dovegreyreader scribbles

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. 

 

 

Munnings in Cornwall - Midsummer's Day in Penzance

The Longest Day, the summer solstice, always feels like a really special day to me. So special that when I inexplicably woke at about 4.15am and looked out of the window I had completely forgotten the significance of the moment, or which day it was, went back to bed and woke up again at 8am. I could have kicked myself because it was a beautiful dawn and I could have sat there and read Alice Oswald’s Tithonus 46 Minutes in the Life of Dawn and created a special moment. Never mind because Bookhound suggested we carpe the diem and head west to Penzance, into the bright light and the sun to see the Munnings in Cornwall exhibition at Penlee Gallery Penzance is very doable in a day from here and so off we went.

Everyone talks about the light down in Cornwall...how ‘different’ it is and how beneficial it was for the artists who settled in colonies all around the coast, predominantly at Newlyn, Lamorna and St Ives and you’d wonder how true that might be. Well, as we headed further west how true it was. The sun shone (that helps) but the sky was all-a-dazzle, deepest azure and as we drove along Mounts Bay and into Penzance we both agreed that perhaps summer had finally chosen its day to arrive.

Penlee House Gallery and Museum is located in the midst of a fine tropical garden setting and as we walked from the car park there was the sound of summer...the pock pock pock of tennis balls. The courts were full of fit looking people of our age and the pair of us recalled with fondness our fine doubles victory against some friends very many years ago. They challenged us, we agreed and immediately wished we hadn't because they took their tennis very seriously. They turned up in all the gear...whites, posh racquets, new balls, proper tennis shoes, and there we were in a mish mash of colour, the wrong shoes and ancient Dunlop racquets in wooden presses. Something came over the pair of us...my service suddenly went from gangly to lethal, Bookhound’s coverage of the court was akin to that of a gazelle and we slaughtered them. Such form and prowess was never to be repeated, the friendship didn't survive and we haven’t played in years, but still the sound of those balls as we sat on the cafe terrace with sustenance was a joy.

The Munnings in Cornwall exhibition just added more joy to the day.

Born in 1878 and best-known for his paintings of horses. Alfred Munnings grew up in Norfolk and Suffolk. Famed for his depictions of horses I was surprised to discover that he was blind in one eye. It was seeing Laura Knight's painting The Beach in 1909 that convinced Alfred to move to Cornwall...

It's one of my favourites, I'd have been convinced to head west too.

Alfred would take the Lamorna artist's colony by storm with his ebullient personality and extraordinary artistic talent as Summer in February describes so well. I'm not sure I had really taken on board his role as a war artist, and whilst those paintings didn't feature in this exhibition it was nevertheless good to see the breadth and depth of Alfred Munnings’ talent across a wide range of subjects. I loved this painting, 'Phyllis Crocker' and those blue stockings...

Even in Cornwall though, horses remained a central theme but with the landscape providing a spectacular backdrop to some of the paintings.

As always exhibitions like this are greatly enhanced by photographs and displays of sketchbooks, letters and ephemera which always add to our enjoyment, Munnings' tattered and bespattered painting coat on display with brushes and palette a particular favourite.

The exhibition is enhanced by the addition of works by many of Alfred Munnings' contemporaries, and its always good to see work by Lamorna Birch alongside superb works by artists we had never heard of. Eleanor Hughes nee Waymouth (born in Christchurch, New Zealand) really impressed us.

The gallery upstairs always has a fine selection of some of the more well-known works from the Penlee collection including Garstin's The Rain it Raineth Every Day which was starting to feel like the story of our summer had midsummer's day not come good.

I actually feel as if I have wet feet every time I see the Garstin, and what's not to love about Elizabeth Forbes' School's Out...

I feel sure someone somewhere must have written the story of this painting...why is the little boy crying...why is everyone looking at him...are those his books on the floor...and then the crumpled piece of paper...

Penzance is the perfect place for a wander, we did find Chapel Street with its range of unusual shops, and of course there's The Edge of the World Bookshop to be browsed. We took a picnic to the Morrab Gardens and it felt quite other-worldly to sit amongst the tropical plants, in front of the bandstand, miles from the realities of the world... until we were befriended first by a very brazen squirrel and then by an exceedingly bold seagull. The truth is seagulls have become something of a menace around Cornwall and my advice is never to feed them. We didn't and it eventually sought more willing prey.

We were home in time for our traditional Longest Day evening walk to the woods before settling down with blankets and cocoa for Barn Owl Watch (updates over on Instagram <<<<<<). We really know how to party down here in the Shire.

 

 

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.

 

 

Exhibiting... John Caple in London & Sir Alfred Munnings in Penzance

With no imminent plans for a London trip this month I'm unlikely to see the new John Caple exhibition, but for those who will be in the city this might be one for the diary...except it's only on until June 30th, at the John Martin Gallery (38, Albemarle St, W1S 4JG) so you'll have to be quick.

I fell in love with all things John Caple when writer Nell Leyshon very kindly sent me a copy of his book Somerset in the very early days of the scribbles. The pictures immediately struck a deep chord with me and have done ever since. They somehow give light and voice to a way of life and a tradition that really demand something far more than a superficial nostalgia. Maybe it's a respect for the people and the past, their ways and their beliefs.

The paintings in this exhibition, 'Silence and Twilight', follow a journey beginning on midsummer's day and then meandering into the evenings of late autumn. How true it is that Midsummer's Eve is a bittersweet moment, especially on a year like this here in the Shire where we haven't really enjoyed many warm summer's evenings in the run up. They will come.

'The exhibition begins on midsummer’s eve and the magical descent into a summer’s night. It was the time when divinations revealed what the darker months of winter might bring: visions seen through doorways and mirrors, with candles and fires to strengthen the sun on its journey. It is a bittersweet moment: both the height of summer and the start of summer’s ending. Taking his inspiration from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Shelley’s epic poem, ‘Alastor’, John Caple has set his paintings in the landscapes and formal gardens of a midsummer garden, a place from which he explores both the melancholy and the ever-beckoning spirit of the wild and our precarious place in nature.'

Completely self-taught and unphased by modern criticisms or sensibilities John Caple seems like a real one-off, a unique artist...

'He is entirely self-taught and as untroubled by contemporary art as he is unbothered by academic training and his work requires neither. In the twentieth century the folk tradition was often confused with naïve art, yet an important distinction exists between the two and that distinction in many ways helps to understand John’s work. Whereas a naïve artist paints entirely from within a private, enclosed world, an artist like John Caple is expressing stories and sentiments that have a shared ownership. In the twenty-first century he is an oddity amongst painters – though that is an observation that will trouble him little.'

Though I will be sorry to miss the exhibition, along with the absence of a lottery win to buy a painting (it would help if we even bought a ticket I suppose), I am always grateful to the gallery who keep in touch and send me the details so I can covet from afar and let you all know too.

But never mind because there is an exhibition that we will be going to very soon....

Opening at the Penlee Gallery in Penzance for the summer 'Munnings in Cornwall.'

'This summer, we are showing a special focus exhibition to mark 60 years since the death of the eccentric and controversial artist Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959) exploring his works from the years he spent living in Cornwall.

Munnings is best known for his equestrian paintings, his love of horses stemming from his early childhood on the border between Norfolk and Suffolk. Throughout his career he received equestrian commissions and his work was especially beloved by the English aristocracy and the Royal Family. 

Munnings in Cornwall will open at Penlee House on 15 June and runs until 7 September. There will be a focused selection of Munnings’s Cornish works in Gallery One, with the remaining ground floor galleries devoted to works by Munnings’s friends and contemporaries including Harold and Laura Knight, Dod and Ernest Procter, Charles and Ruth Simpson and Samuel John ‘Lamorna’ Birch.

Penzance is a very easy and enjoyable day trip for us from here so Bookhound and I will be heading west very soon. The gallery is always a joy to visit, lovely setting, a cafe and shop (why do I always buy MORE postcards) plus a good selection of other artists on display and then a wander around the town and of course both The Edge of the World Bookshop and Barton Books beckon.

I will report back of course, and meanwhile if anyone does go to the John Caple exhibition perhaps you could come back and share your thoughts in comments. I'd be very grateful.

 

 

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....