New Year's Eve, and we are definitely not party-throwers or party-goers these days, yawning our way through as we sit up to see the New Year in, watching everyone else's fireworks from the veranda, and that's that....how about you??
I'll bet some of you are doing the pineapple chunks and cheese on the cocktail sticks right this minute, and I hope you all have wonderful celebrations if you have some planned.
But thinking back over those years gone by when we have reached this day, and after this time of reflection... as Margarete called it in comments, 'the time between the years', and perhaps for one reason or another we may have thought 'Well, we'll be glad to see the back of that year,' and felt ready to welcome the next, yet this year I almost don't want to let go of 2012.
I know it won't be the same for everyone, in fact I can think of quite a few friends for whom the year perhaps can't end soon enough, but for us 2012 has been a steady gathering of Pleasings, almost too many to mention but all will live long in the memory...
Our trip to Orkney with the Tinker, and those flawless visual images and colours which nip back into my mind unbidden on a regular basis. Being chosen by Magnus a few weeks after we got back. Port Eliot Festival....all the preparations and the knitsuke, and then meeting and talking with so many excellent authors and some of you.
The whirlwind arrival of Little Nell, our new walking friend, who has taken us back out onto Dartmoor, and trust us to choose a dog who shows the dirt.... how many times we have said 'Should have had the brown one,' in recent weeks London 2012 and the Olympics.. and the way we all cheered the success of each other's countries on here. We have really been enjoying all the recap programmes in the last few days...I came over all teary-eyed again about Super Saturday.
My usual spate of craft activities, and the inspiration I have found from so many sources. The Kaffe quilt will take me into 2013 and I have a few knitting projects up my sleeve too, more on those soon.
Team Old Ways and how much I have gleaned from reading Robert Macfarlane's book and what a joy it was to meet and talk with him this year. If I was off to a desert island with six book choices, this would most certainly be one of them, except I would probably ask for the trilogy (Mountains of the Mind ,The Wild Places, The Old Ways ) to be bound into one volume to leave me another five choices. There's a blog post in that idea, watch this space.
And not forgetting Team Middlemarch. It has been very special for me to re-read the book for pleasure, and with so many of you for company along the way...we reconvene here on January 16th for Book Seven.
Being asked to judge Fiction Uncovered (you should just see it here, I have had to designate a special table) which will take me into 2013 very up to speed on contemporary fiction before the announcement of the chosen books in May...
And no year would be complete without having read some really exceptional books. I am not going to do my Best of 2012 because if I have written about them here I have enjoyed them all and would hand-on-heart force everyone to read them highly recommend them....except one that is....oops.
It doesn't seem five minutes since the first million, but this week dovegreyreader scribbles crosses the two million hits mark, which feels like a super-special mammoth milestone, and a lovely solid foundation as I approach the start of my eighth year of writing and sharing here.
So my thanks to each and every one of you, I hope you will all carry on reading and commenting whenever you want to. Comments are the oxygen here, I love them, and reply to each whenever I can, because it feels like a conversation with friends. I'll do my best to carry on writing, because I love doing it and now can't imagine life without it, and without all of you out there.
And looking ahead to 2013... well Bookhound and I plan a year full of nice things and new challenges, because, being Coronation Year babies, we will both be celebrating diamond jubilees of our own (how can that be) and I have no doubt you will hear more about our year along the way.
At forty I was challenged to get that OU degree.
At fifty I was challenged to do something with it, which turned out to be writing this.
At sixty...well right now I just want to finally master the art of Fair Isle knitting and survive the steek...we'll see.
Here's wishing you all a year of Pleasings of the best sort, Happy New Year one and all.
A tenuous connection to the Acland family of Killerton and ours did emerge in the end, and thanks to the Tinker for remembering that, many years ago (1940s) when my mum had worked for the Commercial Union Insurance Company in Exeter, she had looked after all the Acland family insurances... there I told you it was tenuous, but I feel we have done our bit to help look after this lovely house.
And as always, when I walk around places like this I keep an eye out for patterns, Killerton had plenty... and did I mention this amazing organ in the drawing room, really every home should have one, and even a little note on it saying that if you wanted to play it just ask. ...and then there was the secret cupboard in the library..
and the private chapel in the grounds, built in 1841 and wonderfully gothic... and ghostly.. So much to see, even on a dark winter's evening, and all hail to Killerton for opening in the run-up to Christmas, making this all feel like a very different National Trust property as a result, and one that we felt part of. Well worth a visit if you are heading west, hit Exeter and feel like a break, just minutes off the M5 and we will certainly be going back in the summer when we can explore the grounds in daylight.
Wandering around Killerton as darkness fell outside, and with a pianist reaching the end of a long day's playing in the drawing room to add to that magical atmosphere,
we moved through the hallway... ...past another of the many Christmas trees that graced every room, and then walked up the main staircase...
I don't always know what Bookhound thinks about when he wanders around places like this... probably worries about the number of chimneys to be swept, or how to clean the guttering, whilst me...well I just pretend I live there, and these are my stairs and someone else has to sweep them. Delightful things to look at upstairs, because as well as the costume displays...and this fabric was embroidered.. ..we came across this wonderful doll's house peopled (mousled) with little mice, and I hope if you click on these pictures they should enlarge a little...
and with the magic of Picasa and the collage feature I think I have almost managed to recreate it. The detail was perfect... you can even see Carson in the hallway and Mrs Patmore and Daisy (Downton Mice) down in the kitchens. Here's a close-up of that laundry, and of course as we wandered around the grounds searching out those Twelve Days of Christmas, we had to stop and admire the two turtle doves.
I'd like to be able to say 'Just look at our dining room !' but I'd be fibbing. We had the loveliest afternoon out at Killerton House near Exeter last week. Tea in the old stables when we arrived at about 3pm, and sitting next to this we decided we could have sat there all day... but the second-hand bookshop beckoned before we 'did' the house... The house and grounds decked overall for the festive season and late night opening on Wednesday.
Killerton a lovely Georgian house with a lived-in feel, and built as a temporary residence in 1775 pending the construction of a grand mansion which never happened. But with spectacular grounds extending to ten square miles, and all once owned by the Acland family for generations before being given to the National Trust in 1942, it wasn't hard to imagine the house in its heyday in the 1800s. The 10th Baronet, his wife and ten children would have had an idyllic life here, the loudest noise probably the horses and carriage wheels trundling along the driveway, long before the arrival of the nearby M5 and the drone of traffic in the background now.
It also occurred to us how rarely you get to see a National Trust property at dusk on a winter's afternoon, and the atmosphere around the house and peeking in the windows was a delight, we loved it. The staff couldn't have been more welcoming, were very happy for me to take pictures, and unlike so many properties with those well-placed teazels on the chairs, there were signs around saying things like 'Feet tired? Please do take a seat here.'
Fascinating costume exhibitions upstairs and one that included a Victorian Crazy Quilt on the bed that caught my eye. That little red dress incidentally called a Transition Dress, which I assume may have meant for a young girl entering adolescence. I can get really carried away looking at clothes and just imagining who may have worn them.
As as we wandered around the torchlit grounds at dusk seeking out the Twelve Days of Christmas, the visit all felt like a lovely quiet beginning to our very quiet mid-winter break.
Touching base with anyone who is reading, and greetings from the far side of the turkey, the trimmings, the pudding, the homemade crackers, Christmas cake, The Snowman and the Snowdog,(adorable) Downton (gasp) and now deeply into Boxing Day which we LOVE.
Cold cuts for lunch, tea, supper...
Fires lit...
Weather blowing a hoolie up from Cornwall...
Warnings about landslides here in Devon...
It transpires that Father Christmas does read blogs because amongst other lovely surprises I unwrapped the three books I wanted very much...
200 Fair Isle Designs by Mary Jane Muckleston
Ted and I - A Brother's Memoir (of Ted Hughes) by Gerald Hughes At the Source by Gillian Clarke All of which I am curled up with today.
The television has waned a little for now, just Miranda and Mrs Brown's Boys for us this evening, but there are some great programmes coming up including a two-part dramatisation of Restless by William Boyd... anything else anyone recommends to save me poring over the Radio Times??
And sadly my trip to London this Saturday, to see the matinee performance of The Dark Earth and the Light Sky at the Almeida, now abandoned due to the absence of train track and trains and flooding. So if anyone is in London, and at a loss for something brilliant to go and see at 2.30pm please do contact me, (dovegreyreader at gmail dot com) you would be very welcome to my ticket.
So how about you... any good reads in amongst the other lovely things??
Nearly there, and with our broadband dropping more off than on I am scurrying in while I am winning.
Firstly I wasn't going to mention the weather, other than to say it is now getting a bit monotonous, but also to say how awful for those flooded out of their homes yet again, and can you believe it Shelterbox, purveyor of instant homes to areas of devastation and disaster around the world, have been giving out tents on their home turf in Cornwall this week. The South West is cut off again by rail and now I'm feeling sorry for all the people who will have to work over Christmas to sort it out... I hope they are on treble-double time or something.
But we have experienced floods of our own along the lane, discovering, for the first time since we' have lived here, exactly why that dip in the lane is called Ford... We knew that there had once been a ford there long ago, diverted through culverts under the road, and I had always nursed a romantic notion of the 'olden days', ably helped by that picturesque ramshackle barn, and imagined a nice friendly trickle across the lane.
I have scored myself 10/10 for the homemade Christmas cake, now marzipaned and iced, the shopping, the decorations etc but have been woefully slack over the Christmas cards this year and can see that, if you agree to be on the judging panel for a fiction prize, this might be what happens. Fortunately I am really enjoying that whole Fiction Uncovered experience, and already reading some brilliant books that I might not be able to tell you about until May, but even if they don't make the cut you will still be hearing about them here.
Some of you on the other hand have been very busy with your cards (and thank you for them) but somehow the days were eaten up, and before I knew it there were about three posting days left.
Each year I think perhaps this will be the year I give a donation to something and stop sending them...
What do you all do??
Anyway, if I was going to send one it would have been this one...
Bought, couldn't resist. Magnus managed to dispatch a few, and to all of you my heartfelt wishes to you and yours for a happy and peaceful Christmas, and of course from Bookhound, Magnus and Nell too.
I shall be dropping in over Christmas as usual, see you on the other side of the turkey xxx
Happy Winter Solstice Day everyone, and should we glimpse the setting sun this evening this is where it will be, perfectly centrally aligned behind that little woodland.
The evenings will start to draw out for us in the Northern Hemisphere now, isn't that a lovely thought, and it is not Truman Capote's 'fruitcake weather' here at the moment because still the rain it raineth.
For the Shortest Day this has turned into the Longest Post, but you have all been so amazing with your wonderful Christmas reading suggestions, and I didn't want to lose the list, so here it is, and thank you so much. They have had me scurrying around the shelves digging out chapters from hither and yonder, and wondering where on earth our copy of The Children of Green Knowe was hiding, found it eventually and ended up reading half the book and will now have to read the rest (thank you Flossie Teacake).
So here's the list for you to cut and paste to somewhere safe (and remind me about when I say the same thing next year) along with one or two extracts that have worked their magic for me in the last few days.
A Christmas Memory ~ Truman Capote and this lovely film extract is well worth eight minutes of respite from the preparations (thank you Mary and Mary) and if watching that makes you want to seek out the story then your luck is in, it's here.
Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "it's fruitcake weather!"
The person to whom she is speaking is myself....
And before I forget...Jude in Oz has temporarily mislaid her 'Post' button (Typepad are on the case Jude) but suggests...
The third last chapter of "We of the Never Never" by Aeneas Gunn has a wonderful Christmas complete with outback stockmen, Aboriginal tribespeople, a Chinese cook who makes the most humoungous Christmas pudding all set on a station in the Northern Territory at the turn of the 19thC.
And suggestions from all of you cut-and-pasted in from your comments...
The christmas chapter in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
The Mole family's Christmas ~ Russell Hoban Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas ~ Russell Hoban
A Child's Christmas in Wales ~ Dylan Thomas The Dulce Domum chapter in Kenneth Grahame's 'The Wind in the Willows'. Alison Uttley's description of Christmas preparations and the day itself in A Country Child.
Cider With Rosie ~ Laurie Lee
The week before Christmas, when the snow seemed to lie thickest, was the moment for carol-singing; and when I think back to those nights it is to the crunch of snow and to the lights of the lanterns on it. Carol-singing in my village was a special tithe for the boys, the girls had little to do with it. Like hay-making, blackberrying, stone-clearing and wishing-people-a- happy-Easter, it was one of our seasonal perks.
By instinct we knew just when to begin it; a day too soon and we should have been unwelcome, a day too late and we should have received lean looks from people whose bounty was already exhausted. When the true moment came, exactly balanced, we recognised it and were ready.
So as soon as the wood had been stacked in the oven to dry for the morning fire, we put on our scarves and went out through the streets calling loudly between our hands, till the various boys who knew the signal ran out from their houses to join us.
One by one they came stumbling over the snow, swinging their lanterns around their heads, shouting and coughing horribly.
'Coming carol-barking then?'
We were the Church Choir, so no answer was necessary. For a year we had praised the Lord, out of key, and as a reward for this service - on top of the Outing - we now had the right to visit all the big houses, to sing our carols and collect our tribute.
A chapter in DH Lawrence's 'The White Peacock'on preparations for Christmas.
The midnight mass scene in The Children of Green Knowe ~ Lucy Boston
Pepys- Christmas Day 1661
A letter from Virginia Woolf to Clive Bell December 26th 1909, Lelant Hotel, Lelant, Cornwall
My dear Clive It is past nine o'clock and the people still sing carols beneath my window, which is open owing to the clemency of the night...there is the Godrevy lighthouse, seen as through steamy glass, and grey flat where the sea is. There is no moon or stars, but the air is soft as down...no one seems to have any wish to go to bed. They circle aimlessly. Is this going on in all the villages of England now?
Elizabeth Bowen's Home for Christmas.
Short seasonal extracts from D H Lawrence - The Rainbow and James Joyce- The Dead
Lanterns Across the Snow ~ Susan Hill
It was cold. It was absolutely still. Quiet, so quiet, she could hear the pant of her own breathing, in, out and the silky shuffle and squeak of her boots, pushing forward. She stopped. The air smelled cold. Tasted cold in her mouth. Above her head the sky was clearing and she could see a few stars pricking out between the parting clouds. There would be moonlight then, and no more snow tonight. A bone-white, frozen, beautiful world.
John Masefield' s The Box of Delights.
On Angel Wings' by Michael Morpurgo
A superb Christmas scene in TH White's "The Sword in the Stone".
Christmas Eve by Cecil Day Lewis
Jesus' Christmas Party by Nicholas Allen.
Christmas Landscape ~ Laurie Lee
Christmas scene in Return of the Native ~ Thomas Hardy
A wonderful piece by Washington Irving in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, where an American outsider observes the British way of Christmas in the early 19th century.
Little Grey Rabbit's Christmas and the poem by T.S.Eliot about the journey of the Magi.
Miss Read's No Holly for Miss Quinn.
Josteen Gaarder's Christmas Mystery - start on the 1st of December and read a chapter a day until the 25th! Bliss.
Alphonse Daudet with "The Three Low Masses".
Selma Lagerlöfs "Christ Legends and Other Stories"
The diverse Christmas Scenes as told by Laura Ingalls Wilder 'from the wile wile West'.
There are good German-language contributions, stories as by Marie-Luise Kaschnitz or Robert Walser.
Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House On The Prairie
More Miss Read ~ Village Christmas and The Christmas Mouse.
Rumer Godden's The Story of Holly & Ivy.
I can't explain why the Dorothy L Sayers - Peter Wimsey books should fit this bill - but they do especially the books featuring Harriet Vane.
The chapter called Christmas Shopping in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown.
The chapter about the hideous Christmas doll in Winifred Foley's A Child in the Forest
For poetry Betjeman's Christmas, Marriot Edgar's Sam and the Christmas Pudding and Wendy Cope's Christmas Life. I also really like the letters to her true love in response to all the 12 days of Christmas gifts he sent her - Norwich possibly? And, especially read by Joan Hickson, Christie's Christmas Tragedy.
Sou'West and by West of Cape Cod by Llewellyn Howland (1947). The last chapter, Holly Days, is an evocative marvel.
"The Dead" (Dubliners) by James Joyce (and the film of the same name) in the Usher Island house in Dublin (alongside the Liffey) location...The final story of the book (Dubliners)is considered one of the greatest short stories in the English language.
Christmas Eve in The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill: Susan making mince pies, the carol singers, the new hens arriving and then little Jessica (who of course is now a grown up writer herself) coming out in spots and being ill over Christmas!
I like to read a ghost story at Christmas. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. There's nothing like a good scary book while curled up in front of an open fire - with all the lights on, of course!
As I'm Downunder, I'll mention my favourite Australian Christmas book - 'Christmas at Longtime' by Hesba Brinsmead. It's set in the Blue Mountains where she was born and is based on her childhood and a Christmas Day picnic. It's full of Joy!
The Christmas poems chosen by Carol Ann Duffy for the Candlestick Press pamphlets. A Christmas present to myself!
O'Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" short story. Perfect.
Letter from America" by Alistair Cooke called "Christmas in Vermont".
The description of the Aubrey family's Christmas day in The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West, 1956, begins something like 'We never had a better Christmas until 4 o'clock' . What happened at 4 was more of an irritation than a catastrophe,though as so often in close-knit, fraught families, it was hard for the youngsters to tell the difference and West tells the story through the eyes of one of the children. The Christmas Day up to then is beautiful though, and just in case it makes us too comfortable, it is followed by a disturbing-then-happy post-Christmas visit to relatives, which manages to convey the no-man's land atmosphere of the days-after-Christmas very well.
Please do add any more in comments and I will edit them into this post drekkly.
So the plan was that David Waller would get us off to a flying Dickensian start this week, and my thanks to David for doing that, and then I would amble around my book shelves and be thinking of lovely non-Dickensian Christmas extracts to share. It happens to me with great regularity, I read a book and think 'Oh that chapter would be perfect to read at Christmas,' I would find stacks of books.
So I have wandered around my shelves in between working, and reading books for a fiction prize, and thinking it really is time I actually wrote a Christmas card, and going to Blacker Yarn's woollen mill at Launceston to choose the wool for a big knitting project for a big birthday year in 2013 (it would have been bus pass year had the rules not changed) and knitting gauntlets when I really should be reading books for the fiction prize, and watching the Strictly semi-final, and going out Christmas shopping in Chagford and stopping for lunch at the Ring O'Bells, and getting my self-employed tax accounts submitted (thank you Bookhound - Butler, Woodsman and now Accountant) and sorting out a last-minute air mail parcel for the Kayaker in Oz because he has stopped in Queensland and suddenly has a job and an address for a while, and working some more because it would be nice to have all my loss and bereavement etc replies up to date before I log off from the day job for Christmas as it really is a tough time of year for so very many people, oh yes and putting up some decorations and walking the dog and ...and...and..
Excuses, excuses, I am sure that makes me no busier than everyone else by December 19th, but if only I had written all these Christmas literary extracts down, for I have come up with the sum total of precisely ONE...
“Now to Farmer Shiner’s, and then replenish our insides, father?” said the tranter.
“Wi’ all my heart,” said old William, shouldering his bass-viol.
Farmer Shiner’s was a queer lump of a house, standing at the corner of a lane that ran into the principal thoroughfare. The upper windows were much wider than they were high, and this feature, together with a broad bay-window where the door might have been expected, gave it by day the aspect of a human countenance turned askance, and wearing a sly and wicked leer. To-night nothing was visible but the outline of the roof upon the sky.
The front of this building was reached, and the preliminaries arranged as usual.
“Four breaths, and number thirty-two, ‘Behold the Morning Star,’” said old William. They had reached the end of the second verse, and the fiddlers were doing the up bow-stroke previously to pouring forth the opening chord of the third verse, when, without a light appearing or any signal being given, a roaring voice exclaimed —
“Shut up, woll ‘ee! Don’t make your blaring row here! A feller wi’ a headache enough to split his skull likes a quiet night!”
Slam went the window.
“Hullo, that’s a’ ugly blow for we!” said the tranter, in a keenly appreciative voice, and turning to his companions.
“Finish the carrel, all who be friends of harmony!” commanded old William; and they continued to the end.
“Four breaths, and number nineteen!” said William firmly. “Give it him well; the quire can’t be insulted in this manner!”
A light now flashed into existence, the window opened, and the farmer stood revealed as one in a terrific passion.
“Drown en!— drown en!” the tranter cried, fiddling frantically. “Play fortissimy, and drown his spaking!”
“Fortissimy!” said Michael Mail, and the music and singing waxed so loud that it was impossible to know what Mr. Shiner had said, was saying, or was about to say; but wildly flinging his arms and body about in the forms of capital Xs and Ys, he appeared to utter enough invectives to consign the whole parish to perdition.
“Very onseemly — very!” said old William, as they retired. “Never such a dreadful scene in the whole round o’ my carrel practice — never! And he a churchwarden!”
So can you help me out here, and at the double before the whole thing is over for another year... favourite Christmas literary extracts in comments. Just the book and the author will do, and I can go hunt for them once I know where to look.
And for anyone wondering...no I haven't knitted all those mice (yet) but if anyone wants to, the pattern is Dickensian Mice designed by Alan Dart - Sirdar 4132
As Christmas is now definitely heading our way, and the geese are getting fat etc I thought we should be festive and jolly this week and focus on some Christmas reading recommends, and what better way to start the week than by re-visiting that Dickens bi-centennial that we'd almost all forgotten about now. A Dickens and I seasonal reminder before the year is up, and my thanks to David Waller, author of The Magnificent Mrs Tennnant which I wrote about here, and David has waited very patiently for this piece to appear, and my sincere thanks to him for writing it.
Pickwick Papers, by David Waller
Last Christmas we stayed with my in-laws at their lovely old house on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, not too far away I imagine from dovegreyreader’s own idyllic home. Sitting by the fire, glass of sloe gin in hand, snoring dog at my feet, there was no better place to read Pickwick Papers for the first time.
Pickwick is Dickens’s first novel, the book that transformed him, a mere 24 years old when he started writing in February 1836, from a relatively obscure journalist into a colossal celebrity. After a slow start, the monthly episodes sold by the tens of thousands and Dickens became the darling of the pre-Victorian public, never to look back. It captured the imagination of his contemporaries, but does it appeal to the modern reader?
Like many people who love Dickens, I simply had never read this book, probably because by repute it is long, unrelentingly cheerful and perhaps not even a proper novel in the sense that we understand it: a structured story with a beginning, middle and an end. As I would find, Pickwick is indeed episodic, rambling and always improvised, a collage of unconnected stories and sketches, without the ingenious plotting and coherence of his mature works.
I wasn’t especially taken by the early, especially meandering chapters. But as the afternoon wore on and the sloe gin glass was replenished a couple of times, I found the story came to life with the arrival if the impish cockney servant Sam Weller, who plays Sancho Panza to Mr Pickwick’s Don Quixote. We follow the bumbling, benevolent Pickwick and his band of hapless chums as they travel the length and breadth of southern England on a series of madcap adventures.
Set in the late 1820s, the book is fascinating in part as a portrait of pre-Victorian England. This is the age of the stagecoach and so much of what we think of as typically Dickensian simply does not exist in the world of Pickwick: there are no trains, for a start, and the rapid industrialisation of the mid century and the build up of the overpopulated cities is yet to come. The chapters on the elections at Eatandswill are a classic description of rambunctious politics before the Reform Act of 1832.
Yet Pickwick is as much about a state of mind as a place: there is no evil, merely benevolence and good cheer. Whatever quandary Mr Pickwick finds himself in, whether breaking into a girl’s school at night or getting himself locked up in Fleet Prison, the world rights itself, assisted by copious quantities of Pickwick’s money, Weller’s ingenuity and generous helpings of porter, punch and other alcoholic beverages.
So Pickwick is a Christmassy book: bluff, hearty, always “the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness…” Sitting by the fire as you read it, you might doze off from time to time, but when you wake again you will soon find yourself chuckling and helping yourself to another glass of sloe gin.
As Mr. Weller concluded this moral tale, with which the fat boy appeared much affected, they all three repaired to the large kitchen, in which the family were by this time assembled, according to annual custom on Christmas Eve, observed by old Wardle's forefathers from time immemorial.
From the centre of the ceiling of this kitchen, old Wardle had just suspended, with his own hands, a huge branch of mistletoe, and this same branch of mistletoe instantaneously gave rise to a scene of general and most delightful struggling and confusion; in the midst of which, Mr. Pickwick, with a gallantry that would have done honour to a descendant of Lady Tollimglower herself, took the old lady by the hand, led her beneath the mystic branch, and saluted her in all courtesy and decorum. The old lady submitted to this piece of practical politeness with all the dignity which befitted so important and serious a solemnity, but the younger ladies, not being so thoroughly imbued with a superstitious veneration for the custom, or imagining that the value of a salute is very much enhanced if it cost a little trouble to obtain it, screamed and struggled, and ran into corners, and threatened and remonstrated, and did everything but leave the room, until some of the less adventurous gentlemen were on the point of desisting, when they all at once found it useless to resist any longer, and submitted to be kissed with a good grace.
David Waller’s latest book is The Perfect Man, a life of the Victorian strongman Eugen Sandow. See www.victorianstrongman.com for further details. His biography of Mrs Tennant, Victorian society hostess, was reviewed here in 2009.
My heart goes out to all those families in Newtown, Connecticut this weekend... I can't think of anything else to say that can come close but that I am thinking of you America, and I feel sure many others who read here are too xxx
Like many of you here in the UK, and probably elsewhere too, in between frosts we have been doing a very nice line in mud at the moment, and this post will be very exciting for not one...not two...but three pictures of my glovely (fit like gloves) Scarpa boots. I don't even really feel like singing the Glorious Mud song either because it is everywhere and it's glutinous, treacly horrible stuff... muddy cat paw prints in the oddest places indoors that we didn't even know a cat could reach. So it was with a sense of some resignation that I set off with my sparkly clean walking boots, having hosed them off after the last mud-walk. At this point I really would like to thank the woman (surely it was a woman) who invented Gore-Tex, thanks to which I can traverse just about any wet obstacle and keep my feet dry, and even hose these off and still keep my feet dry.
Anyway I set off for a tramp without Little Nell. Possibly my first walk-alone since we have had her, and it is occasionally nice to be able to look and think without worrying I hear a car and need to go through the getting-back-on-the-lead palava. I had only planned to walk to the Meths (Methodist Chapel) and back but, carried on and had a wander around the village church that we can see from our kitchen window, before finding the footpath up across more fields.
I'm happy with sheep in fields, they safely graze and usually ignore. These looked a bit Wensleydale-ish to me, but surely not in Devon...any sheep experts out there?? Anyway sheep take no notice unlike bullocks ...who do.. and don't worry I was the right side of the gate for this lot.
It was only as I stopped in the field of sheep to take a picture of an interesting 'thing' growing on a stick... and one of you will know what it is I feel sure...
But I suddenly sense the proximity of animals and there were the sheep racing across for a look too. I think they might have thought I was the bearer of food so we soon sorted that out, just one Bonio in my pocket, but my only exit was possibly the muddiest gate to date... By which time all was lost with the clean boots... I headed up towards my favourite cattle trough and thought about it... But decided I was more likely to lose my balance and fall in so squelched home and did the hose thing....God how I love these boots.
Interestingly the very next morning, well who would have thought it... A deep frost, all that mud frozen solid and the most beautiful sunrise, the grey and lowering sky of the previous day consigned to a distant memory... and suddenly I forget all about the mud and realise all over again just why we live here, and why we are so very lucky to do so as I look back down Rocky's Field to home And yes, if you look very carefully, on that right boot...you will see where You-Know-Who (not Bookhound) has chewed my new laces.
As in my recent six month sojourn with The Wild Places, I realise that these books just can't be rushed.
I am currently and variously on a slow read of Wildwood by Roger Deakin, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit and Deep Country - Five Years in the Welsh Hills by Neil Ansell...which reminds me of that poem by Christopher Logue
To a Friend in Search of Rural Seclusion When all else fails, Try Wales.
So with my thoughts on The Wild Places pending, and those on the other books unlikely to appear any time soon, and with another little queue of similar-themed books in the wings, I thought I would just share the next batch with you in advance. Text is taken from blurbs and websites with some additions of my own, and yet again, you'd be delighted to find any of these under the tree in ....eeeeek... twelve days time.
A Year in the Woods ~ Colin Alford (Penguin)
My thanks to Carol for this book which I have been saving to start reading at the beginning of a year, and to then follow it month by month through that year. Somehow I missed 2012 so 2013 it will be.
"Colin Alford spends his days lone but for the deer, the squirrels, the rabbots, the birds and the many other creatures inhabiting the woods.
From the crisp cold of January, through the promise of spring and the heat of summer, and then into the damp autumn, we accompany the forest ranger as he goes about his work - stalking in the early morning darkness, putting an injured fallow buck out of its misery, watching stoats kill a hare, observing owls, and simply being part of the outdoors."
This is the Gamekeeper's life too...the life that, as Kathleen Jamie suggests, is not all 'otters and primroses'. If he takes me out for a drive around the estate he works on I get a real feel for those realities and the hardships too. It is no easy life working with the light, from sunrise until sunset and through every conceivable weather, much of it alone... and I still marvel that from a 50% genetic inheritance that loves her bed, there comes a son who jumps out of his crib every morning as dawn breaks and without fail, and who won't return to it until he is sure all is well with his bit of the outdoors.
Wild Hares and Hummingbirds - The Natural History of an English Village ~ Stephen Moss (Vintage)
"Naturalist and author Stephen Moss lives in one of the longest villages in England - Mark, on the Somerset Levels. This watery wonderland is steeped in history: it is the land of King Arthur, where King Alfred burnt the cakes and where the last battle was fought on English soil.
This ancient country parish, dating from before the Domesday Book, has been reclaimed from the sea over many centuries. Today the landscape bears witness to its eventful past, and is criss-crossed with watery ditches and broad droves, down which livestock was once taken to market. These are now home to a rich selection of resident and visiting wildlife: rooks and roe deer; sparrows and snowdrops; buzzards, badgers and butterflies. Amongst these natural wonders are the 'wild hares and hummingbirds' of the book's title: one of our most iconic mammals, the brown hare; and a scarce and spectacular visitor, the hummingbird hawk-moth.
As the year unfolds, Stephen Moss creates an intimate account of the natural history of his parish. He witnesses the landscape as it passes from deep snow to spring blossom, through the heat haze of summer to the chill winds of autumn; from the first hazel catkins to the swallows returning from Africa; the sounds of the dawn chorus to the nocturnal mysteries of moths.
But this is not simply the story of one small corner of the West Country; it also serves as a microcosm of Britain's wider countryside. At a time of uncertainty - as our landscape and wildlife face some of the greatest changes in recorded history - it reveals the plants and animals that will adapt and thrive, and those that may struggle, and even disappear from our lives.
This is a very personal celebration of why the natural world matters to all of us, wherever we live. Wild Hares and Hummingbirds is nature-writing at its finest, expressed through the natural history of one very special place."
Well this should be our life too. We have lived on the very edge of the Parish, three miles from the village, for eighteeen years now, but I am interested to see whether there are parallels in my perceptions of life here to that as seen be Stephen Moss.
Beechcombings - The Narrative of Trees ~ Richard Mabey (Vintage)
In 1987, the greatest English storm for three centuries laid flat fifteen million trees across southern England and devastated a nation of tree-lovers. The storm marked a turning point in our perception of trees and a dawning realisation that they have lives of their own, beyond the roles and images we press on them.
In Beechcombings Richard Mabey traces the long history of the beech tree throughout Europe, writing about the bluebells, orchids, fungi, deer and badgers associated with them, the narratives we tell about trees and the images we make of them. It is an engrossing, exciting, poetical and profound book that will stimulate debate about man's relationship with nature and enchant the reader.
With my focus on 'our' Beechwood and the walking of my own Wild Places I am hoping this will be the perfect book to graft onto (sorry couldn't resist) my reading of Roger Deakin's Wildwood.
Walking Home - Travels With a Troubadour on the Pennine Way ~ Simon Armitage.(Faber)
'In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards theYorkshire village where he was born.
Travelling as a 'modern troubadour' without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep.
Walking Home describes this extraordinary, yet ordinary, journey. It's a story about Britain's remote and overlooked interior - the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his journey. It's about facing emotional and physical challenges, and sometimes overcoming them. It's nature writing, but with people at its heart. Contemplative, moving and droll, it is a unique narrative from one of our most beloved writers.'
I am intrigued to see how a poet imparts his skills to the land of psycho-geography especially in the light of this from Simon Armitage which I chanced upon as I browsed the book...
'...when I swapped social work for poetry, part of the idea was to get out of the office and into the wider world again, to rejoin the adventure. But the sediment has built up. The stodginess of routine has set in. So even if I'm writing about the Sahara or the Antarctic I'm usually doing it in a chair, behind double glazing. The Pennine Way is about getting OUT THERE again. Its about taking the air and clearing my head.'
Winter - Five Windows on the Season ~ Adam Gopnik (Quercus)
'Winter takes us on an intimate tour of the artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists and thinkers who helped shape a new and modern idea of winter. We learn how literature heralds the arrival of the middle class; how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world; how the race to the poles marks the human drive to imprint meaning on a blank space. Offering a kaleidoscopic take on the season, Winter is a homage to an idea of a season and a journey through the modern imagination.'
I like the premise for this one, a series of lectures given by Adam Gopnik, thus pieces that retain the spontaineity of the spoken word, that are 'meant to sound vocal.' and having already made my bookmark selection as this card for its plenteous snow..
I was then really intrigued to see there is a big chunk on the art of Caspar David Friedrich in this book. It was ages before I had spotted the detail beyond the snow, I had missed the crutches, the man presumably beseeching the shrine... that gothic castle, so I clearly have much to find out.
And if you have any more reading suggestions around similar themes please do add them in comments and perhaps we'll have ourselves another list.
'A single grid is beckoning, each of its thirty-three clues sparking a different chapter on the art of puzzling and the secret lives of words. You'll also read about the peculiar life of clue-mongers...and the tangled tale of human wordplay, how an ancient itch to toy with letters has led us to this black and white curio we call a cryptic crossword. Just be warned: the further you travel down this winding road, the more likely you'll catch the bug...'
I love a good crossword puzzle though rarely make time for them these days, but I do enjoy a good bit of cryptic solving and it has taken me years of painstaking anguish to figure out some of the more obvious routes that the puzzle setters use. Once you spot them you might spot them again, but discovering them in the first place is the thing. Unless you know someone who knows how on earth are you supposed to find out, other than sweating blood and a whole day trying to figure it out.
Fret no more, here's the best bookish Christmas Cracker for the crossword solver in your midst, Puzzled by David Anstle. (did you see what I did there, Christmas Cracker? It would probably come under the Pun chapter)
The book begins with, quite sensibly, an unfilled crossword grid, and each chapter will take the reader through every twist and turn of the puzzling world whilst filling in the clues along the way. Reach the end and there are more crosswords to be completed with the benefit of the book under your belt and a helping hand from David Astle should you need it.
Anagrams..'Crossword makers turn to anagrams like Catholic nuns to rosaries..' says David Astle so here's one for you...
Discourteous shift is dispatched, subcontracted (10)
Easy when you know how isn't it...nigh on impossible when you don't.
Charades... right I didn't really know the proper 'crosswording' name for these, but this is about breaking the words down into syllables to make a single word answer. Here's your starter for ten...
Monk in oxygen mask (6)
Containers... these are the nesting clues.
Doctor binds a fracture (3)
And so it goes on through Hiddens, Double Meanings,Homophones, Deletions, Alterations, Codes, Puns, Spoonerisms and more. It's all very Bletchley but the mysteries are revealed, and in amongst the explaining David Astle weaves a narrative about the crossword-setters, the fiendish crosswords themselves and their history and much more.
The perfect book for anyone who loves crosswords obviously, but also for anyone who loves words and what those words can be persuaded to do.
Oh alright, one last one but beware, it's fiendish so I'll give you a pointer, it's a reversal...
One London doctor (in the nineteenth century) writes that female patients might be allowed fiction but should be carefully watched. If a novel seemed to worsen their condition, it should be taken aways and replaced by a book 'upon some practical subject; such, for instance, as beekeeping.'
I am always very grateful to Erika in Delaware who regularly snippateers on my behalf sending me an envelope of newspaper and magazine cuttings and cartoons every so often from the other side of the pond. One of these was a piece entitled Turning the Page - How women became readers by Joan Acocella, published in the The New Yorker (October 25, 2012). The New Yorker is hard to come by in the village shop, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a copy in Tavistock either, so I am always very grateful to be kept in contact with life out there, and that quote reminded me...as these things do of one of my favourite books this year.
I wrote aboutBee Journal by Sean Borodale some time ago and have been slowly walking out to Sean's hive with him on a regular basis through the year to check on the bees. Virtually that is, but with a sense that I am really there watching, because...
These poems were written at the hive wearing a veil and gloves, and the journal is an intrinsic part of the kinetic activity of keeping bees: making 'tiny, regular checks' in the turn around the central figure of the sun, and minute exploratory interventions through the round of the year. The book is full of moments of revelation - particularly of the relationship between the domestic and the wild. In attempting to record and invoke something of the complexity of the relationship between 'keeper' and 'kept' it tunes ear and speech towards the ecstasy of bees, between the known and the unknown.
Because of its genesis as a working journal, there is here an unusual intimacy and deep scrutiny of life and death in nature. The language itself is dense and clotted, the imagery thrillingly fresh, and the observing eye close, scrupulous and full of wonder.
And in that strange tennis-elbow-foot way that my reading so often joins up with itself, Roger Deakin writing in Wildwood had reminded me of a Ted Hughes' poetry collection Moortown Diary. I had somehow forgotten about it, but this is a series of poems written through the year on the farm on the northern edge of Dartmoor where Ted Hughes lived later in his life, so I am going to make that one of my year-long reads for 2013.
I was reminded that here too is a collection that had also been written very much on the hoof as Ted Hughes' notes confirm.
'In making a note about anything, if I wish to look closely I find I can move closer, and stay closer, if I phrase my observations about it in rough lines...my way of getting reasonably close to what is going on, and staying close, and of excluding everything else that might be pressing to interfere with the watching eye. In a sense the method excludes the poetic process as well..'
Ted Hughes goes on to say...
'This sort of thing had to be set down soon after the event. If I missed the moment - which meant letting a night's sleep intervene before I took up the pen - I could always see quite clearly what had been lost. By the next day the processes of 'memory', the poetic process had already started.'
When he decided to revisit those notes and leave the words as they were Ted Hughes calls their strength a 'souvenir bloom' ...
'Altering any word felt like retouching an old home movie with new bits of fake-original voice and fake-original actions.'
There is that same sense of 'souvenir bloom' to Sean Borodale's writing in Bee Journal, so if you are looking for a year-long read, a short meaningful piece every so often, then either of these would be ideal. I'd give my eye teeth to be able to capture the things that I see in this way....not that I have really tried that hard. There is an immediacy that captures and seals those moments of approach and arrival, of standing and watching, the sense of perhaps surprise, maybe pleasure, sometimes shock at what is waiting to be discovered there, and I can't tell you how much pleasure it has given me to be alongside Sean Borodale's hive... and without all the worry of being stung.
I suspect Ted Hughes might have loved Bee Journal too, here a few lines from Moortown Diary...
March morning unlike others (15 March 1974)
Blue haze. Bees hanging in air at the hive-mouth. Crawling in prone stupor of sun On the hive-lip. Snowdrops. Two buzzards. Still-wings each Magnetized to the other, Float orbits. Cattle standing warm. Lit, happy stillness.
Any more suggestions for year-long, day-to-day reads like this??
From this post you may conclude that I don't get out much and perhaps should get out more, but the highlight of my week has been the anticipation and subsequent arrival of Colours of Shetland by Kate Davies. I know, I know, so much excitement over a 'knitting' book, but I have grown to love Kate's designs... who wouldn't want to make or own and cherish a Rams and Yowes blanket or a Peerie Floooers hat or the Tortoise and Hare gauntlets.
The book arrived on my self-awarded Kitchen Day, when Bookhound is out helping the Gamekeeper for the day and I am home alone and bored and lonely (*ahem*) and force myself to sit in the Aga-warmth of the kitchen, and either 'make' things, or reluctantly wheel the chair up to the oven door and read. The radio trills along in the background, I get the urge to make proper cocoa, the day gets greyer and murkier outside, the animals sleep and I just have to woman-up and cope. In fact this week I was forced out by a 'no milk' scenario, so did the six mile round trip to the village shop only to find it was Swiss Day (yes in deepest Devon...we know about Switzerland) as evidenced by stollen and hot chocolate, so I sat and partook before persuading myself back home to the chair and the warmth and the Aga.
It's tough.
Colours of Shetland was waiting for me, and this home-alone day was good news because had Bookhound seen it he may just have snaffled it for one of my Christmas gifts. You couldn't go wrong adding this to your list (N.B. Listed on Amazon but only available direct from Kate) if you love intelligent knitting, because of course you knew I was going to say it, this is far more than 'just a knitting book.' Admittedly, ten signature hand-knit designs from the Shetlands do form the foundation of the book, but alongside each an essay offering some history and inspiration as well as background for the designs.
Kate Davies has a doctorate in Eighteenth Century studies, was a university lecturer and has written books on a wide variety of subjects including the American Revolution and the history of lace. When some research in Philadelphia, surrounding a group of women's letters, shifted the emphasis in her thinking from women's oppression to the way that textiles enriched their lives and created the bonds of friendship, Kate, remembering that she could knit, went from the library to the wool shop and almost hasn't stopped knitting since.
'Like those eighteenth century women whose letters I was reading, creating textiles enriched my life tremendously, opening paths of inspiration, and connections with people, that I would never have otherwise discovered.'
For me the connection between reading, landscape, history and creativity, and the way it all connects and inspires me and so many others so readily in this online world has felt increasingly seamless, so I felt completely in tune with Kate's observations.
But there is much much more to Kate's achievements than some knitting, some designing and the production of a book...any one of which I would be inordinately proud to have accomplished.
I doubt Kate would wish her readers and fellow knitters to define her by the major stroke that knocked her for six almost two years ago now; that stroke down to a really unique and rare combination of medical and life circumstances whilst only in her mid-thirties. However I would urge you to take a break from Christmas planning, settle down with a pot of tea and read Kate's account of that day, and her subsequent battle to learn to knit again and to challenge and face off off the disabilities with which she was left. I read it all a while back and felt humbled and privileged to have shared in her story, and I can only begin to imagine what some of those dark and dismal days of uncertainty about the future may have felt like for Kate, but I also know that to feast the eyes on colour, and know the tactile comfort of wool would be a tonic I would seek out too.
I often find myself feeling grateful for the solace-giving, restorative powers of sheepy wool and needles. When one is feeling ropey, knitting really comes into its own, I think.
This is a remarkable story of a remarkable woman and the self-published Colours of Shetland an absolute triumph in the light of all that.
The book itself is of the highest quality and production values and the designs themselves things of rare beauty, (all modelled wonderfully by Kate) inspired as they are by the sights, colours and landscape of the Northern Isles, and there I am back in Orkney in a flash and thinking 'Hmm, Shetland next,' as I covet the Northmavine Hap. The Hap a shawl to most of us, and Northmavine a wild and rugged corner of Shetland, but the colours are those embedded in my mind from the waters around Orkney just a little further south... probably a few inches or so by sea on the map, if I was navigating and Bookhound was asking me how much further to go. As Kate Davies explains,
'The hap was a garment with a function : to keep the body warm. Wrapped and tied around the torso, or tucked hood-like around the neck and chin, a good hap would effectively insulate its Shetland wearer against the exigencies of cold and wind...beautiful and striking in their simplicity...a timelessness of design.'
I want one of course, who wouldn't, but I have the challenge of Kate's Betty Mouat cowl in the queue too so first I plan to start with 'easy'. More about my starter for ten and Jamieson & Smith the Shetland Wool supplier when my wool arrives from them... and that will probably be my exciting don't-get-out-much highlight of next week.
... I came over all Jane Austen. Completely out of the blue too.
Jane stands quietly in her corner on the 19th Century Women Writer's Shelf and I don't usually hear a peep out of her..
I am not famed for my allegiance to the Austen. I 'like' but am not 'bowled over by' would sum it up, but I was idly gazing at that stack of Connell Guides when it occurred to me that it would be an interesting exercise to read one in association with a book I hadn't read before, see which doors of perception might open with a few prompts from a helping hand. I am really enjoying the relaxed and accessible yet robustly critical approach taken by these little books.
It was a toss up between Paradise Lost, Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Emma and automatically hanging my head in shame at not having read any of them I settled on Emma.
Except why hang head in shame??
I came across an edition of Emma on my shelves published in 1947 with an introduction by Monica Dickens. It is as refreshing to read today as it must have been then...
'There can never be anything quite like that first reading. The word-perfect, possessive devotees, who will hardly allow your appreciation unless you have read it twenty times, are apt to forget that Jane Austen wrote her books, as every author writes every book, to be read for the first time.'
I daresay the book gets better at each re-reading. Long after you have exhausted the discovery of every subtlety, the pleasure, like that of getting into clean sheets, remains ever fresh and no less keen for being familiar. But what does not remain, what can never be recaptured, is the pleasure of first following the story's unfolding, led forward by the gentle bu inexorable hand of Jane Austen. You can't let go.'
Well Monica is right on every count in my eyes.
So much enforced study and available expertise about Jane Austen out there it can be hard to come to her books out of choice and when you want to, and without incurring the incredulity of the devotees...
'You have never read Emma??
As age increases I regularly quell that rising Keatsian sense that I do still have so many books I want to read...
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
But I firmly believe too that there is a right time in my life for some of those books, and I am astonished and delighted that Emma has ambushed me now. I am not sure I would have spotted years ago what I am seeing on this first read.
I have been engrossed and interested, have had the characters all sorted out in my mind. I am watching for the little details and espying all those oh so clever little Jane Austen nuances that are so easy to miss. And I am still only on page 150, reading ever so very slowly and wanting to put the book down to digest the day's events in Hartfield, in no rush to finish it but also desperate to pick it up again.
Bookhound nips out for supplies...'I'll sort the washing' I'll say, but have actually pulled the chair up to the Aga before he's even got the car out of the gates. This at 11am, just so that I can read a few pages more. So to everyone out there who has probably been telling me I should read Emma, I make no apology for taking so long, but thank you, you were right. More about the book eventually but I really do think Emma Woodhouse might become my favourite Jane heroine to date.
Mind you I haven't read Persuasion yet either.
Is anyone else still waiting for the Jane Austen moment to happen in their reading life??
No messing, you might just want to get this on your Christmas list NOW.
In fact ...stop reading this and nip off and slap a big Post-It note on the fridge, or write it on the kitchen notice board, or wherever you need to draw someone's attention to the fact that 2013 might not be complete without the Faber and Faber Poetry Diary.
I usually spend hours looking at suitable diaries...the pictures...are they interesting enough to see me through a whole year... is it portable enough... or should I use it for the kitchen as the MAIN diary where everything gets written. In the end I have often left my selection too late and end up with a £1.49 Week to View for the kitchen and perhaps a Moleskine for my bag... or I top up the Filofax Pocket sized diary again...or whatever.
But this year I am deeply attached to my 2013 Poetry Diary already.
and a little guided tour for you..
and I always dash to the week of my birthday just to see...
Favourite poems, new poems unknown to me and all mixed in with those iconic book jackets. Sometimes I will have to figure out the significance for that particular week because I don't think any of this is down to chance...
I have decided this will be the year of the pencil entry too. I'd love to add a quote a day from whatever I have read or heard, and I have already started writing in little quotes, other favourite lines on similar themes or from the same author. On Jo Shapcott's Of Mutability page I have scribed that wonderful quote from her poem Northern Lights ... By the end of 2013 this will be a microcosm of my year in quotes.
'In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphical world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs...'
So having been on that virtual visit to The Mount, and hastened to the Edith Wharton shelf, the first novel I settled on for this little reading journey was The Age of Innocence. I read it in the old Oxford World's Classics edition with this cover picture a detail from An Evening at the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen by Paul Gustav Fischer. It made for perfect gazing as I stopped and pondered the book, all eyes very cleverly focused on a woman sitting alone and seemingly isolated.
I think we've been through the whole 'Why on earth haven't I read The Age of Innocence before?' and I am confident that this Edith Wharton foray will yield some great reading before the trail eventually lures me off in another direction. I am sitting on (not literally) the new biography Nancy - The Story of Lady Astor by Adrian Fort though I don't know how long I can keep my hands off it. There are real local connections to pursue with Nancy given that she was the first woman MP and the seat she won was Plymouth, but I want to spend a while with Edith and the glittering world of Old New York first.
Published in 1920, The Age of Innocence, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year and it would seem no one was more surprised than Edith. In fact everyone else was probably surprised too, including Sinclair Lewis whose novel Main Street was chosen by the prize jury only for that decision to be over-ruled in favour of Edith Wharton by 'higher authorities.'
Imagine that happening today...or does it??
By this time Edith was earning big money too, an $18,000 payment for The Age of Innocence along with further payment of $15,000 against royalties came as a welcome boost to the bank balance of a woman who was restoring and running two homes. Editors of the fabulous volume of Edith's letters that I am dipping into alongside my reading estimate that between 1920 and 1924 her earnings were approximately $250,000 (in 1988, the year of publication of these letters, that was calculated as about $3,000,000 in today's money) which gives much credence to her popularity whilst adding to the mystery of quite how and why Edith fell out of fashion for some years before a resurgence in the 1970s.
It would seem that not a great deal happens in The Age of Innocence.
On the surface, and perhaps even more so to a 21st century reader, lives seem superficial and beset by boredom and monotony in the gilded age of wealthy 1870s New York. People don't seem to do much and pay lip service to the notion of work without breaking into a sweat whilst living off inherited money. This is a closed circle of 'old money' that admits outsiders, the 'new money', with reluctance, and of course I immediately saw parallels with rural life here. Whilst the community may not be quite so 'moneyed' there is much suspicion levelled by the old guard at those who seem to appear from nowhere, buy up a large country estate and proceed to live the life.
It will be many years before the likes of Mrs Struther are considered true 'locals' but Edith Wharton cleverly pins down that willingness of the old guard to sample the hospitality nevertheless...
'It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions : conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceeding age. There was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) has surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable? Once people had tasted of Mrs Struther's easy Sunday hospitality they were not likely to sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted Shoe-Polish.'
Newland Archer and May Welland, living in their world of 'faint implications and pale delicacies', are betrothed and swiftly married at Newland's impatient insistence, and perhaps more out of convenience and convention than real love, and it is the arrival of May's cousin, the enigmatic Ellen Olenska, in the throes of a divorce from her Polish husband, that will gently upset the marital apple cart. I say 'gently' because this is Old New York, 'tumultuously' would be inconceivable within a community that has sufficient power and authority at its kid-gloved fingertips to ensure that everything is kept cleverly beneath the surface. Appearances must be kept up at all costs, so the possibilities are rarely given voice and only allowed to bubble up through occasional cracks. It is never made clear quite what makes Count Olenska so dreadful that to return to him would be unthinkable, but lawyer Newland works tirelessly on the divorce inevitably becoming besotted with Ellen in the process.
May is not quite the dupe she would seem and plays a canny game with her husband, leaving the reader in no doubt that she is fully aware of what is happening, though Newland might be too blinkered to see it. Under no circumstances will May relinquish her husband and herself to a life of scandal, and when matters do come to a head it is the tribe that steps in to support her, and with such devastating precision at a dinner party.
The penny finally drops for Newland...
'He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the seperation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything...'
Along the way I think Edith Wharton has created one of the most memorable characters I have yet to meet in her fiction...well, apart from Undine Sprague in The Custom of the Country that is. Prepare to meet a Wharton classic in the 'carniverous old lady', Mrs Manson Mingott...
'The immense accretion of flesh which has descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active woman with a neatly turned foot and ankle into something as cast and august as a natural phenomenon.'
Well I nearly choked on my cup of tea... Edith being best read on the sofa on a gloomy, overcast winter's afternoon with a blazing fire and a pot of the best Earl Grey...oh for a day bed like Edith's... Confined by the burden of her flesh to a single floor of her New York home it is Mrs Mingott who holds court in her sitting room with a very unacceptable glimpse of a frivolous, lace-flounced bedroom....'in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties.'
For me, Edith Wharton's skill rests not only with her depiction of this elite, insular, tight little citadel and her barely diguised disdain for it, but also in her acute observance of the social nuances and the motives behind them.
'Madame Olenska is a great favourite with the gentlemen,' said Miss Sophy, with her air of wishing to put forth something conciliatory when she knew that she was planting a dart...'
Moments that added up, piece by piece to a complete understanding for this reader.
The ending, which of course I won't reveal, is replete with yet more unspoken anguish as it becomes clear what fate has awaited those who tried but failed to break free.
The Age of Innocence was initially serialised and sent to the U.S. publishers in instalments from Edith Wharton's home in Paris. For all the money that Edith was earning she was no pushover when it came to laying down her terms, and getting wind that the publishers may 'tamper with the text of the novel' she had this to say...
'I have done a really super-human piece of work in writing. within a year, the best part of two long novels, entirely different in subject and treatment, simply to suit the convenience of the Editor of the Pictorial and I cannot consent to have my work treated as if it were prose-by-the-yard.'
Magnus here, recovering from my third rather Embarrassing Episode of 'Getting Lost.'
I'm sure when they took my bits away they took my compass too, this isn't my fault. I always follow the dogs on their walks but I get distracted...and then I've gone a bit too far from home, at least a good league hence... and I've lost them...and I don't really know where I am...and I feel like a lost kitten again and I don't know what to do.
So I sit and wait until one of them comes to find me hours later because I've missed lunch and I never miss lunch or an afternoon in my basket, and it's getting dark and the rude wind's wild lament is doing that, and they walk along the lanes shouting 'Maggers' and 'Magpuss' (yes they do call me that) and I miaow from the hedge because I am just sitting there thinking, oh dear... fails my heart I know not how and I can go no longer, but I pretend I meant to be there all along and was just doing things.
Anyway it's alright now, I'm home in time to do this Wenceslas prize draw which is what I was most worried about.
'No,' I said as Bookhound carried me in the door, because why bother to mark my footsteps my good page tread thou in them boldly when there's the offer of a lift.
'No, I will eat that lovely pouch of Whiskas in gravy with swan plover lark something indeterminate and drink that dish of milk later, first I must do my duty,'
And so the winners of a copy of Wenceslas by Carol Ann Duffy are...
26 2 34 60 8
Random numbers generated Dec 2 2012 at 10:59:50 by www.psychicscience.org
2 ~ Nancy
8 ~ Carol Norton
26 ~ Lesley-Ann
34 ~ Liz F
60 ~ Marilyn
Congratulations everyone, thank you for entering and thank you to Pi-cat-dor for the books. Check it's really you here and if you could send your addresses to dovegreyreader at gmaildot com subject line I'M A WINNER or some such, King Wenceslas and all that poetic crusty goodness will be dropping through your catflap letterbox with haste.
Having equipped myself adequately for dog-walking in torrential downpours it's not often that I feel a bit trapped indoors by the weather, but this last week had been a bit extreme and cabin fever was setting in.
So wet that I will confess to occasionally opening the back door and hoping Nell will go out, perform and return of her own accord. Nell, in return, knows that if she just ventures around the corner of the house, out of sight, I will panic and think "Supposing she goes out onto the lane...and the one of three cars a day that go past happens to come along this minute," and end up getting togged up and doing a proper walk.
Anyway it was heaven to get out to meet a friend, who comments here as PineHillNotes. PHN lives down in Cornwall so we met halfway at Lanhydrock House, the National Trust property at Bodmin. The theme to Downton Abbey was playing on the car radio as I drove through the gates, and the news was reporting an upsurge in the number of UK trained butlers now being sought in China and Russia (and earning £150k...I may send Bookhound for a stint) which all felt spot on for this beautifully preserved Victorian pile, now very much an Edwardian preserve. The house is closed for the winter but the grounds, cafe and shop are open.
We immediately did coffee/hot chocolate and cake, and exchanged books for wool. PineHillNotes has recently completed the Betty Mouat Cowl designed by Kate Davies and there was wool to spare, enough for another for which I paid in books... Fans of Kate Davies will be up at dawn on Monday to order a copy of her new book of patterns, Colours of Shetland. Kate has been dripping tantalising previews of the patterns onto Twitter this week, (you can find her on Twitter here,) and I will be as interested in the essays that accompany the designs as the tempting knits.
I have never really explored the estate at Lanhydrock so a walk round (well, hobble for me with a sprained ankle sustained in time-honoured fashion slipping off a pavement) and an inspection was in order... Predictably stunning on a sunny Cornish day...
On the way round we stumbled upon a gem of pottery, as you do, I'll show you around there soon because it all segues well with my current read of The Potter's Hand by A.N.Wilson, a novel about the life and times of Josiah Wedgwood which I am really enjoying.
Recent storm damage much in evidence as we made our way back... ...by which time we have missed lunch and it is time for tea and crumpets. So back into the cafe which is located in the old stables, so you sit in nice little individual equine quarters and, rather than hay, make difficult decisions about whether you want jam or lemon curd to accompany.
As PineHillNotes drove west into a glorious setting sun, and I drove east with the sun gleaming in my mirror, the miles flew by as I pondered the intricacies of knitting the cowl with a puppy and a kitten in attendance, but also the blessings that are good days in the company of friends.
And apropos of no connection beyond the setting sun, we have had some corkers this week as the winter sun makes its way (left) across to its Shortest Day setting point, which will be exactly behind that woodland on December 21st, before setting back across the valley again. Good for the soul, sights like that.
Tinker's Cott. We are now taking bookings for holidays and peaceful retreats. Click on the image for more information and email us for further details.
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