dovegreyreader scribbles

Three Million...

I can feel myself drifting into summer holiday mode with ease so dovegreyreader scribbles might be a bit As & When and book-thoughts-light for the next few weeks, and back to whatever normal is in September. 

By now I would usually be revving up for the tent at Port Eliot this weekend, starting to pack up half the house and preparing for nine author interviews as well as making the gifts for the authors. Countless emails around the busy Team dovegrey helpers, sorting transport and food and knitting and the flower show entry. Welded to my notebook I'd have a separate bag packed for each day with the books and gifts needed, and I'd be up late each evening unwinding from one day before making absolutely sure I had my questions ready for the next.

Bookhound would be prepping for making hundreds of cups of tea and keeping things ticking over in the tent. The festival would fly past in a bit of a blur and then on my return the rest of the month would be taken up with washing and putting the quilts and accoutrements away, writing everything up for here, writing lots of thank you letters, and the Kayaker would be busy editing photos, and summer would almost be gone.

But this year, out of choice, I am not doing any of that, the Penguin Happy Reader tent has filled my slot... so life is very different to 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 (2013 there was no festival) 

For a start the Kayaker is off to India with his camera for six weeks, and with the word INDIGO inscribed on his brain. Bookhound and I are looking forward to some vicarious travel without the hassle of the three anti-rabies injections. Offspringette's box of birthday surprises (some home made) has been posted to New Zealand in plenty of time and adorned with a plethora of Magna Carta commemorative stamps. This asking for real stamps is becoming something of a tradition in the local post office now and they are lovely with it, promising to look after the cargo and deliver it safely...and I walk out of the post office all emotional and missing our first born and biting my lip.

Meanwhile I will be nipping across to Port Eliot each day as a punter and I have been grateful to the Happy Campers for scheduling advice from the vast number of events that are on offer. The Happy Campers are pitching their tent as usual so I'm going to present them with some bunting and gaze longingly at the 5* luxury restroom facilities they have booked for themselves this year. Who knew they even existed, but they do, and they will be revelling in them while I paddle around with everyone else. I shall probably post a few festival pics but not the extensive write-ups of years gone by.

I hope it doesn't rain, but if it does I won't mind because I have acquired new wet-weather gear with which I am very well-pleased.

It involved channelling my non-existent inner super model, but like most of them I can't be dragged away from my hand quilting for less than £20k a day. However the promise of a set of waterproof over trousers and a top did the trick.

The rain obliged so I set aside the quilt and the audio book (The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill), donned the gear and went out jumping in puddles for some pictures for an outdoor clothing company who specialise in gear for water sports and have sponsored the Kayaker for years now, but they wanted him to take some pictures of this kit and so I obliged.

The preference would probably have been for some leggy teenager but there wasn't one to hand so a bedraggled mother had to do. And maybe some of these companies miss a trick with the older generation who still need to keep dry, especially when dog-walking....or going to festivals. Anyway I gave the whole lot the thumbs up for size, comfort, waterproofness, breathability, fit and general lookability...I'd go shopping in it and not feel out of place. Let it rain if it must I'll be fine.

It was back to the quilting and I am pleased to report I am still on it...


My listening has now moved on to A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson, and I am even starting to think Village Show on September 5th... An Item of Patchwork ...



I have completed seven of the twelve blocks, plus quilting their surrounding lattices and borders as I go along, even reaching the first of the elusive (as in thought I'd never get there) four inch square Rising Sun corner blocks...

Might it be finished.

I also have time for some exciting craft-related adventures so have booked two courses at Cowslip Workshops to learn new and different skills, and also a weekend trip to the NEC for the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. How I am going to cope with not only the best quilts in the land but the presence of 300 traders for two days is anyone's guess but I am very excited about it all. Full reports eventually.

And what's the 3000000 all about??

Well, this week dovegreyreader scribbles will pass three million hits since I started writing it over nine years ago...

Congratulations, one of you will have been the THREE MILLIONth...ye gods, thank you for reading everyone.

Your turn now...any lovely things planned for the summer holidays??

Related articles

The Millenium Quilt

Indigo ~ Jenny Balfour-Paul

Pleasings : Fledglings and Stooks...

That title sounds like a department store, but Very Pleasing News, our first brood of swallows have fledged this weekend..

They chose the wettest day and thus spent most of it practising how to perch and balance under the veranda roof whilst still waiting to be fed...

and thankfully too wet for Magnus to be waiting around.

And another glorious sighting by the Kayaker in North Devon this weekend. We can't remember that last time we saw a field of stooks like this...

Any pleasings over your way to report...

The Millenium Quilt

An indigo gallimaufry is all well and good, as is dreaming up the next project whilst suppressing the guilt about the Kaffe Fassett diamonds, but there is also the not-so-small matter of the forty-nine un-quilted square feet of this quilt still pending. If you have been reading here for some years I forgive you unreservedly for looking at this picture and thinking 'Surely not that old thing again,' because it it has been on and off here like a yo-yo. I bow to all those people who finish hand-quilting bed-sized quilts (including myself in a previous life) because it is a massive undertaking...



This the largest quilt that I have attempted and started last century in good time for the new millenium as I recall. I chose good quality fabrics and expensive pure wool batting ( the wadding sandwich in the middle) which is like quilting butter, but fifteen years on the quilt is in a bit of a sorry state. Not helped by hanging it unfinished in the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot each summer where it always looked lovely and was much admired. If unfinished quilts had a voice this one would tell you that it has been the silent listening backdrop to some memorable speakers...Edmund de Waal, William Fiennes, Robert Macfarlane, Helen Rappaport, Gillian Slovo, Brian Selznick...

Spot Martin Parr and the quilt...


But it was exposed to the vagaries of the Great Outdoors, the damp, occasionally the mud, insects galore and the indignities of transportation in a wheelbarrow. If I ever finish the thing it will have to go in the washing machine immediately and there are running repairs to be done before I ever get that far, but I still love it, and loving a quilt is an essential trick to finishing it. 

The so-called Millenium Quilt (I might rename it) evolved from a book, Around the Block by Judy Hopkins which was one of the first to give very clear and precise measurements for rotary cutting a multitude of traditional American blocks. I chose each block for its name in order to create a quilt that would be a celebration of our home.

Milky Way for the centre block and for our night sky which gives us the clearest view of it..

I worked on the quilting of this centre years ago and stitched it to within an inch of its life. Along with accurate piecing it was one of my rules for this quilt, masses of quilting...



Silly rule, I have amended it slightly.

There are twelve surrounding blocks, all with appropriate names...Sunnylanes, Summer Winds, Autumn Tints, Fox and Geese, Flight of Swallows...

Then I cheated and added in six inch wide borders to make the quilt bigger for less effort.

Less effort??

What on earth was I thinking...six inch borders a potential nightmare of acres of monotonous quilting to be stencilled and then stitched.

And so it has sat there...and sat there. Sometimes folded up and out of sight, sometimes 'around' as a prompt to get on with it, except I could always think of something else I would rather be doing...until now...and suddenly I am back on it.

For those that don't know of these things, the best method is to start quilting in the centre and work outwards. The Milky Way was pure quilting joy back in the days before I wore glasses for close work. The stitches are tiny, the thread is fine but then I hit the first of the six-inch borders...less joy, before reaching each single block, great joy. I am now working my way around it very slowly...a bit of border, another block, more border, and with a plan for all the quilting designs in my mind I feel as if I have it within my grasp at last. These things can feel like acres of Impossible Wilderness without a strategy.

With those small indigo pieces I had my quilting eye back in especially with the Aurifil thread (Mako 12) which is a dream to use and this week I have had Flight of Swallows on the hoop..

 Forgive the remnants of marker pen which will disappear in the wash eventually but I love to do the less predictable when faced with straight lines, and the circles most definitely mirror the swallows flight around us here at the moment...babies in both nests and a regular feeding frenzy, new broods from elsewhere circling the house and clocking up the flying hours before the migration. An unexpected pattern emerged as I stitched and all to the French Revolution because having hoped to read A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel this summer I am listening to instead so there's some of our 'ilary being stitched into this quilt now.

And I am alternating that with Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. The stitches are fair flying along now, eating up the lattice strips....



And I have had a little helper too... a Dowager purring gently at my feet; now in her twenty-second year, she's seen it all before of course.

 But all of a sudden I am optimistic that there will be a Finished Quilt.

 

Related articles

Mood Indigo gallimaufry...

Indigo ~ Jenny Balfour-Paul

The Lost Gardens of Heligan

Having realised that we had still never set eyes on a sea of poppies, and that our own attempt at sowing one was more like a puddle, I was delighted to get a prompting email from a reader here reminding me that last year's sea of poppy failure at Cornwall's Lost Gardens of Heligan had this year been an outstanding success.

We hadn't been to Heligan since 1997, soon after it opened and when the place was very much in its infancy both as a resurrected garden and as a tourist attraction. We had taken the Tinker on his birthday soon after my mum had died, and that sadness, combined with the sadness of the Heligan story made for an emotional recollection and an oddly melancholy association with the place.

For those who may never have heard of it, this from the Heligan website...

At the end of the nineteenth century its thousand acres were at their zenith, but only a few years later bramble and ivy were already drawing a green veil over this “Sleeping Beauty”. After decades of neglect, the devastating hurricane of 1990 should have consigned the Lost Gardens of Heligan to a footnote in history.

Instead, events conspired to bring us here and the romance of their decay took a hold on our imaginations. Our discovery of a tiny room, buried under fallen masonry in the corner of one of the walled gardens, was to unlock the secret of their demise. A motto etched into the limestone walls in barely legible pencil still reads “Don’t come here to sleep or slumber” with the names of those who worked there signed under the date – August 1914. We were fired by a magnificent obsession to bring these once glorious gardens back to life in every sense and to tell, for the first time, not tales of lords and ladies but of those “ordinary” people who had made these gardens great, before departing for the Great War.

The house itself, now apartments, had once been owned by the Tremayne family who had lived in a manor house very near us here before crossing the border into Cornwall in the sixteenth century, and the gardens, rediscovered and restored by Tim Smit and his team are now a splendid living and working memorial to those 'ordinary' people, and my what a difference twenty years makes...we hardly recognised the place.

 I bought some seeds to grow my own Black Peony poppies...

 And came home with yet another Regal Pelargonium ...

 And the restored nineteenth century pineapple pit is doing wonders...

In all its glory Heligan felt much less poignant this time around, in fact Bookhound said he almost preferred it when it was all volunteer working parties and tumbledown sheds but I disagreed. It is now vibrant and enticing and though there have been debates about restoration v re-creation the garden seems the perfect compromise somewhere between the two. No garden ever stands still in time, and Heligan is no exception, yet it remains a splendid and living tribute to those gardeners who lost their lives in the Great War, and though there are still reminders around of the heritage it somehow blends with the whole, doesn't dominate quite so much. That sadness seemed much more obvious in those days of dereliction...

When Tim Smit was putting together his business plan for the gardens in the early 1990s there was the question of a lease on the land to be resolved before any restoration work could commence. This involved a meeting with the fearsome family matriarch Damaris Tremayne, a formidable Margaret Rutherford look-alike, no push-over with her questioning of the viability of Heligan's future as a tourist attraction ..how on earth would a derelict garden with no house attract the predicted 40,000 visitors a year?

Well on the mid-week day we visited they might all have been there on the same day. Coach parties pouring in, the restaurant buzzing ...all a far cry from the genteel little crowds we tend to see at National Trust properties. so no doubt that Heligan must be paying its way and is a huge feather in the cap for Cornwall's tourism. With Tim Smit's other highly successful brainchild, The Eden Project, just down the road, this little corner is well and truly on the map and well worth a visit if you are heading West this summer. 

And what of the Sea of Poppies... 

Breathtaking...

 

Frances : The Tragic Bride ~ Jackie Hyams

We're going a bit off piste today, not my usual reading fare by any stretch of the imagination, but bought in a Kindle Daily Deal, read last November and by chance I come across some notes in my book and realised I haven't written about Frances: The Tragic Bride - The True Story of Reggie Kray's First Wife by Jacky Hyams...and it was such a good read that I'm playing catch-up.

NB: Working from notes and memory of a book read nine months ago, I can't quite be sure what may be a direct quote from the book (which would normally be in quote marks) or my own words, for which I apologise now... though the fact I can remember the book at all suggests it was a good read.

Frances : The Tragic Bride is still as cheap as chips and it maybe worth downloading a sample to see if it is your sort of thing before committing. Except this book was for me an object lesson in keeping an open mind about what I might choose to read, to be less dismissive of subjects beyond me ken. The Kray twins, gangster land and my head full of all those urban myths...but maybe they were true...bodies cemented under motorway bridges...heads nailed to the floor... and maybe for obvious reasons I've been a bit nervous about writing about it. I lived and worked in the East End in the 1970s, back then it was still quite a fearful place to be; with good reason the Krays were described as the most dangerous men in Britain and the legacy of the Blind Beggar pub just opposite the London Hospital was legendary. I worked with a Staff Nurse who used to go for a drink in there before coming on night duty which we all thought was terribly brave back in 1974... now I think we'd be reporting her.

With upmarket addresses in Spitalfields these days it's hard to imagine that the East End was once considered the territory of the renegade, the petty criminal, the poorest of the poor, all of which bred a Them v Us mentality that involved looking out for yourself and your family. Authority was there to be questioned and shunned, breeding a spirit of survival born of centuries of rough tough living; there was tenacity amidst utter deprivation and if you weren't an outlaw, you almost certainly knew those who were and would keep quiet about it,  Jackie Hyams portrays this as the East London 'omerta' (the mafia code of silence) thus setting the scene for the birth of Frances Shea in September 1943, into the over-crowded and crime-ridden neighbourhood of Hoxton and Shoreditch and most significantly, living just a mile away, Ronnie and Reggie, the ten-year-old Kray twins.

Just to set this in a twenty-first century context...to rent a tiny studio flat in Ormsby Street, Hoxton where Frances was born, would leave you little change from £1200 a month in 2014...you could probably have bought a street for that in 1943.

If life in the East End was the Great Unknown unless you had lived there then Call the Midwife certainly sorted all that out, dispelling many of the myths, perhaps creating a few more along the way, but certainly giving a realistic portrayal of the life and the people. 

The Kray twins left school at fifteen going to work as fish porters at Billingsgate market and holding down their only full time employment for just six months. The call to fight was not unusual in the East End, there was a love of violence harnessed and tamed to some extent in the boxing clubs much loved by the brothers, but the Krays packed a double punch out on the streets, you didn't just take on one of them, you'd better be ready for both.

Inseparable, their identities inextricably linked and impossible to disentangle, Ronnie and Reggie's steady rise to supremacy on the streets was readily paved by the post-war struggle for survival; the harsh winters and the derelict housing creating the perfect climate. The war must have seemed like a hollow victory in the face of such hardship, the black market thrived and behind a facade of respectability, by violence and manipulation, did the twins assume their power. If there was a power behind the throne it was their mother Violet, ambitious for her boys and happy to move in the world of night clubs and movie stars that their fame bestowed. The desire for respectability and social acceptance amongst the matriarchs of the East End was a common trait, a powerful force and one possessed by both Frances's mother Elsie Shea and Violet Kray. Who can know how much of this propelled the hapless Frances in the direction of Reggie Kray. 

To read Jackie Hyams account is to see what lay beneath the surface and I was riveted in that way that often takes me by surprise...because this really isn't my subject at all. Except in many ways it is, because when Frances, bowled over by Reggie's wealth, succumbs to his charms what unfolds is the tragedy of a young woman's life in what we now tend to look back on as the generic freedom of the Swinging Sixties, but tradition dies hard in the East End.

Reggie, a brutal man with a penchant for sentimentality, traps Frances with his sharp dressing, the glamour, the gifts and money, a huge and irresistible temptation for the Hoxton girl. He is jealous, possessive and controlling and Frances becomes the ultimate pampered doll in the gilded cage, isolated from her friends and family, a no-go area for others. She repeatedly delays the wedding, breaks off the engagement and who can blame her because always standing in the sidelines is the more unstable Ronnie nursing a hatred that has to be read to be believed. A paranoid schizophrenic fuelled by drugs and alcohol, Ronnie could be uncontrollable and unpredictable and ultimately, as events would prove, a liability. 

But the power and control are too great, Frances has no means of resisting, doomed if she does, doomed if she doesn't, and the couple are finally married in 1965...the photographer, also a local, a young David Bailey (the only wedding he ever did apparently).

Some of the pictures revealing, in body language and facial expression, far more than words ever could...plus don't you just love the wallpaper...

No spoilers here about what happens next to Frances, even though her sad fate is well-known as is her family's fight to 'retrieve' her,  but suffice to say that I was fascinated to read of a world I knew of only in relation to its menfolk, and the eventual life sentences in prison for both Ronnie and Reggie Kray, thus Jacky Hyams account of life for the women offers a new and very readable perspective and one I am surprisingly pleased to have read.

So this was my book that flew in out of the left field...I wonder if you have books that have surprised you too..

Books that have taken you far from home reading turf and that you have, maybe strangely, enjoyed...

 

 

 

 

Mood Indigo gallimaufry...

It continues.

My foray along the indigo path is proving all-consuming, serendipitous, fascinating and enlightening.

I am so grateful to those of you who have emailed with offers of Sashiko designs and to Curzon who needed a home for her Shibori books and could I be persuaded to adopt them...

Swift answer...

Then to my delight I happened to be checking out local Shibori dyeing courses and there was one run by Devon County to be held in Tavistock the following week. I couldn't believe my luck, except I was the only person to have shown an interest so it has been cancelled.

No matter.

I nipped across to Cowslip Workshops and Janice Gunner will be doing some courses there next Spring so my name is on the list. I had just borrowed some of her books from the library so that was a happy coincidence.

There are always parcels and postcards going back and forth to New Zealand and by chance Offspringette's last package contained a copy of the New Zealand Quilter magazine. It was exactly what I needed at that precise moment...a new angle, some new inspiration because I have threaded up my quilting betweens (the needles) again and been doing some small pieces to get my eye back in. 

After a break I always find it helps to set up some plain quilting projects that can be completed in a Wimbledon-on-the-radio afternoon.

Listening to Wimbers always reminds me of having my appendix out when I was sixteen. Emergency admission at 3am and then a week in hospital feeling as rough as rats, missing what was supposed to be a very exciting summer after my O Levels which had finished the week before. I was lying there with the radio headphones on and very sparse commentary so trying to figure out which end the ball was at and who had just hit it. The commentary now vastly improved and listening to Andy Murray's semi-final, I was stitching as if my life depended on it, I felt more like Madame Defarge next to the guillotine...torture and a good thing my hands were occupied doing this...

Which eventually became this...

The design an old Deighton's silver iron-on embroidery transfer left over from the days when I had a little quilt shop and sold such things, but whole-cloth hand quilting a real joy to do.

Back to the New Zealand Quilter because it couldn't have fallen open at a better page...

A simple-looking but very effective quilt made by Irene Anderton. I say simple-looking because in reality these things never are quite as easy as they look, and mention of

'a repeated pieced block cleverly constructed using partial seams,'

should be a warning. But I love the placement of sashiko blocks in between the pieced squares, and whilst I may not make an enormous quilt it is exactly what I fancy doing with some indigo fabrics and good practise for the sashiko..

On that same jaunt to Cowslip Workshops there they were, a wonderful selection of Japanese fabrics waiting for a new home so I have made a start on the stash...

I have also discovered two new (to me) cotton threads in recent months.

Aurifil in both a fine and slightly thicker twist. The fine one does nigh on invisible applique whilst the thicker one is perfect for hand quilting. And also Cosmo Multi Work threads, again for hand quilting and embroidery and in the most delicious range of colours....you have all probably known about these for years while I've been sat here stuck in a bit of thread rut.

And finally, an interesting observation from Anne Scott, editor of the New Zealand Quilter, and I have noticed this at recent exhibitions too...where have all the hand quilted quilts gone?

The last few exhibitions I have been too haven't included a single one. I'm not agin machine quilting in the least, the quilts are beautiful if a little stiff and formal and maybe it's a sign of our times, when people have less time and want a finished quilt sooner than fifteen years after starting it (and counting...my Millenium Quilt...watch this space) and who can blame them. Me, I'm sticking with the thread, the beeswax, the tiny quilting needles, my thimble, cursing my eyesight and resorting to a needle threader and then just disappearing into the flow of it for the time being.

So how's your making coming along...

Any lovely projects keeping you out of mischief...

The Butcher's Shop

In an effort to refine our weekly shopping, and enjoy it more than taking a reluctant flog around the supermarket and ending up with a trolley full of stuff we didn't know we wanted, Bookhound and I are behaving like proper mature people and doing more shopping in different shops in town.

Incidentally someone told me I should go to Lidl's. I went on and on about it and suddenly, as we were passing one day, we turned in. Being a loyal Morrison's man Bookhound refused to enter the portals and waited outside in the car while I dashed in for a bulk buy of sugar for Elderflower cordial-making. 

Can I admit it was a terrible experience. All these half-familiar things, in almost but not quite facsimile packaging that mimicked the well-known brands. I just couldn't get my head round it at all and in the end the mental anguish and confusion didn't seem worth the 50p that I had saved.

The Elderflower cordial is lovely though... from tree...

 

to bottle...

We didn't make enough last year and it's our main summer drink, so this year we've upped our game...twenty litres sitting in the Tinker's Cott fridge.

It isn't hard to shop differently here, market towns in every direction bursting with local produce and the best moment of the week has become the trip to Howell's butcher's shop in Tavistock. They make their own sausages (best ever), there is not an ounce of fat in the mince, good old-fashioned bacon with rind that has been allowed to breath rather than being trussed up in heat sealed polythene. Then they slice the ham exactly as we want it and score and slice any meat in the old-fashioned way...and if it's pie day we'll have a chicken and mushroom, and we take ages as we move along the counter and so do they, nothing is ever rushed and there is a good old natter going on. Bookhound, with his interior design showroom, was a town trader for twenty-five years, they all know each other of old. Eventually we pay, marvelling at how much cheaper this is than the supermarket, and aren't we ninnies for not having done it sooner, and we walk all this ...well... dead animal back to the car and feel really pleased with ourselves for bothering.

To put the lid on this self-righteousness we then head to the vegetable shop and buy loose potatoes and whatever fruit is in season.

Honestly...is this what retired people do because they have time...or just what sensible people have been making the time to do for years.

I have wonderfully vivid and rather strange memories of the butcher's shop as a child, all delightfully reinforced by those illustrations by Edward Bawden..

and Eric Ravilious...

The sawdust on the floor which I would scuff and slide into piles while my mum was buying liver, and chops and the Sunday roast and the Saturday mince.The mince that would be staple Saturday lunch fare, boiled, cooled, the fat scraped off the top, and then stewed some more with runny gravy and carrots and served with mashed potato and all eaten without a word of complaint. I think if you put a plate like that in front of me now I'd die. 

Then do you remember when Chilli Con Carne became all the rage and suddenly there were new things to do with mince and who knew such things as kidney beans had even existed.

But best of all was the paper...

All the way home my mum and I would be wondering how many sheets of untainted drawing paper I'd get out the week's meat wrapping.

 

.

 

RHS Rosemoor

I have just exchanged my subscription to Selvedge magazine, now at the end of its year, for membership of the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society). This seems like a good deal especially as, if I am very honest, Selvedge has been just a little beyond my ken and enjoyment, savoured too quickly and maybe just too esoteric for my current craft needs, and at £50 for six issues, quite expensive. I'll go back to buying it when I see if it looks interesting...it worked before.

RHS Rosemoor is about 35 miles from us here. Less than an hour's drive across country and we had never been. Driven past the turning enough times, but who knew there was a plant shop I could have been going in all these years. Obviously this membership is going to cost far more than the £41 for this first year, which incidentally also gives free entry to a guest at the four RHS gardens, plus a monthly magazine...and maybe maybe maybe we might get tickets to the Chelsea Flower Show one fine day.

So off we went to Rosemoor this week. A dullish day day but dry and I was that excited you'd have thought I was six years old and off to the seaside, and I wasn't in the least bit disappointed because mid-June...what better time to go. No point in doing anything until we have checked out the tea/coffee/cake/lunch facilities and the verdict is that it will be worth the hour's drive for that alone.

I have to admit that we both gasped as we walked into the rose gardens...

Even more breath-taking were the foxgloves...

And as for the vegetable garden...well comforting to see that ours aren't the only runner beans that are miles behind, but just look at these lettuces...not a slug to be seen...

Our entire lettuce collection was ravaged in a single night by an army of gastropods and the runner beans have done precisely nothing this year...a big fat fail.

We only walked one half of Rosemoor so plenty more to see on our next visit, but there was the plant shop to be negotiated before we could get out and it was obviously going to be dangerous. In the end I came away with Gertrude Jekyll to add to my now rather miniscule-looking rose collection, a Regal Pelargonium 'Chocolate' for the Book Room windowsill with petals of the softest, deepest shade of carmine red...

and next to it the Tinker's Regal is still flowering its socks off...

but best of all this...

Some of you might recall that I spotted something tall, purple and swaying at Lytes Cary last September which you all very kindly told me was Verbena Bonariensis...

I have been on the look out ever since but to no avail, so I chanced my arm with a packets seeds... here's the sum total so far...

Just the one and that label is the height of optimism because for all I know I could easily have pricked out a rogue weed from the seed tray.

More trips to Rosemoor on the horizon but is anyone else an RHS fan...

Do other countries have an equivalent...

 

 

Running for the Hills ~ Horatio Clare

I have taken almost a month to read Horatio Clare's first volume of autobiography Running for the Hills, and waited a few more weeks before I have sat down to write about it. A few chapters read hither and yon with time to ponder in between, and I have come to the conclusion that this is one of the best memoirs I have read in ages. Not easy to strike the balance between the adult-self reliving the child-self and find the voice, or to make a book interesting enough to have me eager to start the next volume; I've read many a memoir where one volume is plenty. 

The first child of journalist parents Jenny Williams and John (known as Robert in the book) Clare, young Horatio spends much of his childhood on a seventy-two acre working hill farm in Wales, bought for £11,000 and with sheep thrown in. His mother in particular wants to escape London and brings passion and instinct to the role of a sheep farmer that she rapidly has to undertake, whilst Robert takes a much more considered approach buying the books, identifying the problem, talking to people who know and applying logic and reasoning with Jenny still dashing about learning on the hoof.

The results are at times eye-wateringly chaotic, and having recently read The Shepherd's Life, and James Rebanks words of caution to any would- be shepherds, my eyes were out on stalks of incredulity at the life the family plunged themselves into.

'It is a leap backwards through centuries of time. It is an attempt to gather in the fraying threads of old ways and plait them into a lifeline...'

Thus comments an adult Horatio Clare having watched an old cine film of his mother and Jack, the farm hand (Jack in reality much more than that, more the wisdom required for the farm to function) both of them at work in the sheep pens.

It is a chance for adult observation to blend with childhood recollection, and with it the realisations and reflections that make Running for the Hills so compelling. There are moment of rosy happiness but there are plenty of moments of misery, fear and anxiety too as a young Horatio and his brother Alexander watch their parent's marriage disintegrate in the face of Jenny's insistence on sticking with the tough and isolated farming life. Horatio watches his parents not so much drift apart as set sail as Robert chooses London and his career whilst Jenny chooses the farm and the children.

'Her heart was no mystery at all. It beat for her children and her farm.'

As a child often dragged out to help on that farm, and one particular day demanding hours and hours of catching and holding the reluctant sheep in the pens, Horatio has his own idea of what may have gone wrong...

'I thought darkly of my father's departure and decided that there was no mystery to it at all. He probably resented being used as a sort of sheep dog with arms.'

Once the couple have separated for good, and only after Jenny has returned to London with them to give city life and togetherness one more chance, life for the family becomes even harder. Determined that her children will live their lives steeped, infused and marinated in the countryside, the work to keep the farm afloat is relentless, daunting and back-breaking as well as a continuous drain on already limited finances, yet Jenny soldiers on regardless. With spirits undimmed (I'd have cracked at maneouvering a car up the precipitous track for starters) she ensures some truly magical moments for her boys in amongst the hardships... ones that must surely set a child up for life regardless of what may follow, and it is clear Horatio Clare can bring them to the fore with ease...

The snow at Christmas...

'The valley a twinkling masterpiece, as if the starlight had thickened and fallen on the world.'

Watching the badger cubs......

'adorable fat little bears full of play and trepidation...we had known the edge of an evening wood as a badger knows it...we had slipped the separation between us and the world.'

And then there are the smells...once known never forgotten...

'Freshly baled hay is a plaited harmony of scents, reeking of clover, old suns and cut grasses, rain and earth and dew...'

Of these things it would seem are memories and resilience made, and with Horatio Clare's vivid recollections it is clear his mother's plan had worked...

'She encouraged us to stop and drink in the beauty, to set sights in our minds like postcards...'

We do it all the time here, especially at this time of year, as if we are storing up some mental light-bright days to counter the winter grey.

Our field behind the house (not ours at all but we pretend) had just been cut as I read and it was all enough for me to go out and capture the moment, to smell the 'old suns' for use in the depths of January...


There are un-favourite things in Horatio's life too... crows, maggots flies, magpies, thorns, thistles, barbed wire, rain... I'd add in horseflies (huge and plenteous this year) and slugs (equally huge and plenteous) and all is not set fair in young Horatio's world. With his father absent he frequently assumes the role of man of the house whilst nursing a deep-rooted fear that he may somehow lose his mother. There is a form of surrogacy evident, the child containing the anxieties of the parent, and along with the isolation and the sparsity of peer-group contact outside school it isn't hard to see a childhood that may be cooking potential problems in later life. 

But this is also a childhood full of adventure and freedom as well as books and reading. so one that may well breed some very useful life-skills to take into adulthood, particularly self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, so I am looking forward to reading the sequel Truant where I think things may all be about to go horribly wrong.

I won't spoilt the ending of Running for the Hills because nothing is ever certain as you read, but I do want to share one of Horatio Clare's wonderful and very true observations...

'Baler twine holds the countryside together...'

He's right, it does, never without it here.

 

 

 

 

Harper Lee...

July 11th 1960..fifty-five years today since To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was published to extraordinary acclaim. 

So I have to ask you all because the day is almost upon us...

Who is planning to read Go Set a Watchman?

I hadn't been that bothered until last week, then I started to see the signs up saying publication day was nigh, read a few articles about Harper Lee in the press and that was it. I had stepped into the contagion zone and suddenly thought it was one of those books I wanted to be a part of on July 14th. 

It doesn't need me to say that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most influential books of the last century, but with so much intrigue and mystery surrounding the writing and discovery of Go Set a Watchman I couldn't resist. Veiled and very carefully worded suspicion seems to prevail here in the UK and I would be interested to know what you all think.

And in America, this is your book after all, so what is the received opinion on the its appearance...excitement and anticipation, or wariness and cynicism...

How true are all the snippets about Harper Lee's life and her current mental and physical capacity, and ability or not to give permission for this publication...long-distance rumour is rife here.

Regardless of all that, I have been enjoying yet another read of To Kill a Mockingbird and am off to a bookshop to buy a copy of Go Set a Watchman on the day. I can only think of one other forthcoming book I will be doing this for and I expect you can all guess what that is too...

 

Wimbledog...

At last we can tell you...what proud dog owners we are...

All those weeks and weeks of winter training have finally paid off...

Nell has been selected to be the very first Wimbledog...

Look out for her doing her bit to help Andy Murray on Centre Court this afternoon...

C'mon Andy (and with thanks to Bookhound for the artistic interpretation of Nell's debut)

School prizes...

School prizes, I won one or two books along the way and can't bear to part with them, are you the same?? 

I-Spy books from Primary School...butterflies, wild flowers, a lovely little book called Greykin a Squirrel by Cecily Rutley, a quiz book and then a copy of Jane Eyre in my first year at grammar school, before I swapped schools, never quite caught up and never won another.

So there I am wittering on about how much I am enjoying The Forsyte Saga when Bookhound remembers an old leather-bound copy, tooled in gilt with a school badge and motto that he had bought for £1 in the market, for the glory of the old leather cover as much as thinking I might want to read it one day...

This well-worn copy, and looking closely it is clear it has been read many times, would seem to have a story attached of which we knew nothing more than that it had been awarded as the Ellen Stanton prize to L. Pearce, who had been in the Upper VI at the Central Foundation Girl's School in 1931. 

We see these all the time and so often leave the books behind on the stall and with it the story and the successes and moments of pride in a person's young life I suspect, but this time I have done some delving. I did discover Lyndall's married name and that she had died locally in 2008, hence the book on a charity book stall. Talking of things and their narrative, and parting with them as we were last week, I suddenly felt the need to find a story for this book because clearly it had become meaningless even though Lyndall had kept it with her for almost eighty years.

Honestly, I'm having enough trouble with 'things' of my own, let alone finding stories for other people's who don't want them, but never mind.

The delving took me here to the school archive and the discovery that my prize-winner was called Lyndall, that she and her sister Barbara both attended the Central Foundation Girl's School, and one or other had lived at some point in Aylestone Avenue, Brondesbury Park, London (where houses now sell for £ 2.5 million) and that the school still exists in the East End of London; Spitalfields in fact, and yes of course Mr Spitalfields Life has written about it.



It is clear from the school's extensive online archive (I delved for an entire evening) that here was an education for girls that gave them choices and opportunities at a time when I might have assumed they had few, and the old school magazines provide a fascinating insight.

In the 1932 edition Lyndall Pearce is now Captain of School and is writing with maturity about the League of Nations as well as playing Goal Defence in the netball team (I'm thinking she might have been tall). News of Old Girls (maybe alumnae these days) reveals careers in dentistry, pharmacy, teacher training, the Air Ministry, lectureships, horticulture,  whilst Lyndall is reading English at University College in London. The magazines reveal head mistresses' reports on the life of the school and the status of the staffing (Miss Smith has left to get married) accounts of school trips, competitions with other schools, sports days, concerts and school pageants as well as much wry and respectful humour on the part of the girls about their teachers. Alongside the day-to-day life of the school the girls' writing demonstrates an acute social conscience about local, national and international affairs. Impressive and revealing documents about women's education in the 1920s and 30s as well as essays and prose pieces by the pupils, and even one or two poems by Lyndall...

I scrolled on through the school magazines for 1934, 1935 through to 1939 until I was cross-eyed, desperately hoping to find more news of Lyndall. Her sister Barbara had married and was now Mrs George Cadbury, and had a baby also called Lyndall, but no news of our Lyndall and her degree before the war broke out. At that point the school was evacuated to Ely and the school magazine went on hold until 1946.

With Lyndall's trail running dry I moved onto her sister Barbara Cadbury and therein more surprises. If I have the right person then George and Barbara Cadbury were very well-know figures in Canada, where Barbara's experiences of life in the East End (think Call the Midwife) seem to have steered her towards international expertise in Family Planning...

Born in England, Ms. Cadbury became, at age 24, the youngest elected borough councillor for the City of London. Her work in the slums convinced her of the importance of family planning, where she actively promoted birth control and family planning.

Eventually receiving the Order of Canada for her services to the country.

Moving onto George Cadbury I discover he was the grandson of the chocolate magnate...

I have contacted the school archivist in the hope there might be a picture of Lyndall somewhere but meanwhile I am thinking about her name.

Those of you who have read it might be thinking the same....

Am I being too way off the mark to hope that maybe Mrs Pearce had read The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner. It was the book Roland Leighton gave to Vera Brittain before he went off to the Great War and the name Lyndall, the book's independent and free-thinking heroine, had became popular since its publication at the turn of the century. I'm going to have to read it again now (free on Kindle) but I love the thought that Mrs Pearce might have been encouraging Lyndall and Barbara to achieve in life and ensuring they had the education to do so.

I also love the thought that Lyndall obviously cherished and read her prize and kept it with her all her life.

 

 

 

 

 

The Forsyte Saga

I think it was a comment on here from Liz a few weeks ago. I asked what everyone was reading and Liz's reply was The Forsyte Saga.

It was all enough to send me to the shelves to find my aged Penguin editions ...

6/- (shillings each...30p in new money) Christmas presents and it would seem I read these two volumes and no more back in 1968.

I idled across to You Know Where to look for the DVD of the original TV series. I can't be the only one with vivid memories of this...

The Forsyte Saga  was shown in twenty-six consecutive episodes between January and July 1967... just imagine the BBC commissioning such a high-risk and lengthy project nowadays. And it was high-risk, but who could have predicted that the country would grind to a halt on a Sunday evening and even stop going to Evensong rather than miss it. Those were the days when people did still go to Evensong on a Sunday, and even though the vicar valiantly changed the service times and cut the sermon short we still bunked off as a family to watch. By the time I left another church choir thirty years later we often felt we were singing our laboriously rehearsed anthem to fresh air.

The Forsyte Saga equals Eric Porter (Soames) Kenneth More (Young Jolyon) Nyree Dawn Porter (Irene) and Susan Hampshire (Fleur) for me; all so deeply etched in my imagination and with a hint of that teenage envy of Susan Hampshire's retrousse nose, her natural beauty and silk-smooth complexion still evident. Incidentally I now discover the nose achieved by plastic surgery but I forgive all.

Sadly the DVD box set was prohibitively expensive on the day I looked, £50 (cheaper ones now I see) but to my surprise there had since been a miniseries in 2002 that had completely passed me by. I hope you all read miniseries as an odd sort of churchy word too, one that might mean pastoral duties or something, because I do and it took me a moment to add a hyphen of my own and create a mini-series starring Damian Lewis, Corin Redgrave, Rupert Graves and other acting nobility. I must have either been very busy or had my head in a bucket of sand to have missed it.

Anyway I sent for a copy of that thinking it might be good to catch up and then turned to the book...free on Kindle... maybe I'd read a few chapters just for old time's sake, because I have to confess that The Quincunx has temporarily defeated me at page 500 or so. I will return to it one day and it could be argued I was ready for anything that wasn't the misery of the Mellamphys, but two hours into The Forsyte Saga I was thinking I hadn't read such a good book in ages, what a pleasing surprise.

I know Virginia Woolf had a good old dig at John Galsworthy, and probably in the context of the time was perfectly entitled to do so, but I have to say the whole thing is suiting me fine...

It is June 15th, 1886 and the family are gathered at Old Jolyon's to celebrate the engagement of his grand-daughter June to architect Philip Bosinney and quite by coincidence it is June 15th when I start reading The Man of Property.

'Pickled in these pages it lies under glass...here it rests preserved in its own juice.' says John Galsworthy of his creation, and this formidable family unit, the' upper middle class family in full plumage,' is paraded before the reader with the potential for much confusion.

Ten senior Galsworthy siblings and twenty-one cousins to be identified and sorted out. Twins, maiden aunts, reclusive brothers, gossipy sisters, it's all a joy, not as difficult as it might seem and greatly enhanced and enabled by a photocopy of the family tree stuck in my notebook. 

More about The Man of Property to come because the revelation is how differently I am reading it now. It seems obvious, I mean I have forty-eight more years of life in-between, but it still never ceases to amaze me.

And then a really nice thing happened, as seems to happen quite often in relation to the Tinker at the moment.  I was pottering about in Tinker's Cott and, though I had sorted the bookcases and the DVDs and thought I knew what was there, I obviously hadn't been paying attention because there it was...

A bit paint-spattered but the complete boxed set of the original 1967 series, two episodes in and I might be addicted.

 

And the winners are...

With apologies for taking so long to announce the winners of Magnus's Birthday Prize Draw.

No sooner had I uttered the word Odyssey than Magnus took off on one, absenting himself from home and his beloved food bowl and day bed (greenhouse) for several days which is completely out of character. 

We even had a sleepless night, can you believe it until he strolled in one morning, fat as can be on field rabbits and heaven knows what else while I was having nightmares about him being shot, poisoned, trapped down rabbit holes or eaten by badgers. I had even gone out for several walks calling 'Maaaaagnus' like a real lemon. In fact that's why you call out a cat's name before bestowing it...I didn't feel too stupid and there was no one around.

Anyway he's home and the winners of a copy of Homer's Odyssey published by Oxford World's Classics are...

 

7 13 8 40 38 30

Random numbers generated Jul 5 2015 at 20:37:24 by www.psychicscience.org

By my reckoning that is...

7 - Jude McBain

8 - Ellen B

13 - Anne

30 - Barbara M

38 - Nicky Keep

40 - Jane from Dorset

 

Check here to be sure it is really you and then send addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and the book will arrive eventually from OUP, and many thanks to them for offering this lovely draw.

Swallows...

Having arrived back early in April, and us with so much to tell them, our Swallows then seemed to disappear for a few weeks.

Then in came another cohort and it was clear these were 'our' Swallows. Swooping and chittering around the house and heading straight for the place where their nest had been.

The nest that we had taken down because we couldn't open the window ..


And we felt utterly wretched because you could almost hear the disappointment in the chittering. The birds knew exactly where they were, sat in the empty space and flew back and forth while we sat there hoping they wouldn't go off in a sulk.

One lot took it all out on some poor unsuspecting wrens, first evicting the squatters and their mossy creations before they set about renovating their old nest on the veranda, and they have now moved in. 


That's put paid to sitting on the veranda for the summer, but this, as you will see, is quite inferior to the Grand Designs creation to come, and most likely the work of last year's brood so for a first time nest we're giving them a Highly Commended.

About ten days ago, just as Bookhound had finished painting the window, (doesn't didn't it look nice) we noticed a hive of activity around Tinker's Cott. Day by day the Swallows have built and built and built until now there is a veritable penthouse suite in situ. 


A work of art by the Grown Ups who are showing the Youngsters how its done...

So cleverly constructed, they will be as snug and as happy as larry in there and all house painting (to Bookhound's great relief) now conveniently on hold as we watch the Swallow guano pile up. 

I have been reading about nest-building in Angela Turner's excellent book The Swallow, in the Hamlyn Species Guide series, and this, for our area, will be a composite of mud and grass added like bricks in a wall, and will have been built by both the male and the female, mostly in the morning, whilst the afternoons are spent feeding to build up reserves to last the night. They both hop in there in the evening and then poke their heads out to stare at us. The nest must keep the eggs and the nestlings warm, but not too warm, must give room to grow and must last until fledging. This one, south-facing, cleverly offers maximum protection from the south-westerly weather, and tucked high up under the eaves also shades from the sun now at its zenith in the sky. I suspect by any standard this is a large nest so plenty of room for a large brood of babies.

The eggs will be laid one a day, early in the morning, probably four or five of them which will take fifteen days to hatch, at which point the mother drops the empty shells over the side...

And apparently the lining of feathers now being accumulated will be slowly thrown out as the babies grow so that they don't overheat...

We are going to be scouring the ground below for all these clues, watch this space, it'll be like Spring Watch on here.

Border Patrol...

It's getting busy out in the garden. Not only with tasks but with so much to look at. It's easy to forget to spend time looking as well as doing. We stroll around every morning, watering and wandering and noticing new things.

The borders to the front of the house seem to be shaping up nicely. Who'd have thought it, a hundred feet or so to fill seemed impossible but the perennials now taking up their places as second years and not leaving a lot of space for the annuals waiting to go in... this is clearly not good planning.

In fact there is no plan to this border whatsoever. No paintbox selection of blended colours...I'm just grateful that anything I sow or plant comes up at all and just squish it all in with no thought for colour or form. I'll be squeezing in nicotiana and rudbeckia grown from seed where I can any day or there will be nothing to look at in August.

It is only two years since Bookhound was doing this to create the place for greenhouse number three. The only spot in 3/4 of an acre where this one might stay put, protected from the south-westerly gales and with the base anchored in concrete...


...and we wondered if our daisies would ever return.

What a difference two years, a bit of application and a lot of random self-seeding can make and please note my chamomile valiantly filling in between the paving stones. I labour over the grass and clover invasion on a regular basis...

I know some people hate daises so heaven help the person who ever tries to get rid of them from this garden. This year they are at least a yard high and looking amazing....especially from the roof (the Kayaker up there, not me) and that's the Tinker's garden over the way there...


All that coveting sheltered walled-gardens and we have finally achieved the nearest we can manage, a sheltered corner protected from the south-westerly gales, and everything is thriving.

Drifts of snow from the Book Room window..

And on all sides (click to enlarge hopefully)


And thank you to all those of you who recommended Evelyn for our potted rose garden, we love her. The blooms drift from apricot to blush pink before the petals fall..beautiful.

And our little village of potted roses all doing so well despite my late novice prune...

Gertrude Jekyll has just moved in next door to Winchester Cathedral and seems to have settled in well. I think they will all be partying hard through July.

And did I mention the Meconopsis Lingholm...

I'm sorry, it's all brag and boast, but giving us so much pleasure I had to share it.

Now tell me how does your garden grow...

Anything that you are looking at and getting that enormous sense of pride...

Any recommends for growing next year...

I already have a seed order in with Suttons for some of the things we lack..

Delphiniums, Russell Lupins. more Canterbury Bells...

 

Indigo travels...

Walking boots on, rucksacks packed, water bottles filled...we're going on an outing today....

So talk here is of little else but indigo since reading Jenny Balfour-Paul's fascinating book on the subject.

When might I find the woman selling the hand-dyed fabric in the market again (thank you Avis for the tip that she might have moved on to Totnes) 

Looking out for indigo everywhere I go...

The Sashiko things have arrived, I can make a start, more about that soon.

And then there was the Kayaker's trip to Sapa..

During his 2012-2014 sojourn in Australia, the Kayaker took three months out to nip across to Asia (because it was there) bought a little motorbike, and travelled off the beaten track around Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Someone had advised him to go to Sapa and so at the end of the bike journey he took an overnight bus, and with the added bonus that he kept a journal in the notebook that we had sent off with him..

This is an overnight bus Vietnam-style and some thoughts from the Kayaker's journal as he travelled...

'Rick, a friend of mine back in the UK, and I had spent many a conversation while working on the shop floor at Cotswold Outdoor talking about Asia, and especially about Sapa.

'You have to head to Sapa,' Rick said, 'the mountains, people and culture are a must.' so when I planned my trip to Vietnam I wasn't going to skip that journey.

Sapa was wet and cloudy at first sight...but the view from our window was of the mountains shrouded in cloud and mist and I was starting to see what Rick was on about..

'Our tour guide from the Hmong tribe met us. She was very short with a huge smile, a comb holding her long dark hair up and decked out in traditional Hmong dress with a few 21st century additions. Her hands were completely blue because earlier that day she had been dyeing the hemp used to make traditional clothing plus the bags, jewellery, blankets...

Our walk took us down into the valley passing rice fields unlike any we had seen before, set on the mountain-side and creating fantastic contours...epic crops on impossible hillsides, this is why I came...

 Is that the indigo dye crop growing in between and being carried home...

"Life went on around us, a woman sewing, two boys carrying a bird's nest full of chicks, playing with an umbrella, two more firing rocks across the river from catapults, children playing on a giant swing ...

The walk took us back into Sapa where we were hit by locals selling their creations, all trying to outdo each other to make the sale. We haggled a lot and still bought stuff we knew our families would like but we didn't really want. $10...$5 it's a drink to us, it's a lot to them, and you do buy a memory as well as an overpriced whistle thing for Rick, a sash for Ganga and a shoulder pouch for mum..."

 

'Several of the Hmong women stuck with us, more to confirm the sale of some more home-made bits we didn't really want but a small price to pay for the company, the guiding and the incredible pictures that I can take home as memories for life.

 

'In the afternoon we hired two mopeds and drove up into the mountains to see the waterfalls.

Watched Wimbledon on the hotel TV in the evening. Night bus back to Hanoi tomorrow.'

                    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And it transpires that it was exactly two years ago this week that the Kayaker was in Sapa, so what a timely coincidence that is with my Indigo Love.

It all made me think about 'things'.

Some of the Tinker's ornaments held no narrative for me, no memory that made me need to keep them. The narrative for a great deal belonged to my mum and dad and had gone with them. But this sash held that sense of giving, it had been chosen and brought back as a gift from one family member to another (along with stones) so I would never have parted with it, but suddenly, thanks to these pictures and some lovely conversations with the Kayaker this week, it holds a much deeper story and is elevated to a treasure.


My shoulder pouch was already a treasure...


It makes me think that somehow, whether written down or told, I must make sure that stories like this stay with the things.

What do you think...

Do you have 'things' like this that would make little or no sense without their story...