dovegreyreader scribbles

End of Year Gallimaufry...

Firstly, as we wander towards the end of another decade, I want  to say a huge thank you to all of you for reading the scribbles through its thirteenth year. In those thirteen years you have notched up 4,141,308 visits and added 67,269 comments to 4496 posts, whilst at least 1321 of you receive each post by email.

I hope you know how much I appreciate you all; those who comment or email, those who I know read and enjoy silently, those who contribute via the donate button (thank you, much appreciated)  those who send things by post. You all contribute to what feels to me like a knowable and incredibly valuable community and long may we thrive and continue to share books and life together, as well as those vital conversations about vacuum cleaners and scent and Ikea of course.

Now then, I never usually do those end of year 'Best Books I've Read' round ups, mainly because I can never actually choose, and if I do I feel mortified about the books I've left out. However each year I do put the books that have left the greatest impression on the Top Shelf  alongside the 'Best Books I've Ever Read' just to see if they will ultimately make the cut and join the rest. 

Are you keeping up...

Does anyone else do this?

It all started when friends would ask for a reading suggestion, or perhaps a good book group read and, surrounded by thousands of books, could I think of a single one?

No I couldn't. 

Things might be further complicated this year by the fact that I have filtered a lot of books read onto the Tinker's Cott shelves so that our holiday visitors can share them, so it's all a bit of muddle but nevertheless I see that seven books are sitting up on Top Shelf and I think they may all be promoted...

Time Song by Julia Blackburn

'Should Julia Blackburn knock at your door and suggest that you go for walk together, just stop whatever you are doing....switch the iron off, plug the Dyson back in to recharge, put your book down, get your boots on and go..'

Lanny by Max Porter

'On the surface Lanny is the story of a young, middle-class couple and their son who move to a village about an hour's commute from London; she a crime thriller writer, he something in finance and their young and unusual child Lanny...

'You seem to me a child of the old times, a proper human child...'

 

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings

Now I have to confess that I never actually wrote a full blog post about this one. Just praised it to the heavens as I was reading, promised more dreckly, but dreckly never seems to have happened. Looking back I see it was caught up in owlet-watching season and a summer break, plus I took the book along to an Endsleigh Book Group session and talked endlessly about it there, so my apologies but it was superb. Deserving of all the praise and accolades it received and more, and if you can make head or tail of my notes (click to enlarge, hopefully) perhaps you will get a flavour of the book.

I learned a great deal about Lincolnshire the unsung county, and about visual imagery, through Laura Cummings' informed analysis, but I think the ultimate message for me was what a daughter can do for her mother when faced with a conspiracy of silence about her mother's past. This coupled with the most incredibly moving finale that insisted on a complete reappraisal of my assumptions about 'certain people' in the book. It was moving, generous and allowed for some healing and redemption that quite took me by surprise. Plus an observation that resonated with me...

'In the great democracy of family albums we all have photographs upon which disastrously nothing is written.'

We rarely have photos printed these days and to that end I sent Offspringette a photobook of our year here in Devon in with her Christmas parcel. A friend recommended a free phone app (photobooks) that offers a free twenty page book a month for the cost of the postage. There is another that offers thirty free printed photos (Free Prints) a month and we are enjoying seeing prints again which had become prohibitively expensive to do on a home printer.  

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

'Four war-damaged people holed up in a villa, once a nunnery, near Florence towards the end of the war. The German retreat has been considered and brutal. The countryside is laced with landmines and booby traps at every turn and whilst Sikh sapper Kip ('the warrior saint')  sets about defusing more of them each day back in the villa Hana cares for 'the English Patient'. The anonymous man so badly burned that he is unrecognisable and clearly dying. Into the mix comes David Caravaggio (thief, drug addict and now thumbless after Nazi torture) a character along with Hana who both first appeared in Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion.

What I may have missed first time around I gleaned by the shovel-full this time. '

Forty Autumns by Nina Willner

'Well, how lucky was I when a book group in Berkshire sent me a copy of Forty Autumns by Nina Willner. The group had read and discussed this 'family's story of courage and survival on both sides of the Berlin Wall', were recommending it far and wide and thought I might like to read it too....Not only had her mother Hanna fled the divide as a young adult, succeeding after several attempts, but Nina Willner had worked for US Intelligence in Germany during the years of the Cold War....'

The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen

'Just a single family live on the Norwegian island of  Barrøy. Hans and Maria with their daughter Ingrid, Hans's sister Barbro and his father Martin along with three sundry others who eventually find themselves living as part of the family for reasons various. Life is harsh, the weather is brutal, hardships abound, and merely eking out an existence in such an extreme environment takes every ounce of courage, energy and kroner that the family have....' 

Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly

'Back in harness to a member of the family she has served in the past and who is now dying (painfully) Mary Ann Sate writes her own story alongside that of her 'master', though his takes second place to hers. Mary Ann privileges her own experiences, looking back on her life and creating tantalising shadows of events yet unknown and still to be explained....'

Think yourselves very lucky that I'm not attempting a Best Books of the Decade because when I added them up from the sidebar lists there were 752 to choose from but at least here are seven good 'uns to be going on with.

And now its your turn... your best reads of 2019 

On your marks...get set...GO

 

Elementum, Zoology & The Hare and the Moon...

Back along, on a crisp autumn day in October, the B****y Difficult Women had one of their regular gatherings. For those who may be wondering what on earth this involves, these are the friends who used to help with the dovegreyreader tent at Port Eliot Festival. It seemed a shame to stop meeting up just because I was no longer doing the summer bonanza, and so we gather twice a year somewhere central and bless that somewhere with our presence for coffee, lunch, shopping, afternoon tea  and general merriment. Previous blessed venues have included Bath, Montacute House, Thomas Hardy’s cottage and Bristol, but this year it was the turn of Sherborne in Dorset. Specifically Sherborne because we all wanted to visit the Elementum Gallery.

Elementum Journal has been one of those gifts that keep on giving. There have now been five editions of
this beautifully presented collection of essays and photographs on place and people, journeys and discoveries, all immaculately curated by Jay Armstrong into a thing of joy. I still pick up and revisit the earlier editions and read the articles like old friends....the pilgrimages and the quiet revelations, with their sense of peace and tranquillity alongside the personal challenges happening in a world in flux. There is no preaching here, no beating around the head, just pure observation and love for both the ordinary and the unusual. Edition Five, with its stunning cover of volcanic flow in Hawaii has seemed very pertinent this last week or so as I follow the news from New Zealand with my usual obsessive interest. I get first-hand impressions from Offspringette and hearts go out to all those involved, to the courageous people searching and to a country which has endured its fair share of tragedy this year.

Jay Armstrong has now brought her quintessential values and themes from the journal to life, opening Elementum Gallery in Sherborne, and if you happen to be nearby it is well worth a visit. Alongside crafts and an array of really lovely ‘things’ Jay has collated a selection of books that segues perfectly with the Elementum ethos and I was spoilt for choice. In the end I came away with a few books which couldn’t be left behind.

Finding new poetry collections is always a treat and I picked up Zoology by Gillian Clarke, read the first poem, knew I would love this one and I wasn’t wrong. I’ve been reading it for over a month now, a few poems a day, maybe just one, a gap of a few days, read another and jotting down thoughts in a little notebook which seems to have become my new diary. Interestingly, given that I am very prone to marginalia in every other book, I read, I never write or underline in a poetry book because I want to come back to it as new each time. Much more about it eventually, but Zoology has already been elevated to sit alongside my treasured Alice Oswald and Mary Oliver collections as go-to sources for quiet inspiration and a touch of mindfulness when required.  Having read Gillian Clarke's At the Source  some years ago, I have Ice lined up to read next.

Maybe it was the picture of the hare that worked its magic too, bringing to mind Paul Durcan's poem that has stayed with me since reading it in the Candlestick Press pamphlet In Memoriam soon after my dad died. Staring Out the Window Three Weeks After His Death  was my introduction to an Irish poet unknown to me...

Sitting by the bed of his dying father the poet likens his father's soul to a hare..

I saw that his soul was a hare which was poised
In the long grass of his body, ears pricked...

As the poem progresses, and his father's life draws to its close, that hare first approaches, then turns and bounds away disappearing out of sight. Convinced he will never see his father again there are tears, until suddenly the hare reappears...

'Springing out of the wood into a beach cove of sunlight
And I thought - yes, that's how it's going to be from now on:
The hare of his soul always there, when I least expect it;
Popping up out of nowhere, sitting still.'

Hares have always been a love of mine and, as I read this back in 2015, there was the bronze hare that my dad had bought me for my birthday sitting on the bookcase alongside. I took it as a sign and have rarely seen a hare in any shape or form since without whispering a quick 'Hello Dad'.

This is probably  why I also succumbed to The Hare and the Moon - A Calendar of Paintings by Catherine Hyde. I'd had a little run of good fortune on eBay (thank you to the person in Malta who bought my lace-making pillow and bobbins) and I wanted to use the money for something special.

To be doubly sure I needed this I checked there was a picture of a barn owl...

Maybe Catherine Hyde's artwork is best know to you via greetings cards, but I can't tell you how much pleasure I have had from The Hare and the Moon already.

A month-by-month almanac of the phases of the moon and a hare's journey through the twelve months of the year. Beautiful pictures, a few words along with a flower, a tree and a bird of the month and it sits on a book-stand by my desk for gazing at when I am scribbling here. I turn a page every so often through the month and take in the words and pictures. December feels spot on as we head towards the solstice; that turning point when our valley sunsets will start to make their way back from their furthest point behind the trees.

A coal-dark month of mists and fog
when the sun sinks early behind the hill

Harsh against the hard land, the hare toils,
pulling the moon towards the longest night.

And she sings,

The Old Moon, The Snow Moon
The Sap Moon, The Crow Moon
The Hunger Moon, The Wolf Moon

Please do visit the gallery and Sherborne if you are nearby. I'll be going back because so much talking I didn't even get near the Abbey. Even better the journals make great Christmas gifts  as would both these books. Treat yourself if nothing else, and please do leave a comment if you are an Elementum fan, have visited the gallery or know more about Gillian Clarke and Catherine Hyde. 

PS Barn Owl update : They pass by and say hello most evenings at about 9pm but we don't think they are roosting in the box. The Barn Owl Trust are coming to repair the platforms in January and we will have everything crossed for repeat occupancy in February/ March. You'll be the first to know.

 

 

 

 

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup ~ J.L.Carr

'Book writing can be a tedious job needing some incentive to keep one at it. The impulse here was 'can this unbelievable feat be made to sound like the truth, even though it didn't happen? 

So I stacked the cards - a foreigner with remarkable theories. two young men with good reasons for having quit top class football, a Chairman of Napoleonic ability.

Then I dredged up memories of 1930 when I was an unqualified teacher, 18 years old and playing that single season for South Milford White Rose when we won a final which never ended (Pitch invasion and furious fights are not new things.) I learnt much of rural life during that long-gone autumn and early spring...

But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want to believe it.

J.L.Carr 1992

A  notoriously mysterious and private man, this is about as much information about How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup as can be expected from the writer who burned all his diaries in his final years, shunned publicity, would dissemble if journalists came too close, but was not averse to playing the system if he had a new book to sell via the publishing company he ran from his spare bedroom. I have been dipping into The Last Englishman - The Life of J.L. Carr  and finding out a fraction more about the enigma that was J.L.Carr

....the most English of Englishmen: headmaster of a Northamptonshire school, cricket enthusiast and campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen utterly unique novels, including his masterpiece, A Month in the Country, and a publisher of some of the most eccentric and smallest books ever printed.

Byron Rogers' acclaimed biography reveals an elusive, quixotic and civic-minded individual with an unswerving sympathy for the underdog, who led his schoolchildren through the streets to hymn the beauty of the cherry trees and paved his garden path with the printing plates for his hand-drawn maps, and whose fiction is quite remarkably autobiographical. Much more than the life of a thoroughly decent man, The Last Englishman is a comic and touching anatomy of the best kind of Englishness.'

At heart, I am as proud to be English as the Scots, Irish and Welsh are of their countries, and so a fictional journey to Steeple Sinderby, the fenland (perhaps) village created by J.L.Carr, was something of a self-indulgent and welcome treat. Perhaps best known for that book of all books, A Month in the Country and there's the rub I suppose, for any author who writes such a stellar book, and one so close to my heart, well...would it be worth reading anything else they have written. Except the book group theme was Sport and How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup beckoned.

Firstly to explain for those who might now know...the FA Cup is the annual tussle for the top football trophy in England played between the league clubs that turn out every week across the country. It's a knock-out competition and it can get quite exciting when a lowly club (like Plymouth Argyle) gets a bit of a cup run and advances through the early stages. The random draw often pits the top clubs against the lesser ones, and the mighty do occasionally fall when faced with tiny stadiums and the partisan enthusiasm of local supporters.

And it's all here in spades, in this 120 page novel published in 1975. Remembering that England had won the World Cup in 1966 and we still thought we were quite good at football in 1975, quite expected that we would win it again very soon, so a book like this that raises the underdogs to the heights of champions must have been as much of a delight then as it is now...fifty three years since that victory and still we wait.

With some clever tactics inspired by the postulations on the Art of the Possible from a local businessman, the village football team start to rethink their approach, first turning their attentions to the goalkeeper...

' a very good goalkeeper is a team's most valuable asset. Almost alone he can thwart superior opponents.

A goalkeeper does not need to be an accomplished footballer. He needs qualifications similar to a good cabinet-maker or bus driver - distinguishing instantly what will or will not fit a space. To this must be allied outstanding agility and courage.'

Indeed, when I thought about it, how true. The goal keeper doesn't need to be that good at football. he just needs to be able to kick the ball a long way, fill that space between the posts and catch the ball when it heads his way.'

Son of a trapeze artist 'Monkey' Tonks fits the bill. He didn't 'climb trees, he ran up them' hence the nickname, climbed the church steeple to straighten out the weather vane, and though his ball skills were limited (non-existent) this milkman quickly embraced the whole idea of stopping such a thing getting past him.

I'm writing this and laughing all over again at how funny this was in the book, and how ridiculous it sounds in explanation. Suffice to say J.L.Carr weaves the words like magic as the team use every advantage at their disposal  to play their way to the final at Wembley.

There were some little observations that had me smiling too...

'The English are properly honoured amongst Europeans for their protestations of uprightness whilst preparing the destruction of their enemies...'

And so it was in Steeple Sinderby. Using the examples of Bannockburn's battlefield pocked with hidden pits, along with Wellington's cunning ruse to make the French 'play uphill at the Battle of Waterloo, and so the search is on for the most unsuitable piece of land in the parish for the siting of a pitch to flummox the 'enemy.' 

'There's an old spring deeper 'n any drain and you'll find falling balls won't bounce and running balls'll dra-a-ag.' He then added unnecessarily, 'There'll be no need to record what I've said in the minutes, Mr Gidner.'

Honestly I laughed like that proverbial drain, and some, and thought what a wonderful book this is for the now, for the moment. I smiled at seeing how the success of the underdogs can lift a nation's spirits...

'...here was this Real Life Success Story of a Lifetime of people just like them. And these poor souls felt, 'This could happen to me. To me! If these poor country folk can do great memorable deeds, then so can I. Given the chance. 

So what was happening in Steeple Sinderby breathed hope back into hearts withered, rotted and stunted by what life had done to them, and what they'd done with life...and each saw out story as it suited him.'

This was 1975, of course times have changed but some sentiments never do. There is comedy balanced with melancholy here too and I felt the full gamut of emotions whilst thinking maybe we need a J.L.Carr writing now...

Do we have one I wonder...

Anyway, if you are in need of a smile read How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup and I promise you will...even if you don't really like football.

And have you read any more of J.L.Carr's books...

 

 

 

The Franchise Affair ~ Josephine Tey

I was struck, when reading about the life of novelist Josephine Tey, by the similarities in her life to that of Nan Shepherd of The Living Mountain. Both women born in Scotland just three years apart in the 1890s, both writers, both reticent about publicity and both committed to caring for elderly parents, perhaps sacrificing some of their own personal ambitions in the process. I wonder if they ever met.

Born in Inverness, Josephine Tey (the pen name of Elizabeth Mackintosh), like Nan Shepherd, would receive a solid education that enabled her to qualify as a physical training teacher and led to employment in schools in Liverpool, Oban, Eastbourne and Tunbridge Wells before finally having to return home in 1923 to care first for her dying mother and then to keep house for her father. Josephine would outlive her father by a mere two years, dying at the age of fifty-six, but in that time she wrote some splendid novels and several plays (under the pen name Gordon Daviot)  and I can hardly believe that I have only just discovered them.

Sir John Gielgud, who would act in several of the plays, became a life-long friend of Josephine's saying this of her 

'...an elusive character who shunned photographers and publicity of all kinds and who gave no interviews to the press, was deeply reserved, and was 'proud without being arrogant, and obstinate, though not conceited'...'

Many of you will be way ahead of me on this one so please do add your thoughts in comments, but having plumped for The Franchise Affair when faced with a shelf-full in Waterstones the other day, I quickly ordered another three once I had finished it. 

When local solicitor Robert Blair is called in to represent a mother and daughter accused of the abduction and beating of a young girl, Betty Kane, in order to make her work as their maid, a deep sense of mystery and intrigue surrounds their house, Franchise, and the town of  Milford. The Sharpes live on the outskirts of the town in  their dilapidated and secretive house, inherited without the means to maintain it and, thanks to high walls and solid gates, visible only from the top deck of a bus. Yet Betty Kane, having apparently made her escape and with the bruises and a convincing account of her treatment, seems to know every detail of the house, the interior, the attic in which she has been imprisoned, its contents and more. The situation predictably runs out of control once the national press get their teeth into it and suddenly everyone has an opinion and becomes judge and jury.

Having eschewed contemporary fiction for a while for all its ticking of the PC boxes, it is serves me well to remember that fiction has done this since forever, maybe its purpose, amongst many others, is to immortalise the now for the future. Meanwhile The Franchise Affair, published in 1947, laments the single letter of five thousand written to Scotland Yard that might be worthy of police attention...

'Letter writing is the natural outlet of the "odds". The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties -...also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet... they can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it...But I do remind you that the ordinary intelligent citizen writes only one time in five thousand.'

Likewise the press come under equal scrutiny, and when the word  'FASCISTS' is painted in large capitals along Franchise's wall, and bricks are lobbed through the windows...well this could have been one of many moments in recent history.

The story cracks along apace as Robert Blair, beguiled by the younger Miss Sharpe steps well beyond his brief in support of the women, and in an effort to prove their innocence...or are they guilty. Josephine Tey cleverly kept me guessing. I really couldn't predict which rabbit was going to be pulled out of the hat, and without giving anything away it is an irony that the newspaper much maligned will feature large in this final courtroom conjuring trick.

The Franchise Affair felt like a book that has stood the test of time despite its occasional non-2019 attitudes leaving me keen to read the rest of Josephine Tey's novels, except I'm now stuck for choice as to which of these to pick up next. They seem to have had a very favourable make-over, with delectably subtle covers and floppy pages and binding which are my new best friend. All suggestions gratefully received and now over to the Josephine Tey fan club which I'm sure is out there amongst you and itching to confirm in comments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advent Sunday Prize Draw : Frost Fair ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Advent Sunday is here, we can sing Hills of the North (and South) Rejoice and say the word Christmas at last. We’ll be bringing in our bough for the kitchen today and will start decorating it having decided that we will enjoy a full season of Christmas cheer this year, especially given the skies are grey and the rest etc. This will involve a trip up into the loft to find the deccies and yes, it doesn’t seem like five minutes since Offspringette helped me to pack them away before she flew back to New Zealand last year. 

And if it’s Advent Sunday then it’s time for another scribbles tradition too. The prize draw for a copy of Carol Ann Duffy’s annual Christmas offering very kindly offered by Picador. Every year I ask and every year (except last year, there wasn’t one) they say ‘Christmas wouldn’t be right without it.’ 

And then there were ten, so this year ten copies of Frost Fair to be won.

 

It is a snowy London day in The Great Winter of 1683. We follow our bold narrator as she explores ‘the town on the Thames’, a thousand tents and dancing fires lit on the frozen water with jubilant residents and lively festive revelry. All is a fete upon the ice as she sees jugglers, dancing bears, palm readers and even a merry wedding. Her journey leads her to meet many new companions with whom to spend a starry night upon the river, where they sleep with no inkling of who will be looking down on them in the morning light . . .

Carol Ann Duffy's new Christmas poem, Frost Fair is inspired by the fairs held on the River Thames in London as it froze over in the uncommonly cold winters of the Little Ice Age. This delightful, moving new poem captures the inventiveness of a great city and the drama of winter. Beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, Frost Fair is an irresistible read for our festive season.

If you would like to be in it to win it, (and these can go worldwide), please do leave a comment on this post and Magnus will engage his Choosing Paw dreckly.

Incidentally Magnus has declared winter, and after a bit of sign language we finally realised it was Basket on the Kitchen Windowsill Season. No fool that cat when the Aga cranks up.

 

Footnote: comments are now closed and Magnus is doing his choosing.

Olive Kitteridge ~ Elizabeth Strout

It has taken me no less than ten years to make the acquaintance of Olive Kitteridge.

I bought the paperback in good faith backalong even though I loathed the cover. It stayed on the shelf until I read My Name is Lucy Barton and realised I had to fill in the gaps. Elizabeth Strout's writing first came onto my radar with Abide With Me in 2006 and I was an instant fan. Having overcome the cover  in 2016 I then started to read Olive Kitteridge only to find the font was miniscule along with the line spacing and I gave up, three years on and it seemed even smaller. It's happening more and more often so perhaps it's my eyes, but once you've relaxed into adjustable font Kindle reading it's hard to struggle on...

Except Kindle books, unless bought via the Daily Deal, are no longer as economical as they were and upwards of £5.99 seems a lot to pay for a book I already own. But it was late one night, I'd read the sample and realised how a great writer draws their reader in very fast. These were interesting people and I absolutely had to read the rest.

So that is the story of how I have finally met the amazing Olive Kitteridge in 2019.

Olive the maths teacher is married to Henry the pharmacist, they have one son, Christopher and all is not sweetness and light. Olive speaks her mind and seems to dominate, Henry seems meek and hen-pecked, while Christopher is just plain awkward and ungrateful. The action rapidly jumps ahead by twenty years and my curiosity about what may have happened in the interim was insatiable. It is through a series of stories, in which Olive and Henry make sometimes fleeting cameo appearances, that the events of their lives unfold. It is beyond clever and beyond compelling as Elizabeth Strout creates a huge web of interconnected lives, shedding light on the couple's place in the community as those lives overlap, revealing what the community thinks about them via these different perspectives. With Olive as the common denominator there will be loves and cruelties, dramas and disappointments and through it all stomps Olive...by all accounts larger than life, big, tall, heavy, outspoken, assertive, knowingly flawed (aren't we all) but with limited insight or self-awareness into the effect she has on others. It is through the eyes of those around her that the reader is privy to much that Olive is not. 

From that description you might think there is everything to dislike and nothing to laud about Olive but I loved her. The moment when she lays on the bed in Christopher's house, after his marriage to a woman he had known only a few weeks, the house that Henry and Olive have had built for him, and Olive is overcome by heaven knows what and does something vengeful and churlish to vent her feelings. So many moments when somehow Elizabeth Strout allows something unexpected to shine through and illuminate. 

I spent a happy hour in Waterstones in Truro (very nice cafe) recently, browsing the Elizabeth Strout shelf, sympathising with another browser at the same shelf with the same tiny font issues and the same Kindle solution. It seemed we both wanted to check the books for real because they have been revamped in simple but very appropriate covers. I had got a refund on my lovely signed copy of Olive, Again  (back to my Kindle) having failed to check the font/line spacing issue in Waterstones in Plymouth and now settled on a copy of The Burgess Boys as a replacement (font etc fine) just so that I have a real book to show for this renewed flurry of Elizabeth Strout reading.

If you have read Olive Kitteridge I would love to know your thoughts, and about any other of Elizabeth Strout's books too...

Have you watched the film version...should I...

I wonder too if you have books like this which for reasons various you have resisted reading. I have another, it's The Go Between by L.P. Hartley in the New York Review of Books edition and another cover I can't abide. I'm being ridiculous I know.

And the font/line-spacing thing...is it just me...

 

 

 

My Name is Lucy Barton ~ Elizabeth Strout (redux)

Having finally succeeded with Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (it's a long story) I had a delve in the scribbles basement to remind myself about My Name is Lucy Barton and to revisit what had so enamoured me with Elizabeth Strout's writing at the time. I plan to read it again but thought it was worth sharing those thoughts again before Olive bursts onto the scribbles stage later this week....

This was from February 2016...

Hospitalised for nine weeks following complications post-appendicectomy, married mother of two Lucy Barton is surprised to wake and find her mother sitting by her bed. Surprised because Lucy has been estranged from her parents for many years, and in any case her mother is not renowned for the sympathetic or caring gesture. For five days the two re-explore and re-kindle their mother-daughter relationship before Lucy's mother abruptly departs at a crucial moment never to be seen or heard of again.

It is no spoiler to reveal this plot line because My Name is Lucy Barton is one of those tantalising novels where the future is openly revealed before being given any context or reason. In fact ultimately a reason may or may not be given, leaving the reader to forage for clues and hints which I think I found but of course won't reveal.

And it all raised so many interesting questions as I read..

What are the roots of inferiority...

Is it deeply embedded in childhood deprivation or can it be overcome...

Is self-esteem and confidence set in tablets of stone early in life or can it be found later on...

By her own admission Lucy might be an unreliable narrator...

'This must be the way most of us manoeuvre through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true....so much of life seems speculation.''

She is hospitalised and unwell (though it would seem to be an illness of unknown origin) perhaps making her observations and perceptions of her childhood all the more distorted, whilst the presence of her mother and their conversations shed new light for both on long-held certainties. As a reader I hovered around the edge of the family secrets half-expecting and hoping for a clear disclosure given that Elizabeth Strout reveals so much about the future.

Did I pick up on one (or two)...well I couldn't possibly say.

But it all made me think about the intricately woven book, the phrase bandied around and often hard to explain. It is as if Elizabeth Strout has started weaving from a different side with My Name is Lucy Barton because suddenly the book turns in on itself as Lucy attends a writing class where the tutor gives an appraisal of the book I am reading.

It all took me somewhere different and unexpected...

'This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this : You are not doing it right.'

Amongst the paeans of praise always littered around a proof copy is one from the Literary Review concerning Elizabeth Strout's ability to home in on the dropped stitch of the family fabric. It is a wonderful and apt analogy...some unravelling required but with it comes the ability to pick up the stitch, repair the hole and knit on. Lucy's life knits on with some shaping and decreasing and increasing of stitches. The chapters are measured and short, the book flows and having been sent this copy by a friend in with a Christmas card I started reading it at the kitchen table and was instantly engrossed.

It's what I want from a novel these days...draw me in and I will stay; sadly piles of books seem to be falling at this first hurdle these days.

I am streets behind with my reading of the novels of Elizabeth Strout having loved Abide With Me and for some reason dipping out on Amy and Isabelle, Olive Kitteridge and more recently The Burgess Boys (which several people have recommended highly) so I am looking forward to a bit of a reading retrospective.

Meanwhile any more Elizabeth Strout fans out there...

And what about the book that intentionally telegraphs what is ahead...do they work for you...

And do you persevere with a book if those first twenty pages don't pull you in... how long do you give a book to impress.

 

The Land of Green Ginger ~ Winifred Holtby

The theme for November's gathering of the Village Book group this week was 'Colour' and vowing, as always, to try and read something new rather than recycling something from the past, I settled on The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby.

It fitted in with my current reading for several reasons, not least that it was set in the 1920s where I seem to be residing right now in an effort to escape the issue-led fiction of the present day. In fact it's proving to be quite a revelation to read the issue-led fiction of the 1920s instead, because the post-war pre-occupations of the authors offer unusual and often unexpected comparisons with the now.

That sense of a nation unsettled...hoping to find its feet again after a period of turmoil...you know the sort of thing.

The Land of Green Ginger had been beckoning for a while on two fronts...the title and the cover. Books that use the British Railways posters, or a likeness of them, are a shoo in for my consciousness, everyone's doing it and everyone's winning my adoration. 

Those British Library murder mystery books...

A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr. I already had a copy but bought another one solely for the cover. Well. that and the fact that I have a well-thumbed much annotated copy and I wanted a crisp new unsullied one to read over and again without being influenced or drawn to earlier thoughts and impressions, thus allowing new ones to creep in (it works). 

And there it is again on Winifred Holtby's South Riding. Ubiquitous maybe, but still endearing...

And then there's the title, The Land of Green Ginger, what warm, sweet-smelling magic it conjures up. I think of  Yorkshire parkin cake and sugar plum fairies and Christmas. That might just be me though.

Born in South Africa Joanna Burton's mother dies a few days after her birth and, realising that he won't be able to cope or continue his work, Joanna's missionary father dispatches baby Joanna back to the care of her maiden aunts living in the town of Kingsport. Kingsport is based on the city of Hull and it is here that the growing child Joanna, skipping along one day, sees the street name The Land of Green Ginger (an actual street in Hull). The magical name plants seeds of wonder in her imagination and, though it won't feature again the book until a brief reference in the final chapter, it establishes a pathway of escape for Joanna throughout her life, a means when times are tough (and my goodness they are) for her to disappear off on flights of fancy as an antidote to drudgery and hardship.

Married to Teddy Leigh before he sets off to war, Joanna has to cope with the return of a changed, damaged and very difficult man as they try to establish a life for themselves and their two young girls on an isolated hilltop farm in Yorkshire. Having failed to tell Joanna of his childhood brush with TB it comes as something of a shock when Teddy is struck down by the disease again, eventually becoming the carping and controlling invalid of the family. But Joanna is the queen at countering the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, the ultimate soaker-up of verbal abuse and maltreatment, and I spent a lot of time railing against her lot as I read. Comparing it to the present day leaves a great deal wanting in Joanna's existence whilst providing real insights into a woman's lot in the 1920s.

Maybe too, it could be argued that The Land of Green Ginger reads as a bit of self-congratulatory apologia on the part of the unmarried Winifred, a justification of her 'spinster' position. By all accounts an absolute angel of a woman, with ne'er an ill thought about anyone, Winifred was nevertheless reportedly distraught when her closest friend Vera Brittain was married. Perhaps this fiction was a vehicle for her to convey the unsayable, a means of saying 'Just look what I have been spared...look how dreadful it would have been...' .

Joanna's hardship is relentless, her flights of fancy to a new life a constant necessity if she is to stay the course. There will be a distracting love interest in the form of a Hungarian refugee whose account of his war around Europe was both gripping and informative. It's easy to forget the vulnerability of neighbouring countries with land borders when you live on an island, and the fast-paced instability and turmoil, the changing allegiances and enmities and the unpredictability of the war were an education. 

There will be an ultimate 'insult' which I can't possibly mention for fear of spoiling (but let's say I was shocked)  and the outcomes will be tragic and life-changing, yet even then Joanna takes the blame and the consequences upon herself (again) loves and forgives (again)  and I ended up feeling quite a wretched person for not feeling quite so loving and forgiving as I read.

So a right old gamut of emotions but, apart from one rather overwrought and melodramatic section on religion, I emerged realising that I had read a really good book. Winifred Holtby excels at creating that sense of place and situating her characters in the midst. It's not hard to feel the chill and the discomfort as Joanna goes about her farm and household chores in her ragged and worn-out clothes, or to feel some relief as she starts to see the light.

Now I'm wondering, after a suitable length of time to recover my equilibrium, which of Winifred Holtby's books to tackle next...

Any more fans of Winifred out there...

Anyone else lured in by the railway poster book covers...

 

 

Dæmon Voices - Essays on Storytelling ~ Philip Pullman

Doing a bit of housework behind the scenes here on the scribbles and I idly clicked 'draft posts'. This is a helpful little feature that allows me to sift 'draft' from 'published' and it sometimes holds nice surprises.

Surely I had already shared my thoughts on Dæmon Voices - Essays on Storytelling by Philip Pullman early last year?

Perhaps this was a duplicate..

I hunted high and low, up and down the side bar and could find no record.

I read the post through again, written in the early months of 2018 and have decided to publish it now, warts and all, given my re-immersion in all things Philip. So please cast your mind back to February 2018...

 

Among my Christmas gifts this year (2017)  Dæmon Voices - Essays on Storytelling by Philip Pullman, and may I say how overly thrilled I am to have discovered that æ symbol on my iPad keyboard; by mistake of course, having pressed that little world symbol and ended up typing in Norwegian for an age before I realised what I had done.  I am very partial to a collection of essays. Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind has held my attention many times over and I am more than excited about a new collection Feel Free to be published very soon. Notting Hill Editions also publish some fascinating collections .

I have been eyeing up Dæmon Voices since finishing The Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage. I will admit to a bit of a love-hate thing with Philip Pullman. Rare glimpses on TV and social media in recent times have conveyed the impression of a brusque, outspoken and dare I say it slightly arrogant persona. There was an impassioned letter from an Independent Bookseller bemoaning Philip Pullman’s allegiance to Waterstones regarding signed and discounted copies of La Belle Sauvage whilst the smaller bookshops couldn’t possibly compete. It was all adding up to a sub-conscious stance of ‘Well I won’t bother reading him,’ in my mind until of course the post-New Zealand jet-lag did its worst and I ran out to buy a book that would be worth being awake for. It was chunky and I liked the cover and needs must and I was enchanted, entranced, engaged and converted. Oh yes and thankful, because the month after I have said goodbye to Offspringette is always hard.

Philip can now do no wrong...mostly, but I’m hoping some of you might understand this feeling (rightly or wrongly acquired and narrow-minded as it might seem) that us mere mortals can sub-consciously find ourselves adopting without quite realising it or analysing why. Now I discover it’s nigh on impossible not to warm to a writer who feels this when talking about the responsibilities of being a writer...

’....and there is a joy too in responsibility itself - in the knowledge that what we’re doing on earth, while we live, is being done to the best of our ability , and in the light of everything we know about what is good and true.’

I’m already sold.

’Art, whatever kind of art it is, like the mysterious music described in the words of the greatest writer of all ‘the sounds and sent airs, that give delight and hurt not’. To bear the responsibility of giving delight and hurting not is one of the greatest privileges a human being can have, and I ask nothing more than the chance to go on being responsible for it till the end of my days.’

Stirring stuff.

Anyway, with stupid prejudices cast to the winds of let’s-move-on and I am reading an essay every few days from a book that I have a feeling will become something of a constant companion, a reminder of why we read and what it gives us.  I’ve made a terrible mess with my pencil on some of the pages but can’t stop myself, it’s the sort of book that makes you want to join in the conversation, add your own thoughts to those on the page, cite your own examples, agree, disagree and generally engage.

A fond example of mine and Philip’s synchronicity would be on the subject of fiction written in the present tense. I can’t quite describe the disappointment I feel when a book I have been really looking forward to is in the present tense but Philip comes close...

’Reading a novel written entirely in the first person and the present tense seems to me like being in a room where they have those Venetian blinds that go up instead of across - you can only see out in vertical stripes and everything else is closed off to you.’

We agreed on plenty more too,

...what I call Emperor’s New clothes fiction..

...that the way to tell a story ‘is to say what happened and then shut up...’ because ‘meanings are for the reader to find, not for the storyteller to impose.’

...how cheated a reader feels when they reach the end of a supposedly truthful memoir only to find it is fiction, an invention. Philip Pullman suggests its linked with ‘the desire not to be made a fool of: the wish not to be shown up as ignorant of a truth that everyone else knows.’ And I understood that.

...about authors ‘being courteous to their readers and their listeners.

...about how so many of us stop drawing when we hit adolescence, lose confidence and feel self-conscious.

...about the perils of interrogating poetry until it confesses and this with reference to and some advice on how to read John Milton’s Paradise Lost (which is on my radar for later this year with the help of Professor John Carey’s book....

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

And that's as far as I wrote in February 2018. Suffice to say Dæmon Voices has been off the shelf ever thereafter, and even more so now as I reach the final chapters of The Secret Commonwealth.

If you too have discovered Dæmon Voices please do share your thoughts, especially on those points above...present tense, feeling duped, courteous authors, stopping drawing...

And is anyone else happily trapped in the world of Pullman? I set The Secret Commonwealth aside for a week or so because I was galloping through too fast and, for reasons various, we are now two episodes behind on the TV series and waiting for a rainy, cold, wet afternoon to catch up.

Pullmanitis continues unabated.

 

 

Oligarchy ~ Scarlett Thomas

It is no secret here on the scribbles that I am a huge fan of the girls' boarding school novel, and aren't we lucky to have such a rich seam to choose from. Whilst the boys had to make do with Tom Brown's School Days and Goodbye Mr Chips and Jennings (there must be more I just can't think of them) us girls were spoiled for choice. I cut my reading teeth on Malory Towers and begged to be sent to boarding school where I thought I'd fit right in. Darrell Rivers and lacrosse and midnight feasts and tuck boxes. I yearned for one of those little tiny trunks to keep my 'tuck' in, leaving my mum quite distraught at the whole idea that I wanted to be sent away. Chalet School (Fran, this is your cue to tell us about your Chalet School bedroom, it can't be told often enough) and the Abbey books weren't for me, but that vague sense of having missed out on something stretched into adulthood. Maybe nursing helped assuage the 'deprivation' a little, as we all pitched up with our trunks to be housed at Rosslyn Lodge in Belsize Park for Preliminary Training School, but I have still loved the books...transferring my affections to St Bride's and the 1920's series by Dorita Fairlie Bruce where the girls get into all sorts of scrapes involving things like rough seas and leaky boats.

There is also a really excellent little book, Terms & Conditions by  Ysenda Maxtone Graham, published by Slightly Foxed, which shines a hilarious light on the truth about life in girls' boarding schools from 1939-1979 and I recommend it if you didn't go, and wish you had, and want to know more. This book might almost cure you, whilst those who did go to boarding school might be nodding there heads sagely and saying 'I told you so.'

'Harsh matrons, freezing dormitories and appalling food predominated, but at some schools you could take your pony with you and occasionally these eccentric establishments – closed now or reformed – imbued in their pupils a lifetime love of the arts and a real thirst for self-education. In Terms & Conditions Ysenda speaks to members of a lost tribe – the Boarding-school Women, grandmothers now and the backbone of the nation, who look back on their experiences with a mixture of horror and humour.'

If that doesn't work then I can highly recommend Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas.

Honestly, I'm completely cured. I'm over the whole boarding-school-yearning thing now.

Set in the here and now, in an unnamed minor girls' boarding school in Hertfordshire, I settled down to be decadent, on a very November-ish Monday morning, lit the fire, stretched out on the sofa and started reading whilst thinking how important it was to do these things now, just because I can. All those miserable November Mondays schlepping off to work, out and about around the Dartmoor farms in the mud and rain to see the new births, running the gauntlet of hostile dogs, opening and closing five gates to get down there.

And then finding it was the wrong farm and the place you wanted was right on the road, so five gates to get back up and out again. 

Perish the memory.

Anyway I digress. Whilst the preoccupations for Daryl and Sally of Malory Towers are sports and midnight feasts, life is a little different for Tiffanie, Lissa, Bianca, Donya, Danielle and Rachel because into their midst comes Natasha the fabulously wealthy daughter of a Russian oligarch. In fact Natasha's wealth is slightly new-found because her father has only just discovered her, but no matter, she does her best to fit right in. These girls worry about diets, beauty, fashion and phone apps and all embrace anorexia as if born to it. Scales are confiscated but no matter...

'On Sunday night the girls break out of their attic dorms and it's like an Enid Blyton book except it isn't because in what Enid Blyton book do girls escape at midnight to weigh themselves on the kitchen scales that they then break. It's Tiffanie of course. Her obese lardarse. The kitchen full of food and no one eating any of it. No normal midnight feast behaviour here.'

The tyranny and dangers of adolescent dieting are forensically dissected by Scarlett Thomas in a book that she says 'came out of nowhere', surprising her and everyone around her. Think Muriel Spark and you will understand how wry humour can so expertly convey serious issues. The girls all have a warped body image, are utterly obsessed by their weight and are both impressionable and gullible in their pursuit of the perfect shape, whilst the school are hopelessly incapable of dealing with it. The arrival of the new and uninformed Biology teacher (to replace Dr Morgan who...well I couldn't possibly spoil it) a case in point...

'She is tall and sporty with thick porridgey calves... 'I know,' says Miss White...'Why don't we look at BMI? Body Mass Index. We can design some experiments. I'll get the scales....the mood lifts a little...

The only people who look uncertain are the fat girls...'

Out come the calipers as the girls are urged to measure and calculate their body fat percentages...

'You've got to hold someone else's muffin-top and basically pinch it, hard, with these metal things...'

Whilst none of the pupils were eating, Scarlett Thomas had me eating out of her hand. How can you not laugh, except you know it's going to end in a meltdown eventually. The book charts a steady course through this world of adolescent girls and their collective behaviours. 

Though internet access is strictly limited the girls make the most of their one hour per evening, downloading new fitness apps to their phones and scouring Instagram for 'thigh gaps' and all manner of 'other' things. All an education in just how much more information young people have access to, and have to process, than we ever did in the 1960s and 70s. Honey magazine and maybe Cosmopolitan were our limit; that and a hot line via a classmate to her mother who was a very broad-minded youth counsellor and thus answered all our questions by proxy.

Ask on a Tuesday, have the correct answer by Wednesday.

There are some acutely funny moments too. The school outing is hilarious...

'They go to Stevenage on a geography trip. What kind of geography trip takes you to what must be the worst town in the history of the universe, well, except for those Soviet ruins of course, and the towns near Chenobyl?'

The girls have their own ideas....

'Then Donya comes out of a department store with a free sample of a new moisturiser and suddenly everyone needs free samples and there is a rampage of these beskirted, long-limbed exotic creatures with great bone structure. They stampede into Debenhams and BHS both of which smell of bad cafeterias and children's nappies and wee...'

Nonsuch Girls'  did at least go to Bude.

There will be a series of very serious events along with worrying undertones, dubious activities that the reader sees and which scream predatory behaviour, but which the girls don't quite understand as such and it's clear it will end in tears, but what a fillip of a book this was and what a brilliant day I spent with Oligarchy. I buy very little hardback fiction these days but this proved to be a splendid choice, so if you are in need something a bit different get onto your library and persuade them to stock it immediately.

Muriel Spark is indeed born again and I loved it.

And now over to you because it's while since we've had the conversation...

Favourite boarding school books anyone...

Or maybe you didn't need to read them because you actually went  to boarding school...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The True Deceiver ~ Tove Jansson

Sailing along happily with my Tove Jansson reading, I picked up The True Deceiver.  First published in 1982 and translated from its original Swedish by Thomas Teal in 2009 for Sort of Books, this is a little gem of a novel. So much tightly bound into one narrative as Katri Kling decides that she and her brother Mats, a boat-yard worker, need money and perhaps the best way to achieve it is to inveigle their way into the life of famous local artist and illustrator of children's books, Anna Aemilin. 

'Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness,' thinks the socially awkward Katri as she lies awake at night...

'...going on and on, like living in a tunnel where dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you're screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. You wait and hide like a tree...'

And , as winter cloaks the remote fishing and boat-building village of Västerby, Katri plots a credible route into vulnerable Anna's life. There will be coercive control and gas-lighting as Katri homes in and slowly takes over the house, the cooking and the administration of Anna's working life, eventually even answering her copious correspondence for her and it's hard not to fall into the trap of judging Katri's actions...but don't.

There was a moment in the book when the whole premise and my assumptions flipped and Tove Jansson gently and cleverly suggested that I have a rethink.  I had to ask myself who was the 'true deceiver' Katri or Anna, and for fear of spoiling not a word more about the plot.

I can think of another book that did this, The Beacon, to my mind one of Susan Hill's finest novellas. Susan sent me a very early version of this many years ago. I read it and sent back instant thoughts...it was a good read, I'd really enjoyed it. Then, at about 3am I woke up with a start and thought 'Blimey...so THAT'S what this book is about.' The massive and unanswerable conflict had initially passed me by, only dawning when I let the book settle in my mind. I've never forgotten my first reading of The Beacon and if you haven't read it maybe seek it out.

There are some wonderful motifs in The True Deceiver...the old furniture, the piles of Anna's belongings that Katri unilaterally dumps out on the winter ice until the spring thaws when the detritus will sink out of sight...

Slowly it degrades within sight, slowly Anna's past life disappears.

And then here is a dog. Katri's unnamed dog with its menacing yellow eyes. From the off I sensibly didn't take my eyes off that dog...

Given that the book was written before all the current research and knowledge about the autistic spectrum Tove Jansson may unwittingly have written with great insight into some aspects of the condition. I found myself asking (myself) whether in setting out to deceive, had Katri done so by simply being herself. This was how she thought, this was a perfectly right way to proceed and ultimately it will become clear that her motives were...well I'd better not give that away.

Incidentally, in the quest for the Perfect Bookmark for my Tove Jansson reading I have settled on this, a favourite postcard from the National Gallery...'Lake Keitele', by Finnish artist  Akseli Gallen-Kallela and painted in 1905. I go and look for it every time I visit and buy a postcard every time I visit.

Doesn't it create the most incredible atmosphere and likewise The True Deceiver took me to an unusual place and made me flex my mind around strange and unusual ideas; no answers, no definite conclusions at the end beyond that old saying 'there's nowt so queer as folk', and Tove Jansson knew it too.

The Remedies ~ Katharine Towers

You might remember that I had a moment of great fortune in one of the town's charity shops backalong. Someone had donated their entire collection of poetry books and I might have been the first in the door, who knows, but I scooped up a few gems for 50p each, poets I'd always meant to explore, along with a few new names that had drifted onto my radar.

I started my reading of this bounty with The Remedies by Katharine Towers and it resonated with me from the first page and the first lines of the first poem The Roses

Because my father will not stand again
beneath these swags of Himalayan Musk
nor  stare for hours to see which stems are safe

and which need tying back...

When the Tinker first moved in with us here, Susan Hill, who had published his memoir, bought us both a rose to celebrate the moment. It was a lovely thought and my dad spent several days deciding which one he would like. He eventually chose Highgrove for its royal connotations, and the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh had written the introduction for his book, something of which he was inordinately proud. Highgrove and my choice Lady Sylvia, duly arrived and were planted with much ceremony and mychorizzal powder to help the roots. Highgrove launched itself up the wall at Olympian speed, (Lady Sylvia was much more sedate) but my dad would spend hours coaxing it along, tying in the right direction and it flourished. A profusion of deep red flowers year on year since, and every time I go to tidy up I find a little piece of the wire he used.

Isn't this one of the great gifts of poetry, its congruence with experience.

From the title alone there is enough guidance for what may be to come. Remedies with their connotations of healing, solution and resolution, ways of making better and when I checked official definitions they added to the meaning with words like treatment and cure, redress for a wrong and recovery of a right.

There is a method and an order to the poems, one handing over the baton to the next. So Beautiful it Must be True explores the idea of a single note played perfectly, the next poem Tinnitus  when those notes are not quite so perfect...

'If only it were church bells
or the early morning chanting 
of choir boys in Latin.

You could even learn to love
your own inner sea -
swishing through the ossicles,

but not this round-the-clock
back-chat of an irritated nerve
that doesn't know it's time to shut up.

Perhaps the one connection that hadn't occurred to me was that of the Bach Flower Remedies.

I'll admit to buying the odd bottle of Rescue Remedy in the past, and thinking I maybe needed more than the standard few drops as I headed into court to give evidence in a child protection case, but beyond that I knew nothing about them so researching this has been fascinating.

Based on remedies created by Dr Bach in the 1930s, and apparently consisting of 50:50 water and brandy (50-80 proof) whilst the dilution means only a single molecule of the flower essence may remain. It is argued by many that the efficacy is purely that of a placebo, together with the benefits of a moment or two of calming introspection on an emotional state, and EU law changed the classification of the remedies to one of 'nutritional supplement'  thus ending medicinal claims, but many people know and believe differently and I wouldn't dream of denying that belief. If it helps, use it.

Katharine Towers explores each flower remedy... Aspen,Water Violet, Early Gentian, Willow, Cherry Plum and several more via the voice of the plant itself and the condition attributed to its efficacy.

Here's Hornbeam - a remedy for apathy

A rumbling in the bones
but I'm too tired for spring.
All winter I have been
as good as dead...

Treating like with like came to mind as human foibles are imposed on the plants, mental torture, pride, self-pity, hatred, jealousy, aimlessness, impatience, and the effect created by Katharine Towers is both haunting and salutary in itself; a chance to step back and ponder the human condition.

As the collection moves towards it conclusion there is Bluebells

'In the way that we cannot be other
than ourselves even in the deep of winter
these woods where bluebells grow

are always bluebell woods...

and I had to agree...our woods only have one name..

And a final poem 'for example' ,with its simple antidote to a fear of dying, somehow rounds off the collection quietly, thoughtfully and perfectly.

What a brilliant and unexpected find The Remedies has been, and reading it again now to write this post I am reminded of poetry as the greatest gift that keeps on giving.

If there is one sadness, and it's a great and miserable one, it is that this very same shop suffered a catastrophic flood a few months ago and the entire stock, including many more poetry books, a superb fiction section along with a fantastic collection of vinyl records, was lost, so I'm very relieved I gave my selection a  home when I did.

If you know The Remedies, or Katharine Towers' poetry I would love to know your thoughts...

Also news of any more good poetry collections that have caught your attention lately...

And Flower Remedies, what's your verdict...

His Dark Materials...

The TV adaptation of His Dark Materials has started here in the UK, to much-generated hype and anticipation  and I'm wondering whether anyone else watched the first episode on Sunday evening, and if so what did you think?

I'm deeply into The Secret Commonwealth and the world of Lyra and the Magisterium and alethiometers and dæmons, so it was an easy transition for me. Having loved La Belle Sauvage I have slipped straight back into the world that Philip Pullman creates. He makes it effortless for a reader prepared to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves, and I was reminded (thank you Kate in comments) to revisit his books of essays Dæmon Voices and now I'm intrigued by the connections between His Dark Materials and John Milton's Paradise Lost. I don't know Paradise Lost at all but have an inkling to explore those links. Philip Pullman offers a book by book resumé and I have a copy standing by so I may be brave enough to dip a toe in alongside a helpful book, The Essential Paradise Lost by John Carey.

However at 8pm on a Sunday evening Bookhound would be the ultimate test. Having no knowledge of the books would he be interested. Would he grasp the storyline which even to me, in the know, seemed a little obscure in the first instance.

Slowly it all became more evident as the episode unfolded and with very little explanation from me...

Daemons and their purpose...and the fact that they change until a child becomes an adult

A strange world familiar in many ways, but then a huge step removed from the familiar in others...

And who are all these people...the gyptians, Asriel, Mrs Coulter...

Who are the goodies and who are the baddies...

I'm pleased to report that Bookhound loved it, remarking 'This is going to be huge,' after about ten minutes and loving the settings and the graphics as well as the characters. By the end of the first episode the atmosphere of this strange world was established and we both agreed that was Sunday evenings sorted for the forseeable.

Once I have finished The Secret Commonwealth I'm planning to re-read or listen to the first book Northern Lights and then  tackle (for the first time) The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass , having armed myself with a beautiful Everyman edition in readiness. (Titles corrected thank you for comments) 

Please forgive our second Philip Pullman conversation in as many weeks but I'd love to know your thoughts about the TV adaptation and whether it worked for you. It's getting great reviews but opinion on social media seems to be divided...

And what about Paradise Lost...

'The way poems and stories work on our minds is not by logic, but by their capacity to enchant, to excite, to move, to inspire...its primary influence is on the imagination...'

...suggests Philip Pullman who freely acknowledges its influence on him ever since he read it at school.

Did you read it at school....

I wish I had...

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Here we are, on our way towards the Shortest Day, but it doesn’t take much to remind me of summer if it involves memories of a good book. A couple more of my summer deck chair successes, with thoughts from my notebook as I read, so not a full account by any means but hopefully enough to give you the gist. 

Scoop ~ Evelyn Waugh

I am deeply into Evelyn Waugh territory based on my success with Brideshead Revisited coupled with these irresistible new Penguin Modern Classics editions (soft floppy binding so the book stays open, 1.5 line spacing and readable-sized font). My next choice was Scoop the story of the mistaken identity of a hapless William Boot as a top flight journalist who then finds himself shipped off to Africa to cover a 'promising little war' that hasn't really started yet, and might need a bit of help to get going. Satire and irony are timeless, I suspect Scoop reads as well today as it did then and I loved every word.

I've since read the first book in the  Sword of Honour trilogy, 600 pages of pure reading pleasure ahead whenever I feel like picking it up again. More irony, more satire and a book I'd love to run in to the Tinker and say' You'll love this', because it's a world he'd recognise instantly. For the world-weary perhaps it also helps to look back and realise ‘twas ever thus, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well...eventually. 

 

The Offing ~ Benjamin Myers

I often wonder whether authors really like having their book compared to others but two novels came to mind as I started The Offing. The first A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr and the second The Triple Echo by H.E.Bates. Both books held in high esteem here. Pitch perfect sense of place which was no surprise given my thoughts on Benjamin Myers book Under the Rock recently, but here a place isolated and unchanged as sixteen-year-old Robert Appleyard sets out to walk south from the coal mines of the north for a bit of freedom. His childhood has been stolen by war and he needs to breath easy for a while before he to is expected to start his underground working life.

There is a sense of mystery too and whilst I feared one plot, when Robert alights upon the enigmatic but forthright Dulcie Piper on his travels, I was relieved to find it would be something entirely different. A novel about loss and its many guises and how optimism and kindness can triumph in the end.

'You never know what's around the corner. A morning's sunshine can harbour an afternoon's storm clouds. Life is long when you're young and short when you're old, but tenuous at any time.'

Isn't it just.

If you’ve read either of these, or other books by these authors, please do share your thoughts in comments...

And as always, any other good reading recommends too...

And please do tell us what you are reading now...

I’m happy to report that I am completely beguiled and entranced by The Secret Commonwealth. 

Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters ~ Sarah Watling

My grumble back in 2006, when I started writing the scribbles, was how difficult it was, when you lived away from the centre, to find the good books to read and, though things have moved on a bit since then, I always seem to revert to one reliable source, Literary Review. I subscribed again last year on the basis that  £3.18181818 a month (£35 a year for eleven issues) represented a good investment if I was to keep up to speed with what is out there.

Each edition arrives and there's a bit of a fight for it. Bookhound, who would agree that he is not really a reader of anything unless it involves fish or catching them, loves it because it saves him reading the whole book. He reports back to me because I tend to skim the reviews and head to the final verdict for fear of spoilers in the first instance. I won't read it properly until I have finished the book and written my thoughts here.

'There's a book in here that you will really love,' he said after reading the June issue.

Coming from him it's a fatal statement that can only have one outcome, because I then want the book yesterday so, any excuse for a trip to a bookshop, we head off and I come home clutching a copy of Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. It prompted that post about Sisters a while back and we had an interesting discussion about their proliferation in dedicated biographies like this. 

Born at the close of the nineteenth century, sisters Margery, Daphne, Brynhild and Noel Olivier (Sir Laurence was a cousin and is barely mentioned) are raised as free spirits by parents who live and love by Fabian Society principles. The family are well-connected with in-crowd of the day which reads like something of a Who's Who of early twentieth century society... George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, Bunny Garnett, E. Nesbit and those connections expand as the girls get older to include Rupert Brooke (who was said to love all four of them, but in particular Noel) D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf (who couldn't get the measure of them at all). Meanwhile the sisters develop a seemingly unassailable solidarity... 

'The thing about being an Olivier...was that there were four of them, so they could afford to discard outsiders, knowing that isolation would never be absolute.'

However, times are a-changing for women, their voices are being heard and they are 'asserting a claim in the public realm' and it is clear that there is a world waiting out there for the Oliviers and it must be explored and embraced.

There will be family diversions to Jamaica, where their father Sidney was the governor, but ambitions would set each daughter on a different path and in some cases blazing a trail in a world riven by post First World War chaos and uncertainty. The expected role of women will be to step back, to surrender and sooth the men, and far fewer of them, on their return from the Front.

Daphne will embrace the burgeoning educational philosophies of Rudolf Steiner and eventually set up one of the first schools in the UK.

Noel, against all the odds will train in medicine at a time when many hospitals were closing their doors to women medical students and doctors...

For all the free-thinking upbringing some things hadn't changed and it is Brynhilde who narrowly escapes being the designated daughter who will care for the emotionally demanding parents. Described as 'the great beauty of the four' Bryn will marry (twice) and raise a family that will include a daughter Anne. Anne would marry Quentin Bell and as Anne Olivier Bell go on to edit Virginia Woolf's diaries (among many other accomplishments) 

And then there was Margery..

I'm guessing that 4/4 success stories would be too much to ask and sadly it is poor Margery who succumbs to mental illness and is hospitalised for many years. Sisterly solidarity is all well and good, and the motherly Brynhilde goes to extreme lengths to care for her, but Margery's obsessive, volatile and unpredictable behaviour when convinced that someone is in love with her, when really they are definitely not, will eventually lead to the family's heartbreaking and exhausted decision to have her committed into care.

Whenever I read a book like Noble Savages, whose timeline traverses those years of the First World War, there is always that sudden and overwhelming sadness in the run up that I know what is ahead and they don't. It still seems to be a fruitful source of investigation...everything seemed to be going so well...

'The present is amazingly ours, ' says Rupert Brook to Noel, ' we have inherited the world...'

Noel rejects Rupert Brook's desperate and obsessive love for her in the pre-war years and will have to live with that decision ever thereafter. 

An historian with a master's degree in historical research writing her first book and you'd think there would be endless traps there for the falling into, but to my mind Sarah Watling has sifted and handled her information adeptly. By cleverly marshalling her narrative into seven distinct time frames, omitting those years when life trundles on, because I was left desperate to know how life had treated the sisters in the interim. What had changed, who'd had another baby, who was still married, who was off on a frolic of their own, who had escaped a difficult situation, all making for one very  addictive and fascinating book. The book didn't leave my side for a week. Four women living through times of huge social and cultural change and, as a footnote to the book, I would add there is some interesting background information coupled with honest observations from Sarah Watling about the ethics of a biography like this, which had been resisted by the last remaining sister Noel for many years. 

I'm interested too...how do you find out about the books you might want to read (apart from here occasionally)...

Do you rely on newspaper reviews...bookshop shelves...the library...

And what about biographies...are the famous fair game for a reader’s insatiable appetite to know, or should their reticence be respected.

 

 

 

 

 

The Greedy Queen - Eating with Victoria ~ Annie Gray

One of you recommended The Greedy Queen by Annie Gray and I thank you for it. The Village Book Group theme was 'Food', I had bought it especially and read it and it would have fitted the bill perfectly had I remembered to go. But it was back in the days of Tinker’s Cott preparations and we were knee deep in paint and curtains. It was only the 'Are you joining us?' text at 7.30pm that had me putting my brain back in and remembering. I walked over the next day to apologise (except everyone was out). 

Meanwhile you'd need some stamina to keep up with Victoria's appetite...

'Food was the only true constant in her life: it didn't judge, it didn't moan, it rarely disappointed and there was always something new to discover around the corner.'

Food it seems can often be a means of control for troubled Royals.

The book is awash with fascinating information and anecdotes...

En route to Balmoral the party would stop in York for an eight course lunch that had to be consumed in thirty minutes. I don't like to think how many times the coaches might have had to stop by some bushes on the next leg of the journey. 

There are some wonderful recipes for the adventurous to try, Lait de Poule for example...

Beat two egg yolks with 10 oz of pounded sugar and a teaspoon of orange flower water and stir in half a pint of boiling water or milk.
Lait de Poule should be taken very hot, and will be found very soothing for coughs and colds.

But what emerges are the sheer quantities of food consumed and the number of people required to prepare and serve, and all this  alongside a fascinating social history. The kitchen hierarchy ruled and created jobs for life but there were stark contrasts between the lavish wealth and gluttony at Court and the subsistence and poverty beyond the palace gates.

I was (being me) particularly interested in Victoria's ailments...flatulence, indigestion, trapped wind, ventral hernia, a prolapsed uterus; onset of the latter doubtless aided by successive pregnancies and impressive weight gain. These things, 'women's ailments', are rarely addressed with any openness because I'm guessing there are no factual details, but who can doubt the impact on Victoria's physical well-being. We tend to blame reclusiveness on mental state but I'd bet my last pound that her physical state felt equally precarious and vulnerable.

Seeing the old recipes reminded me of the Family Heirloom of which I only have a partial photocopy and I have no idea where the original went, but it is my great grandfather's hand-written recipe book. Born in 1866 in Liverpool, he was a successful confectioner for Barker & Dobson, the sweet manufacturers, before getting into the drink, losing his job and moving to work as a journeyman for Victory V Lozenges in Nelson in Lancashire, where family legend has it that he drank himself into an early grave in 1910. I often look at Alfred's picture and that of his wife Annie and wonder what their life together must have been like, and of course, perhaps it explains why their daughter, my grandmother, was such a tartar and a disciplinarian where my poor hen-pecked grandfather was concerned. 

But the recipe book is a gem of a thing. Nougat according to Anne Gray is devilishly difficult to make but was a favourite of Victoria's. Great Grandad Alfred's recipe for Best Nougat as follows...

10 tbs of Crystallised sugar
8 tbs of Glucose
4 tbs of Honey

Boil to 280

Vanilla flavour, almonds (something illegible) and pour slowly into the whites of twelve eggs well beaten.
Pour in a frame, wafer paper top and bottom.

Then there's Throat Essence but you'll have to decipher Alfred's handwriting for yourself...

Victoria would die in 1901 to be succeeded by her son Edward (known, for obvious reasons, as 'The Caresser'). Though 'jolly lovely but a bit dim' Edward would rework the monarchy and ensure its survival into the twentieth century but, as Annie Gray suggests, Victoria's culinary legacy would live on. 'A greedy queen was replaced by a greedy king', but what comes across throughout this fascinating and very revealing book is Victoria's ability to embrace her food wholeheartedly even when life and its attractions may have palled.

If you have read The Greedy Queen please do add your thoughts in comments...

Meanwhile... Victorian women's lives hindered by the unsayable physical consequences of childbirth...what do you think...

 

 

 

The Summer Book ~ Tove Jansson

'For a story to hold the child's attention, it must entertain her and arouse her curiosity. But to enrich her life, it must stimulate her imagination; help her to develop her intellect and to clarify her emotions; be attuned to her anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to her difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb her...'

I have taken huge liberties with this quote from Bruno Bettelheim's book The Uses of Enchantment - The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by substituting 'her' for 'him'. It was a book I first came across during a misguided dalliance with a Masters Degree in Children's Literature back in the day. I quickly realised that this was going to unpick and analyse everything I held dear about my childhood reading, and for what gain...a certificate and some extra letters, and so I withdrew and have never regretted the decision. The central theme of Bruno Bettleheim's book is the importance of fairy tales as a means for a child to explore the emotions and anxieties of life before they actually meet them for real. I didn't get much further with the book but the gist of that quote has stuck in my mind and its essence has relevance for six-year-old Sophie and her grandmother in Tove Jansson's exquisite novel The Summer Book too. 

Sophie's mother has died (this in common with many fairy stories) and she and her father and grandmother spend a long summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. This is no wicked grandmother though because Tove Jansson has spun a tale that is quite the opposite.  Whilst father is busy working, Sophie and her grandmother explore and create stories and magic and adventure for themselves; Sophie with her child's imagination and grandmother who has never quite lost sight of her inner child and can now bring it out to play. Whilst Sophie is growing up it could perhaps be said that her Grandmother is growing down.

They are two distinct personalities but with many similarities...

Sophie... assertive but unsure, adventurous and strong willed. Prone to those declarations of certainty that childhood permits and about which grown-ups are there to counsel and guide.

Grandmother ...ageing reluctantly, wise, rebellious at the right moment, reassuring when Sophie becomes volatile, daring but relaxed and equally up for an adventure.

Each chapter recounts a new event in their summer lives, I read one each day through August and marvelled at how astutely and wisely grandmother 'manages' Sophie. There will be stories to resolve difficult moments, inventions and actions to control anxieties, encouragement to try new things, the chance to take a few risks and the pair get into some hilarious scrapes too. It's clear to see how this might fulfil Bruno Bettelheim's idea whilst giving Sophie resilience and confidence to take into adulthood with her.

Rowing out to a nearby deserted island where Grandmother notices a house has been built, and thinking it to be deserted, the pair go ashore and peer in the windows..

'What we are now doing...is a demonstration. We are showing our disapproval..' she tells Sophie.

When the owner returns unexpectedly Grandmother's bravado dissolves, realising 'they had stooped to the unforgivable'. Panic sets in along with 'pure primitive flight' as they attempt to hide but fail miserably, and the whole event is hilariously portrayed by Tove Jansson.

The Summer Book is a microcosm of  love and family, courage, resistance, belligerence, curiosity, about taking risks, getting into mischief and finding a way out of it. The loss they have all suffered is mentioned but once as I recall (when Sophie realises she now sleeps on her own) but becomes the new bedrock to build on for their future as individuals and as a family.

I had a spare copy of the book which went off to a new home recently but it occurs to me that The Summer Book is a gift of a book for all seasons...for times of loss and sadness, for moments when life throws more at a person than the feel like dealing with, for those days when escape is required or just the pure pleasure of delighting in a child learning about life,  there can be no better place to visit than Tove Jansson's island and in such magnificent company.

If you have read The Summer Book I would love to know your thoughts...

And if you haven't read it can I warmly recommend it as the most perfect book for troubled or unsettled times of any description...

 

 

 

 

The Gown ~ Jennifer Robson

I seem to be happily becalmed in the 1940s with my reading at the moment and I'm in no rush to seek out the wind or the currents that will move me on. Contemporary fiction just isn't cutting it right now; everything I pick up seems to be ticking off the 2019 'woke' PC boxes and if I'm honest I'm a bit weary of it, maybe life seems real and uncertain enough without 'making it up'. I know it will pass, and that fiction is all about reflecting the moment, but for now becalmed in reliable waters is fine. When a visitor to Tinker's Cott backalong recommended The Gown by Jennifer Robson (alongside additional praise from a librarian in Canada) I was ready to disappear into a jolly good book, especially one that involves needlework, and this one more than lived up to hopes and expectations.

The engagement has been announced between Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten in July 1947 and tensions are running high in the Norman Hartnell workrooms as the decision about who will design and make the dress for the wedding on November 20th is awaited. Ann Hughes and Miriam Dassin, as the Mayfair fashion house's most accomplished embroiderers, would be obvious choices for the more intricate work. Whilst Miriam, having fled from the traumas of post-war Europe has a tragic past,
Ann (for reasons various) will have an uncertain future, but for this brief moment in time the women will forge a close and supportive friendship, heads bowed over the embroidery frames. Of course Norman Hartnell's design is the chosen one, Ann and Miriam are the chosen workers and what follows is a credible and intriguing account of those few frenetic months in which hundreds of silk motifs (silk...imagine the slip and the fray) must be appliqued invisibly onto the wedding gown and train and embellished with pearls and all sorts of precious. There was a small kerfuffle when it was thought the silk worms to make the silk may have been Japanese (until recently an enemy) so much relief when they were found to be Chinese in origin. 

Woven into this narrative is that of Canadian Heather who, in 2016, finds some embroidered samples in her grandmother's belongings after her death in Toronto. It slowly becomes apparent that the motifs closely resemble those on the Royal gown, but how on earth have they ended up in her Nan's possession on the other side of the Atlantic, and with n'er a mention of any connections to the making of the dress, being an embroiderer or perhaps working for Norman Hartnell.

My mum was born a month after the Queen in 1926, always had an affinity and so was immensely proud to have been married a month before the Royal wedding, and perhaps now I understand why. The excitement must have been at fever-pitch in a post-war Britain desperate for some cheer and a bit of pageantry, and that excitement is well-conveyed in The Gown. The smallest details adding to the whole...women across the country sent the Princess their ration coupons for the fabric. The coupons all had to be returned as they were non-transferable, but how desperate the women must have been to see their real-live Princess in a fairy-tale gown marrying the man she loves. The couple had been secretly engaged for some time but the King insisted the announcement could not be made until after Princess Elizabeth's twenty-first birthday; fever pitch doesn't cover it really.

There will be the secrets that must be kept, all the girls in the workroom sworn to secrecy about the dress, windows blocked out against prying eyes and predatory journalists doing their best to weasel their way into the lives of the girls in the hope of a scoop. The details about the stitchery were wonderful. The rules of the sewing room overseen by the strict but benevolent Miss Duley; washed hands, no nail varnish or make up allowed for fear of staining the fabric, the care taken in marking up the designs (nothing more than needle marks to guide), stitch-by-stitch needle-turned applique and women deeply immersed in the flow, oblivious to time as they created their gown and train fit for a Princess. Norman Hartnell makes regular appearances and by all accounts seems to be an all-round good egg. Approachable and understanding he knows talent when he sees it and nurtures it accordingly, and as the big day arrives both he and Miss Duley are keen for everyone to feel they have contributed. Both Ann and Miriam will be suitably rewarded with an unforgettable memory each and every  woman in the workroom, especially those who haven't been directly involved with the sewing, will be invited to place a stitch in the final motif to be appliqued so that they call all now say with pride 'I worked on the Princess's dress.'

For a while Ann and Miriam's lives are seamless (sorry) as they work all hours to complete the dress,  and through the men they both meet a sense of their futures starts to emerge. Will they both ultimately be happy and fulfilled, will there be sadness, well I couldn't possibly comment, however good and true friends are indeed for life and Jennifer Robson leads the narrative towards a very fitting and moving denouement that had me biting my lip with emotion at the end.

It was page 236 before I finally caved and looked up a picture of The Dress. I'd never really paid it much attention in the past, but once I had this image in my head it was a treat to check out pictures of it and by page 330 I was watching Pathé News film footage of the actual day. Jennifer Robson's descriptions of the crowds and the atmosphere within Westminster Abbey came to life and I loved it all.

Another book to add to the stitchery reading shelf but I'm intrigued...has anyone else read The Gown and if so did you enjoy as much as I have or not...

And the quest goes on for more stitchery reading if you have any more suggestions, my stack is growing...

 

 

 

The World of Wolf Hall

Standing at the check-out in Waterstones the other day and a little pile of books caught my eye...

The World of Wolf Hall - A Reading Guide to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies

A free 50 page booklet that will also be published free on Kindle. 

'Please do take one,' said the assistant.

'Ahead of the release of The Mirror & the Light, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy, revisit two of the most celebrated novels of our time.

Bringing the opulent, brutal Tudor world of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII to glittering life, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have thrilled and delighted readers, critics and prize judges alike. Both novels won the Man Booker Prize and have sold over five million copies across the globe.

This reading guide takes you through the story so far, introduces you to the main players, explores the key themes and offers reading group questions to discuss.

The stage is set for The Mirror & the Light. After Henry’s marriage to his third queen, Cromwell attains riches, status and unprecedented power. But how long can his luck last – a blacksmith’s son who has risen to be an earl?'

'Your whole life depends on the next beat of Henry’s heart’ it said on the back cover and I thought, yes it absolutely does. I'm already in a state of feverish excitement about The Mirror & the Light  (all 864 pages of it) and this has helped fuel it no end. I've had a quick read through and, though I usually avoid them, this little book is splendid. Time lines, summaries, key dates, main themes, reminders and an interesting section on the 'the trilogy's relevance today'...

'Nothing makes a book more readable than discovering that a world a million miles away - or five hundred years ago - shares the same concerns as our own...'

A while back now Bookhound and I had nipped across the Tamar Valley to Cotehele on a Monday morning, assuming that it would be deserted, which it was but for another couple walking ahead of us around the garden. I knew instantly that I was following in the footsteps of Hilary Mantel and her husband...I nudged Bookhound, he nudged me...'You know who that is' we both whispered. They sat on a seat and we walked past and on. You'll be relieved to know that I didn't do the fan girl thing, because who knows whether Hilary was hoovering up some atmosphere for the final stages of the book (there could be no better place to do it) and far be it from me to jeopardise the unfinished project.

I'd better confess to this though...

'Sit on that step and I'll take your picture,' said Bookhound knowing full well that I was the least important player on the stage...

I've been suggesting to every bookshop I go in that if they will open at a minute past midnight on March 5th 2020 I promise I'll be there on the doorstep waiting to buy my copy.  After all, why should the Harry Potter children have all the fun. No takers so far but I'll keep on pestering until someone relents, and shouldn't March 5th be declared a National Day of Reading while were at it.

I had been wondering about a reread of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and this little book has really fired me up to revisit and refresh my memory on how wonderful both books were. I know not everyone has pitched their tent in this camp but I certainly have. I've been in this for the long haul since I read the first page back in 2009. I'll admit it took two goes to get into Wolf Hall, but once in I couldn't bear to leave. I've downloaded both audio books too so I'm looking forward to some winter listening while I sew.

There was so much about the books to love. The Tinker read them too, I kept his paperback copies (just because) and we had some wonderful discussions about both. I think he would have agreed with these words of Hilary Mantel...

'The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgement from the lofty perch of the twenty-first century when we know what happened. It's to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case moving forward into a future that is not predetermined, but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.'

Meanwhile, if you are a Wolf Hall acolyte too hie thee to your local bookshop and nab one of these while they have them...

Is anyone else planning a reread...

Did you love them as much as I did...

Or maybe you haven't read either book...

Or maybe you struggled with them...

Anyone else planning to camp outside a bookshop on March 5th 2020...

 

 

The Stopping Places - A Journey Through Gypsy Britain ~ Damian Le Bas

Bringing you up to speed on more of my deckchair reading, which now seems such a distant memory, the sunshine having been replaced by the torrential rain that we knew had to come. All we can say is God bless it for keeping the bore hole happy.

Bookhound and I spent a carefree day or two wandering around the very last Port Eliot Festival back in July. The Kayaker was doing all the outdoor photography workshops for the festival so we kept out of his way, rolled up as usual for Mik Artistik's set before wandering around all the 'talking' tents, dipping in and out of events various. This dipping in and out is fine until you dip in on the end of an event that you wished you'd dipped into from the start. And so it was with Damian Le Bas talking about his book The Stopping Places A Journey Through Gypsy Britain. Quietly spoken, thoughtful and considered in his responses and we were both impressed enough to hot foot off to the book tent to buy said book afterwards. 

Damian Le Bas takes to the road for a year in order to explore his own Gypsy heritage as well as find the 'atchin tans', or stopping places recounted to him by his great-grandmother. These the traditional camping sites around the country where the Gypsies would stop and find work for a while before heading off again. Replacing the horse-drawn with the combustion engine, Damian's transit van becomes his home as he starts to explore his own Romany heritage and somehow strikes a fascinating balance between the old and the traditional and the new and increasingly maligned travelling community of today. 

There will be horse fairs and cemeteries, lay-bys and grassy verges with much to learn from it all, as well as a road trip to the Camargue in the South of France. And then there's the Romani language and the origins of the Gypsies themselves, initially thought to have come from Egypt (hence the derivative name) though the language suggests a closer connection with India. But with layers of 'borrowings'  too, from Persian and Slavic and all hardly surprising for such a peripatetic community. The language is used freely throughout the book and a glossary at the end helped enormously when I get stuck on 'poshrat' ( half-blood, specifically a mixed-blood Gypsy), 'radgey' (mad) , 'ruvengo' ( of the wolves) and especially 'kushti chokkers' (nice boots). and now, of course, I see from whence Del Boy (Only Fools and Horses) borrowed his best lines.

And now of course I’m reminded of that 1970’s holiday in a horse-drawn caravan around County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland. The horse knew the way, which was fortunate, but also knew how to open its food box on the back of the wagon and had eaten most of it on the first day. 

The fair comes to Tavistock this week, and with it the Gypsy community. Their trailers will be parked in the Meadows and the town's annual Goose Fair will take over the Square and the entire length of Plymouth Road on the second Wednesday in October.  The geese come along and join in the fun too though no one mentions the C*******s word.

It's always a day of extreme weather, it will either tip down with rain or be gloriously hot, but we can cope with any amount of that because for a single day the town ignores the Rest of the World, is unanimously happy, plays games only one in a hundred can win and buys a load of things it might not necessarily need, but enjoys the day for the fun of it.

On the evening before the day itself the fairground offers free rides for local schoolchildren (every parents' worst nightmare...'Are you going to Free Rides?'....'I suppose we'll have to'...) schools are closed the next day and everyone heads into town.

Each year there is a common denominator gimmick toy that the children will all be playing with until it breaks. I well remember the year of the inflatable viking axes. The town was sufficiently armed to repel any Nordic invaders for weeks afterwards.

The fair lasts long into the night and when you wake up the next morning there will be no sign of it. Gone, stalls packed up until next year, but for the rides which stay for the rest of the week in the town car park before moving on. One of the joys of my health visiting life was the occasional new birth visit to a Gypsy baby during Goose Fair week, first find your trailer but never so warm a welcome as I sat surrounded by any amount of ornament and colour and a very frilly and doted on baby.

I've barely scratched the surface here but was intrigued about so much in The Stopping Places, not least the way that Damian Le Bas quietly made me examine my own prejudices. Maybe inculcated in me as a a child, when I remember my mum being distinctly unnerved when a Gypsy woman handed her a bunch of heather and then asked quiet aggressively for the money. I might even have come away from that encounter with a stern warning about  'avoiding Gypsies' and I think Damian Le Bas, as he attempts to square their present reputation with their traditional past, willingly admits to the problems. The community regularly gets a bad press but I am now mindful of so much more than I was...of their tradition and heritage, and the seriousness with which many quite rightly still hold dear to that.

If you have read The Stopping Places I would love to know your thoughts...

 

 

 

A Single Thread ~ Tracy Chevalier

Happy memories still of interviewing Tracy at Port Eliot Festival backalong and I always look forward to a new book from her.

A Single Thread, centred on the city of Winchester and its Cathedral, follows the life of Violet Speedwell in the early 1930s. One war barely over, another beckoning, and life for single woman is often precarious and complicated with many social constraints. There is loneliness, prejudice, fear, and in many cases poverty, so when Violet volunteers and joins the cathedral embroiderers there will be much to learn but also friendships within the cathedral community to be forged.

Woven into the book is the manifest and devastating impact of the grief of the First World War. It remains lasting and unresolved, deep and debilitating and it seems to touch everyone, as does the presence of fewer men. 'I'm so tired. I've been tired since 1916'.... but there is great solace to be found in tradition, in this case, church embroidery with its meticulous handiwork and demands for perfection alongside the age-old art of bell-ringing. It could be argued that perhaps both are a means for those who might be feeling dis-empowered to feel in control of a small fraction of a country's way of life. A life that has spiralled out of control and taken something of a hammering, but god willing some aspects may never change. The reliable fall-back position is always there, always will be.

I couldn't help thinking what a pleasure it must have been for Tracy Chevalier to research this book, and whilst I had a few issues with plots and their twists, and a nasty character who seemed relentlessly overwrought, this sat in a happy balance (for me) with the intricate and fascinating details of campanology and needlework. Violet will help make the hassocks and what a joy these are to see in so many of the churches that we visit.

We had the Blessing of the Bell Ropes in the village church a few weeks ago.

This might seem like rather a non-event, but in a tiny church with a tiny congregation, raising the funds to replace the ropes was a major endeavour and one worth celebrating....and really we don't need much of an excuse for a get-together. The tower and its bells were all that survived of a devastating fire in the 1950s and the church was rebuilt to half its former size. The new ropes are in the traditional Devon colours of green, black and white and the blessing was combined with the monthly Songs of Praise. We started with eight verses of The Bellringer's Hymn...

Ring out! ye bells below.
Your thrilling notes entwine,
Let music Heavenward flow
To blend with peals Divine.
God's praises sound
And without fault
His name exalt
With every round.

Written in 1947 and sung to the tune 'Tavistock' (you'll know it when you hear it) this hymn has been adopted by the Devon Bellringers Association. The organist lost count after five verses, and then after seven, but we all just called out 'Three more' and 'Last one' and we got there in the end with huge smiles on our faces. Thus the scene was set for us to sing our way through all the old favourites finishing with The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended. This one always makes me want to cry when I get to the verse

'As o'er each continent and island,
The dawn leads on another day,
The voice of prayer is never silent,
Nor dies the strain of praise away.

But how lucky we are that our bells are still rung and ring-able and that we can still gather and be pleased about it. The social gathering afterwards a wonderful chance to catch up on all the local news.

As Violet sits and listens, and William Carver makes the calls in the Winchester Cathedral belfry in the 1930s, it may be slightly less ambitious but little different in our village church belfry ninety years on.

'Rounds and then Grandsire  Caters...Look to. Treble's going...

Go Grandsire...and the order of the bells changed, then changed again...'

Thankfully Violet will find ways around the vulnerabilities and restrictions imposed on her, along with the courage to thrive and find happiness and fulfilment, and so as I turned the final page of A Single Thread I realised I was very pleased to have read it.

If you have read A Single Thread I would love to know your thoughts...

Do any other campanology or needlework-themed novels come to mind..

Footnote : I’ve just started The Gown by Jennifer Robson, a novel about two women working for Norman Hartnell and creating Queen Elizabeth’s wedding dress, and the first hundred pages have been excellent.

Tove Jansson

The Tove Jansson bus came and seemed to have gone for me quite a few years ago, or so I thought.

New translations were being published and much love for Tove was evident around the interwebs yet somehow I never quite jumped on the wagon. I've dipped in and out, and the shelf of books has grown year on year thanks to Nat at Sort Of Books. Nat has kept the faith and sent me new editions of each Tove Jansson book as they became available, but, as I think I may have mentioned a while back, it was the arrival of a proof copy of the forthcoming Letters From Tove which finally tipped the balance.

That and a summer of starting and stopping more books than I care to remember. 

I was in need of An Autumn Reading Project.

There is nothing I love more than to explore the life and work of one writer but it's something I have stopped doing in recent years. I end up gorging, finding out far too much and spoil it for myself, but I had a feeling this wouldn't happen with Tove. 

Born in Helsinki in Finland at the outbreak of World War One in August 1914, Tove Jansson would become famous for her illustrated Moomin books and perhaps less famous for her adult novels and short stories. Recent translations by Thomas Teal have rectified that. The Moomins, first made an appearance in 1945 and featured heavily in my library borrowing through the 1950s but it is only in recent years that Sort Of Books have made the adult fiction available.

A word of praise for the beauty of the books. French flaps...don't we all love a French flap and the Moomins reprinted in their original hardback format (for smaller hands) and iconic livery.

I have now read all three available novels and my thoughts on The Summer Book (third reading of that) The True Deceiver and Fair Play will appear dreckly over the coming weeks and I will be working my way through the short stories too. It strikes me that reading Tove Jansson is like stepping through the back of the literary wardrobe into a Narnia-like world of magic and difference. There's still plenty of snow but the landscape is changed, quirky, often eccentric but exciting too and so very refreshing for that. 

It is Letters From Tove, published this week, that currently has my heart.

'Out of the thousands of letters Tove Jansson wrote a cache remains that she addressed to her family, her dearest confidantes, and her lovers, male and female. Into these she spilled her innermost thoughts, defended her ideals and revealed her heart. To read these letters is both an act of startling intimacy and a rare privilege.

Penned with grace and humour, Letters from Tove offers an almost seamless commentary on Tove Jansson's life as it unfolds within Helsinki's bohemian circles and her island home. Spanning fifty years between her art studies and the height of Moomin fame, we share with her the bleakness of war; the hopes for love that were dashed and renewed, and her determined attempts to establish herself as an artist.

Vivid, inspiring and shining with integrity, Letters from Tove shows precisely how an aspiring and courageous young artist can evolve into a very great one.'

Reading volumes of letters is always fascinating for the insights. I prefer them to diaries which perversely often give me too much insight and Tove's letters are absolute treasures. She was a prolific writer and I'm currently enjoying her long, chatty and illustrated correspondent to her parents; her mother Signe Hammarsten, an artist and illustrator, and her father Viktor a sculptor, the letters as near as I think I could get to being in conversation with her. I have been known to write airmail letters like this to Offspringette...they start and I add to them for the next week or so...tiny little life events of home and family. 

Letters From Tove, will be serialised on Radio 4 in the week leading up to Christmas and, from the little I have read so far, it promises to be wonderful. A nod to a beautifully presented hardback book too, 500 pages of high quality paper and binding.

As I embark on my journey with Tove, please do come along if you would like to and I would love to know your thoughts...

Were the Moomins part of your childhood too...

Have you read any more of Tove Jansson's books...

And what about handwritten letters...

I fear books like this will be unknown for the future generations...

Can e mails possibly hold the same magic...

 

Rising Ground - A Search for the Spirit of Place ~ Philip Marsden redux

Whilst writing about Philip Marsden's new book Summer Isles here a few days ago I went down into the scribbles basement to revisit my 2015 thoughts in his earlier book Rising Ground - A Search for the Spirit of Place and decided to bring it back into the light...

February 15th 2015...

One of the most immediate and surprising effects of reading Rising Ground by Philip Marsden is the whole notion of those landscapes of childhood...

'On to these blank places - known only as the 'hill' and the 'combe' - I sketched the map of my childhood... for years...whenever I heard the word' childhood' , it always brought to mind a picture of the hill and the combe...'

Though Cornwall is not the landscape of Philip Marsden's childhood, it is the place he now calls home and the subject of his wanderings in Rising Ground, and with that comes the debate about where exactly is home...

Is it the place where you were born...

Is it the house you grew up in...

Is it the house you make your own...

Home is certainly a shifting concept, and one that my recent reading of The Snow Geese by William Fiennes gave me much to think about,  and as Philip Marsden made his way around the county it was fascinating to see what might attract his attention. As he proceeded to elaborate on that search for the spirit of place I found my own childhood landscape pictures appearing in my mind, conjuring up 'so much of a life,' and it all made me think how key those landscapes of the child's eye are.

It's true... apart from the daily accumulation of views of the Tamar Valley views from home, do I really remember any landscapes as vividly and as clearly as those I knew then?

And the reason I was going to love Rising Ground as much as I did, is that my most deeply embedded childhood landscapes, apart from those around our suburban home in Surrey...Mitcham Common, Seven Islands Pond, Coldblow Lane, Three Kings Pond, the Beehive bridge... yet the landscapes I remember with greatest sea-bright clarity are those of the north Cornish coast. 

One of those 'aunts' and 'uncles', that so many of us gained after our parents made wartime friendships, lived in Tintagel where they ran a market garden, and we would go there for two week-long summer holidays in the early 1960s, in the days when there was just one gift shop (Camelot Crafts) and an old Land Rover to take us up and down to Merlin's Cove. Or us children (they had two sons of our age) all primary school age, would wander off on our own down to St Nectan's Glen, or walk through Rocky Valley to Boscastle, or maybe go on mass day-long family excursions to Bossiney Beach, or for twilight summer evening swims along the coast at Port Gaverne...and if I think of childhood and holidays these are the landscapes that conjure themselves up with very little effort , though that might be an age thing too...

Philip Marsden's own journey to Tintagel focuses largely on the sham of the castle and the equally dubious legacy of Arthurian legend with which the town is now awash, though thankfully the childhood landscape, blossoming and unfurling again in my imagination, withstands the onslaught and I cling onto that visit to see King Arthur's absolutely original Round Table where he of course sat in conference with his very genuine and courageous Knights. I suddenly remember, apropos of an odd connection, that it was whilst on one of these holidays that my 'aunt' , a teacher at nearby Delabole School, set me up with a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S.Lewis as my holiday reading and that was me sorted.

Philip Marsden writes about the recurring motif in idealised places: a sense of enclosure or encirclement. Well, my childhood landscape of Tintagel has the wagons circled protectively around it, and interestingly any number of return visits, and witnessing the horror of the changes, does nothing to dent the happy remembrance.

But there is a lot more of the county to explore in Rising Ground, and if you know Cornwall, or even if you have only read about it, then you may well see it with renewed eyes through these pages, I certainly have.

Bodmin Moor, if I am honest, has always been something to drive across to get to somewhere else in Cornwall. It doesn't fill me with that sense of well-being and peace and quiet that Dartmoor does, and for that I blame Daphne du Maurier (amongst others) for the bleak portrayal that seeped into my teenage consciousness as I lapped up the novels (Rebecca whilst sitting on the beach at St Ives). I react emotionally to the beauty of Dartmoor but objectively to the desolate, slightly spooky atmosphere of Bodmin...and we can see it rising in the distance from our garden here in the Tamar Valley, but still no allure, no sense of reverence. Philip Marsden succeeds where I fail as he walks out on the moor in search of, and discovering, that Neolithic spirit of place as he recalls the words of an archaeologist...

'Imagine how depleted your people would be after a harsh winter. Imagine the spirit of loss blowing across the moor.'

I can half see it now and I probably need to do a little more than just drive across Bodmin Moor in the future.

There are fascinating chapters about Quaker William Cookworthy and his 1768 recipe for porcelain, a very exact combination of ingredients, glaze, slip, kiln temperature and time, utilising the Cornish china clay, and that had us nipping into Plymouth Museum to check out the china cabinets that we always walk past to get to the more interesting things like a Dame Laura Knight exhibition. 



Plymouth porcelain is robust but with the delicacy of lace, translucent to light, chimes when tapped (we didn't check that out) and very hard to copy. Apparently only Willam Cookworthy ever made true porcelain successfully in the UK, and only for a very brief period of time in the city of Plymouth, and how many times have we driven past the China House pub on Sutton Harbour without knowing that this is where Cookworthy's factory is thought to have been. Spode, Wedgwood and Minton swooped after Cookworthy's death but apparently never quite matched the perfection of his porcelain.. And William Cookworthy was an enterprising man in many other ways too...the desalination of seawater, discovering the cause of scurvy, helping Smeaton develop the lime that would be used to rebuild the Eddystone lighthouse (now on Plymouth Hoe)

Don't you just love books like this that take you on a journey of discovering new things, and remembering some old things too and even better when the places are on the doorstep. Rising Ground created connections in every direction and many more explorable characters and places that I haven't mentioned, poet Jack Clemo, tracing the River Fal, finding the magic in amongst the embarrassingly commercialised shambles that is Land's End. Land's End so dreadful that Bookhound couldn't face it, sitting outside while I went in just so that I could say I had been there.

If you have an interest in Cornwall, or sensing that spirit of place anywhere, then Rising Ground is the book for you and well worth a read, but meanwhile

...what thinkest thee all about this idea of childhood landscapes being firmly fixed in the imagination...

...can you see yours I wonder, and if so I'd love to know where it is because I reckon between us we could probably cover every continent.

A Spy Among Friends : Philby and the Great Betrayal ~ Ben Macintyre

The Village Book Group that I helped set up a year ago has proved to be a winner. We are a mixed bunch with a variety of reading tastes and so our themed evenings make for fascinating discussion and much hilarity.

This month's theme was 'Betrayal' and I had in mind a John le Carre. Not only because I have never read him, but the books are republished in the new 'softer' Penguin Modern Classics binding and I've fallen in love with them. As a book in the hand they cannot be bettered with their eau de nil livery, floppy pages, a binding that lays flat without excessive spine-cracking persuasion, good sized font and line spacing and generally a very happy-making reading experience. Plenty say le Carre books can be complicated so I plumped for The Night Manager on the basis that I'd seen the TV series so would have the plot and characters in my imagination, even though I much prefer to do this the other way round, no matter, it would be fine.

It wasn't.

I'm not sure whether my concentration was shot to pieces by national developments...

Or was I distracted by the images of the TV characters (I confess Tom Hiddleston mostly) and the fact that the book has much action that I think was omitted from the series.

Or perhaps I wasn't giving myself a long enough run at it...maybe I needed a 100 page sitting to really get into it.

I soldiered on in a complete fog of ambiguity and started to feel a bit stupid. Even worse miserable, because if I haven't got a book on the go that I can't wait to pick up again then really what's this life all about. I was completely confused and finally threw in the towel at p160, experiencing a wave of relief before panicking that the book group was meeting in two days time and I wouldn't have a lot to show for it. I know I could easily have found a fall-back reserve but I'm trying to read anew for this group, and really enjoying it, which is where Ben Macintyre comes in.

I downloaded A Spy Among Friends : Philby and the Great Betrayal onto my Kindle and within minutes I was feeling less stupid and completely in control of my reading life again, flicking the pages like a thing possessed.

I was too young to grasp the whole Burgess - Maclean - Philby  spy scandal back in the 1950s and 60s but goodness me what a scandal it was; a betrayal so profound it seemed almost impossible to believe...likewise for those nearest to Kim Philby, who suspected nothing about his Soviet connections, and when suspicions were raised refused to believe their charming friend capable of such duplicity.

'You didn't just like him, you worshipped him'.

This is not a biography, more an attempt to describe a friendship, namely that between Philby and his closest fellow spy and confidante, Nicholas Elliott and a wider circle that included some well-known figures...Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Green, Dennis Wheatley, Peter Ustinov's father Jona, Ian Fleming, Tim Milne (nephew of A.A.Milne). Writers and journalists make the best spies apparently, even better it would seem if they had been through the brutal prep-school system, attended a top flight public school and thence to Cambridge University, a place that 'boiled with ideological conflict' in the 1930s and beyond. We had an interesting discussion about the potential impact of the 'brutal prep' school' on these men and the qualities they may have taken into adulthood as a result.

Friendly to all but emotionally connected to very few, Kim Philby had been spying for the Russians for six years before he was recruited into MI6 during the war, and here's a thing, I had never really known the difference between MI5 and MI6, nor the class divisions, until Ben Macintyre explained it...

MI5 - maintaining security and combating enemy espionage...below the salt, working to middle class ' a little common'

MI6 - gathering intelligence and running agents, upper middle class, elitist and very old school.

It was MI5 who first suspected Philby and MI6 who would have none of it, mostly at the behest of Nicholas Elliot who defended his friend against countless accusations over his part in the escape of fellow Soviet spies Burgess and Maclean to Russia. There would be questions in Parliament, answered by the then Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, about the identity of the 'Third Man' who had tipped them off and Kim Philby (guilty as charged as we now know) would be exonerated and eventually brought back into MI6 to carry on his duplicitous life.  Ben Macintyre analyses film footage of a press conference called by Kim Philby, to answer questions and protest his innocence, and it is fascinating to watch it now. A consummate liar and dissembler at work and apparently MI6 would eventually use this as a training video.  

It's a sad and sorry life with a trail of discarded and damaged women and children left in his wake, but Philby's luck would eventually run out and throughout the book all I could think was 'How is Nicholas Elliot going to feel when the penny finally drops?'

And how is Philby going to react...

A lifelong friendship that had been deeply meaningful to one yet meaningless to the other.

In fact Elliot, never one to reveal his innermost emotions, insisted that he be the one to confront the disintegrating and now alcoholic Philby (much against MI5's better judgement) and here the plot thickens when it appears Philby, after initial interrogation by his once closest friend and the signing of a confession, is effectively allowed to escape to Moscow. Ultimately it becomes clear that this might have been the most expedient political outcome...the scandal and revelations of a court case, the duping and misplaced trust experienced by those who couldn't step back and see the situation objectively, all far too embarrassing for Harold Macmillan, now the Prime Minister, and the British government to contemplate...witness the fact that many papers relating to the case remain under lock and key.

But, as seems equally likely, was this also a clear case of the old-boy network looking after its own...

I got my John le Carre moment in the end because he has written an afterword for A Spy Among Friends that recounts many very revealing conversations he had with Nicholas Elliot in the aftermath, and which offer further opportunities for the reader to reach their own conclusions.

And so a brilliant Kindle read and a great discussion at book group about the Great Betrayal, treachery, treason and all manner of pertinent points raised.

Meanwhile am I alone in my le Carre confusion...

Which of his books would you recommend because they all look delightful on the shelf...

And I wonder which book title you might have chosen for the theme of 'Betrayal.'

 

 

 

 

Surfacing with Kathleen Jamie

I suspect great screeds have already been written out there about Surfacing, the new collection of essays by Kathleen Jamie. We've all been waiting a long time, or so it seems, but here's where the writing of Kathleen Jamie differs from so much else that I read, because Findings and Sightlines have each become a sort of vade mecum on my shelf and I hoped that Surfacing would do likewise....become not two but three books I couldn't manage without.

Findings became a true vade mecum. Inspired by Kathleen Jamie's account of her visit to Maes Howe it was a book that travelled to Orkney with me three times. In 2012, when Bookhound and I took the Tinker back there, I pencilled in our own journeys around the islands,next to Kathleen Jamie's, in my copy of Findings. I read it again now and can remember the days so clearly.

On June 3rd we drove out to Hoxa tapestry gallery at St Margaret's Hope

On the 4th we went to Maes Howe and my dad bought me the Complete Works of George Mackay Brown...

At 8pm on June 5th the three of us stood in the middle of the Ring of Brodgar...

Each morning we woke to the distant whale humps of Hoy..

For those who might not know of it, Maes Howe is a

'Neolithic chambered cairn, a tomb, where 5000 years ago. they interred the bones of the dead.'

On the Shortest Day the sun sets directly in line with the entrance tunnel and shines on the far wall of the chamber. It's a moment that Kathleen Jamie goes in search of in Findings, but in doing so sees and finds a great deal more.

When I went back to Orkney with my dad for the Royal Oak commemoration in October 2013, and knowing it would probably be his last visit and memories must be stored like treasures, he and I went inside Maes Howe with a guide and he was enthralled. That evening, as we watched the sun set over Loch Harray, I read bits of 'Darkness and Light' from Findings to him.

'You are standing in a high, dim stone vault. There is a thick soundlessness, like a recording studio, or a strongroom...the world you have entered into is not like a cave, but a place of artifice and skill. Yes, that's it, what you notice when you stand and look around is cool, dry, applied skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel their self assurance.'

If I could have scattered a thimble-full of my dad's ashes in Maes Howe when Bookhound and I went back for our Ruby wedding anniversary in 2016 I would have done (I know, I know, you're not supposed to and I didn't) instead they went safely, and with much love and sadness, into the tidal waters of Scapa Flow at Waulkmill Bay.

I found it incredibly hard to leave Orkney after this visit.

And, with so much riding on it, I'll admit I opened Surfacing with some trepidation...

Supposing Kathleen Jamie had somehow gone off the boil...

Lost that vision for which I am so grateful...

Those seemingly tiny observations, often just a few words, but that work like depth charges in my mind.

Maybe, I've got older and wiser (yes to the former, jury out on the latter) and the alchemy I first discovered in 2005 wouldn't still be there...

As if.

And I knew I would have no worries from the first line of the first essay 'The Reindeer Cave'

'You're sheltering in a cave, thinking about the Ice Age...'

That first essay calibrated my senses, eased me away from the present and back in time. I thought about it, imagined it, sensed it, knew it.

This was all excellent preparation for a much longer journey to the Alaskan village of Quinhagak where Kathleen Jamie joins an archaeological dig. As the tundra melts artefacts are surfacing but this recovery of the past is not without controversy...is it unwarranted interference with the dead, or an opportunity for the young to learn about a heritage that has been lost to them for a generation or more.

There will be a return to Orkney for another dig...more surfacing...

And a piece I loved with a passion 'The Inevitable Pagoda' about those shards of crockery so often found in a ploughed field, or in our case the garden and yes, there is always the pagoda from the Willow Pattern

Each is a glimpse of a life and a time. It begins to sound like a clamour rising like mist from an empty field. All the stories, the voices, the dead...'

You look out over the new-ploughed acres as over human history, and the next field too and the next, all the fields...

Ach.

They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field.'

Whilst Kathleen Jamie casts her pieces back into the field ours are kept in a jar. Our stories have surfaced over twenty-five years of digging this garden and we have kept them in a jar because, from the census returns, we 'know' the people who may have touched them...

John and Betsy Geake (both born in the 1790s) or maybe it was their granddaughter Alice who dropped the plate.

Maybe Ann Hendy threw a dish at husband William...

Honestly the stories we invent. 

And then Surfacing, the essay of the title...

'You're losing their voices. When did that happen? You're forgetting the sound of your mother's voice, and your grandmother's...and today you realise you can't quite bring their voices to mind...'

My eyes actually welled up at this.

Never so true.

And when Kathleen Jamie mentions that her grandmother had diphtheria as a small child a memory of my own surfaced out of absolutely nowhere... that my mum had also had diphtheria as a baby in Liverpool in the mid-1920s and I knew next to nothing about it, and never will....

'And where did they put her, to isolate her and her infection in that crowded house? You can't reach her now to ask.'

How on earth did my mum survive that.

And as I turn the final page on Surfacing I realise that thankfully, whilst I may have got older, so has Kathleen Jamie. She too has surfaced, her memories surface as do mine, the experiences that are universal for so many of us; the empty nest and independent children (and in my case barn owls too) the loss of her father, that sense of time regained as your family responsibilities shift and what to do with it, the opportunities that present themselves, the chance to see and do new and different things and view them in a changed light. And to view the past in a changed light.

In a recent interview Kathleen Jamie suggests that she is not an emotional person and I suspect this might be a favourable asset for an essayist. Maybe it leaves plenty of space for the reader's emotions to flood in, because mine have and will continue to do as I spend time unlocking everything that this book holds. I will read it over and again. It will hold different meaning and relevance each time I pick it up and I will be grateful that such writers exist.

If you are new to the writing of Kathleen Jamie I can promise you these are books for our times. Someone prepared to look at the world without the rose-tints and reveal what matters.

Books that will make you see and think differently.

And if you know Kathleen Jamie's writing and had been wondering about this one, dither no more, you need it on your shelf.

Scroll down for gifts...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under the Rock -The Poetry of Place ~ Benjamin Myers

Are unremarkable places made remarkable by the minds that map them...

It is so long since I finished Under the Rock by Benjamin Myers, and now I'm thinking again about that first line in the book. It was back in March, when I went on a journey to Mytholmroyd with the author of The Gallows Pole, a book I raved about on here last year, so I was intrigued to found out more about his home turf in and around the Calder Valley in Yorkshire where both books are located. I've thought long and hard too about the early observation that

'the countryside is meanwhile idealised by some and dismissed as retrogressive by others.'  

Especially when you live in the middle of it, with all its realities and occasional challenges and know well the often precarious livelihoods it supports, often misunderstood by the centre yet where the decisions can be made on our behalf and supposedly for the national good...well, yes, I wonder on. 

With a foot experienced in both camps Benjamin Myers, moving from London to settle under the shadow of Scout Rock in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, casts his keen and observant eye over it all and I loved this book. This is not your typical writer-moves-to-country-and-puts-us-all-straight type of book, not in the slightest, but it is an intense and unwavering focus on one place, the multiple perspectives of historical, social, geographical and cultural references allowing me to know it. I know too that sense of walking the same place over and over again, to see difference and change and find the voices of the past.

I sensed a Ted Hughes bass line running through the book, homage to what has gone before acknowledging that he was there first; why reinvent the wheel that the one-time Poet Laureate, born and raised in Mytholmroyd, had set in motion with his poetry and writing about this place   

There was plenty in Under the Rock that chimed with my own experiences living here in the Shire. Reference, for example, to the changing names, words that are 'gradually chiselled and chipped away by time and even 're-sculpted in the changing shapes of our mouths, teeth and tongues.' There is a green lane here known as Maggie Purley's and local lore has it that Maggie hanged herself at one end of said lane. But I can find no record... was it Maggie Burley or Durley or anything else really. No one seems to know any more and I'm guessing that soon the story will be lost.

Blending history with legend, myth and local lore there is a burrowing down below the surface of the seemingly impenetrable millstone grit to find the meanings that surround a place that can at times seem light-less and downright depressing. Many's the time I wanted to shout 'Come and enjoy our great big West Country skies to lift the winter spirits,' because even in deepest winter we have light and sun and sky, something which life beneath Scout Rock seems to lack. Of nearby Hebden Bridge 'If you live there you'll be depressed then,' and you have to wonder what the local mental health and prescription statistics are.

And there is a lot of water for swimming in, and a valley that can suddenly become 'a low budget Venice'. We watched the Calder Valley floods on the news and of course thought 'how awful,' but to read of the reality was far worse...

'How quickly we can be pushed back through the ages when robbed of all that we take for granted...'

Through his constant walking of Scout Rock and the surrounding area, with his little dog Cliff alongside, and an exercising of a right to roam, slowly Benjamin Myers achieves a congruence with the place, but one that can be shattered by the imposition of sudden restrictions...

'My moral compass is, I hope, correctly calibrated to the basics of goodness, yet I struggle particularly with the concepts of borders and boundaries, In short, I like to trespass....perhaps life is too short to go only where we are told to go...'

Even though the restrictions were based on the discovery of an asbestos dump, therefore wise to accede, but I understand that powerful sentiment ..completely.

A measure of the involvement, and sense of belonging to the place and the people that Under the Rock had invested in me, was the stomach-churning plea on social media recently that, having been spooked by fireworks, Cliff had gone missing.

It was a long four hours until Cliff was found I can tell you.

The book is interspersed with greyscale photographs and poems entitled  'Field Notes' and has a useful bibliography of sources at the back... incidentally, am I the only person to go through these and tick off the books I have (sixteen) ...and soon I will be moving on to a new book from Benjamin Myers, The Offing..

'One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood's Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea.

Staying with Dulcie, Robert's life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.'

I'm reminded at once of A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr and that H.E.Bates novella, The Triple Echo. I will report back dreckly.

Meanwhile, if you know the Calder Valley does this sound something like the place you would recognise...

And does light, and year-round access to it, matter or am I being a bit precious about our big skies...

 

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Fleishman is in Trouble ~ Taffy Brodesser- Akner 

I fell for the 'Best Book of the Summer' hype and bought a copy just to see. Well, I quite enjoyed it in parts, but I don't think I loved it as much as everyone else.

New York-based liver specialist Dr Toby Fleishman faces the end of his marriage to high-flying business woman Rachel with some trepidation until he discovers dating apps and realises there may be advantages to his new found freedom. Let's just say he tests that freedom to the limits (many times, all described in detail) whilst also caring for his two children, because just as he's starting to enjoy himself Rachel disappears. Juggling the demands of his job and the needs of the children, life spools back and forth as the past is slowly revealed. The USP of the book, flagged up in the reviews, is the use of what has been termed a Trojan Horse narrator, Libby, an old friend of Toby's, who slowly takes over the narration bringing her own life events with her. It is seamlessly and cleverly done and a relief towards the end of the book to finally get Rachel's version of events, but it seemed to take me an awful long time and oodles of patience with the premise (was I really that interested) to reach the final page. I nearly surrendered at page 250, and would have done had I not spent £15.99 of my Waterstones loyalty card points buying the book. In the end I was mostly glad I finished it or I'd have missed the last line.

Brideshead Revisited ~ Evelyn Waugh

Isn't it funny when you think you know a book so well via lifelong osmosis that there really is no point in reading it...until you find a really nice, floppy-paged edition with 1.5 line spacing (thank you Penguin Modern Classics) and the book group theme is England. I dived in assuming this was a book about an Oxford student and his teddy bear only to find it's about so much more.

When Charles Ryder returns to Brideshead as an army officer and to the house now commandeered for the war effort, memories of his student years come flooding back. His relationship with Sebastian Flyte, sister Julia and parents Lord and Lady Marchmain slowly unfolds and laden with Evelyn Waugh's consummate wit and irony and lashing of Catholic guilt. Sebastian, who fades into an alcoholic stupor somewhere in Europe, is overshadowed by his sister Julia in the plot. All of this was a complete and very enjoyable surprise because I hadn't watched the TV series or the film (on the basis it was about a posh boy with a teddy bear).

I loved the book and it has set me off on a reading trail through more Evelyn Waugh starting with Scoop, also in the delicious floppy Penguin edition and I have the Sword of Honour Trilogy lined up. 

 

The Photographer ~ Meike Ziervogel

Several books I've read recently have focused on photography, On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummins and The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes and maybe that tempted me to pick up this book by Meike Ziervogel. I once visited a new mum called Meike, she was Dutch and she very helpfully told me that her name rhymed with 'formica' and I've never forgotten it. That's an aside but after our humiliating Belvoir experience I do like to get pronunciation right.

Trude, married to photographer Albert and living with her son Peter and her mother Agatha in Germany in the early days of the war.  A cataclysmic betrayal separates the family and it will be many years before they are reunited. Trude and Albert are both traumatised and changed by events and must learn to compromise if they are to succeed as a couple again. There is a defining and decisive moment in the book when Trude must decide where her loyalties lie and Meike Ziervogel sets up such a tense situation that I could barely breath and not could I predict the outcome. 

A great read from Salt Publishing and as another aside, the cover photo is Meike's grandparents.

Footnote : The Belvoir Humiliation was Bookhound and I arriving at the gates for a country fair at and asking if this was the way to Bel-voir? '

‘Yes. Welcome to Beaver,' said the person on the gate.

Any good summer (winter) reads to report over your way?

King of Dust - Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture ~ Alex Woodcock

Welcome back to normal service. The West Country is emptying of visitors and Bookhound and I will be wandering off hither and yon after weeks of going no further than town one way (Tavistock) or town the other way (Launceston). I hope you’ve all had a restful holiday season and are ready for some good reading and commenting in the weeks and months ahead.

It’s fair to say that a book about Romanesque stone- carving in the forgotten churches of the West Country might not be top of the most exciting books I would want to read, but I can't tell you how excited I was about King of Dust by Alex Woodcock. Having read his articles in Elementum Journal I had a feeling I was going to enjoy this one and I wasn't wrong. Incidentally, edition five of Elementum, published recently, won't disappoint anyone who has come to love this journal of nature and story as much as I have.

Billed as 'a craftsman's journey through the landscapes of ancient sculpture', Alex Woodcock weaves in his own journey into stone carving, which would eventually lead to him working at Exeter Cathedral and a journey around some of the most beautiful little churches in this area.

'Now I speak ruins. I'm fluent in the language of decay. The years working at Exeter Cathedral have completely reorientated me....I was part of the cathedral's immune system, intervening when and where necessary to slow the processes that lead to damage and repair parts that had already succumbed.'

I'm an Exonian, Exeter, the city of my birth and a place very close to my heart. We visit frequently and I wander around the cathedral whenever I can. And I have learned so much from this book; new and interesting things that make wandering around a church an even greater pleasure than it already is

From Gunwalloe near Land's End to Toller Fratrum in East Dorset each church is beautifully described and all enough to make me set off on a day back in April, with sandwiches, flask and the book in my hand, a notebook and a hand-drawn map (I traced it) to guide me and off I went to find some of those churches near to us here.

With no idea about the Romanesque I was a blank canvas ready to be filled and there was much to discover about this architectural sculpture, 'bold geometric patterns, fantastical creatures and humans in states of rapture or distress' along with...

Round arches...

Solid masonry walls...

Small windows...

Bulky Columns..

My first stop, St Stephens, Launceston was only open because everyone was gathering there for a funeral, so a quick glimpse of the font and I departed. But I'd seen my first bit of Romanesque and it was a bit exciting. And suddenly I'm also a complete expert on the tympanum, usually found above doorways and rarely noticed (by me). This was my first tympanic encounter at the church of St Gregory, Treneglos not far from Launceston...

Carved in the twelfth century and located in the porch of a little out-of-the-way church, the imagery on the tympanum (in this case a Tree of Life flanked by lions) is all about finding salvation and renewal in this building and placed above the doorway to remind worshippers of this as they enter. How sad then that St Gregory's is now closed to the public for safety reasons, a building in need of its own salvation and redemption, one that is failing fast.

A single broken lattice pane allowed me to peek inside and glimpse the font and the general disarray of a disused building...

Alex Woodcock writes eloquently, quoting Rebecca Solnit as he takes in the silence that surrounds St Gregory's and ponders the 'fragments from another world' that the Romanesque has left behind,

'In medieval culture, churches were considered liminal places, thresholds between one space and another, places where the supernatural merged with the everyday...

Peering through the window and I understood that. Echoes of the past and a desperate sadness about the deteriorating condition of the church now. And how unlikely it seems that it will be fully restored.

I motored on towards Egloskerry; a thriving church it would seem in a thriving village  and by now I spot the tympanum the minute I walk in.

I head for Tremaine  a bit further up the road and eventually find the church, up a hill along a narrow lane and a fair old stroll from the village itself. Dedicated to St Winwaloe...Cornwall knows how to do saints, goodness me was this tiny church worth the finding...

I would never have known of it but for Alex Woodcock's book and his quote from the guru of the Romanesque, Edmund Sedding...

'To one whose mind is still full of the memories of some great English Abbey or Cathedral, this desolate little sanctuary would hardly seem worthy of notice...but to the few who love the work of the medieval craftsmen, these works they have left us are beyond price...'

And with just six people on the parish electoral roll what a miracle it is that the place is open and still used. 

Now a complete expert (after a single afternoon) I spotted the font immediately..

And sat in the church and read Alex Woodcock's thoughts about it...

'Sitting on a pew for a moment...enjoying the complete absence of sound and the smell of damp plaster that permeated the nave... sculpture as a point of connection with the unseen, the doorway into another world. In the small nave of the church at Tremaine, I could understand that.'

A little meadow alongside the churchyard was awash with orchids and bluebells...

'In some parts of the South West the past hangs like a veil across the land, refusing to fully make way for the present...'

suggests Alex Woodcock...

and the unchanging view across the Cornish countryside that day seemed to confirm the idea.

All in all no more perfect and peaceful a-sitting place than this to sit and read King of Dust and knwoing I have a lot more days like this with churches to visit. If you are heading west and you enjoy a meander around forgotten churches then let this book be your guide. Failing that enjoy it from the comfort of your armchair knowing they are there; solid ancient sanctuaries clinging on to the twenty-first century for all they are worth.

Meanwhile does anyone else love a good wander around an old church...

I wonder what you look for...what interests you most...

I had always been drawn to the stained glass until now...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not all those who wander are lost...

I've been on some amazing journeys to far off places (from my armchair) so far this year.

Underland (with Robert Macfarlane),  Doggerland (Time Song by Julia Blackburn), Antarctica (Erebus by Michael Palin) and I'm currently in the middle of a really surprising and very exciting journey through the audio book of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien and Middle Earth are synonymous with the Tinker. It was his most favourite book alongside anything by Charles Dickens, and which he had read at least twenty times, and though I've read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring several times I've never made it onto the other two. I famously took one in my rucksack on our Silver Wedding Eurorail trip and deserted it in Barcelona (along with The Secret History by Donna Tartt ) as a completely wrong holiday reading choice. Then we went to see the films with the Tinker and I really didn't feel the need to bother with more...until recently.

Robert Macfarlane mentioned that he was going to start reading The Lord of the Rings to his six-year-old son and I suddenly remembered how much my dad had also loved his cassette version. I think it may have become a shared escape when my mum's confusion increased and their social world narrowed down; they could both listen to it, and whilst my mum would be soothed by the cadence and rhythm of the words, my dad would be enchanted and deeply engrossed in the story, as am I. Every time I see this box on the shelf, because it's become a family heirloom that none of would ever part with, I think of them.

I am listening to a newer version (via Audible) narrated by Rob Inglis and have nothing but praise and admiration for the joy, excitement and sensitivity he brings to the book. He sings the songs, he does all the voices superbly and creates the characters much as I imagine them to be. Tom Bombadil, larger and jollier than life, Strider/ Aragorn as serious and measured as he needs to be, Gandalf, wizard supreme and all the lovely hospitable hobbits, always ready for their next meal. Together we have some exciting adventures ahead and I am making any excuse I can to listen.

All that is gold does not glitter

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

I suspect the entire Lord of the Rings 'thing' might be adored by some and loathed by others and that is entirely understandable, but I would still be interested to know of your encounters with the book or the film, and your thoughts about it...for good or ill.

 

 

Invitation to the Waltz ~ Rosamond Lehmann

Susan Hill has been urging me to read Rosamond Lehmann for months now and I can't quite believe that I had never read her before when I finally picked up Invitation to the Waltz. Published in 1932 but set in 1920 it has been a hugely enjoyable read, the perfect foil to some uber modern novels of late.

It is her birthday and seventeen-year-old Olivia, woken by her sister Kate the svelte natural beauty, prepares for her day...the family breakfast at The Lodge with her parents, her sister and her young brother James. The table, the presents, the good wishes, the slight self-consciousness about opening gifts and appearing delighted with them even if not,  and all set against the backdrop of the house so perfectly described by Rosamond Lehmann.

Olivia's parents give her a length of startling red dress fabric (chosen by Kate) which she takes round to Miss Robinson the dress maker to be made into something suitable for the dance. Both sisters have been invited to the evening at the Spencer's grand neighbouring estate. Themes of class, the vulnerability of women and the instability of their lives quickly become apparent, and with it the unspoken sequelae of the war... a dire shortage of available men. In contrast there is a surfeit of grieving needy women along with gentlewomen; spinsters living in reduced circumstances and scraping a living. Everyone is struggling in their own way, especially the mothers who are frequently portrayed as both selfish and possessive, controlling their daughters by various means, whether through illness or emotional blackmail, in order to keep at least one of them nearby. Yet still no mention of the war.

There are splendid contrasts between the social classes. Olivia's family have clearly fallen on harder times and a rather creepy uncle lives with them which adds to the difficulties, whilst nearby live the happy-go-lucky Wainwright family, the chimney sweep and his wife with eight children and counting. And then I remembered that I had read another book by Rosamond Lehmann, a novella entitled The Gypsy's Baby because the Wainwrights are surely the trial run for the Wyatt family.

The dance becomes the focal point for Olivia and Kate and it becomes apparent it is one of the few social opportunities for the girls to meet and socialise with men, but with it comes the trauma of Olivia's unfilled dance card and the misunderstandings with the men. It begs the thought that those men who have survived the war are damaged both emotionally and physically, and as this becomes increasingly apparent through the evening so Rosamond Lehmann slowly filters in the details about the war. Allowances are made for the men's unusual and exuberant behaviour whilst the women must adhere to the rules. Suddenly the unspoken is unleashed as Olivia remembers her own version of the war.

I knew very little about Rosamond Lehmann but more urging from Susan and I ordered the biography by Selina Hastings which I can't wait to read.  Born in 1901, the Oxford DNB has Rosamond down as tall, beautiful with almond-shaped eyes, a firm mouth and a warm impulsive manner, which all sounds like a green light for trials and tribulations to come. A lengthy affair with C.Day Lewis, who then goes off and marries Jill Balcon leaving Rosamond deeply traumatised, suggests I am not wrong.

Lots more about Rosamond Lehmann to come but if you have read her books, which I feel sure some of you have, please do share thoughts in comments.

I'm very late to this particular party but what a fine discovery. 

 

Sisters

I'd have loved a sister and spent a good proportion of my childhood praying/begging for at least one. I grew up with a brother, male cousins, male sons of my parents' friends and had to go out and find a girl-friend to swap Judy and Bunty comics with. That said, if there was a single upside to losing my brother when I was twenty-one it was that I gained a very lovely and special sister-in-law who I am still very lucky to have in my life. Mind you, I'm sure there are plenty of people who may not be as close to their sisters as they would wish, or as the rest of us sister-less folk might assume happens naturally.

But a new book came my way via the Literary Review and a trip to Waterstones and it's all made me think how many books I have on my shelves about famous sisters. The book in question is Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters, Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. This from the 'blurb'...

'From the beginning of their lives, the Olivier sisters stood out: surprisingly emancipated, strikingly beautiful, markedly determined, and alarmingly 'wild'. Rupert Brooke was said to be in love with all four of them; D. H. Lawrence thought they were frankly 'wrong'; Virginia Woolf found them curiously difficult to read.

The sisters seemed always to be one step ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought by some to be damaging to ovaries. Noel became a doctor; Daphne a pioneering teacher; Margery's promising trajectory was shot down by mental illness; Brynhild, the great beauty of the four, excelled as a Bloomsbury hostess yet gave it up for love and a life of uncertainty.

In this intimate, sweeping biography, Sarah Watling brings the sisters in from the margins, tracing lives that span colonial Jamaica, the bucolic life of Victorian progressives, the frantic optimism of Edwardian Cambridge, the bleakness of two world wars, and a host of evolving philosophies for life over the course of the twentieth century.

Noble Savages is a compelling portrait of sisterhood in all its complexities, which rediscovers the lives of four extraordinary women within the varied fortunes of the feminism of their times, while illuminating the battles and ethics of biography itself.

I've finished the book (splendid, more thoughts soon but I definitely commend it to the house) and it has all got me thinking just what a fruitful source sisters are for biographies. A quick run around my shelves and I'd found these without really trying and I'm sure there are more because I haven't even gone near Bloomsbury Corner or the Bronte Shelf...

A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders : The Macdonald sisters ...Alice (Kipling) Georgiana (Burne- Jones) Agnes (Poynter) and Louisa (Baldwin) who all started life among the ranks of the lower middle classes but would marry a poet, a painter, the President of the Royal Academy and a Prime Minister. I haven't read this but I will soon.

The Sisters - The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary Lovell. Jessica, Debo, Nancy, Diana and Unity.

Four Sisters - The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport. Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and Helen's book breathes light and voices into their world. 

The Wild Wyndhams - Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton. Mary, Madeleine and Pamela, surrounded by the work of the Pre-Raphaelities, a family famed for its 'Bohemian closeness and whose lives 'were intertwined with some of the most celebrated and scandalous figures of their day.

If I looked harder I could probably find more but I'm going to leave further 'sisterly' reading suggestions to you...

Meanwhile just to balance things up I thought I'd put together a pile of books off my shelves about brothers...

Perhaps you have some suggestions there too...

 

 

 

The Easternmost House ~ Juliet Blaxland

The shortlist for the 2019 Wainwright Prize was announced last week. This the book prize which celebrates the best books about nature, the outdoors and UK travel 

 

Time Song by  Julia Blackburn
The Easternmost House by  Juliet Blaxland

Our Place by  Mark Cocker

Thinking On My Feet by Kate Humble

Underland by Robert Macfarlane
Wilding by Isabella Tree

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

 

It's a list I always look forward to not least because it's my favourite genre, so perhaps there's a chance I'll be ahead of the game on the reading...I never am. With Time Song by Julia Blackburn and Underland by Robert Macfarlane under my belt, but none of the other five, I turned to The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland. In a way it connected seamlessly with Julia Blackburn's book, set as they are on the East Anglian coast and concerned as they both are with land disappearing under the sea.

 

By rights it has to be a source of great anxiety when you know your house is on the brink of disappearing into the North Sea, but Juliet Blaxland quickly puts this into the wider perspective of a husband serving in Afghanistan and I would also suggest the fact that the house is rented not owned. The financial loss of the house will ultimately be someone else's burden which perhaps allows Juliet Baxland to focus more on the spatial and emotional losses instead.

 

'The portrait of a place that soon will no longer exist. It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has gone.' 

 

It's as if the house has been fostered until of an age. This felt like a studied emotional attachment that knows its bounds, will know when to let go and thus comes with less baggage, anxiety, worry or fear allowing for a clearer-eyed look at it all.

 

And I loved it for that.

 

Living as we do in the countryside, away from mains drainage and water, in the middle of farmland and a lot of wildlife, and with a son who is a gamekeeper, we have also come to learn, as has Juliet Blaxland, that it is all a question of balance requiring a breadth of understanding, pragmatism, compromise and common sense along with a realistic outlook, and The Easternmost House has it by the shovel-full. Juliet and I agreed on just about everything from living with inclement weather...you just have to accept and brace for it which we do. From foxes to pheasants, from restrictive diets  to hay-fever, the impact of 'ecological bad news', the sirens of doom and the vested interests involved in its dissemination, just how useful rural skills might be one day and what we would be both do when confronted by mile after mile of sawn timber 'unloaded' from a cargo ship and washed ashore on the beach as far as the eye could see... Juliet and I were in complete and generally optimistic and hopeful accord.  

 

Each month begins with a poem, each a perfect choice, some I knew, some I didn't and one in particular that I didn't know and now love, an extract from God of the Open Air by Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)...

 

These are the things I prize
       And hold of dearest worth:
       Light of the sapphire skies,
       Peace of the silent hills,
 Shelter of forests, comfort of the grass,
 Music of birds, murmur of little rills,
 Shadow of clouds that swiftly pass,
       And, after showers,
       The smell of flowers
   And of the good brown earth,—
And best of all, along the way, friendship and mirth.

 

 

Month by month the bounty of the land is recorded...the wildlife, the natural resources, the weather, the local traditions and way of life, and the practicalities, of which there are many. And also recorded the measurement of cliff loss. Both elegy and eulogy, Juliet suggests that living with erosion has been a life-changing experience. As the land shifts so do perspectives, tolerance increases and what rises to the surface are the things that really matter and, in a less urgent way, I can understand that.

 

It's been an interesting year for us with our resident barn owls. Suddenly no spraying of weeds on the path, not even an organic slug pellet in sight. This year, thanks to a local establishment I have used buckets of coffee grounds. It smells like Costa around the garden and the slugs seem to hate it. Either that or they can't sleep a wink and are too tired to even bother with my dahlias. We've allowed much more of the garden to go semi-wild rather than flogging ourselves over immaculate edges and 24/7 weeding (this is harder than you might think) mowing a path through the grass and daisies in the orchard,  keeping the lawns in shape and leaving the rest. We have been rewarded with the sight of the owls swooping from the nest box into the long grass and returning with dinner and one less creature for Magnus to catch. Poppies, borage, nigella and aquilegia are springing up on the paths along with islands of clover that the bees adore. Juliet Blaxland sees something similar on the cliff edges, as once ploughed land is allowed to naturalise, and in doing so ably achieves her aim of making the cottage on the cliff and its surroundings as familiar to the reader as it is to her. 

 

I understood this conclusion exactly...

 

'This place has quietly taught us how to carry its still small voice of calm within us, always and wherever we go...'

The Easternmost House an excellent read and one most deserving of its Wainwright Prize short listing.

 

And oh alright, here's another picture for you...one very clever Mrs Barn Owl. Wild and free and very busy feeding her noisy brood.

 

 

 

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Further to my discovery of Backlisted Pod I followed up with a read of The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller, one of the hosts. Famed on Twitter for his skyscraper stack of books read each month which is often followed by some heated trolling about whether he has a life, or a job or a family, nevertheless his reading prowess (it's his job) is extraordinary and his choices fascinating. The Year of Reading Dangerously is about one man's attempt to up his reading game by filling in the gaps, exploring how and what we read and 'why we should make time to do so.' There's something of the mid-life-oh-my-god-I'm-almost-forty to the premise and with a sense of renewed enthusiasm and some urgency Andy sets about a chosen list of titles to read in the year. Time must be carved out of seemingly non-existent hours and it is surprising how it mounts up into a good chunk of reading time per day. 

One early saviour, when the project looks doomed to failure at the second hurdle known as Middlemarch, is for Andy to set himself a set number of pages in a day. Now I'm remembering our year long read of Middlemarch on here a few years ago, when Bookhound carved a spare copy into eight equal segments to mirror the instalments that the Victorians had read and we were up and away.

If you love other people's reading journeys then this is the book for you. If you don't then I'm sure Andy Miller (who has a very self-effacing sense of humour) would say just get on and read the books you do want to read and pass this one by...except you'll miss...oh well, never mind.

 

Spring by Ali Smith

I really feel I should devote a whole blog post to Spring but to be honest, much as I enjoyed reading it, I'm not sure I've really grasped the nettle and fully embraced the project. This might be sacrilege, and I may be cast out, but perhaps I should have read Autumn and Winter, the first two in this seasonal quartet first. I'm a devotee of some but not all of Ali Smith's writing and suspect this might be more about whether my reading mood is ready to be challenged by the post-post modern approach or whether it just needs a jolly good story. How clever am I feeling in other words, because I think Spring is a  very clever book that requires some application. Nevertheless, returning to Backlisted Pod (who aren't sending me cheques in the post or anything, but are informing my reading a little right now) there is a brilliant episode where Andy Miller (see above, he's not sending me cheques either) reads out the first few pages and I was transfixed among my 150 dahlia seedlings in the greenhouse as I listened. If you have read Hard Times by Charles Dickens then you will get the Gradgrindian gist of Ali Smith's opening pages and perhaps proceed to relate the book to our own times.

 

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

This might be another book that left me feeling slightly bemused. Not for the quality of the writing but for what was actually going on, but Heavens has garnered some good reviews so what do I know.

Set in New York in 2000 and London in 1598 time travel is my first potential for confusion, which is not helped by the intentional incongruences...a flag has been planted on Mars, there is no war anywhere and a Green Party senator is about to become the first female president of the United States. 

Kate seems to live both in the present and via her dreams in the past, frequently 'waking' as Emilia, 'the mistress of a nobleman and surrounded by the plague. My recent plague and pestilence affinity helped, as did the occasional location of Nonsuch Palace for the action. The Palace long gone but replaced by a girls' school in the 1930s, and of course my alma mater in the 1960s. I'm not sure we gave much thought to the fact that Henry VIII might have galloped over our hockey pitch, but anyway the slightest mention in any book and I'm right back there bullying off. 

It is  certainly a story of love and madness  and I begged my Reading Friend to read it too (especially  given her workaday psychiatric experience) in the hope that we might figure it out between us. To be honest we didn't so if you have read The Heavens and have some thoughts to offer about this, or any of the other books, please do.

Meanwhile, what have you all been reading?

Let’s have ourselves a list of good suggestions for the summer holidays....

 

De Profundis: Robert Macfarlane talks to Horatio Clare at the Hay Festival

I'd bought the tickets in December and there they'd sat on the kitchen shelf ever since, but in the end time was against us in the run up to the opening of Tinker's Cott a few weeks ago. Bookhound and I agreed that a long day trip to Hay-on-Wye to hear Robert Macfarlane in conversation with Horatio Clare was just not feasible, so, knowing the event was a sell-out, I offered the tickets free via Twitter. I was delighted to hear from Gail Simmons because by coincidence Gail's book has been to hand recently. 

The Country of Larks - A Chiltern Journey. Subtitled In the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson and the footprint of HS2, Gail takes to the roads and countryside of her childhood almost 150 years after Stevenson to 'peel back the layers of history, recording forever a world destined for change.'  The Chilterns is not an area I know particularly well but I will be reading the journey alongside Gail once I've got Odysseus safely into port with my month-of-June read of Homer. It's a beautiful little pocket-sized book too. 

Anyway I posted the Hay tickets off to Gail and asked (cheekily)  if she would mind writing a blog post about the event for us here, and I am really grateful because she has...

De Profundis: Robert Macfarlane talks to Horatio Clare at the Hay Festival

Writers are solitary creatures. Reading is a solitary activity. So should I be surprised that book festivals are today such popular and gregarious experiences?

Bill Clinton may have described Hay as ‘the Woodstock of the mind’ but my first experience of the festival last month reminded me of Wimbledon - all deckchairs, picnics and Pimm’s.  A uniquely British gathering, with books instead of tennis. And like those for Wimbledon’s Centre Court, the queue for Robert Macfarlane’s fixture with Horatio Clare at the Baillie Gifford stage was long, patient and good humoured.

Macfarlane has an almost rock-star following, with over 150,000 devotees on Twitter alone. So it was no marvel that all 1,700 seats in the marquee were taken. Some fans had even brought along their copies of Underland, the author and academic’s latest bestseller.

Still, the two authors managed a relaxed conversation, seated in front of changing images accompanying Underland’s theme. Short questions were followed by full answers. Macfarlane thinks clearly, and possesses the exceptional (and enviable) gift of speaking in fully-formed paragraphs. 

Many reviewers have highlighted the author’s visits to potholes, mines and catacombs, but Underland is a book about time rather than place. And not just regular human time, but deep geological time. Underland is profound in more than one sense. Macfarlane has explored the earth’s deepest, darkest places and he’s emerged a troubled man. As he commented, ’we are shallowing deep time with our actions.’ There’s now even a term for humanity’s geological impact: the anthropocene.

Macfarlane is no pulpit-thumping, evangelical preacher. Rather, he reminded me of a benevolent Anglican vicar trying to deliver a message of hope while gently urging us to repent. Speculating about the future, he asked the audience ‘will we be good ancestors?’ He’s plainly frustrated with politics, and with politicians who have no incentive to consider future generations, invoking the example of schoolchildren like Greta Thunberg who show no such constraints. They have little interest in the past - only concern for the future.

I’ve not yet read Underland. But like his other books, it’s clearly an intellectual journey full of word-wizardry, dizzying knowledge and classical allusions. At one point during the talk, Macfarlane even joked about the inclusion of a rare joke. But then anxiety about our fate is no laughing matter.

The book’s themes may be complex, but Horatio Clare – himself a distinguished author - posed lucid, concise questions, prompting Macfarlane’s anecdotes and reflections. I wonder how many other authors might have tried to make this more about themselves, but Clare left his ego at home and handed the spotlight to the star of the show.

While the event felt like a fireside chat the staging matched a rock concert, complete with a live piece of Underland-themed music by The Bookshop Band which charmingly concluded the conversation. Then, after a few audience questions, it was back out into the evening sunshine for a final glass of Pimm’s.

I know some of you were there too so please do add your thoughts in comments if you want to, and perhaps some of you have encountered a Robert Macfarlane event during his current US tour so we'd love to hear from you too.

Maybe you have read Underland by now, if so please do leave a comment with your thoughts...

Meanwhile my thanks to Gail for this post and for giving our tickets a good home. 

 

 

Summer in February ~ Jonathan Smith (redux)

Before I tell you about our trip to see the Munnings in Cornwall exhbition last week I thought I would revisit this post from five years ago about Summer in February by Jonathan Smith and which actually has its origins ten years ago. Tempus fugit etc.

 

March 31 2014

A very funny thing happened as I was reading Summer in February by Jonathan Smith... the novel about the Lamorna artists. It was a book that had been on my shelves for a while. I couldn't remember where I had heard about it, but on the balance of probability it had to be one of you here in comments, and a quick search of my own blog came up with a comment and link to her blog from Lizzy Siddal back in 2009.

It was the trip to Lamorna (more searching) in 2012 ...



and sitting on those very rocks...



that filled me with the sense of place and persuaded me to buy the book, because by then there was news of a film version too. As always it felt imperative to read the book first, rather than allow the film to infiltrate my imagination with characters and setting before I have had the chance to do it for myself.

I wonder if you have preferences about this??

Book first...

Film first...

Not bothered...

I'll bet some of you share my preference for avoiding  film tie-in editions of books though don't you...

So I started the book...twice.

On the first occasion getting no further than Munnings's speech at the Royal Academy before being diverted.

Then the film was out there...

I had done some snippeteering and found the cuttings in the book when I opened it again in the summer of 2013. Everyone is telling me the film is fantastic... Carol goes to see it twice because she loves it so much (sorry to divulge that Carol!) and I think I must get a wriggle on.

I make another start (are you keeping up, by now this has taken me four years to get around to this read) and I am cracking along nicely. The brash, extrovert, gregarious artist Alfred Munnings is leaping irrepressibly off the page as are the Lamorna artists...Laura and Harold Knight and the sad and disconsolate land agent Gilbert Evans. The artistic community is revealed in all its eccentric glory and into its midst has arrived Florence Carter-Wood, a young London woman of privilege whose father, under duress, has agreed to fund some art lessons for her. 

The beautiful Florence is nicknamed Blote.

Blote??

I am a little off-put by that...

By this time I am halfway through the book but, despite my best efforts at avoidance, news has seeped through the review pages that this story isn't going to end happily, and all of a sudden, and quite unheard of for me, I stop reading the book and decide I want to see all this unfold in the film.

The film stars Dan 'Downton' Stevens as a mild and gentle Gilbert Evans, Dominic Cooper as quite a menacing Munnings, and Emily Browning as a wide-eyed Florence, trapped in a love triangle and torn about her choices.

There's a wait for the DVD to come out of course, but when it does I buy a copy.

Then there's another delay while we find time to watch it, and that is eventually prompted by a talk at Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery as part of the Laura Knight 'Portraits' exhibition. The subject to be Love, Art and Tragedy – Close encounters in a Cornish Art colony.

I have to say the whole long-winded process has been duly rewarded by all three components, half the book, the entire film, the most brilliant and engaging talk by Catherine Wallace a few weeks ago, followed by the rest of the book.

The first half of the book had set the scene for the film which I really enjoyed (Carol, you are not alone, I will certainly watch it again) even though not filmed at Lamorna. The community springs into life, and having been there it's not hard to envisage how life in this remote little Cornish valley could know no bounds. Carousing and creativity going hand in hand and plenty of anything-goes behaviour. It does end in tears ( I won't give anything away for fear you haven't seen it) and the film plays to that strength with great drama towards the end... suffice to say I would have been blinking and sniffing unashamedly in the cinema.


Catherine Wallace painted (sorry) a much more varied picture of Arthur Munnings at the gallery talk which somehow balanced out that of both the film, the book and my imagination (which by now has Munnings sitting at the brutish end of unpleasant with the word 'dislike' hanging over his head) showing us a wonderful slide show of some of his lesser-known paintings. Famed for his horses, and indeed, in the context of Summer in February, for this picture Morning Ride, of Florence seated side-saddle on Merrilegs...



But I had been unaware of Munnings's Lamorna coastal paintings, all of which favourably compared with the best of the Newlyn school and many of which can apparently be seen at Munnings home Castle House at Dedham in Essex.

Of interest too, as Catherine Wallace elaborated, was the fact that all the artists painted each other..

Munnings painted Laura painting...



Harold Knight painted Munnings reading, this picture we learned, was found concealed behind another one, someone unwittingly bought a 'buy one get one free'...

This sorry tale became a period of his life about which Munnings neither spoke nor wrote in the years to come, leaving Morning Ride behind in Cornwall with Laura and Harold Knight, to be given to Gilbert Evans should he return from his self-imposed exile with the Royal Engineers in Africa. Gilbert had enlisted in April 1914 to flee the impossibility of his love for Florence, by this time herself in the loveless and unconsummated marriage to Munnings, and from which she desperately needed to escape. The source of the book's title to be found in an entry in Gilbert's diary written on 22 February 1914...

'Had early lunch with Blote in my room, and then for a walk over the cliffs to Penberth where we had tea, then back by the road in the evening. A summer day to be remembered'.

The whole Summer in February saga has a been a wonderfully extended reading, watching and looking trail...

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

My thoughts on the Munnings in Cornwall exhibition dreckly.

 

More anticipating... Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

Happy Summer Solstice to all those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and stand by to receive the baton of light and lengthening days down there in the Southern Hemisphere, though we'll keep it for a little while longer yet if you wouldn't mind. Summer hasn't really found its feet yet, more its flippers.

The fifth book...ah yes the fifth proof copy that has flown straight into my life, bypassing all the checks and balances and maybes. I've had to upgrade the house insurance and have been too scared to take it out with me because for sure someone will snatch it and run off with it. No it's not the next Hilary Mantel, I doubt I'll see that before publication date, and in fact I don't want to read it until everyone else does next March, but I'll be first in the queue in a real bookshop.

No, not our 'ilary but surely the next best thing is a new collection of writing from Kathleen Jamie.

I've worn my copies of Findings and Sightlines into well-thumbed very best friends. They are littered with marginalia and thoughts and journal entries of my own, I'm nigh on word -perfect.

That day in February when the light floods back...

The stroll through the whale hall, the Hvalsalen, when I measured out the length of a blue whale along the lane in front of the house...

'Still I walked on, counting until the spine ended. Fifty-seven paces. Less an animal, more a narrative. The ancient mariner.'

Three ways of looking at St Kilda and I still want to go...

Mapping the cells of Heliobacter pylori through a microscope...

' What vistas I'd seen. River deltas and marshes, peninsulas and atolls. The unseen landscapes within.

And Orkney, the visit to Maes Howe on the Shortest Day, just in case the sun might set through the tunnel...

I took Findings to Orkney with me three times, to read in situ and went on the pilgrimage to see for myself the whale's eardrum that Kathleen Jamie sees in Stromness Museum ...

The Tinker sat in an Orkney chair while I stared at this thing...

and then we both stared at the best scrimshaw ever and loved it...

On the 800 mile drive up from the Shire, on our first visit, the Tinker (my dad) and I had 'played' caravans. Kathleen Jamie says 'and what is a caravan if not a shieling hut on wheels.' We totted up the wheeled shielings, the Viking Marauders, the Unicorns, the Pageants.

We went to Skara Brae and I thought of Kathleen Jamie's words..how it re-calibrates your sense of time, the domestic normality of the late Stone Age...'beds and cupboards and neighbours and beads.'

And on our next visit, the one that I knew would be about storing up memories of the Tinker for my future self, when we were invited to go to the Royal Oak commemoration on Scapa Flow, we flew into Kirkwall on a tiny plane that my dad fondly named 'The Paraffin Budgie.'

He and I went into Maes Howe and he didn't want to leave, asked every conceivable question of the guide...

'Many visitors come crawling along the entrance tunnel to marvel at the tomb, and they breathe. The building wasn't designed to be breathed in and lit. It was designed to be dead in, and dark...'

The Tinker bought me a copy of The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown in the shop at Maes Howe. I've read it through and through and treasure it. And of course we went to 'the huge brooding stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar' 

I read him some of Kathleen Jamie's Orkney observations and together we kept an eye out for the 'scraps of rainbow' that she mentions. 'There's one of Kathleen's scraps' my dad would say...

'Oh look, there's another one, a proper scrap that one...'

By accident the Tinker and I discovered Waulkmill Bay late one afternoon..

We were both transfixed by the peace and the beauty and, though I didn't say so at the time, I knew I had found the place where one day the family would scatter some of his ashes in the waters of Scapa Flow, and we did in 2016. Waulkmill is on Scapa Flow where my dad had been stationed as a fourteen-year-old boy bugler on the battleships in 1939. He felt an affinity and a connection with the place. It was something of a totemic place representing the loss of his teenage years spent doing his bit in the defence of the country. It seemed right that he'd be sailing in and out on the tide there. I think of it often.

I'm not sure that authors perhaps realise how important their words can be, or how they can creep into a reader's imagination, invested with their own personal resonances and lodge there, ready to surface when required, but both Kathleen Jamie's books have done that for me and I doubt I'm the only one. So how apt, in that case, that the new collection is titled Surfacing.

 

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie will be published in hardback in September 2019

'Under the ravishing light of an Alaskan sky, objects are spilling from the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village to its hunter-gatherer past. In the shifting sand dunes of a Scottish shoreline, impressively preserved hearths and homes of Neolithic farmers are uncovered. In a grandmother's disordered mind, memories surface of a long-ago mining accident and a 'mither who was kind'.

In this luminous new essay collection, acclaimed author Kathleen Jamie visits archeological sites and mines her own memories - of her grandparents, of youthful travels - to explore what surfaces and what reconnects us to our past. As always she looks to the natural world for her markers and guides. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself.

Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.'

I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to sharing it all with you.

Meanwhile, have you read Findings and Sightlines...

If so please do share your thoughts in comments...

And if not you have two incredible treats awaiting to help pass the time until September.

Oh yes, and one more Kathleen Jamie-related thing...

I happened to catch this delightful programme on Radio 4 Extra yesterday. The Whitsun Weddings, first broadcast in 1999...

A verse drama by Kathleen Jamie, based on the poem by Philip Larkin.

On a Whit weekend at the end of the 1950s, Philip Larkin caught a train from Hull to London which was boarded by a number of newly-wed couples.

He turned his observations about them into one of his best-known poems.

40 years later, three of the couples and the daughter of the fourth look back on the day to consider if its promises have been fulfilled.

 

It’s all made me revisit the poem...

 

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

   Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense

Of being in a hurry gone....

 

 

Anticipating...

Proof copies come and proof copies go, plainish covers giving little away, flagging up books ahead of publication, but of course they all come with dire warnings about 'not quoting without reference to the final copy' and then it's all a palaver to ask for a final copy, or hope one will be sent...or wing it and hope for the best.

If I'm honest only a small percentage make it through as 'of interest' and onto the 'anticipating' shelf, from whence there's another leap onto the 'pending' shelf, however five proofs (three from Bloomsbury, one from Harper Collins and one from Sort Of Books) have arrived in recent weeks that have all bucked the system. They are all bypassing and heading straight for the Must Read shelf. The next hurdle is that I have to really enjoy them before I will share thoughts on here so we're not home and dry yet. Publication dates are a way off , August and September but it's never too early to add them to your list and gee up the library system with a request is it...

The Offing ~ Benjamin Myers ( 22 August 2109)

My love for The Gallows Pole last summer was no secret and having since read Under the Rock (thoughts coming dreckly) by Benjamin Myers I was delighted when a proof of The Offing, his first novel since signing for Bloomsbury, arrived.

'One summer following the Second World War, Robert Appleyard sets out on foot from his Durham village. Sixteen and the son of a coal miner, he makes his way across the northern countryside until he reaches the former smuggling village of Robin Hood's Bay. There he meets Dulcie, an eccentric, worldly, older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea.

Staying with Dulcie, Robert's life opens into one of rich food, sea-swimming, sunburn and poetry. The two come from different worlds, yet as the summer months pass, they form an unlikely friendship that will profoundly alter their futures.'

With comparisons already being made to J.L.Carr's A Month in the Country it's not hard to see why The Offing flew onto Must Reads of its own accord.

 

This is Happiness ~ Niall Williams (5 September 2019)

I had a wonderful run of reading Niall Williams a few years ago, Four Letters of Love , Only Say the Word, and As it is in Heaven swept me away on a tide of adoration. I read a few more and then seemed to be the only person to stumble over History of the Rain (did it start in the present tense...was I in an 'oh not the present tense' mood). I have plans to try again alongside Niall's forthcoming book This is Happiness

Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish unaltered in a thousand years.

For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now – just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity – the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets for which he needs to atone. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. 

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world. 

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community – its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs – and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.

 

A Single Thread ~ Tracy Chevalier (5 September 2019)

What's not to love about a new novel from Tracy, especially when even the proof copy has a pair of those wonderful stork scissors on the cover..

'It is 1932, and the losses of the First World War are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiancé and her brother and regarded by society as a ‘surplus woman’ unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother and strike out alone.

A new life awaits her in Winchester. Yes, it is one of draughty boarding-houses and sidelong glances at her naked ring finger from younger colleagues; but it is also a life gleaming with independence and opportunity. Violet falls in with the broderers, a disparate group of women charged with embroidering kneelers for the Cathedral, and is soon entwined in their lives and their secrets. As the almost unthinkable threat of a second Great War appears on the horizon Violet collects a few secrets of her own that could just change everything…'

 

The Dutch House ~ Ann Patchett (24 September 2019)

I've had a patchy (sorry) reading relationship with Ann Patchett over the years and admittedly the Patchett shelf is a bit sparse, but I sense that this one is going to be a winner, and as always the arrival of a new book makes me revisit the backlist which I shall do...

'Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania taken on by his property developer father. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance. Life is comfortable and coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house's former owners in the frames of their oil paintings, or under the cover of the draperies around the window seat in Maeve's room.

Then one day their father brings Andrea home: Andrea, small and neat, a dark hat no bigger than a saucer pinned over a twist of her fair hair. Though they cannot know it, Andrea's advent to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve's lives. Her arrival will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for the rest of their lives. 

For all that the world is open to him, for all that he can accumulate, for all that life is full, Danny and his sister are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own enforced exile is that of their mother's self-imposed one: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known. 

Told with Ann Patchett's inimitable blend of wit and heartbreak, The Dutch House is a story of family, betrayal, love, responsibility and sacrifice; of the powerful bonds of place and time that magnetize and repel us for our whole lives, and the lives of those who survive us.'

I did say five proofs but I think the fifth one probably needs a post of its own. But now all I need is some fine August weather, a recliner behind the summer house, 'someone' to bring me cooling drinks and tasty snacks and I think that's my Summer Staycation sorted.

 

 

The Lost Words ~ Spell Songs

Some of you might remember an evening that I will never forget because I did sing its praises quite loudly on here at the time. Bookhound and I had gone to London last year to hear Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris talking about The Lost Words. There was to be a musical interlude with a couple of the 'spells' set to music and I hadn't really given that bit much thought...probably a bit of twiddling on a mandolin and some folksy ear-holding singing. In fact we were the luckiest audience in the world because we heard Kerry Andrews' performance of 'Wren' and premiere of 'Bluebell'

I've just listened to this again and NOW, because we hear it every night, I hear the whirr of the barn owl in Kerry's music.

And (to steal another spell), from that 'acorn' something marvellous has grown.

The Lost Words Spell Songs.  'a new musical companion piece to The Lost Words book where musicians unfold the “dreams and songs” living within the pages of the book.... Eight visionary musicians, an astonishing book of magical spells - a chance to sing nature back to life...'

Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Kerry Andrew, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and  Jim Molyneux have created something very special indeed and the minute I knew this was in the offing I had a copy on pre-order. Incidentally I've added links to the individual artist's websites because one of the glories of this project is the coming together of eight very talented and award-winning musicians who combine their talents to create and share as one.

 

To my delight, and something of a consolation having missed the Hay Festival events, Spell Songs arrived in the same week and I have been listening and reading ever since.

 

The CD is presented within a beautiful book and the result is frankly stunning. Encouraged to pursue their own musical trails with the spell songs, taking the words to new and different places, a collaboration of voices and fascinating musicality has emerged. Each artist brings their own unique interpretation and sound, but the skill is surely in the blending and the sharing, the creative connections, along with the generosity of spirit involved in letting others take centre stage when the music calls them. Surprising affinities emerged and these became increasingly apparent the more I listened...

 

Seckou Keita, plays the kora, an instrument from his native Senegal with twenty-two strings and a very unique and new (to me) sound and I defy anyone not to be singing 'Here hunts heroon' (intentional spelling there) and mentally filling in the 'twiddly bits'...

 

Or Willow... with Rachel Newton's unique (to me) pronunciation of 'willow'...

 

Willow when the wi-ind blows
Whisper while we listen so we learn what
    wordsyourlongleavesloosen

 

Whisper when the wi-ind blows
Listen for a day, a week ;til we know what
    the willows say, what willows speak...'

 

I'm humming along as I type that. There are a lot of words to squeeze into a line but then a willow seems like that sort of tree to me, often a great deal growing very fast in a small space.

 

Though Kerry Andrew, who gave the musical project its first premiere, had to leave because of illness, she has created a song that I was always going to love...Ghost Owl...

 

Silence

all silence

owl hunts in silence...

 

And as we watch 'our' barn owls hunting each evening, Kerry's voice and spell song are right there in my mind. Research has shown that barn owls are indeed silent flyers, something to which we can now testify.

 

'Will you listen with owl ears for a while?'

 

 

And I have listened with 'owl ears' to every song many times over and each has settled into place..

 

Kris Drever's  Little Astronaut, a tribute to 'Lark' ...

 

Kingfisher, Selkie Boy, Heartwood, The Snow Hare, Acorn, Conker...

 

By all accounts The Lost Words has grown into something entirely unexpected and heartwarming. Copies of the big book making their way into every primary school, children working on outdoor projects and writing  'spells' of their own, reconnecting with nature as a counter to the lure of the screen. Robert and Jackie created something very special and the magic lives on.

 

And isn't it always good to end with a Blessing...

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A Journal of the Plague Year ~ Daniel Defoe

I’ve been dipping into A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe having for years thought it was a sort of memoir only to discover it is fiction. I'm ridiculously proud of my Plague, Pestilence & Poisons shelf but I rarely go there or I might have known this.

This plague thing all started because I have been listening to Backlisted Pod whilst working away in the greenhouse growing for the garden (my give-it-a-go dahlia seeds morphed into about 150 plants which then became a bit of a crisis). I’m sure I'm very late to the party on all this and you all discovered Backlisted ninety episodes ago, but  if not you might like to seek it out. John Mitchison (of Unbound) and Andy Miller (author of My Year of Reading Dangerously) and a guest or two, share their thoughts and breath new life into an old, perhaps forgotten book and author and the result is a very entertaining hour of bookish chat. The rapport is splendid, the results both humorous and entertaining as well as informative. I’m there in the greenhouse scrawling down titles on old seed packets and getting all sorts of reading ideas, while Bookhound thinks I’ve got a gaggle of people in there having a great time. In fact it’s just me and my little Bluetooth speaker and 150 dahlias.

I’d listened to the Penelope Fitzgerald Human Voices episode, and the J.L.Carr Month in the Country episode,  before moving on to  A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. I had started reading the book in readiness (which I find adds to the enjoyment) and of course means I can chip in as the discussion proceeds. My own observation about Daniel Defoe was a complete surprise to me, because having avoided 18th century literature and the pestilence shelf like...well, like the plague, I was actually really enjoying this book and beyond impressed at the details.

Despite the fact they didn’t really know what they were dealing with, or the disease’s true source or means of spread, Daniel Defoe has some forthright and sensible ideas about infection control in the eighteenth century. We tend to think of them as clueless when in fact far from it.

Isolation and confinement were key factors in his process. Now admittedly barricading people in their houses and then posting a guard outside was a bit barbaric but the principle was there. Keep infected people away from others and each house of infection would be 

’marked with a red Cross of a foot long in the middle of the Door, evident to be seen, and with these usual printed Words...’Lord have Mercy upon us’ to be set close over the same Cross.’

There had to be notification at the first sign ‘either of Botch or Purple, or swelling...’ within two hours  to the Examiner of Health.

There was also an extended period of no access to ‘infected’ houses for a month and contents had to be aired with the aid of ‘Fire and Perfumes’. No clothing or bedding could be sold or passed on for at least two months. 

Anyone who had knowingly been in contact with infected people or homes also had to be isolated. 

No infected person could be removed from an infected house unless it was to another house he owned and in which case the transfer must be done at night.

Likewise burial must be between sunset and sunrise and no neighbours or friends could attend and no children could come near. Graves had to be six feet deep.

And so it went on and it was all a complete revelation. 

I learnt all I know about infection control the hard way. As a student nurse, had I had the slightest penchant for cutting corners it would have been well and truly knocked out of me by a twelve week stint on Cohen ward, infectious diseases, at Gt. Ormond Street. Fortunately Sister Beech had already performed that painful task in my previous twelve weeks with her. Catching me idly diluting the Milton bottle sterilising tanks on the babies’ lockers one day (instead of carefully measuring each one) she made me go around with her and taste them all.  I didn't die exactly but I didn't have a very good day, and it all stood me in good stead for Cohen where my life probably did depend on doing things properly.

We tend to think we invented all this but writing in 1722, about the plague of 1665, it’s clear Daniel Defoe knew plenty.

Public gatherings were also seriously curtailed 

‘That all Plays, Bear-Baitings, Games, singing of Ballads, Bucklerplay, or such like Causes of Assemblies of People be utterly prohibited..’

Likewise ‘publick Feasting’ and ‘disorderly Tipling in Taverns’ ...

’be severely looked unto as the Common Sin of this Time and greatest occasion of dispersing the Plague.’

I plodded on hither and yon through the carnage until my plague interest had been sated, before reaching the fascinating medical note at the back of my OUP edition.

It would be 1894 before the transmission of plague via rats and fleas would be identified. Yersinia pestis lives in the digestive tract of the fleas who live off the black rat Rattus rattus and happily bite humans. The bacillus can survive in ‘excrement, old nests or even textile bales for up to a year in warm and humid conditions.’

By way of a local diversion I’m on the trail of the origins of a nearby church and its designation as a Plague Church. The story goes either that the children were shut in there to protect them whilst everyone else died and they were discovered in there alive by some monks...or were the adults shut in there to die to protect everyone else. The story has many versions and I’m no nearer discovering whether it is myth or fact, or a story invented for the Sunday School children. 

Anyway, this has all been a fascinating excursion that is leading me (eventually) towards The Ashes of London, the first in Andrew Taylor’s series of books about the Great Fire in 1666. Apparently the theory that this somehow caused the plague to abate holds no substance according to my OUP medical notes; the fire caused little damage in the places were the plague had wreaked the greatest havoc, public and private hygiene improves little, and rebuilding with brick and tiles rather than thatch and timber had little impact either. The simplest explanation may be herd immunity where the strongest have survived and the weakest have died, coupled with a milder mutation of the disease. In any case, and thankfully, it all but disappeared from the British Isles.

Anyone else suffer from an overwhelming interest in plague and pestilence, or is it just me...

Any good reading recommends...

And what about eighteenth century literature.. have I been wise to avoid it or am I missing a trick...

 

 

 

The June Odyssey

Well, I lasted precisely 4.25 days before bailing out of the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey and jumping back on board my beloved copy of Emily Wilson.

This for my book-a-day read through June.

Much as I loved the floppy comfortable feel of the book in my hand, with its deckle edges, Fagles felt too studious and academic (and complicated) for my needs, whilst Emily Wilson's translation is so readable and amenable  but no less challenging for a non-Homer person like me.

And I discover that, as I read last year, I wrote in life happenings, on odyssey of my own through the month of June 2018, so I'm adding in this year's events too.

I've sifted out a pile of related fiction, though have no idea how many (if any) I might read. I've discovered it is entirely possible to overdo this Greek reading theme. Maybe its the sheer volume of names and gods and their offspring, but nevertheless a great selection here when the fancy takes me.

Meanwhile wishing anyone else, who might be reading along on an Odyssey of their own, safe passage through the torrid events to come, no looking at the Gorgons now and take care navigating Scylla and Charybdis. 

 

The Wainwright Prize Longlist 2019

It's here, my favourite prize list of the year...

The 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize Longlist:

Underland by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton)

Wilding by Isabella Tree (Picador)

Lanny by Max Porter (Faber & Faber)

Landfill by Tim Dee (Little Toller Books)

Time Song by Julia Blackburn (Jonathan Cape)

Our Place by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape)

How To Catch A Mole by Marc Hamer (Harvill Secker)

The Stopping Places by Damian Le Bas (Chatto & Windus)

Thinking On My Feet by Kate Humble (Aster)

Wild Woman Swimming by Lynne Roper (The Selkie Press)

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland (Sandstone Press)

Ghost Trees by Bob Gilbert (Saraband)

Maybe the book I am most thrilled to see alongside those I have shared thoughts on here,  Underland, Lanny and Timesong, is Wild Woman Swimming by Lynne Roper. Lynne lived locally and was a regular swimmer on Dartmoor until her death a few years ago. It was her dying wish that her swimming journal be published and hats off to Tanya Shadrick who honoured that wish, set up her own publishing company and made Wild Woman Swimming a reality.  Roger Deakin and Waterlog may have sowed the idea years ago, but it was Lynne Roper's inspiration, courage and enthusiasm that finally made me take the plunge in the River Dart last summer, and if it would warm up a bit I'll be having another dip this year too. I also know for a fact that several local friends have also read the book and dipped an unlikely toe in the moorland waters...I like to think Lynne would have been delighted.

I enthused a bit too much about the book to Offspringette, and my copy of the book went back to New Zealand with her at Christmas as a happy reminder for her of Dartmoor from 11,000 miles away. Meanwhile, huge congratulations to all the longlisted authors, and I see I have some catching up to do.

Have you read any of the longlist...

Any recommends...

Wild swimming anyone...

Good Listening...

I have listened to some brilliant audio books in recent months, mostly whilst making a quilt and sewing eight nine new sets of curtains for Tinker's Cott, and I can't for the life of me remember whether I have mentioned the books here or not. However they can all cope with some repetition, all excellent and though I don't take any notes so can't offer detailed descriptions, I can offer impressions. I sit and sew wearing my noise-cancelling head phones and am completely at the mercy of the book, so it has to be better than good and all these were.

Erebus The Story of a Ship ~ Michael Palin.

This was a recommendation from one of you and thank you for it because I absolutely loved every minute, helped no end by Michael Palin's narration.

Michael Palin – Monty Python star and television globetrotter – brings the remarkable Erebus back to life, following it from its launch in 1826 to the epic voyages of discovery that led to glory in the Antarctic and to ultimate catastrophe in the Arctic.

The ship was filled with fascinating people: the dashing and popular James Clark Ross, who charted much of the ‘Great Southern Barrier’; the troubled John Franklin, whose chequered career culminated in the Erebus's final, disastrous expedition; and the eager Joseph Dalton Hooker, a brilliant naturalist – when he wasn't shooting the local wildlife dead.

Vividly recounting the experiences of the men who first set foot on Antarctica’s Victoria Land, and those who, just a few years later, froze to death one by one in the Arctic ice, beyond the reach of desperate rescue missions, Erebus is a wonderfully evocative account of a truly extraordinary adventure, brought to life by a master explorer and storyteller.

 A case of not even knowing I was interested until I started listening, and for all us fans of his Monty Python days it wasn't hard to hear the humour in both the narrative and his voice as Michael Palin read. I was completely engrossed and of course reliving our wander around Stromness Museum on Orkney where John Franklin and the expedition to find him were both very evident. Each time I emerged from a sewing/listening marathon I'd update Bookhound on events in Antarctica and then the Arctic as Franklin goes missing. I made an uninteresting interesting discovery that Mrs Franklin's family lived in Bedford Place in Lonodn, in the house that is now the Penn Club. She was nothing if not persistent in the search for her husband...and of course the ships were finally found in 2014 and 2016, so the adventure of discovery and the story of Erebus and her sister ship Terror, lives on.

 

The Lost Man ~ Jane Harper

I have now read or listened to each of Jane Harper's three books and this one is the best so far for me, in fact superb...

'Two brothers meet at the remote border of their vast cattle properties under the unrelenting sun of the outback. In an isolated part of Australia, they are each other's nearest neighbour, their homes hours apart.

They are at the stockman's grave, a landmark so old that no one can remember who is buried there. But today, the scant shadow it casts was the last hope for their middle brother, Cameron. The Bright family's quiet existence is thrown into grief and anguish.

Something had been troubling Cameron. Did he choose to walk to his death? Because if he didn't, the isolation of the outback leaves few suspects...'

I was gripped and hot and thirsty and completely wrapped up in the sense of place, the hotter than hot Outback and a family full of secrets and mysteries with plenty of red herrings along the way. I didn't see the end coming until the characters did which is always a good sign.

 

Let Me Lie ~ Claire Mackintosh

Someone had read this at the village book group and recommended it so I downloaded the audio version and waded into the lives of the Johnson family. Both Anna's parents have committed suicide a year apart by jumping off Beachy Head, leaving their daughter grief-stricken and vulnerable. Anna marries Mark who she has initially gone to for bereavement counselling (big tsk about that) and they now have a baby, but the past keeps coming back to haunt Anna who becomes convinced that somehow her parents were murdered. Nothing is what it seems in this really cleverly plotted book by an author who was once a serving police officer. The twists keep on happening until the very last page, and no I didn't see those coming either.

 

Pompeii ~ Robert Harris

Another of your recommends and this one was a good old romp through the volcanic ash as the early signs started to create problems with the town's water supply. Of course I knew what was going to happen,but they didn't and I found it all fascinating and set against the backdrop of politics and slaves being fed to the eels and things. Robert Harris never fails, good books all.

Right, that's my listening but now I need some more recommends from you. We have welcomed our first guests into Tinker's Cott this week, the three months hard graft of preparation is done and so I can turn to some craft projects again...and more listening.

ON YOUR MARKS...GET SET...GO....

 

 

A Stranger City ~ Linda Grant

'It was impossible...to tell London's story; it was too large, too ancient, too many layers obscured, its stories were too contradictory, the the poor lives, in the journalistic phrase, cheek by jowl with the wealthy was a shallow simplification - the place simply defied narration.'

A copy of Linda Grant's new novel A Stranger City landed in my postbox by a stroke of good fortune because I'm quite careful about buying hardback fiction these days, and truth be told I wasn't that over-enthused about yet another London-centric, state-of-the-nation (bound to be) book (the last one I encountered was dreadful in more ways than I can detail here for now) when there's a whole lot more world to read about.  However, my Reading Friend had an advance copy on order and somehow two copies arrived. 'Would you like a giftette of the spare one?' came the message, 'Oh yes please,' went back the reply. By some miracle a hand-delivered copy appeared invisibly in our post box and I made a start, because our six-weekly-two-hour-non-stop-book-talk meeting was imminent.  None of this reluctance is to denigrate the centre, or the place, or the people who call it home, or the times we live in, it's just...well, you know. I'm losing touch with the capital as I get older and it gets increasingly expensive to get there, and stay there, and it isn't worrying me as much as it would have done, and I'd rather read about Antarctica or The Odyssey and go to art exhibitions in Penzance, so any book about real time London now has to sell itself to me very quickly.

It is February 2016 and the funeral of DB27 has just taken place over at Wanstead Flats east of the city. An unknown woman has jumped off London Bridge and police have been unable to find any trace of her. Detective Sergeant Pete Dutton has been investigating the case for seven months to no avail. One of the pall-bearers is busy bidding for a car on eBay (1965 Triumph Herald, colour olive and cactus, very unusual), Pete Dutton is late for the funeral and misses it, and a camera crew are filming events as part of a documentary about missing persons. I'd need to be sold by page thirty I had told myself before I opened the book, but as luck would have I was sold by page thirteen. DB27 ( Dead Body 27) buried in a deep pauper's grave where the coffins are layered, each life over-laying another it was clear I was in for a palimpsest of a read...or I'd just read too much into this space-saving method of burial about which I had no idea.

The plot is instant. Other people go missing, their lives will unfold and overlap, actual events are alluded to but never quite detailed, tragedies will happen, life will take a different track from the norm for some, others will have change imposed upon them, but each and every character is skilfully wrought, both human and knowable. To add to my enjoyment  this is a London well aware of its own shortcomings, delineating the difficulties of community, and the finding of and belonging to one in such a huge and seemingly faceless city. However another London is to be found just below the surface cracks, the London often hidden to outsiders. There is a timely reference to the hidden rivers of underground London, and likewise there exist those hidden but ever-present satellite communities, and when film maker Alan stumbles on one he has to work very hard to persuade his wife to move from their rented and centrally convenient but expensive rented flat to an old railway cottage..  

'Alan (and eventually even Francesca, who had stumbled and grazed herself badly against the double digits of the postcode) understood that this forgotten enclave behind the railway line was a tiny sequin in the fabric of London...'

Isn't that priceless. Francesca kicking and screaming against the move finally has to admit that perhaps there are benefits to this whole community thing after all and why not open a shop selling Persian rugs. Yes, why ever not.

Meanwhile the plot flows along, others, like Chrissie the nurse, live the peripatetic life of the flat share, or the room in a house, and with little sense of permanence and belonging other than, as Linda Grant suggests, in that 'most ephemeral place of all, online.' 

Of her many writerly skills one of Linda Grant's best, and one that I have come to associate with her, is the ability to cast a wry and perceptive eye for the humorous without being cruel. It's all about observation, seeing the amusing and then relaying it in subtle ways. I could mine the book for so many instances none of which would work out of context, but trust me I forgave all my own London misgivings as I read on. Humour is a tricky course to steer without descent into comedy but its presence in A Stranger City works and regularly grounds the book in the realities of life and sometimes their absurdities.

This brings me onto another of Linda Grant's specialities...fashion.

I'm guessing if I ever wrote a novel (I won't) it would probably major on illness and disease (human) and barn owls (I know a lot about them now). A Stranger City is liberally sprinkled with no barn owls but more fashion and cultural references than I knew existed. Google was my best friend for assuaging my ignorance about the Mies Van de Rohe chair, the Ligne Roset sofa, the Edwin Jeans,  Basquiat prints. There is Jo Malone in the bathroom (not Lidl's Handwash) the Hugo Boss suit (not M&S) hangs in the wardrobe, but these references are all about image and image matters. This is the world of parties and PR, about socialising and impressing people, and first impressions rely on image and cultural identifiers. I don't want to spoil the plot but suffice to say there is a moment when a mask is involved (for perfectly good reasons, not to rob a bank or anything) and for me this epitomised the invisible masks worn by each character in order to survive city life. In the end I was struck by the fact that the quest for community, and belonging to one, is probably no easier in rural Devon than it is in London, or Liverpool or Weston-Super-Mare, or anywhere. 

I mentioned  Chrissie the nurse, not the stereotypical nurse either, and I could write reams about her, it is my specialist subject along with barn owls after all, but suffice to say this moment crystallised it for me....

'On the wards people died, most often four in the morning, that's when the heart gives up at last, when there's no hope of dawn ever coming. She's sat by them and watched them leave and gone to tell someone who'd call to the family.'

Yes they do, yes it is, yes it does and yes you do... and many's the time I've sat alone with someone at that dawning final hour. I'd do the honours and then wander out and watch sunrise across London from the sluice and wish them well on their next journey. Linda Grant encapsulates that moment simply yet perfectly.

So there you have it. A Stranger City, and I survived this foray into London life as did my Reading Friend, both of us rating it a 'terrific' read over a pot of tea and toasted teacakes. Hie thee to library reservations if you are in the mood for a sensitive and well-written read for our times.

If perchance you have read A Stranger City I would love to know your thoughts...

And am I alone with my latter-day London literary aversion...

But what about 'old' London...any good reading recommends...

I've made a start on Fires of London by Andrew Taylor because I'm heavily into the plague and the city in 1666 and think this might be a fruitful reading trail...

By the way, in case you were wondering, this is a Basquiat print....