandmother Joan who, standing in front of a fire at a party one day in 1936, suddenly finds her dress in flames...

'...her lovely dress, her lovely lovely dress. Flames are engulfing one side of it. She beats it with one hand, the other keeps hold of her champagne glass. She is a candle melting. Whatever is Eric doing? Is he mad? Drunk? He is pulling at the curtains, but they won't come down. Another man knocks her to the ground, he rolls her in the stiff old rug -she tries to tell him not to, the rug is valuable - Eric bought it in Paris...'

Joan is in hospital for a year where she is treated by the eminent plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe, her children, including Lizzie's mother, are not allowed to see her in that time and Joan unsurprisingly is changed for ever.

It is into this family, with its tragedies and skeletons-in-cupboards that Lizzie is born, with her mother's ongoing need to keep up appearances and maintain the family's sense of being slightly cleverer and better connected than those around them, yet not always quite making the grade. To say Lizzie asserts and charts her own course through these choppy waters as both a child and an adult would be an understatement, and I don't want to reveal quite what leads to the severe depression that she will suffer from later in her life, nor to dwell on the prolonged hospitalisation or the treatments, because what shines out from a book like this is something else entirely. It's that ability to 'get better' because ultimately this is a book full of an indomitable and optimistic spirit, one in which Lizzie does eventually emerge older and wiser but also 'better' and very suddenly recovered, the depression an affliction of the past.

Sufficiently better to embark on in-depth research of her family with a list that went as follows...

1) why mad?
2) Jewish?
3) where did Gerald meet Ada?
4) where did the money come from?
5) where's Rupert?

In the event it would seem Lizzie's mother cleverly side-stepped the madness...

'Instead of being mad she made a career out of judging who else was and became a psychotherapist. You would have thought she'd had enough of that at home but of course treating the disturbed gave her an element of control over the damage and anger that had once been beyond her power to resolve.'

Then there's Rupert. Who's Rupert?

Well he was another of the seven children of Gerald and Ada and I won't reveal more but if you have read The Return of Captain John Emmett and then you read Sunlight on the Garden you may see how the inspiration for the kernel of a novel could be sitting right under your nose. Elizabeth meanwhile then launches herself into a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge, proceeds to a post-graduate degree in Ancient History and now holds an RLF Fellowship at the University of Warwick. When you discover how little time Lizzie actually spent in school it's clear those achievements seem all the more remarkable, a real lesson in tenacity all making it my absolute pleasure to meet Lizzie Speller both through the pages of this book and in real life.

 

Testing again...

Sorry, I think I'm turning into a Fujipix bore, and I'm rather regretting my suggestion ( seconded & agreed) at this year's Village Show committee meeting that the Macro class in the photography section be given a year off on the basis that is was unfair, mitigating against those of us with bog-standard cameras. This of course bore no relevance to any bitterness I may harbour about my stunning shot of the butterfly on the sunflower being criticised last year for lack of clarity/not really macro enough, when my poor little camera couldn't have macroed harder if it had tried.

So I'd gone out an another Testing Testing walk on a glorious mid-summer's evening yesterday and was idly taking pictures of what I thought might be rabbits in the clover several hundred yards away...

...affirmative...

...when I heard the familiar sounds of this...

And of course now I can even see if I know the people in the balloon, which I didn't..

and even the cows were watching ...

OK I'm over it now, that's enough, back to books this week. We have a serious amount of reading to discuss.

Testing testing...

I managed thirteen days without a camera after the Dublin Bloomsday malfunction before Bookhound, sensing intuitively that I was sinking into a slough of despond without one,  trotted off to the builder's merchants as usual, but went via the camera shop coming home with surprise, surprise...a very nice shiny new one. I really don't need to go looking for things like this, too much choice, I just need one to apparate on my desk which this did with a little note on it.

For the techy among you it's a Fujifilm finepix F80EXR which, according to trustedreviews.com, apparently has a brain of its own ...

The technology which makes the camera so impressive is centred around the EXR chip, which intelligently alters itself to cater best for the ambient situation.

I'll be having some of that then, so all I really should have to do it is take it out of the very nice case, switch it on and point ...I like.

So I sat down' and made myself do instructions (I am usually too impatient to do instructions and then wonder why nothing works) before taking it out for a test walk along the lane the minute the battery had charged, and I have to say what a difference another six megapixels make, along with a 10x wide zoom lens and the brain inside the camera that knows how to use them.

I was this far away from the little Methodist chapel...

but could actually zoom to this..

and quite worryingly almost looking in people's windows in the village two miles away.

Spotted someone having a bonfire because they'd missed the recycling lorry, which is not surprising given that since we complained that it was looking like Beirut (with apologies to Beirut) because they kept missing us out, they have taken revenge by coming around at 7am. It's no good putting things out the night before because the foxes and the rats seem to know.

I leant on the front gate and revelled in all the detail that this picture of Kit Hill picks up.

I decided against a walk around Rocky's field where there was something akin to the Calgary Stampede going down (Kate and Wills are going there) ...

and so came back in to settle down with my pre-Port Eliot reading... look at all those lovely pixels, you can even see the titles now.
Result.

And has anyone else read My Last Duchess or am I the last??

Just published as American Heiress in the US and I am really loving every word and now can't wait to talk to Daisy Goodwin about it ... think of a sort of hybrid fusion of Edith Wharton meets Upstairs Downton Abbey sprinkled with some Rebecca-esque du Maurierism, and all overlaid with some Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle to the faint echoes of Port Eliot's utterly beautiful well-worn and lived-in gentility...it will be a grand book to talk about there and would make excellent holiday reading too, don't miss it.