dovegreyreader scribbles

A report from the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts 2013...

I am having a rest from literary festivals this year, so I am very grateful to Ellie, my Wherevertheroadgoes Colourboration friend, now back from world travels and settling into her new home just a few miles from Hay on Wye, and this week our occasional roving reporter at the 2013 Hay Literary Festival.  I fear for a book-loving friend living in such close proximity to a town with eleventyzillion bookshops, but the Hay Festival attracts the big names so needs must, and I am excited to see who Ellie will be listening to. As I always say, I know it can be an extra burden to take notes at these events, and then have to write them up too, so double thanks to Ellie and her partner Adrian for taking the time and trouble to share it all with us for free, as we sit in our armchairs (well I am) and leave them to cope with the parking and the muddy fields and the queues.  

Notes from a blustery first couple of days at Hay

Once we knew we were moving to within a stone's throw of Hay-on-Wye, our aim was to be in our new home in time for the festival. We managed it by the skin of our teeth! So driving the four miles there, and crossing from England into Wales, we had to pinch ourselves to make sure it wasn't just a dream. Hay Festival is a huge affair located on fields just on the edge of town. We were greeted by sunshine interspersed with cold blustery winds and sharp showers, and I imagined the festival area might be exposed and prone to mud, but it's a beautifully constructed village of substantial marquees surrounded and interlinked by covered walkways, with shops and eateries inbetween. 

The girl at the box office exclaimed over the number of tickets she was printing out for us. I did rather splurge as there is so much choice with more than 400 events, not just literary ones but music, comedy, current affairs and much more. Some very big names and so very hard to choose.

Illustrator Sir Quentin Blake, recently turned 80, gave the Hay lecture, our first event.

Entitled 'In and out of the book: the uses of illustration', he touched on the importance of visual as well as verbal language in childhood. He also described just some of his many famous characters and his memorable work with Roald Dahl - in particular Matilda.

What I found most fascinating were his words about his recent work providing illustrations for hospital wards - a maternity unit and an eating disorders clinic. With a scant brief he spent time talking with patients and went on to produce illustrations to reassure and comfort them with his parallel worlds. An eating disorders patient feeds sparrows on her window ledge, a mother and baby swim through the air - meeting each other and bonding for the first time.

At the end of the lecture someone announced that Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall were in the festival bookshop. We had no idea they would be visiting, although we had wondered about quite a high police presence, including sniffer dogs. We managed to catch sight of them before they were whisked away.

Explorer and co-founder of Survival International Robin Hanbury Tenison talked about his photographs taken on his earliest expeditions in the 50s and 60s, a time when many tribal populations in the world had had very little contact with westerners and their worlds were far less exploited by governments and mass tourism. This struck a chord with our memories of recent travels where it's often hard to photograph local people without them either refusing or over-posing. He had considered the photos purely snaps taken long ago and forgotten about until someone asked him about them. This glimpse into a lost world gave some remarkably tender and natural portrayals that reminded me of Quentin Blake's work for the hospital settings mentioned above.

Rob Hopkins discussed the transition movement - something we didn't know too much about and it was inspiring to learn how people just getting together can bring about real positive changes in their community. Something that we will be thinking more about now we've moved to the country.

We were so disappointed that Sandi Toksvig couldn't appear as planned alongside John McCarthy, but he gave a moving account of his journey to meet Palestinians and his book about their story. One questioner asked about the language barrier and how John could trust the truth of what he was being told. He admitted that he does have to rely on interpretors, but when an old man with tears rolling down his face shows him the ancient olive trees that have been torn up across his land to build the separation wall, there is no doubting the veracity of the story being shared.

Between events, we found the tapas bar, providing wine, beer and delicious eats from Spain with friendly aplomb. I feel sure we will be haunting this stall in the days to come to catch up with friends! There are also lots of other tempting food places and of course the bookshops themselves are a tempting draw.

Rokia Traoré is a stunningly beautiful Malian singer songwriter who played the Wales Stage with her band and just got better and better. There are several Malian acts appearing at Hay, the town is twinned with Timbuktu and launched a charity Hay2Timbuktu to fund development projects there. Following the recent troubles in Mali, their support is needed even more. Rokia's music is a mix of western rock and African rhythms and this tiny woman had people of all ages dancing in the aisles. We held on for her encore - a moving cover of a Billie Holiday song, before rushing to see Irish singer Christie Moore. Although we missed the first song or two, his songs were as strong as ever, from rambunctious irreverent favourites, to a very poignant song about the loss of the Chinese cocklepickers at Morecambe Bay. All in his comforting lilting Irish tones like the cup of hot chocolate with a shot of brandy we warmed ourselves up with when we got home.

Looking forward to many more events from more Malian music to writers like Barbara Kingsolver, as well as more get togethers with friends, in the days to come. In the meantime we'll be trying to get more boxes unpacked, furniture arranged and the garden kept at bay in our idyllic new cottage in the few hours inbetween events!

Monks House ...more thoughts

Monday 14 September 1925

'A disgraceful fact - I am writing this at 10 in the morning in bed in the little room looking into the garden, the sun beaming steady, the vine leaves transparent green, & the leaves of the apple tree so brilliant that, as I had my breakfast, I invented a little story...'

It has been quite exciting to dip into Virginia Woolf's letters and diaries since my return from those few days on the Bloomsbury trail in Sussex recently. I had wanted some context before writing a little about it all, but how much more immediate the Monks House entries seem now that I have seen and felt its atmosphere, with its benign ghosts, for myself. Little corners where you can just imagine the conversations and the heated debates with friends and visitors taking place.

And how frustrating nosey old me finds it when I see a staircase knowing full well that this part of the house is closed to visitors and that I can't go up it and explore.

There was an upstairs sitting room at Monks House, the thought that I couldn't see it nearly killed me.

It is nigh on impossible to walk through the rooms and not think about Virginia being unwell. I used the term madness yesterday, and afterwards thought perhaps I shouldn't have. It's not very 2013 PC after all, whilst being highly perjorative too, but it was common parlance for the 1920s, and there was a summer when the birds were chirping in Greek and the King was hiding in the bushes in the garden (checking out the drugs and treatments prescribed that's all hardly surprising) . So however well those around her protected Virginia, the 'madness' word, and the terror it invoked, can't have been far from anyone's lips.

I could only begin to imagine what Virginia may have thought was happening to her when those episodes descended...

'...wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets. lying awake. sleeping draughts, sedatives, digitalis, going for a little walk and plunging back into bed again - all the horrors of the dark cupboard of illness once more displayed for my diversion.' 

And so there was a moment, as I stood in Virginia Woolf 's bedroom, an extension to the house accessed by an outside path by both Virginia in her day, and by us on the day of our visit, when I thought of the weeks and months of enforced rest that she took here when unwell.

'Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia...'

The heating is meagre, the walls are lined with books...how those must have taunted her when reading was beyond her.. then there was the bell alongside to beckon...

I added my footprint to the carpet because you can't avoid treading on it...

and I coveted the Vanessa Bell design on the curtains...

So, forbidden to write for long periods, often unable to concentrate for long enough to read, just how many interminable hours must Virginia have spent staring out of the window alongside her little bed (it seemed short for the tall-ish person we assumed Virginia Woolf to be ) and onto her garden.

I thought of her dosed with Chloral...

'that mighty Prince with the moth's eyes and the feathered feet...'

And then looking very closely at the glass right by the bed I spotted its flaws and distortions. If it is the original glass then Virginia would have seen this view of the church exactly as I did, enough to befuddle even the most sober of eyes, let alone drugged ones...

Maybe it even inspired these lines in her revelatory little book On Being Ill, written after a prolonged period of illness during the Summer of 1925...

'...the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear...the creature within can only gaze through the pane smudged or rosy.'

Later on Virginia, in the same book, sounds a note of cautious and hopeful optimism for recovery..

'Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery. some undulation, some irregularity of the surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn. But with the hook of life still in us we must wriggle. We cannot stiffen peacably into glass mounds,'

And there, right outside the door, all this would be waiting for her...

and the writing desk too.

And the views, Virginia's beloved views of the South Downs.



Coming soon, some thoughts on Charleston, and then Berwick Church.

Monks House inspiration...

'There seemed an infinity of fruit-bearing trees... I could fancy a very pleasant walk in the orchard under the apple trees, with the grey extinguisher of the church steeple pointing my boundary...'


And if I needed inspiration for gardening, and a place to go and catch a bout of gardenitis, then it was surely going to be those words and more from Virginia Woolf's diary (Thursday July 3 1919) and  a visit to Monks House in Rodmell in Sussex for myself. This the country home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf and bought by them in 1919 for £700, visiting In Fran's lovely company, all sufficient to ensure contagion as we pondered the plants and wished they'd all been in seed...ahem.

In June 1919 Virginia had just bought another house nearby in Lewes, Round House, without telling Leonard but then realising how impractical the house would be, living up to the name with its round rooms. Imagine buying a house and not telling your husband...it says something about their marriage perhaps. I sense a bit of a battle for the trousers, and perhaps Virginia's lapses into madness and the need for care the only chance for Leonard to truly take charge and exert an authoritative upper hand.

Or maybe this was an impetuous act on the part of a free-spirited and independent woman struggling under the yoke of marriage and convention...

Sighting an auction poster for Monks House...'an old-fashioned house standing in three quarters of an acre of land' and en route to take a closer look at Round House, Virginia sensibly keeps her enthusiasms in check and attempts to look critically and unfavourably on this 'unpretending house'. However both house and garden quickly wriggle their way into both hers and Leonard's affections 'after the fashion of a mongrel who wins your heart', and they must have had an anxious few days prior to buying it at auction.

I will never forget how sick with tension we were about buying this house and at about the same time of year too. It was two weeks before we could see inside as the owner, a widow giving up all hope of a sale, had gone away and taken the key with her. Two weeks of looking round and round the outside and we had bought it in our minds regardless of the problems (legion as it turned out, but right up our street for sorting). We would park the car over in the Methodist Chapel car park and view it from afar, praying that our offer would be accepted, sleepless nights and pots of tea at 3am dreaming of what life might be like if / when we lived here, and thinking of little else 24/7 but that it might all come to fruition.

Anyone who has been chasing the house of their dreams will know of the stress which Virginia mentions as they attended the auction for Monks House...

'In short, we decided walking home to buy if we could, & sell Round House, as we conjecture we can. Eight hundred we made our limit, which, according to Wycherley, gave us a good chance of possession. The sale was on Tuesday. I don't suppose many spaces of five minutes in the course of my life have been so close packed with sensation...I looked at every face, & in particular at every coat & skirt for signs of opulence, & was cheered to discover none....some of the substantial farmers might well have their rolls of notes stuffed inside their stockings...someone bid £300. "Not an offer" said the auctioneer, "a beginning."

When the hammer finally comes down at £700 in their favour little wonder that Virginia is 'purple in the cheeks' and Leonard is 'trembling like a reed.'

Now owned by the National Trust, Monks House is a little treasure to walk around. No teasels on chairs, just an unwritten agreement that of course you wouldn't dream of sitting on them, though it's mighty tempting...

And there are little glimpses of Bloomsbury beauty at every turn...

That shade of green ( Farrow & Ball Folly Green, near as, I reckon) must have been a favourite, reflected as it is in everything from the walls to the stove, and Angelica Garnett confirms as much many years later...

'Green was Virginia's colour; a green crystal pear stood always on the table in the sitting room, symbol of her personality.'

Yet the privations of a 1920's rural dwelling are evident too in Virginia's diary entry from that first objective viewing, the kitchen is 'distinctly bad', the rooms are small, there is no hot water, no bath, no facilities and no E.C... I assume that to be an Earth Closet.

Despite its description as a 'welcome country retreat from London', and yet with the eventual addition of a new kitchen and hot water and a bathroom some six years later, I still can't begin to imagine how perishing cold and uncomfortable Monks House may have been. Even on the warmest Summer's day the tiled floors would have been chill underfoot, and the low, dark beamed ceilings, (with which we too are familiar) would do little to lift Virginia's spirits when feeling low. Sacrilege though it may be ours are painted cream to give that feeling of lightness right above your head. And then there were the mice in the beds to contend with (we haven't had that problem yet) and broken windows wedged shut with toothbrushes (nor that) but we have been reduced to pumping bath water in from the cattle troughs when our spring supply leaked.

But Virginia frequently shares moments of utter joy there too...

Monday 31 May 1920
The first pure joy of the garden... wind enough outside, within sunny and sheltered & weeding all day to finish the beds ina  queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.' 

The garden, even so early in the season, was looking beautiful, and I only wish I had taken a notebook round and jotted down the names of the plants. No wonder it was Leonard's pride and joy, but luckily there are clues in the diary about the planting.. zinnias, nasturtiums, dahlias and irises, mock orange and gladioli, clarkia, calceolaria, larkspur, scabious and campanula all get a mention.

Watch this finely tilthed space...

Oh yes, and one more thing, absolutely anything goes in the lampshade department...

 

 

Gardenitis...

Happy Bank Holiday Monday to everyone in the UK... it's probably raining but we must talk gardening today.

So in this new scheme of things...life with no work... I have more time...right.

Well yes, very true, but where does it all go.

Never mind, I am getting used to it all and having reclaimed the Kitchen Aid and some baking through the Winter months, I have now turned my attentions to the Garden and growing things...

We have a lovely garden, almost an acre around the house in the corner of a field, but it reverts to field at the first opportunity, so over the years we have adopted a relaxed, laissez faire approach. This only after spending a fortune on the wrong plants and shrubs which then drowned in nettles, grass, and every other weed known to mankind, whilst sown seeds would come to naught because we just didn't have time to tend it all.

Then there would be another building project and Bookhound would have a digger for a week...

and the garden would look like an architectural dig for a year and the top soil ended up all over the place.  

So Bookhound now mows a path through the grass, whilst the daisies and wild geraniums proliferate alongside the wild flowers and the weeds, the little orchard looks after itself and we turn a blind eye to the rest saying it's good for butterflies.

Much of it will be looking like this any day now and we do love it ...

 But you can have too much of the same thing, so not all of it this year, oh no....

Forget vegetables for now, I am planning flowers for cutting, and since discovering Higgledy Gardens I am hoping for plenty. I had been totally enamoured with Ben Ranyard's blog... full of clear advice and smiles which is my sort of gardening because I want to enjoy this, not win a medal at Chelsea...

Either direct sow your Cosmos ‘Purity’ seeds direct into the soil after all threats  of frost have disappeared….or sow six weeks earlier in pots…in a greenhouse or on your windowsill. Best just not be in too much of a rush to get them started…one bit of frost and our Cosmos chums will keel over…and you will be all sad…guilty….and be in the shallows of  despair….well…maybe. I sow mine from April (undercover)…outside after 15th May…and this year I will be sowing the last batch on the 22nd June as an experiment. 

I just couldn't resist ordering some seeds...and then some more... and then Ben included some more for me to try, and now it's crazy here, seed trays and pots and propagators everywhere, and the Tinker and I are having a Morning Glory race to see whose seeds sprout first... he will be talking to his I just know it. But we also have Sunflowers, Calendula, Cosmos, Aster, Nigella, Cornflower, Corncockles, Scabiosa, Ammi Majus, Climbing Nasturtiums, Gypsophila... all flowers that will blend perfectly here...oh yes and Echinops and Eschscholzia and heaven knows what else. 

In the absence of a greenhouse (last one flew off to Plymouth one windy night, the one before that last seen off Land's End) it's still late to be sowing seed but it has been incredibly cold through May, even ground frost yesterday morning, so I doubt we would have gained much by sowing earlier. We'll probably still be picking flowers in November that's all, but I bought two pots of sweet peas in the market just to have something that looked like real plants, and which have yielded those forty spindly things, tops now pinched out, but all sweet pea advice gratefully received, I have always wanted to grow them.

Everything is a month behind. We are heading into June with all the apple trees still in full blossom and some not there yet...


The Tinker is busy pottering about in the garden that we created around Tinker's Cott whilst we are busy pottering around in the rest. Start simple and manageable I decided, bearing in mind two boisterous dogs and three cats, so two small beds dug in front of the summer house (which has had its annual clear out) before turning my spade to the bed in front of the veranda. Geraniums are our forte at this time of year and they look delightful, but at least ten foot of bed had been colonised by ground elder and the geraniums were losing the battle, next year it would be fifteen, soon we would lose the lot. Bookhound kept threatening to bring in a digger (it's a long bed) but while he was off campus last week the Tinker and I set to.

We had been to the garden centre to get a few bits and pieces and invested £13.99 in one of those ground-loosening grappling hook-like, twizzly tools on the end of a handle... have you seen them??

A Twist Cultivator, amazing things, how have we lived so long without one. The Tinker reckoned that, should the need arise, it could also double as half a Zimmer frame with added weaponry capability.

'I'll just try this on a bit of that ground elder,' said the Tinker, eighty-eight and a double pacemaker in situ...honestly what are they like.

There was no stopping us, three hours later we had cleared the lot and after a great deal more digging and sieving, along with some clever use of the left-over ends of the rafters from the recent roof-building, (thank you Bookhound who produced them from a secret stash in the corner of the wood shed) we now have our third manageable flower bed (approx 10ft x 4ft) ready for sowing and planting...

...and right outside the front door so immediate and grateful thanks from three cats too for such a finely tilthed litter tray in such close proximity.

But we have a cunning plan. There will be some mesh going over the top any minute now, hinged at the back so we can get to the bed for a while, and then the idea is that we will leave it there as support for the plants to grow through, because we will no doubt have some fearsome South Westerlies to contend with up the Tamar Valley before Summer is over ...what do you think...will it all work??

And of course I have yet to wage war on the slugs and snails.

So how are your gardens growing??

Have you planted...

What have you planted..

Anything else to recommend..

Shall we try a postal seed swap come the Autumn...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barney...

Some of you will know this already from Facebook, and my thanks for kind messages...we've said goodbye to our ageing Labrador Barney this week. Bought for the young Gamekeeper by the Tinker from a very local breeeder and given the Kennel Club name RobsMate Barney, just because we could and because everything that had gone before seemed so posh, and we weren't.

Heading for fifteen is a good age for a Labrador but it was the rightest moment in the grand scheme of things, having half-made the decision twice if not three times in the last year or so. We'd decide, get ourselves psyched up and then be confounded when his creaking joints miraculously un-creaked and he would look us in the eye, say 'Not likely,' and skip out of the kennel, bouncing round the field like a puppy.

We'll get him through the Winter and give him a lovely warm garden Summer we decided, but not another Winter. But in the end it was clear he was in a lot of pain, and trekking up to the woods with us out of faithfulness rather than pleasure, yet if we left him behind he howled until we came back and we could hear his gruff, high-low cuckoo bark (Barney's very own distress call) echoing around the valley.

It's the toughest thing about pets isn't it, this departing, and the closing of that chapter of your life spent with them and all that has happened in that time. For us, three children grown and flown. Barney was never a small dog, the huge paws gave it away even as a puppy and he would emerge from his kennel like a jump jet, bouncing three feet off the ground on the spot and greeting you with the same unbridled joy every single time. But for all that he was a gentle dog, he really let the canine side down because he adored cats, they weren't for chasing they were for licking; Rocky would take any amount of it and Magnus too. And he was a scamp too, unguarded rubbish bins were always for emptying and scattering around the garden.

We gave him a fine last day on Thursday, last walk to the woods, last Bonio, last hugs, before our lovely vet came to us at home and wafted him off on his peaceful journey in a corner of the garden that Barney loved whilst cradled in Bookhound's arms.

I took Nell up to the woods, now a carpet of bluebells, whilst it was in progress. Up the green lane, through a vale of sniffly tears and it occurred to me how often we have walked that thinking path, and what emotions must have been taken up and scattered there through history.

Holloways have so many uses.

To our surprise the vet recommended that we let Nell see Barney before we buried him, so we did and it was quite extraordinary. They have had a lovely rapport this last year, he endlessly tolerant of her playfulness and puppy ways, she looking up to his seniority in the pack (it was always Barney who initiated the call for someone to go out and feed them at 5pm) and always keeping an eye out and waiting for him to catch up, the slowest ship in the convoy on any walk.

Nell rushed across to Barney, him looking for all the world as if he was asleep in the sun, and did her usual rolling-around-look-at-me-Barney-aren't-I-gorgeous routine before realising that something was different, eventually just sitting by him quietly and calmly, looking at him and at us. How normal it all felt and how odd that we invest dogs with so many human emotions and characteristics, yet feel we should spare them that moment to understand and say goodbye in whatever way dogs do it, who can know.

We tucked him up and had a little ceremony, and as luck would have it the Tinker and I had lifted all the daffodils ready to plant elsewhere, so bless him, Barney will be pushing up a grand display over in woodshed corner come the Spring.

 

 

The Children's Nurse - The True Story of a Great Ormond Street Nurse ~ Susan Macqueen

Yes, it's time to drag out the 1976 funny-hat-blue-belt photo again (fourth year of training, finals taken, results awaited) and tag another post under The Sufferings of Student Nurse collection, and If I'd known then what I know now I think I would have been rightly terrified at the mere thought of my student nurse ward allocation to Cohen CD, Infectious and Skin Diseases at Great Ormond Street, on March 10th 1974. My last ward before heading off to secondment at the London Hospital for the SRN part of the training that combined RSCN (Registered Sick Children's Nurse) with it.

I know the exact dates because (this being me) I still have my Pink Book with all my ward experience logged and signed. It was on Cohen CD that I worked under the tutelage and eagle eye of Sister Macqueen, (the author of The Children's Nurse - The True Story of a Great Ormond Street Nurse) for the next twelve weeks. Tucked in my Pink Book I have even discovered a scrap of paper with some of the Cohen patient names and diagnoses, obviously an attempt to drill it into my head in readiness for a ward round, and reading it now I am even more retrospectively terrified at how my twenty-year old self gaily dealt with such things as tubercular, e coli and meningococcal meningitis and herpes encephalitis amongst other things, and with never a thought that somehow I might catch something. And then the young teenager with epidermolysis bullosa, a debilitating conditon where the skin blisters and falls off at the merest touch... her distress was not surprisingly manifest in tantrums and teenage angst, and the daily bath sheer, unmitigating torture for all concerned.

But imagine my delight when I heard news that Sister Macqueen, known to us then as Sue ( though never to her face of course, heavens the earth would have opened up and swallowed us) had written a book (with the help of a ghost writer) about life as a nurse at Great Ormond Street. Being a completist with regard to my shelf of books about G.O.S I ordered a copy there and then, but this being me and wanting it yesterday, I downloaded the Kindle version too.

Sue Susan Sister Macqueen (old habits etc) had actually completed her initial nurse training at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge where she first encountered the GOS nurses out on adult secondment as part of their combined adult and children's nursing course...

'... their GOSH uniforms marking them apart from everyone else...the pink nurses were renowned for their attention to detail, not only in the way they looked, but in the way they cared for their patients..'

It was all enough to convince Susan (OK, I'm over it now, I'm sixty this year after all) that she wanted to do her post-registration paediatric training at GOS and that is where she headed at the earliest opportunity. With her nerves in shreds (no...I can't imagine this, she was a formidable ward sister) Susan walked onto 1A, the ward that would put the fear of god up most of us bright young things, Cardiac. 

It is an indication of the terror that Susan, though already a qualified nurse, felt out of her depth amid the noisy hubbub that was an old GOS ward. The wards in our day, now almost obsolete, were a rare mix of medical and nursing care of the highest standard to the backdrop of the laughter and shrieks of children playing and riding tricycles up and down the corridor, and with the radio singing along in the background.

Do you remember that song Lullaby of Broadway, a hit again in 1976. Wiz and I were both staff nurses on the same ward, 2DE (metabolic diseases and burns) and as soon as we heard that song on the ward radio we'd all head for the corridor for the tap dancing bit...no matter what you were holding...baby... potty... syringe. 

Sister Macqueen might have had a bit of a conniption and of course that would not have been possible on Cohen where she became sister in 1972, the year that I arrived at Great Ormond Street to start my training. Cohen was all about barrier nursing... masks, gloves, gowns and hand-scrubbing a way of life, and your hands were even more sore than usual. Susan recounts many tales of life on the ward, the small details all very familiar to anyone who worked at GOS during that era...Z-beds in the waiting room...'specials' providing one-to-one nursing care...the old Engstrom ventilators...

Amongst all my own memories of Cohen ward several stand out....

The day that I was supervising a nurse more junior than I was, though she was considerably more confident, and made that very plain indeed. She was getting her first taste of caring for a baby in an incubator and we had run through what she needed to do, it was only changing a nappy and I had said I'll join you in a minute and probably nipped off to do some observations or something. Imagine my horror when I returned to find that she had lifted the lid of the incubator and put it on the floor (germs...OMG) in order to handle the baby. When I pointed out that this wasn't what we did her reply was priceless...

'Dont be ridiculous, you don't expect me to be able to do anything through those stupid holes in the side do you?'

I think I was more terrified that Sister Macqueen would come around the corner and see this debacle in progress, and I often wondered quite how long it was before Confident Student was cut down to size...she would have been, no question.

'I tried to be firm but fair with the nurses and students who worked under me...I demanded a lot from them. If my nurses worked hard, I made sure I praised them and made them feel at ease...'

Conversely, step out of line or slacken off and you would be told in no uncertain terms. No risks can be taken in the hospital environment full-stop, but on Cohen ward any short-cuts could lead to further infection for a child already compromised, or to a nurse catching a serious illness. We learned the form very swiftly indeed.

Susan Macqueen put all that experience of infection control on Cohen to good use, eventually becoming the hospital's leading expert on the subject, and responsible for ongoing excellent outcomes in the management of hospital-acquired infections in children, before also working at the Department of Health, all of which is charted in the book. In that case I now feel quite reassured by the fact that it was Sister Macqueen who examined me on the first of five practical assessments completed during our training. My Aseptic Technique under her watchful eye (2nd April 1974) must have been up to snuff because I passed and I have her signature to prove it (click on this picture, it should enlarge) and I would still use it now and did, even on the cat's stitches.

Susan describes herself as a firm but fair ward sister and interestingly, before I had even opened the book I was pondering my experience of working with her and, in my mind, had used the exact same words. She talks in some detail about that role and I found it fascinating to hear about it from the other side, ward sisters were slightly terrifying goddesses in our eyes, little did we even imagine they had a social life...or a home...or a boyfriend. Surely they slept, immaculately uniformed and poised in a cupboard on the ward before jumping out and apparating right next to you the very same second that you'd decided to cut that corner, or touch that door with your hand, or...or... And who knew about the love-hate ongoing battle of words and sparring with Dr Marshall, the Australian ward Consultant, who was also the physician for the Chelsea football team.

I have another lasting memory of Cohen too...

It was night duty and the ward desk had a line of visibility through to the vase of flowers in the front hall of the hospital. There were always white flowers in the arrangement, and one would be collected by a nurse when a child had died to be placed in the child's crossed hands when they were laid out. On one particular night I saw Wiz, my flatmate come down to that vase not once but three times, it's a salutory reminder of what we were all dealing with at the age of twenty, though thankfully with the support of each other and sisters like Susan Macqueen to guide us through it all.

A lovely book which it has given me much pleasure to read, though I am aware this may also be because the old alma mater is so close to my heart. But if you are enjoying the current run of nursing and midwifery memoirs then certainly add this one to the list.

 

 

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Beating the Bounds ~ Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink....

Edward Thomas knew much of holloways and Robert Macfarlane quotes this poem in his latest book Holloway, produced with fellow writer Dan Richards and artist Stanley Donwood. The book is a slim but rich and intense fusion of words, observations and drawings compiled after the three returned to the holloway that Robert Macfarlane had explored with Roger Deakin in 2005. That excursion is recounted in The Wild Places...

'There is wildness everywhere,' Roger had written once, 'if we only stop in our tracks and look around us.' To him, the present-day and the close-at-hand were as astonishing as the long-gone and the far-afield. He was an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.'

The holloway (known in Devon as a green lane) just a few yards from our front gate, has become a special place to us in the nineteen years that we have lived in this house, and as I Beat the Bounds with renewed enthusiasm I am getting to know every inch. I spot every new heap of badger or rabbit digging, each newly broken branch, each recently shifted stone.

It now occurs to me that this of course is the rabbit's own 'holloway'. 

Our green lane is little known or used by anyone else; perhaps a few horse-riders, the man from the RSPB who comes to do an annual bird count, and may be just very occasionally some Sunday bikers who, having found it on the map, have to ride it perhaps on the Climbing Everest principle, because it is there. It occurred to me as I walked up with Nell the other day that it is largely us and our footfall that are now wearing and keeping the path patent and passable.

 
'They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddeness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair. they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to other old paths & tracks in the landscape - ways that still connect place to place and person to person.'

According to Robert Macfarlane none of these paths are younger than 300 years old, in which case maybe it's our turn in history to know and connect with this one, and we never fail to wonder about that history as we walk.

Who may have built the stone sides and what labour it must have involved...

...and who may have used it, and how.

And we think about odd things too... what if a horse and cart were coming down as one was going up, well then what... that debate kept us going the full length of the holloway one day.

Can you drive a horse and cart backwards in a confined space...

Would this little place, about half-way up, with some extra width have made a passing place...

I'd buy a seat and make it a Sitting Place  

And a special treat, some words especially for you all from Robert Macfarlane, and a request....

 

"I have come to realise, in the eight years since I first wrote about holloways, that many people share my fascination with these sunken lanes, which have been harrowed down into the landscape by the passage of feet and rainwater (and sometimes 4x4s...). People have sent me photographs of the holloways they know, the paintings and sketches they have made of them, maps with their locations indicated, or the stories, memories and folklore they associate with them. Something about the idea of a path trodden by unknown predecessors, something about the everyday pleasure of walking and following these lanes, and something more mysterious about the symbolic power of the holloway as an image (tunnel, rabbit-hole, vortex, portal to the underworld), seems to draw the imagination of many. 

Last year, the artist Stanley Donwood, the writer Dan Richards, the letter-press printer Richard Lawrence and I self-published a small book about holloways from first principles. The first principle being a lump of lead. That lump of lead was melted to cast fresh type, which was used to set the text, which was then hand-printed onto soft thick Somerset wove paper pages, which were then ordered, stitched and bound, to make an ISBN-less book in an edition of 277. A year on, Faber and Faber have published a hardback version of that book, *Holloway*. They have also set up a site where people can post their own images of holloways and sunken paths. So - if there is a holloway you know or have known, it would be wonderful if you considered adding it to the gallery. The first few have begun to appear. I have this notion that, if the gallery gathers enough images, we might tag each of them to their location on a map, and in this way create a holloway cartography. The holloways don't need to be English or British, though, or especially old or deep. There's one from Normandy already up there. And perhaps the youngest holloways are barely a few inches in depth; perhaps holloways run through cities rather than only through the countryside. 

The site is here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/holloway/ I'm told you have to be a member of flickr to be able to post; I'm also told that if you're not, it's easy to join. But I know little about the internet and its ways. If flickr defeats you, as it has defeated me, you can always send your photos to johng@faber.co.uk, with a quick note saying they're for the holloway gallery, and with any info about location, photographer and such like for a caption. Thank you!"

My photos are in already so please do send yours too, and now scroll down where Magnus awaits with gifts.

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Beating the Bounds ~ Rogationtide & Rammalation Biscuits

Prize Draw copies of Holloway by Robert Macfarlane

Hello chums, Magnus here.

Not a lot to report to be honest, I'm plum tuckered out keeping the Tinker stocked up with fresh rabbit. I leave him half a one, carefully dissected, outside his front door every morning because I can never resist having a little nibble first, but it's all demanding and exhausting work and between you and me they all seem less than grateful.

Now as regards this holloway, well I don't go up there much but of course you-know-who is out there every five minutes flaunting those ridiculous ears...

And Faber are kindly offering FIVE copies of Holloway by Rob, Stan and Dan (we're good mates, the chaps know a decent cat when they see one)  so names in comments as usual and I will draw the winning numbers in about five rabbits' time.

 

 

Thinking about Oklahoma...

...and sending good wishes and warm thoughts to anyone affected by this devastating tragedy.

I've just been watching the news, and the massive tornado cutting a swath through those communities, and trying to imagine 200mph winds and how terrifying that must have been. I'm hoping America have the U.K. equivalent of Shelterbox and the means for people who have lost everything to create at least a temporary home very quickly.

And then the most heart-warming moment of the woman being interviewed on Sky News at the site of her flattened home, and grieving the loss of her dog, at which point out crawled the missing dog from underneath the debris, almost right next to her and into her arms.

Take care America, as always at moments like this, we are thinking of you.

 

 

 

Grace and Mary ~ Melvyn Bragg

I wonder if anyone else heard Melvyn Bragg on the radio recently, taking no prisoners as he urged the BBC to up its game with Arts programming in the face of increasingly high-standard competition from Sky and Channel Four. He was forthright and very direct ( thank heavens we still have people who can be, and broadcasters who will air such ascerbic criticism of themselves...I love the BBC for it) about programmes shifting from BBC One to the remoter outpost of BBC Four, as well as reducing in frequency, and as far as I can tell only seem to 'star' Alan Yentob these days. It would be nice to see a few new presenting faces. Sky Arts have snapped up super model Lily Cole who has a Cambridge double first in Art History as well as modelling for Alexander McQueen, Auntie would do well to take heed.

Anyway thus was Melvyn perfectly positioned upon my radar when his latest novel Grace and Mary arrived. I can't proclaim much success with his previous novels, and given the focus of this one on ageing and dementia, I wasn't hopeful that Melvyn and I were about to become friends, but on this occasion some disparate planets aligned favourably.

I watched the recent six part series The Village (a BBC success in my book, though not a universal one I gather) because it ties in wonderfully with some of my Beating the Bounds research in connection with our village war memorial. Two lads from the farm that surrounds us here died in the Great War and are named on the memorial. Having harboured all manner of imaginings about how that loss may have impacted on the family, and getting quite caught up in the emotion of thinking about them walking these fields, and what their last visions of home may have been as they lay dying in the trenches (maybe that view from our window even) I decided to find out more. I found out plenty about the family and it has all been a real revelation (which I am still writing up for a future post) but the BBC series gave me some context (fictional or otherwise) for how life may have been lived here at the time.

Grace and Mary, though set in the present day, is also interwoven with a narrative of village life through the Great War. John is visiting Mary, his elderly mother, in a nursing home..

'The mother and son meet mostly in the middle of the last century. After the war. Her disintegrating memory can still take her there... Now she is in her tenth decade, he has just gone seventy, and slowly the roles are reversing... they can still draw warmth from the embers of those days...'

John is treading a gentle path through the miasma of his mother's vascular dementia...

'It was as if it had been sent up from the deep to punish the audacity of the human race in so steadily and cleverly increasing its life span...this creeping undergrowth which strangled the roots of thought.'

Convinced he can still reach the mother he knows, John recreates the story of Grace, Mary's mother. In re-telling the story of Grace's life, and Mary's, and this mother she hardly knew, John hopes to rebuild memory for her, clinging valiantly to the glimmers and brief improvements he hopes this brings to Mary's condition. Except as we know, there is little that can be done to reverse the relentless progress of vascular dementia as it wreaks its trail of destruction...

'...broken and frayed, silted up, chokingly webbed in the intricate threads of ageing...'

Judging by many of my previous reading encounters with this subject, and for reasons various, I expected to find this all thoroughly depressing and far too painful to read. When someone you love has suffered this it can make for hard-earned reading pleasure best avoided. I felt sure I would be waving the white flag of surrender by page fifty, but Melvyn Bragg has been through this too, with his own mother, and his sensitivity to his subject and the depths of love and endless patience, and soothing and caring that John offered his mother won me over, as did the interwoven narrative of Grace. 

Writer's take many routes with the subject of dementia and this may be one of the few that has worked for me. I'm a nurse for goodness' sake, I should be able to cope with it, and in real-life I can, but on the fictional page I am highly and subjectively censorious. I need to read of endless kindness being offered to anyone suffering from dementia and the minute an author strays from the path of compassion I'm afraid I just get too upset, invoke reader's prerogative, close the book and move on.

In Mary's world, as constructed by Melvyn Bragg, and in the ideal world that we would hope all dementia sufferers would be cared for, the nurses are endlessly patient, understanding that there will be 'differences of days' and these must be accommodated. When Mary spits her tablets back at them, or becomes abusive, they leave her time to regroup before trying again. But they do try again and with kindness, and they coax the food into her, and sips of drink from the spouted cup, and doubtless those drinks are within reach just in case Mary can manage it herself, and her personal care is dignified and thorough.

It is all sad and poignant, not sentimental... ultimately strangely heartening and giving me the courage to read on.

Strong-willed, single-minded and very determined, Grace's resilience will also be tested to the limits as she mourns the loss of her own mother who died shortly after her birth. It is well-recognised that childhood loss, even of an unknown parent will need to be grieved many times over and Grace is no exception. Finding her way in the world she eventually finds work as a maid in a local home for the wounded soldiers of the Great War.

You can perhaps now see how my walking, watching and reading planets aligned... the lads from the farm and The Village (with a lead character called Grace, brilliantly portrayed by Maxine Peak) all segueing perfectly into this book.

There is a moment in Grace and Mary when Grace and her employer are discussing fiction...

'Agnes enjoyed talking about the characters - were they believable? That was the crucial thing, she said. if you didn't believe in a character how could you possibly go on? And did the writers cheat with the plots?'

No cheating with plot that I noticed and I believed in every one of the characters, even the shadowy and deceitful Alan who Grace falls in love with in the convalescent home, and his embarrassed and evasive parents who Grace finally plucks up the courage to visit when it becomes clear ... no I couldn't possibly spoil it.

But talking of the word, do you remember the days of 'convalescence'??

Days of rest and recovery and recuperation from illness that would set you up properly for life again.

Now it seems you are just so many days post-op/post-viral/ post-chemo until you are well enough to go shopping again. 

Themes of memory and loss, recollection and reconnection surround an underlying sense of belief ... in faith, in self, in the soul and in others, and in human nature to prevail for the greater good, as Melvyn Bragg weaves together three generations of a family in Grace and Mary to create a novel that I couldn't put down, and that I knew had been quietly and profoundly moving as I turned the final page.

 

 

Just to say...

Some of you may recall, as part of the Edward Thomas project on here a couple of years ago, a lovely post that included some pictures of a beautiful, hand-illustrated and bound edition of Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop, done by ninety-year old Harold Page, Fran H-B's father.

Fran has been a daily visitor here for years, comments regularly, and we meet up occasionally, and indeed Team Edward Thomas saw that work for real as Fran brought it with her when we took tea with author Matthew Hollis as part of the project.

On arriving in Sussex for a few days walking the South Downs with Fran last Monday, before I headed into London, she broke the news that Harold, now ninety-two, had been taken into hospital the day before. All was stable and family support was in place, and Fran had very much wanted my visit to go ahead.

We talked a great deal about her Dad during my stay, and I was almost brought to tears by the sight of the most beautiful book, hand-written and bound by Harold which displayed some of his work as a gift for members of the family. As an artist, with architect's training, Harold had quickly excelled at the art of calligraphy which he took up as a hobby in his seventies, rapidly gathering in diplomas which should have taken many years to achieve.

I had never met Harold, but I learned from Fran that he was a quiet, gentle unassuming man, immensely modest about his talent and utterly thrilled when he saw that blog post and imagined others seeing and enjoying his work.

It was with much sadness that I received Fran's e mail to say that Harold had died suddenly but peacefully on Friday afternoon, and I just wanted to send Fran, her Mum and her family, our love and thoughts and to wish them gentle days ahead. 

Harold Page has left the most incredible legacy in his art work and we can but hope for an exhibition, or even a book eventually, I can promise you it would something to behold.

 

Home...

I'm home and with my boots planted firmly in Devon for the forseeable future, and with my head teeming with so much that I have seen in just those few days away.... aren't A Few Days Away such a good invention. 

The Fiction Uncovered evening was predictably amazing. It was a treat to meet up with my fellow judges again, and also the Fiction Uncovered team who have worked really hard to make this initiative work, and we all have everything crossed for their next round of Arts Council funding, and so good to finally meet and talk with all the authors after months of getting to know their books. Chair of judges Louise Doughty gave a brilliant speech, introducing each author's book before presenting them with a beautiful hand-bound edition in a slip-case,along with a Kobo e reader and six months membership of the very atmospheric and exclusive club where the event was being held. So exclusive there is no sign on the door and the building so Ancient London you need crampons and ropes to cross the wonky floors and get up the stairs. We suggested, rather tongue in cheek, that this membership 'gift' be extended to the judges in future, so whilst we may not benefit those ahead of us just might... maybe. I was separated from my camera by about ten foot of floor and about a hundred people, so no pictures from me though there was an official photographer so I expect some will emerge, but it was good to chat to lots of people about books and reading and this.

I still genuinely nurse very modest notions of the impact or the reach of dovegreyreader as I sit writing it tucked away here in Devon, and for me that's best because I still find myself amazed and slightly over-awed when people spell it out to me... lots of lovely people said very nice things, and in turn I spent a lot of time saying how much it depended and thrived on all of you too, so please take a minute to pat yourselves on the back... just don't put your neck out doing it or anything.

I couldn't resist heading out round the corner to look at Foyle's window ...

... which will have a display of the books for the next two weeks, and how good they those books looked, what breadth and depth there is to our choices, and how proud I felt to have been part of it all. That hard reading work coming to fruition and carrying on with it through the worst winter I have had for plagues and shocks and life-changes since...since... oh probably since the last time.

And alright, so I did ask someone if they would mind leaning slightly further long the window so I could get this shot...

and then asking them to move back again so I could get this one...

Thank you whoever you were.

But en route to London I had spent a few days walking the South Downs with Fran H-B. We gave ourselves a Ravilious Day and a Bloomsbury Day and my sincere thanks to Fran, a Sussex native, for giving me such a wonderful taste of the joys that are to behold in this amazing landscape.

The weather didn't stop us checking out the Long Man of Wilmington...

before heading up and over the top of his head for the heart-soaring Ravilious views.

The Cuckmere Valley, Beachy Head, the Seven Sisters followed, and the next much sunnier day Berwick Church, Monk's House (home of Virginia Woolf) and Charleston. More soon when I have thought it all through and have the dovegreyreader perspective on it all. 

Meanwhile, should I ever think about getting even a little bit above myself, there is no greater leveller than coming back to the realities of home.

There is no more cold and desolate place than Paddington Station at 10.15 pm.

The waiting rooms are closed except for the glowing warmth of the First Class lounge, forbidden territory for us mere mortals, and there is nowhere to sit on the platform bar the ledge on the war memorial while you wait for the train crew to let you board. Realising I hadn't really eaten all day I could wait no longer so perched and ate my M&S chicken salad in the hope it wasn't deemed too irreverent..

The Night Riviera Sleeper cradle-rocked me back to Devon in that sort of almost-sleep that isn't quite, and where Bookhound was miraculously waiting for me at 5.30am. I had two loads of washing done and out on the line by 8.00am.. so as we were etc but refreshed and with lots to tell you.

 

It's @FictionUncovered Day

So, if all goes according to plan, this evening I will be in London celebrating with the Fiction Uncovered 2013 authors and their books and guests various.  

My thanks to chair of judges Louise Doughty and fellow judges Sandeep Mahal and Courttia Newland who have made the whole process such a pleasure, and to the team at Fiction Uncovered for inviting me to do this and for being so helpful and patient (Help... I've lost all the e book versions, can you resend them) and so accommodating when I was confined to my kitchen table and Skype for some of the meetings... and had to watch them all eating Sandy's homemade samosas at the other end. 

I think we have come up with a great and varied selection of reading, and I have personally enjoyed each and every one of these books so I hope many of you will enjoy them too...

The Fiction Uncovered 2013 selection is

Lucy Caldwell - All the Beggars Riding

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She read English at Queens' College, Cambridge and is a graduate of Goldsmith's MA in Creative & Life Writing. She is the author of novels Where They Were Missed (2006) and The Meeting Point (2011), which featured on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime and was awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her stage plays, Leaves, Guardians, and Notes to Future Self, and radio dramas, Girl From Mars, Avenues of Eternal Peace, Witch Week, have won awards including the George Devine Award and the Imison Award. In 2011 she was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for her body of work to date.

“The cul-de-sac that is an affair with a married man…loved precisely because he is the sort who won’t leave his wife and children for fear of hurting them. Patrick’s death exposes the fabric of this fragile and tangled web, offering a jagged, searing and intense perspective on love, loss, the chaos of memory and so much more. Grief is what you feel, mourning is what you do, and in this insightful and memorable novel Lucy Caldwell displays a real understanding of that as she explores the lives and the fall-out for the children.” Lynne Hatwell 

Anthony Cartwright - How I Killed Margaret Thatcher

Anthony Cartwright was born in Dudley in 1973. He is the author of two previous novels, The Afterglow and Heartland. His books have been shortlisted for several established literary prizes. He worked as an English teacher in East London for a number of years and is currently a school writer-in-residence as part of the First Story project. He lives in North London with his wife and son.

“While some books capture the spirit of a specific time and place, others paint a broad canvas which speaks of timelessness and exact a relevance all of their own. Cartwright manages both in this masterful exploration that has the quiet power of a pebble thrown into a stream, creating ever increasing circles; a boy, a family, a community, a country; to explain not only what happened in ‘80s England, but how we reached the here and now. An urgently necessary work.”  Courttia Newland

Niven Govinden - Black Bread White Beer

Niven Govinden is author of novels We Are The New Romantics, Graffiti My Soul, and Black Bread White Beer. His stories have appeared in Five Dials, Time Out, Pen Pusher, First City, BUTT, and on Radio 3. He has been shortlisted for the 2010 Bristol Prize and longlisted for the 2013 DSC Prize.

“A couple’s relationship exposed through the excruciating grief of an early miscarriage, and Niven Govinden’s novel explores every painful corner of this less-written about and much-misunderstood subject. Amal and Claud struggle to make sense of what has happened to them against a background of assumptions, high expectations and social pressures. This is a fluent, involving and beautifully written novel that takes the reader’s sympathies and emotions to the quietest, often most unrecognised limits of human pain.” Lynne Hatwell

Nikita Lalwani - The Village

Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff. Her first novel, Gifted, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Desmond Elliot Prize for New Fiction. Nikita Lalwani was shortlisted for the 2008 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. She lives in London.

“In The Village, Nikita Lalwani goes to a world few readers will have heard about, a model prison in India, set up as a social experiment, where people who have committed murder live in a self-sustaining community.  Ray Bhullar is part of a documentary team from the UK, living in the village for two months - but she soon discovers that issues of guilt and culpability are far more complex than first appears.  Lalwani has a rare gift for getting inside character; you believe equally in the team from media London and a poverty stricken woman who has murdered her husband, in a tough, engaging and often funny read where all your preconceptions will be overturned and no-one is quite how they seem.” Louise Doughty

Nell Leyshon - The Colour of Milk

Nell Leyshon's first novel, Black Dirt, was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth prize. Her plays include Comfort me with Apples, which won an Evening Standard Award, and Bedlam, which was the first play written by a woman for Shakespeare's Globe. She writes for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and won the Richard Imison Award for her first radio play. Nell was born in Glastonbury and lives in Dorset.

“Set in 1830, we follow the personal journal of a fourteen-year-old farm girl with hair the ‘colour of milk’. Mary is the youngest of four daughters who has a strong spirit and desire to learn how to read and write. This book follows the growing relationship between Mary and the local vicar where she is sent to live to care for his invalid wife and to serve as a domestic servant and where she also begins to learn. She sets out her story in her own unique, halting prose, telling the truth in her brutal surroundings. Imaginatively conceived, Nell Leyshon has perfectly captured characters of its time and beautiful prose filled with truth, hope and anticipation that makes this novel a pure joy to read.”  Sandeep Mahal 

James Meek - The Heart Broke In

James Meek was born in London in 1962 and grew up in Dundee. His novel The People's Act of Love (2005) won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the SAC Book of the Year Award, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and has been published in more than thirty countries. His latest novel The Heart Broke In (2012) was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award 2012 and his novel We Are Now Beginning our Descent (2008) won the Prince Maurice Prize. He is the author of two other novels and two collections of short stories. His journalism has won a number of British and international awards. He lives in London. 

“James Meek is one of our best novelists and surely the nearest thing the UK has to a John Irving; his fat, compulsive, brilliant books have wide ranging narratives that cover world issues as well as the stories at the centre of the human heart.  Ritchie Shepherd is a television producer with a dark secret; his sister Bec an idealistic scientist with a troubled love life.  As both of them struggle to make sense of their father's death at the hands of the IRA and their own complex lives, Ritchie is forced to betray his sister to the tabloid press lest his own secrets be revealed.  Few novelists writing today have such an acute ear for the nuances of family life and relationships - but Meek never forgets to set his human stories in a social context, making him a supreme contemporary satirist as well storyteller.” Louise Doughty

Amy Sackville - Orkney

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her first novel was The Still Point.  

 “A truly talented writer, Amy Sackville has finely constructed a beautiful, mystical novel of love, obsession and loss. Set on a remote Orkney island, Richard, a sixty-year-old English professor is captivated by his lovely young bride. The story unfolds slowly, beginning with excitement and the allure of romance, but the mood changes into something darker. The atmosphere is intense and the change dramatic, as Richard’s love grows obsessive. Sackville’s skill is in her poetic, lyrical writing, full of rich and emotive feelings, the ebb and flow of the waves and descriptions of the beauty, colours and wildness of the islands. An impressive novel.”  Sandeep Mahal

Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

Rupert Thomson was born in Eastbourne, and educated at Christ’s Hospital School and Cambridge University, where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. He is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, including The Insult, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and The Book of Revelation, which was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos. In 2010 he published a memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop, which won the Writers’ Guild Non Fiction Book of the Year. His new novel, Secrecy, was inspired by the life and work of the eccentric Sicilian wax artist, Gaetano Giulio Zumbo. Rupert Thomson has recently moved back to London.  

“A splendorous, dark examination of the artist's mind set in a politically tumultuous Florence where shadowed streets and alleys mask cruelty and beauty in equal measure.  Secrecy, like one of Zummo's visionary creations, is a twisted hybrid of fantastical reality, stark and terrifying, that compels you to acknowledge its existence. Daringly bold and decadent, as only Thompson can.” Courttia Newland

This and that...

Where on earth do the weeks go when you are happy and content??

I don't ever remember time flying by quite this fast before. It's Monday and then the next thing I know it's Sunday again, and the Fiction Uncovered announcement seemed weeks and weeks away when I booked my train tickets for London, and now it is upon us this coming Thursday.

But whilst it flies, nicest of all is the whole notion of having time to do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it, and yesterday that involved much hovering around NASA TV watching the hastily planned space walk to repair a faulty pump that was leaking ammonia outside on the International Space Station. I find it hard to believe that they are working out there on something that is travelling at 75,000 miles an hour or so, but all is good, I shouted instructions and the lads got the gist, got the new pump round the right way on the P6 truss (imagine getting it back to front and having to unpick it) and all is working fine so mission accomplished. Cdr Chris Hadfield, who has done much to enlighten and inform many of us who have been following his daily pictures of earth from space, returns to earth this week and I am not sure what I am going to do without his daily pictures. But here's to a safe journey, and let's hope the queue at passport control isn't overly long and that they can get the duty free past customs. 

And let's hope the weather for re-entry is better than this; the storm that took the blossom off our apple trees earlier this week heading away from us to Ireland, but see too how the clouds sit perfectly over the English mainland clearly outlining its shape. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

Talking of space, I am going to be on the dark side of the moon in terms of internet and computer access this week as I will be on my travels towards London from Monday onwards, so dovegreyreader will be having a little rest. I have more great reads ready to share but I want to be around to chat in comments with you all... and thank you so much for the Life After Life discussions. I am inspired enough to be taking a new view on Kate Atkinson's writing, and she is another author I plan a Start to Finish read with, so I will taking Behind the Scenes at the Museum for my travel reading this week.

And in the wake of The Great British Sewing Bee post and all your comments, I have sourced a nice skirt pattern (amongst others) from Sew Essentials, flicking through the virtual catalogues I discovered new-to-me Kwik Sew patterns, so the task will be commencing on my return.

In the early hours of Thursday morning I can announce the Fiction Uncovered selection so look out for a blog post then. I will be heading for the celebrations with the authors and guests various that evening before heading home on the sleeper train. I have booked a cupboard cabin on the Night Riviera, about which I am stupidly excited. 

In the meantime feast your eyes on this fabulous colour video footage of London in 1927, and then try and stop yourself wanting to read Mrs Dalloway once it has finished. Of course if you hate Mrs Dalloway you won't have that problem, but I have started it again already.

"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.” 

The Great British Sewing Bee.

I'm wondering if any of you here in the UK watched The Great British Sewing Bee??

This the recent series where amateur sewers took on challenges as they competed to be named Britain's best home sewer. Ann was a worthy winner but I'll admit I wasn't quite sure how the series would work.

Might it be like watching paint dry...

Can you make sewing as interesting as baking on TV...

Can you introduce some stress and meltdown to add to the viewer's interest...

More to the point could Claudia Winkleman, and her canopy of a fringe, carry it off.

But no matter, I love Claudia, she's a breath of fresh air and clearly not a seamstress herself so brought her usual self-effacing wit and humour to the proceedings, whilst judges Patrick Grant (Savile Row tailor) and May Martin (W.I.) cast a critical eye over the resulting garments. I'd be quaking in my boots if the pair of them turned anything I had made inside-out, so when I get back to it I might impose the discipline of a few French seams on myself rather than let the washing machine fray the raw edges into submission.

I was quickly engrossed and ultimately I think Claudia's fringe might have been the only slightly annoying accessory to the whole series. Was I alone I wondered... half hoping that Patrick would pick up the Fiskars and tailor it just a little...

'Well Claudia...the aim is for a neat and tailored look so we must finish your edges properly.'

The stress was readily induced by giving contestants about ten minutes to make a ballgown. In fact that task was allocated about seven hours, ( I would still have needed a long week at minimum) and it was fascinating to watch the different approaches. Those who spent half the time prepping, tacking and making toiles ( a mock-up in cotton fabric) before the scissors came within a mile of the fabric, versus those who leapt right in and guessed, and the subsequent triumphs and disasters. Those who were calm under pressure, those who crumpled into a heap of tears, and they were hardly in a situation where, if it went wrong, they could shove it in a bag and turn it into cushion covers in five years time. I could feel myself wilting inwardly in spirit as someone unpicked a back-to-front something (oh, the times...) 

I have no idea about the cumulative effect on the nation, or sewing machine sales, but I do know that every Wednesday morning all I wanted to do was get out a paper pattern, smooth out the fabric for cutting and fire up the Bernina. All I would need in that case was...well a paper pattern and some fabric. I fancied making a flippy summer skirt or two, home-made Boden-style, and how easy that would have been years ago, but how impossible it seems to be these days. 

Where to buy paper patterns is the first hurdle. Online, yes, a possibility I discover, but that doesn't feel right at all. I have to go and stand in the shop at the sloping shelf, and leaf my way through the dog-eared corners of the enormous Simplicity, Butterick and McCalls catalogues, and keep an eye on that woman over there who is hogging the Vogue. Then of course I must brave the woman behind the counter with her glasses on a gold cord, and the 'This CANNOT be exchanged' stamp.

Certainly there is nowhere within a reasonable distance from here now, though I had felt sure (wrongly) that John Lewis in Exeter would have stolen a march on all this and stocked up with a little pattern department, and with dress-making fabrics too, so that was a wasted trip. And then dressmaking fabric seems obsolete too, acres of furnishing fabrics but who wants to go out looking like a Parker Knoll armchair. The whole industry seems to have wound down into a sad and sorry decline here in the West Country at least, and may need to crank up again if this series carries on.

But no matter, this is me after all, I have never thrown a paper pattern away, there'd be something in the loft. When I got the box down I realised that I get it from my Mum because she didn't seem to have thrown a paper pattern away either, and I had inherited them.

Just browsing the box was like a journey through a history of my clothes...

To the right, my first ever party frock. Mine was yellow and had that wonderful stiff lining that buoyed the skirt out. 

Then, branching out on my own machine, I made every permutation of this lot, including that rather 1980s Dallas-style dress on the right which required 5 3/8 yds of suggested fabric... Crepe de Chine, Voile, Georgette, Crepe or Lightweight Cotton. I remember I chose something cheesecloth-like and was in a state of advanced and picklish turmoil from the off.

The obvious problems about using them again are style and ...ahem... pattern size. I am not huge but I know I will have altered the Size 12 patterns to a very snug fit forty years ago, and I'm not sure puffed sleeves and flared skirts are ready for the comeback yet.

But its not just my wardrobe. I know the 1980s passed in a blur of childbearing but I was delighted to see that I must still have found time to sew because there are plenty of more recent children's patterns in the box, and does anyone remember Lewes-based company Clothkits??

Quirky chidren's clothes and in days of yore the pattern was marked on the fabric so all you had to do was cut and sew. I wondered what had happened to them and I am delighted to see that Clothkits have been re-born.

I must confess I would cheat horribly back in the day because they were expensive. I'd buy one kit, make a paper pattern from the pieces and then proceed to make loads of them to my own fabric specifications and child-sizes various. Thirty years have passed, I should be let off for good behaviour.

I am no further on with my summer skirt, except that  as I watched the programme I did realise that, thanks to my Mum's tutelage, I could probably have tackled many of the set tasks and so why not draft a pattern from an existing skirt. It has all re-kindled my 'alteration' courage too, so half a waistband completely unpicked on a pair of new Craghopper walking trousers, the firmly entrenched but unwanted elastic removed from the back, and the whole rejoined to make a much nicer garment. Bookhound walked in and said 'You have three minutes left for this task,' which admittedly did phase me momentarily, but I feel sure Patrick and May would be delighted with my efforts.

Anyone else out there making their own...

Anyone inspired to start..

 

 

Life After Life ~ Kate Atkinson

'You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.'

I wonder what you all do when you turn the final page of a book.

On turning the final page of Kate Atkinson's latest novel Life After Life I just heaved a great big sigh of relief.

Relief that I had got there and that I had persevered through when I will admit there were moments when I wanted to give up. Could I really bear to go back to the beginning and read Ursula's life over again...and again...and..

By page 150 I had written ..

'Is this the cleverest or the most annoying and frustrating book I have ever read.'

But relief too that I had kept going because ultimately I think I have enjoyed it and the book has given me much to think about.

Mostly I am confused and mostly I think I am supposed to be.

I am not sure the definitive penny has dropped yet, and with many questions unanswered I am surprised that I feel any sense of satisfaction at all, but oddly I do. Compelled to read on for an answer, in the end I'm not sure there is one, and maybe that's the whole point. There is no single 'right' way to read or interpret Life After Life, of that I feel sure, and I suspect everyone will read a subtly different book which probably makes it very clever indeed.

The premise is indeed clever, so much so that I could only wonder why no one had thought of it in quite this format before (maybe they have and I have missed it) but what if you could live your life again and do things differently, and when it didn't go right that time either, just start again. Each new life seems to offer Ursula Todd the chance to alter events and redeem the traumas of a previous one; the assault can be neatly side-stepped, the violent marriage avoided, someone need not die, and in many ways there is a sense of deep satisfaction to this for a reader. It avoids all the 'wonder what would have happened if...' because Kate Atkinson deals with that to the point where you could be left with nothing to wonder about at all. Except that is not the case, I have thought of little else but Life After Life since I finished it, so I am grateful to Kate Atkinson for lightening the load a little.

Chance, fate, coincidence and free will are all cornered and addressed by Ursula's reincarnations, up-ending one of the many fundamentals of human experience... that you can't change what has happened therefore you just have to make the best and learn to live with it. Shifting too the reasoning behind that fundamental... that more often than not you did the best you could at the time, given what you knew, what you were capable of and which circumstances would allow. There is comfort in that if you can achieve the mindset but Ursula doesn't need to, she will be given many chances.

Underlying the premise of rebirth is Ursula's experience of deja vu, both alluded to in the briefest of moments...

'Catch me next time round,'...

'It was a long time ago and it was yesterday.'

I doubt we have any greater understanding of deja vu now than they did in the early 1900s when Life After Life is set; maybe even less given the need for evidence-based everything these days. But I also spent some time pondering the possible reasons for Kate Atkinson's choice of 1910 as Ursula's birth year. Apart from the obvious plot device of ensuring she was the right age for the wars I could only wonder whether Virginia Woolf's proclamation had some significance here too..

'And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character changed.
I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.'

(Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1923)

Change was the key currency here, and plenty of it. The book places the God-like power of the author centre stage as Kate Atkinson pulls the strings of Ursula's life this way and that. The impossibilities of life become the possibilities of fiction. An early initial outcome of that for me was a high level of reader anxiety, and I'll own up to some early doubts and dissatisfaction at having the story 'taken away' from me yet again, flicking ahead nervously to see if a chapter was going to end with the words 'Darkness fell', a sure sign that Ursula and I would be rewinding and taking a different path through the same landscape.

When I was about halfway through Life After Life, and in something of a fictional whirlpool of chaos and confusion with it, we happened to have one of those nights. It is a known fact that when the dogs are barking on and off through the night here because... well who can know why... maybe a fox or a badger is snuffling around the kennel, that by 4am it is incumbent upon someone to go out and let them out for a run or shout at them ask them nicely to be quiet, and settle them back down again.

It happens.

So I stayed put (you really didn't think it would be me did you?) and Bookhound went out along the lane in his dressing gown and wellies with three hyper-sprung dogs, hoping against hope that it wasn't the night that the Plymouth Car Club were having their Moonlight Rally (it happens too). By this time I am wide awake, Bookhound came back in reporting that the Tamar Valley was an echoing vale of noisy animals, he made a cup of tea and I settled down to read some more of Life After Life.

It is a book that was puzzling me on many fronts, and I couldn't have said hand on heart at that stage that I was loving it, though there is much in it that I was admiring for its cleverness and originality. Now it is about 4.45 am, the dawn chorus is in progress and I am on the iPad and skimming (for fear of spoilers) through some of the superlative reviews that the book has garnered. Truly not an ill word amongst them, and  thence I went to the Radio Four Open Book Interview between Kate Atkinson and Mariella Frostrup for some more insight.

It was interesting to hear Kate Atkinson talking about the book and how she really had no plan, it just evolved... no post-it notes plastering the walls, everything kept in her head, which must have been like spinning plates on poles as far as I can tell, and a medal for anyone who has read this on a Kindle because I have spent my life flicking back and forth to check the dates. I read a bit more and it was obvious that when my next circadian rhythm came around and I dropped off to sleep, I was either going to dream about the book, Kate Atkinson, Mariella Frostrup, or all three. 

In fact it was Kate Atkinson.

Kate Atkinson came round and offered to sign my copy for me which I thought was really nice of her considering the house is so hard to find. There was a sharp intake of breath, a tsk and a slight hesitation when she saw the book and how much I had written on the page where she should sign her name. Then she wrote (in red ink I ask you, and over my pencil scribbles) thanking me for reading the book so carefully and for writing such nice things about it.

Given that I hadn't even finished it, search me how Kate Atkinson knew what I might say about the book before I had even thought it... surely not deja vu or something, and I am not sure I have said nice things, but I am delighted to have read Life After Life. It is a book that will stay with me for a very long time, and though I am famed for my loyalty to our 'ilary' and Bring Up the Bodies, if this one wins the Women's Prize for Fiction I wouldn't be suprised, and nor would I be as disappointed as I might have been.

And I suspect Hilary Mantel would be gracious about it too. In a predictably brilliant 1996 London Review of Books piece on Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum (a book I loved and a piece I ended up buying online because having read the first quarter I then had to read the other three quarters, e mail me for details) Hilary Mantel is unstinting with her praise...

'Just when you think you have understood how her book works she will undeceive you....On a second anatomist's reading, the book's articulation shows clearly, its bones and joints almost perfectly aligned; Atkinson cares for structure and here is a delicate but robust skeleton on which hangs the muscle of narrative force and the tissue of loss and sadness...'

Right, over to you...I know quite a few of you have read Life After Life so please do share your thoughts, and even if you haven't read it, are you tempted... 

 

 

And the winners are...

Hello Chums, Magnus here.
I am dreadfully sorry this draw has taken me soooo long, it's the weather you see. The sun...the basket... what's a cat to do but languish.

And also we have a new resident here who is thankfully doing some work on the garden. I can't tell you how interesting this is, and such kindness...the cold frame dug over especially for me to use as a litter tray, I am thrilled with it.

Anyway, here are the five winners of a copy of Tom Vowler's debut novel What Lies Within, and a funny old set of numbers this which just goes to show.

I don't know what it goes to show, but anyway check its really you here and send your address to dovegreyreader at gmail.com with I'M A WINNER (or something equally startling and noticeable in the subject line) and your book will be with you drekkly.

69 25 60 7 6 
Random numbers generated May 7 2013 at 21:33:26 by www.psychicscience.org  

6 ~ Chris

7 ~ Sarah

25 ~ LizzieMac

60 ~ Fran H-B (Yes really Fran!)

69 ~ Caroline 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Rogationtide & Rammalation Biscuits

Bank Holidays were always the occasion for the Church Youth Club to go on a Ramble, so who knows what perambulatory traditions we were inadvertently clinging onto as we made our way to Box Hill, or walked from Dorking to Friday Street every year.

I get so confused about Bank Holidays now but we are having one here in the UK today ... and this isn't the Whitsun one.

Rather disgracefully, for something even as a lapsed Anglican I feel I should know, I've had to look it all up. 

The May Bank Holiday used to be on the Monday after Pentecost, or Whit Sunday which falls seven weeks after Easter Sunday, but I discover it was shifted to the last Monday in May after a trial from 1965 to 1970, none of which I knew or could recall. Today is the more recent holiday we captured from Scotland in 1978 apparently, which they had been celebrating since the nineteenth century.

But anyway, all that aside, this year it is also falls on Rogationtide and I have had to look that up too 

The traditional day for beating the bounds of the parish was Holy Thursday (Ascension Day) 40 days after Easter. The rogation days fall on the four days from the fifth Sunday after Easter which itself falls on the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. In different places these may be called Cross Days, Gang Days or Grass Days.

Rogationtide is the ancient festival to invoke a blessing on fields, stock and folk emerging after a sequence of natural disasters in fifth century France. By the eighth century in England it involved parishioners 'ganging' after the Cross around the edge of the parish.This helped everyone to remember the boundaries before maps were commonplace. Along the way prominent trees often became places for preaching ­ Gospel Oaks. Locations of various landmarks - stones streams, hedges, ponds were impressed upon the children: in the past by ducking them, ritually beating them and then giving them a treat.

Herbert offers the following reasons to beat the bounds: 
1) a blessing of God for the fruits of the field:

2) Justice in the preservation of the bounds

3) Charitie, in living, walking and neighbourliy accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if they be any:

4) Mercie, in relieving the poor by a liberal distribution of largess which at that time is or oght be made.

The enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries which 'fixed' so many lands into common, field and bounds killed many of the perambulations. But where they do survive they prove a wonderful way of getting into the countryside, different domestic customs are still practised or have been revived in secular ways to offer a friendly way of looking at the place from its edges, checking its corners are in good heart whilst getting to know people. On returning 'home' you may be lucky enough to be offered ganging beer and Rammalation biscuits.

So over the next few days, and hopefully before the rain which is forecast, I have a little bit of Parish boundary to walk solo. A = home, turn left out of the gate and walk along the lane a few hundred yards and the Parish boundary is uphill through those trees somewhere before I will turn left along to the woods, and back down our green lane to home.

I will invoke a quiet blessing of the fields but I won't be doing any preaching, or ducking and beating of local childer, and any considerable distribution of largesse may well be curbed by not meeting anyone in need of any, though I'll keep an eye out. At the lower corner of the woods I will pass our spring water supply so I'll say a quick word of thanks for that. Though we now have a bore-hole so are no longer reliant on it, we still use it outside a great deal and always like to know it is there and bubbling away and as you can see it is piped a long way underground to reach us.

In nearby Lydford, the parson on a nineteenth century perambulation apparently declared...

'Now we must make a shout here that we may recollect the bounds.' The people then Huzzard and took off their hats.' 

So perhaps just a little gentle Huzzarding and tossing of the hat will be called for.

I have made the biscuits in readiness, though any recipe for Rammalation-specific ones (which I assumed to be a derivative of 'perambulation' ) proved elusive. However in an old cookery book, compiled for a local charity by the Young Wives group I belonged to many years ago (when I was a young wife,) and which I was about to throw out, I came across an easy recipe for Matron's Biscuits. I liked the sound of them, had all I needed in the larder and they have proved a great and very moor-ish success, so I have declared these to be official Rammalation fare..

6oz S.R. flour
4oz margarine
1/2 tsp baking powder
3oz sugar
1 dessertspoon syrup
Vanilla essence

Melt margarine, sugar and syrup over a low heat then pur onto flour, baking powder and essence.
Mix well with a wooden spoon.
Put onto greased trays in spoonfuls, flatten slightly with a fork.
Bake at 170-180 degs for 15-20 minutes.
Leave on trays for a couple of minutes before transferring to a wire tray to cool.

You too can make some, or alternatively please just help yourself to one of mine. 

 

Vintage Colour

There was a Vintage and Textiles Fair in Tavistock Town Hall yesterday. They seem to be the newest big thing, the whole nostalgia industry generating big money and the town was vibrant and buzzing, and the sun shone.

I didn't buy anything mainly because I'm decluttering not accumulating, and also reaching the point in this whole vintage market lark where it all looks far too familiar and I see things I have haplessly got rid of in the past...and I stand there and think 'How Much!!'

But the colours and the array of 'stuff' is a feast for the eyes, lots of bright-sparkling pretty and too good not to share with you...

...and this little fella for the Australian contingent...

The May Queen

The first Saturday in May only meant one thing when I was a child... the May Queen celebrations.

I thought I'd share again my defining moment as a Rosebud escort (pink sash) to the Mitcham May Queen. This before graduating to a Buttercup (same dress, yellow sash) the next year, and pending promotion to the cohorts of Lily of the Valley (same dress, green sash)  the year after. This all before out-growing the dress and thus escaping the senior echelons of the Forget-Me-Nots (blue sash) and doubtless eventually hitting the heady heights of May Queen Lady-in Waiting. I think you needed to at least be related to the Mayor to stand a chance of attaining the highest office, so no chance of that.

I discover (thank you Steve Roud and The English Year) that this was almost certainly a nineteenth century invention, 'a re-modelling of May Day along Merrie England lines', and an attempt to bring back 'the real spirit of the lost golden age'. The May Queen chosen to personify the season, dressed in royal, bridal and fairy traditions (ours wore a purple velvet cloak of which I was extremely envious) and seated on a throne aboard a float, while the rest of us processed behind this sort of minor celebrity who through the year would open fetes and fairs and generally look pretty.

Like Steve Roud I can't believe that this is a tradition that will hold much sway these days, but it was clearly something that flourished in 1950's post-war Surrey.

Things to note ...

The weather and the short sleeves.

The dress made by my Mum, which I adored, and I can even remember the fabric with its tiny raised white dots.

The hair. Mine was a straight as could be. I would have gone to bed with it in tightly wound rollers/curlers the night before and hardly slept a wink. Words can't describe the bees-knees joy of having curly hair for a day...when it chose to go through a curly phase of its own volition when I was a teenager I hated it.

The doll's pram, my pride and joy. I expect Brenda, Susan or Ann were tucked up in there.

So I am intrigued... did anyone else do anything like this or was it just me??

Beating the Bounds ~ Hedgerows

Having narrowed down my sphere of paying-close-attention to a mile in each direction from home, I am watching everything with a much keener eye. I can really recommend this approach, especially for someone like me who is always wondering what might be over the next hill and then can't stop themselves from going to have a look. Nowadays nothing would induce me to venture forth because I have too much of interest to see nearer to home, and it is also Rogationtide next week, so the proper day for Beating the Bounds, and I have a bit of Parish boundary ready and waiting.

My hedgerow watching has been aided immeasurably by a little book I came across in the library and which no one seemed to have borrowed since 2008. I have now had it for the maximun three reservations so The Living History of Our Hedgerows - A Guide to Dating Hedgerows and I must soon part company. For such a small book, forty-eight pages. there has been a huge amount of Did You Know material with which to drive Bookhound to distraction.

I had no idea that Saxon ploughs needed a wide turning circle for their oxen which is why their fields were long and thin with curved sides to cope with that, and apparently, when dating a hedge it is often field shape that will offer the first clues. They won't have any sharp corners and if the fields are 'S' shaped it will be a reverse 'S' because the ploughs always turn anti-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere...no I'm not quite sure why either...can someone explain that??

Nor did I know that names like Hay, Hayes, Hayne and Hey are all parts of place-names which mean 'enclosed by hedges'.

Land-sharing in the Middle Ages involved dividing fields into strips, which I did know, but not that they measured twenty-two yards wide and two hundred and twenty-two yards long, ancient measurements still familiar today as 'chains' for cricket pitches and 'furlongs' for horse-racing.

By this time Bookhound has meandered off to clear out the shed which has resident rodent activity, and you would all be every welcome to wander off elsewhere too if I am having the same effect....except you'll miss a really good Did You Know bit coming next.

You know how you often see a row of trees in the middle of a field??

This one is just along the lane and I had often wondered...

Well, apparently, when a farmer had earned enough money to buy more strips of land he would plant a hedge (usually hawthorn, meaning hedge-thorn) and plant an oak tree every twenty-two yards. Perhaps these hedges have disappeared but the trees live on. 

The familiar rule for dating a hedge, based on a formula derived from considerable research, is one new species every hundred years measured over a thirty metre length. Lesley Chapman recommends doing six separate counts for six thirty metre lengths, avoiding gates or adjacent woodland and then taking an average, so that's my next task on a fine day. Except now I realise I'm going to have to buy the book because there is a really helpful chart in the middle for filling in as you count, and much pictorial detail about species, along with useful information about the red herrings that can have you barking up the wrong tree and lead you right up the garden path etc....quoting a few salient pointers here...

...Hawthorn dominance may indicate a fairly new hedge not yet colonised by other species, or an unintentional hedge because it grows so fast and is unlikely to be eaten by animals. 

...Hazel is an indicator of former woodland, and of great age of the hedge.'

...Ash was deliberately planted for tool handles, so if dominant indicates a deliberately planted hedge.

...Beech and Sycamore were popular in the eighteenth century, and deliberately planted for their appearance.

... There appears to be a maximum number of possible species in a hedge because there can only be a certain number, about thirteen of fourteen, that like the same soil.

...If you see Primrose, Bluebell, Dogs Mercury and Wood Anemone together in a hedge it is probable that it was once a wood.

...Dogwood and Field Maple will only grow if there are at least four species well established, if present you can conclude that the hedge is over four hundred years old at least.

... A badly neglected hedge will lose some of its species. This has implications for dating, for example lack of manpower because of the Black Death when one third of the population died, therefore the hedge may be older than the number of species suggests. I wondered about the impact of the Great War too.

Maybe the biggest surprise of all though came when I read about Spindle.

Do you remember this little hedegrow phenomenon a couple of years ago when great swathes around us here were festooned in webs which we eventually discovered were the intricate labours of the Spindle Ermine Moth..


 
Well, this is what Lesley Chapman has to say about the discovery of Spindle in a hedge..

'Common in Southern England it got its name from its use in making the hand spindles used for spinning wool. It has very hard wood useful for knitting needles... a hedge will have to be six hundred years old before Spindle can grow in it, as it needs thick shelter for its seedlings.'

So, unbelievable though it may seem, that could make some of our hedges fifteenth century before I even begin, and expect me to go into knitting needle production any day now.

 

 

 

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My Spring Nature Table reading...

Beating the Bounds ~ Berry Wood

Happy Birthday to...

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it first...

'It is one of the blessings of old friends, that you can afford to be stupid with them...'

and I wouldn't normally subject friends to the public Birthday spotlight here, preferring to just embarrass close family, but I have to make an exception today for a very special friend (and she will kill me for this) who has had a very hard time of late, and I am sure some good wishes wouldn't go amiss.

I'll call her Wiz, because I always have; one of my oldest friends having met in 1972, student nursing flat-mate, next door roomies in Nurse's Homes various, compatriot on the horse-drawn caravan holiday around Ireland (why?) me cutting up her food when she fractured her scaphoid (roller skating), my best mate and there for me when my brother died during my nurse training. There followed many, many days when I did not want to walk onto a ward full of sick people and Wiz and Bookhound kept me going. Wiz was the bridesmaid at our wedding and, at 5ft heaven-knows-how-much, she was still taller than me in ballet flats while I teetered on my very 1970s wedge heels.

We've kept in touch down the years, survived three babies each but Wiz has always put me to shame in one department. Whilst I settled in my armchair with a pile of books once all that child-rearing time became mine again, Wiz took up serious training and rowed competitively when the rest of us were letting the mould grow on the plimsolls. Then, as if that wasn't enough, she recently took up Polo... yes, on a horse... the stick, the galloping, the chukker, the works. 

Anyway, Wiz had a really serious encounter with a naughty patch of ice whilst out riding her bike back in early December last year, almost six months ago to the day, and in an instant her right side had hit the road very hard indeed. So fast that she didn't even have time to put out her hand and fracture her scaphoid again, so had a car come around the corner next she would have been in trouble, but as luck would have it the next one along was a doctor, also on a bike. Wiz has had to have a new hip which she didn't want as she liked the old one, except it was very broken, and recently more surgery to mend her dislocated and crocked shoulder.

I went up to see her back in February and it dawned on us that we had known each other for over forty years now. We yakked and laughed the day long, as well as taking a crutch-assisted walk up the road, the only time I've ever been able to keep up with her if I'm honest.

Keeping cheerful when life throws so much at you, and when you are in so much pain... and when you are used to being so active, takes some doing, and I can only begin to imagine how hard the tough days have been, but Wiz has managed to keep smiling because, as we agreed, what else can you do.

Unlike Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, this is reality, not fiction, though, as we pondered when we met, it's hard not to imagine the setting-off-five-minutes-later scenario, and she may have been calling the ambulance for the doctor. But you can't change what has happened and have to make the best of it, and Mr Wiz and Family Wiz are doing a fine job of looking after her. I send her a book every few weeks and we keep in touch most days, and summer and warmth are coming so things will look up soon I feel sure.

And I say that to anyone else out there who is going through the mill at the moment too, for whatever reason, hang on in there.

But to Wiz, Happy Birthday me old mucker, as old as me again now for just a few months... and careful with all those candles now...

And if you wanted to send birthday wishes from your corner of the world I am sure Wiz would be absolutely delighted to read them. 

May Day reads...

Happy May Day everyone, here's wishing everyone plenty more sunshine and plenty good books.

Every so often a real glut of books I absolutely want to read arrives in the post. I shelve the books them in Month of Publication order, taking a look ahead every few weeks to see which I will put in the Anticipating Column over here >>> before moving them and a stack of others to The Table next to The Reading Chair for a closer perusal. It all sounds very organised but over the years I have found this is the best and only way. If I open the new and bright shiny temptations the minute they arrive, chaos reigns and I find I am reading ten books at once.

Some books then graduate from The Reading Table to Being Read.

Easy.

I am still battling (feels like) my way through Ursula's reincarnations in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life and with less than a hundred pages to go am wondering how many re-deaths there can be. To my complete surprise I have also been ambushed by the sheer beauty of Melvyn Bragg's writing in his new novel Grace and Mary. I have to confess that having failed so miserably with some of Melvyn's other books I had accepted that he and I were just not meant for each other. This book is proving me hopelessly wrong so I was pleased to think I had a few others on the shelf. Expect I hadn't, and it was bound to happen, those others went to the charity shop in my latest clear out and now I will probably have to go and buy them back. 

It was only when I had pulled down the five books I really want to read next that I realised they were all written by women, and conveniently alphabetical from D-H. I do like an occasional bit of synchronicity.

Blood and Beauty by Sarah Dunant

I have been fan of Sarah Dunant's novels since reading Mapping the Edge way back when. I then read The Birth of Venus...loved that too and yet somehow Sarah Dunant slipped off my radar and I missed out on In the Company of the Courtesan and Sacred Hearts. The arrival of Blood and Beauty a reminder that this is an author I need to catch up with.

"Acclaimed novelist of the Italian Renaissance Sarah Dunant now takes on the era's most infamous family: the Borgias.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and in the Church. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: he is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women and power must use papacy and family to succeed.

His eldest son Cesare, a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest - though increasingly unstable - weapon. Later immortalised in Machiavelli's The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. His daughter Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages: from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player.

Stripping away the myths around the Borgias, Blood & Beauty is a majestic novel that breathes life into this astonishing family and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex and relentless."

The Round House ~ Louise Erdrich

I had been hearing good things about The Round House so I can't deny I did a little jump for joy when it arrived. My introduction to the writing of Louise Erdrich came with the recommendation of The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse back in 2005, I'm sure I read Pigs in Heaven and I know I always meant to read The Master Butcher's Singing Club (again highly recommended by someone) and I also bought The Plague of Doves...because I felt I ought.

"Hailed in the US as a Native-American To Kill A Mockingbird, and winner of the US National Book Award, The Round House is Louise Erdrich's undeniable - and unmissable - masterpiece.

One Sunday in 1988, thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts learns that his mother has been the victim of a brutal attack by a man on their North Dakota reservation.

Joe's mother is traumatized and afraid. She takes to her bed, and refuses to talk to anyone - including the police; meanwhile his father, a tribal judge, endeavours to wrest justice from a situation that defies his keenest efforts; and young Joe's moral and emotional landscape shifts on its child's axis.

Frustrated, confused and nursing a complicated fury, Joe sets out with his best friends Cappy, Zack and Angus in search of answers that might put his mother's attacker behind bars - and set his family's world straight again. Or so he hopes.

The Round House is a powerful and deeply humane story of a young boy pitched prematurely into an unjust adult world. It confirms Louise Erdrich as one of America's most distinctive contemporary novelists."

The Hired Man ~ Aminatta Forna

I just like the sound of this one and have kept an eye out for Aminatta Forna ever since I heard her speaking at Dartington, many years ago, about her childhood in Sierra Leone. If ever a writer wonders whether appearances at these literary festivals make any difference...yes, if you talk from the heart, as Aminatta did that day, it most certainly does.

"Gost is surrounded by mountains and fields of wild flowers. The summer sun burns. The Croatian winter brings freezing winds. Beyond the boundaries of the town an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life. One of the windows, glass darkened with dirt, today stands open, and the lively chatter of English voices carries across the fallow fields. Laura and her teenage children have arrived.

A short distance away lies the hut of Duro Kolak who lives alone with his two hunting dogs. As he helps Laura with repairs to the old house, they uncover a mosaic beneath the ruined plaster and, in the rising heat of summer, painstakingly restore it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars."

Last Friends ~ Jane Gardam

Well what is there to say... the final book in the trilogy following Old Filth and The Man With the Wooden Hat...

Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that Titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Old Filth QC, and his clever, misunderstood wife Betty. Last Friends, the final volume of this trilogy, picks up with Terence Veneering, Filth's great rival in work and - though it was never spoken of - in love.

Veneering's were not the usual beginnings of an establishment silk: the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in northeast England and a devoted local girl, he escapes the war to emerge in the Far East as a man of panache, success and fame. But, always, at the stuffy English Bar he is treated with suspicion: where did this blond, louche, brilliant Slav come from?

Veneering, Filth and their friends tell a tale of love, friendship, grace, the bittersweet experiences of a now-forgotten Empire and the disappointments and consolations of age.

Clever Girl ~ Tessa Hadley

Now then, though I read The London Train I didn't write about it, which tells you that I was the wrong reader for it; wrong time, wrong place. Others loved it I know, and perhaps I will go back to it, and Married Life, the volume of short stories that have been published since. Having shown my hand it's hard not to sound patronising, but I had certainly recognised that 'subtly subversive talent', as quoted on the cover of Tessa's latest novel Clever Girl. Remembering how long it took me to fall in step with Ali Smith's writing I am looking forward to trying harder and a fresh start with Tessa Hadley.

"Tessa Hadley's brilliant new novel Clever Girl follows the story of Stella, from her childhood as the daughter of a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The story is full of drama - violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella's schooldays, two sons by different fathers who aren't around to see the boys grow up - but as ever it is her observation of ordinary lives, of the way men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles. Yes, you think. This is how it is."

And I have to say it, the cover design is splendid, I feel like I know Stella already. 

All thoughts on any of these authors, or others I should be keeping an eye out for, would be most welcome as always...