dovegreyreader scribbles

Desire ~ Una L. Silberrad, Handheld Press & a mention of Rose Macaulay

In my quest to explore more (and different) publishers of forgotten fiction from the twentieth century, I stumbled across Handheld Press, and you may recall I recently enjoyed Business as Usual. I am grateful that Kate at Handheld persevered with emails given that my inbox currently totals 625 and I have been known to look at it and look away in a state of mild panic. On that note my sincere apologies to anyone awaiting a reply, I do get there eventually if not dreckly. I think almost 2000 people now subscribe here by email and they often send a reply direct to me which I endeavour to respond to but regularly fail. Please know that I read and appreciate every single one and it's always good to know you are out there and reading the scribbles.

And while I’m on the subject of thank you’s...thank you for ALL your comments here, especially these last few months. I’ve always said they are the oxygen of the scribbles and I love the way conversations develop. From the off back in 2006 this has been about creating a welcoming corner of the internet, and it’s been a joy to drop in and find you all here and contributing through such strange and unsettling times.

Under the banner of 'We Sell Stories', Handheld Press books are beautifully produced and arrive like an old-fashioned book parcel might have done in 1920; a layer of tissue paper around the book and all wrapped in brown paper sealed with paper tape. I'm sure even the postman enjoys this quaint variation on the plastic air-filled jiffy bags of today. Signing up for the Handheld e mail means special offers and discounts and just this week I took advantage of Kate's birthday offer and bought The Caravanners by Elizabeth Von Arnim for £10 inc. postage. But cue much excitement when a good friend ordered me two Handheld books at the beginning of lockdown as a gift. I saved Desire by Una Silberrad, with its gorgeous cover, for a Right Moment

When well connected socialite and girl-about-town Desire Quebell takes a shine to the rather staid but steady novelist Peter Grimstone who could have predicted what would happen next. 

'She read books as she made acquaintance with people, enthusiastically almost gluttonously, losing herself completely for the time being, and wringing out the uttermost...'

Desire, the illegitimate daughter of government financial adviser Sir Joseph Quebell and a variety actress, lives her life of privilege and wealth to the full, so when Sir Joseph dies and leaves Desire destitute I could only wonder what life had in store. Except Desire has proved herself to be a bit of a stoic and a stalwart and with a genuine sense of honour and fairness, likewise Peter who must make a choice between his family business and his career as a writer. Both will make sacrifices. Desire trains as a secretary, quite a move for a woman in 1908, and one that ostensibly takes her several (make that many) rungs back down the social ladder, and as for Peter ...well I don't want to spoil it.

Will their paths cross again ...

And will they help each other out...

First published in 1908, Desire has been brought back into print by Handheld Press and a very worthy return it is. I was surprisingly gripped and there are moments of real tension as the challenges mount for both Desire and Peter against a backdrop of family rivalry and sabotage.

Looking through the Handheld list my eye was then taken by Rose Macaulay.

Rose's final novel The Towers of Trebizond has sat unread on my shelf for years and Handheld are bringing more of her books back into print. I knew next to nothing about Rose Macaulay so was delighted to find two biographies (thank you Kate in Cheshire, I think you sent one of them) on my shelf as well. I settled down with The Towers of Trebizond and my trusty 1923 Bartholomew's Atlas (because where on earth is Trebizond) and that famous first line was all it took...

'Take my camel, dear. 'said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.'

I now have to read everything Rose Macaulay has ever written and find out everything there is to know about her. One notable critic has been scathing about her work (maybe that's why I had subliminally avoided...who knows) but I am going to beg to disagree. It feels (to me) as if the Anglican Church is on its beam ends right now and I loved all the wry humour concealing deep insights as Laurie, Aunt Dot and Father Chantry- Pigg make their way to Turkey with missionary zeal  to do a bit of converting. And of course the camel goes too and has starring role. More to come about The Towers of Trebizond (which is on the south coast of the Black Sea)

Having also now read another novel Potterism  (1920) I am finding so much to admire and much to think about. It could be argued that Rose Macaulay's perceptive post-war observations about the 1920s have great relevance for what we are living through now. Handheld are republishing Potterism in August, and what with 'woke' culture and confidence in the media currently undergoing a bit of a wobble, there couldn't be a more apposite moment to read it, so I am grateful to them for sending me an early copy.

I have a few more lined up too, Crewe Train, The World my Wilderness (with an introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald) and Non- Combatants and Others - Writings Against War 1916-1945. The latter also to be published by Handheld in August. Meanwhile Bookhound, sensing my enthusiasm, found me three volumes of Rose Macaulay's letters on eBay for £7 along with Staying With Relations (in a lovely old bound library edition) and They Were Defeated, and so, through my annual August sabbatical from regular to more occasional posts here, you can be sure it is Rose who will have my full attention, new notebook to hand, and I'll be back with plenty of thoughts about her in September. 

I'm hoping you all have some good reading set aside for August too, please do share...

And any more Rose Macaulay fans out there...

 

 

 

 

A Journey to a Bookshop

I had a bit of of an ‘I haven’t bought a book in a shop in ages’ moment a few weeks ago, in fact not since I bought The Mirror and the Light on March 5th, publication day, and so, once we were partially released back into the wild at the beginning of July, Bookhound dropped me outside W.H.Smiths and off I went. The same money had been sitting in my purse for almost four months, this couldn’t be right, something had to give.

I tapped on the shop door and they let me in. Only six people allowed in at a time but the shop was empty. I think confidence might be rising slowly now but it wasn’t backalong, anyway I went in and judging by the enthusiasm of the welcome you’d have thought it was my birthday and Christmas rolled into one. I followed the arrows to the paperbacks and now have to own up that I’d picked up and put back at least ten before I saw it, the sign saying ‘DO NOT PICK UP A BOOK UNLESS YOU ARE BUYING IT.’ I felt marginally better for having sanitised my hands but still, and so I proceeded with due caution and selected three.

Who knows what sort of reading mood I was in to pick up a big fat John Grisham novel, The Rainmaker. I haven’t read him in years but I was in the mood for a bit of  a legal thrillery page-turner. I’m about half way through and I’ll be honest ...I’m flagging. It all seems a bit padded out and extra-wordy but I’ll probably plod on during those deckchair moments in the coming weeks.

Then even more unusually I opted for a bit of Royal gossip. Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner. A candid look at life behind the scenes for the upper echelons in the post-war years, and you can but only feel sorry for them, and the children. The social life of Anne, Maid of Honour at the Queen’s Coronation and former a Lady in Waiting to Princess Margaret, and her husband Colin Tennant, is a mad whirl of nightly engagements and parties. There are houses in London and a stately home in Scotland and this is all compounded by Colin’s purchase of the island of Mustique. Anne is a saint, a martyr and everything else in between as she balances her frenetic life mostly spent placating the irascible Colin, alongside the demands of motherhood.

It has to be said, and I’ll say it...I was bound to be able to spot the future trials and tribulations for children left in the care of nannies and friends various whilst their parents were largely absent. To Anne’s credit she does also address her own shortcomings. These become apparent when nanny Barbara Barnes arrives as a role model and takes the helm. Barbara more famously known for her nurturing of the young Princes William and Harry, but her imposition of some routine and discipline can’t have been easy in the Tennant household given that there were now five children, no make that six if you include Colin. Colin still prone to rolling around on the floor with tantrums well into his later years. 

I don’t know about you but my lasting association between Mustique and Princess Margaret (besides Roddy Llewellyn of course) is the accidental burning of her feet in the hot bath water. I was sharing an office with the district nurses at the time and there was much speculation about it all, and the treatment and potential consequences I can tell you

 

I have to confess that my final choice, probably a salve to the two ‘popular’ reads was a Penguin  ModernClassic, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K.Dick. Endsleigh book group have been meeting via Zoom except I just don’t do Zoom so I’ve been absent. But the theme was Science or Science Fiction so I thought I’d at least try. In fact twenty pages in I’d decided that Philip Dick and I were not hitting it off at this particular moment in time and I abandoned. Maybe it will happen one day but I’ve never really ‘got’ sci-fi so I’m not hopeful.

I had a purse full of coinage so opted for the self service checkout and proceeded to feed £22 worth of change into the machine. About fifteen minutes later, and still the only person in the shop, and after a good natter with the staff while I fed the machine with every 1p, 2p, 5p etc in my possession, I was done. And I can’t tell you how good it felt to walk out of a shop with some new books under my arm.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering how you are doing with the venturing out, if allowed...

Are you nervous, getting less nervous, and feeling a bit more normal...

Or does it all feel a bit too hazardous for now...

And what about John Grisham. It’s years since I read The Pelican Brief and The Firm, any other good ones to recommend...

Sci Fi...will it ever happen here...

And Royal gossip...are you in or out. I thought I was ‘out’ until Anne Glenconner persuaded me otherwise.

Dahlias

Having inherited the dahlia bed from the Tinker (my dad, for any that haven’t met him here before) and the wonders he worked on it during his last two years living here with us, we have always felt an affinity with this little corner of the Tinker's Cott garden. I grew up with dahlias, but with no particular love for them until my dad started planting them here, and now it’s safe to say we are addicted.

It's always a bit nerve-wracking because we don't lift the tubers in the winter. They stay put with a thick layer of mulchy straw on top and we hope for the best. We unveil it once we are past our last frost date (about May 19th for us) and then wait and see what emerges. And it's an ongoing mystery as to why the slugs and snails slither past and walk another thirty yards across the lawn to eat things, but leave this bed alone.

But just when our early summer flourish is over, and the daisies have done their thing.. and how I love this picture of the Tinker in the midst of them...

Then along comes the dahlia bed, all singing and dancing until first frosts.

This year I have taken dahlia expert Charlie McCormick's advice and strung around the supports, and it's a minor miracle of scaffolding which is slowly disappearing from sight whilst doing its job. We add six new dahlias each year, start them off in pots in the greenhouse in early March and are martyrs to them every time there's a frost, dashing out to swaddle them. Dahlia corner is getting a bit crowded, and we’re wondering whether to extend it a bit, but in the meantime it’s a riot of mismatched colour and gorgeous flowers which are just starting to sing.

Wine-Eyed Jill now in her third year and more prolific than ever...

 

This a new one Rebecca's World...

Another new one and quite the star so far this year, Cornel Brons

Arbatax. A village show prizewinner, though sadly no show this year, but I had added in a second one for fear of losing the first.

Another new one, Edge of Joy and its growing on me...

Downham Royal was a fail last year and by the time I'd contacted Peter Nyssen (who always replace or refund if a problem) they had sold out. I was quick off the mark with my ordering in January this year...

And here's Cornel Brons again. I doubt there's a more perfect flower...

Waiting in the wings and laden with buds is Black Jack, and wait 'til you see it. I gave my Walking Friend one for her birthday and was speechless when I saw her flowers last week. She lives up on Dartmoor and her garden is always a few weeks behind ours, but there they were, spiky nine inch dinner plates of deepest purple.

Meanwhile I hope all is well in your gardens, or those nearby that you can enjoy if you don't have one...

And I'd love to know what's doing well in the flower department, and of course any good recommends....  

 

 

 

 

Plague - A Very Short Introduction ~ Paul Slack

'The fuller the sources become over time, the easier it is to test the accuracy of those sweeping statements of chroniclers about the havoc created by plague, and to see that the reality for everyone involved in an epidemic was personal stress.'
Plague ~ Paul Slack ( A Very Short Introduction)

For anyone who is feeling that stress please don't feel obliged to read this, though ultimately I hope it might be reassuring...

When all this started I could hardly believe what I was hearing...that the most popular book was The Plague by Camus and everyone was watching the film Contagion. They’re mad I thought as I walked past my shelf of plague books with my eyes shut.  

I couldn’t think of anything worse. We were living it after all, wasn’t that enough torture.

The Plague Shelf had built up through many years working in public health. Health Visitors of old were trained in epidemics and infectious diseases, and in Plymouth especially in disaster management if there was ever a nuclear accident. And so I’d picked up and added all sorts of book down the years, but reading them now seemed like madness.

It's funny how the cards fall though isn't it.

I can only blame the Happy Campers.

We'd all missed face-to-face bookish talk so much that we set up regular garden sessions and had decided on a shared read of The Wheel of Fortune, book by book, and with a session to talk about it in-between. We'd pay special attention to Susan Howatch's retelling of the era of the Plantagenets through the lens of twentieth century lives of the Godwin family. This historical connection had passed me by on first read; 1985, baby overdue and in need of escapist fiction, but this time around I am a fully paid-up member of the fourteenth century with an essential module on The Black Death, which arrived in England in 1438 or so, during the reign of Edward III.

And so I sidled up to the Plague Shelf and found Plague by Paul Slack, one of those Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press, and what a revelation these 120 pages have been.

I'm sure someone somewhere regularly says something about 'interrogating' or understanding the present through the lens of the past...or maybe it's shifted to the other way round in the current climate, but honestly my jaw was on the floor.

Quoting J.F.C. Hecker..

'The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the Black Plague was without parallel and beyond description.' 

Paul Slack suggests this...

'It destroyed confidence in the future, undermined deference and conventional moral norms, produced extremes of religious enthusiasm and social and religious dissidence, turned everything upside down.'

'Psycho-pathological hysteria in critical circumstances' is mentioned too, but also the ability to accommodate the onslaught...

'not as something commonplace or everyday, but as inescapable facts of life.'

Can I tell you I found all that very reassuring; that human nature and our reaction to something life-threatening and in many ways uncontrollable, would seem to have changed very little since 1348. Maybe we've sheltered a bit too long under the cloak of invincibility where disease is concerned. I doubt we'll do that again for a while.

And there were some other fascinating similarities too...

Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, among the infected of Milan in 1576-7 'encouraged people in quarantine to come to their windows to sing the Litany and the Mass.'

Who will ever forget those moving scenes of Italians singing from their windows, and when we all knew this was headed our way too

In so many ways it has been far easier and more encouraging to return to the fourteenth century for an overview, rather than try and understand what is happening now. We are still slap-bang in the middle of history being made, as they were back then, and it may well be a few decades yet before anyone can make sense of all this.

But it also made me realise that for all our advances we are still only just learning what we are dealing with here. The science is young and has a way to go so, just as we might say now, 'Imagine them not knowing that the Black Death was transmitted by fleas on rats,'  (or by body lice as the latest research shows), well just imagine them in 3020 saying 'Fancy them not knowing Covid 19 was spread by ....'  

There is much about flight, about the origins of quarantine ( Venetian colony of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in 1377) and isolation, about the conflicts of private and public interests when precautions are taken, about scepticism as public knowledge increased, about challenges to authority and all of it suggesting that the Old Testament adage ( I had to look it up, Ecclesiastes) in many respects still holds true..

...and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. 

Feeling emboldened I moved along the plague shelf and read Ralph Taylor's Summer - A Scrivener, His City and the Plague by Keith Wrightson, and then picked up The Scourging Angel by Benedict Gummer.  And as quickly as this bout of interest descended, so as suddenly did it abate; enough of buboes and the like because now I'm plagued out and have moved on to thinking about who was writing in the fourteenth century, who could I be reading.

Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales of course. It's almost fifty years since I read Troilus and Criseyde for A Level. How we groaned at translating Middle English, and yet I glance at it now and it seems almost readable. Then there's William Langland and Piers Plowman...

Any other suggestions welcome.

Or books about life in the fourteenth century, fiction or non-fiction...

And I'd be interested to know, have you been fascinated by all this or avoiding delving ...well, like the plague.

 

 

 

 

Chicken Run the Third

It will be twenty-six years next month since we upped sticks and left town for country. Admittedly only six miles further up the road, but we’d found the location of our dreams, the place where we'd like our children to have some outdoor freedom, and the home we thought we’d still like to live in once the nest had emptied.

And we're still here.

I’m sure you’d all agree that the trauma of moving house is unsurpassed by little else on the stress-o-meter and our transit was no exception. I made things far worse by insisting that no house I left would be anything other than cleaned to operating theatre standards, though things started to fall apart when the removal men shifted the freezer and I saw what lay beneath. I had assumed (very wrongly) that the house we were moving into would be just the same, pristine and clean and lovely, ready to welcome us. Honestly, how wrong and naive could I be, it wasn't. I arrived feeling like a wrung out dishcloth and was ambushed by an unexpected grief for the first little home we'd left behind; the one we'd returned to with three new babies but defintely grown out of. Yet despite that this 150 year-old place had a huge heart and warmth and we felt it had probably been waiting for us to find it and make a home of it.

Adding to the stress on the day was trapping and boxing up the cat (Korky) as well as rounding up the chickens, and transporting them in their ark to their new home. We’d kept chickens for years in our little town cottage garden and thought nothing of twelve egg scrambled egg sessions (between five of us). The girls (Warrens for the experts among you) settled in well in their new surroundings. We only had our old collie dog so they could free-range safely, lay twelve eggs in the hedge that we wouldn’t find for weeks and generally cluck around happily. We took in a rogue bantam cockerel too. George the 5am scourge of a Dartmoor village and my HV colleague pleaded with me...if we can catch him please will you take him. He was an absolute gent was George. No trouble, pecked up food for his girls (twice his size) and then left it for them to eat, roosted every night at the top of the fir tree and far enough away from the house not to bother us with the crowing, except we quite liked it. We were living in the country after all.

We would add to the flock as required but gradually, as our own nest emptied and the chickens depleted, George crowed his last and we decided to stop with the whole chicken husbandry lark. Yet, every so often we’d say ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to keep chickens again,’ and Bookhound would pace out the corner of the garden have a bit of a think but that would be it.

Then lockdown happened and we were suddenly overcome with a massive bout of self-sufficiency. Nothing seemed certain in those early scary days did it, and we had to think carefully about how and where we would shop when supermarket delivery slots were like ...well like hen's teeth. The local farm shop was our salvation, quickly setting up online ordering and click-and-collect but maybe we also needed to think a bit more carefully about our own food production

And that aside Bookhound was definitely in need of a project.

Needless to say no project of Bookhound’s is ever knowingly under-constructed, skimped over or out of alignment (spot the spirit level), and, with access to building materials strictly limited, it was a case of using up all those 'things' that had been kept 'in case they came in handy', tucked away behind the shed for just this very moment. What has materialised is a spacious sort of hopefully fox and spaniel-proof triple-enclosure system (with the best views) that will allow for rotation when we hit winter mud. There’s a cosy roost, and nest boxes inside the woodshed accessed by a little door from the run that we can close at night. 

We rang the place where we had always bought our hens, at point-of-lay and rescued before they end up in Tesco's. Can you believe there was a waiting list...we weren't the only ones thinking about all this, but eventually home they came in the dog crate, six happy and docile Brown Warrens who will get along fine. 

The trouble we always had in the past was trying to mix in some fancy breeds because they looked nice, but they'd end up at war with the 'commoners' and it is only then that you see the true origins of the word 'henpecked.' 

As always they hide for a few days and take a little while to settle in. They have to learn to peck the ground, and to find their safe spaces, and we've had some fun 'teaching'  them to go into the hen house at night. But Harriet, Audrey, Dorothy, Judy, Bunty and Babs have all got the hang of it now and, as predicted, three weeks in residence and they have come into lay.

The Kayaker came round for lunch so we had the Ceremony of the First Egg and there it was ...a double yolker.


Any more Keepers of Chickens out there... all advice welcome.

Anyone else felt the urge to be a tiny bit more self-sufficient...

Or had a rethink about what really matters day to day...

 

 

 

 

The Splash of Words - Believing in Poetry ~ Mark Oakley

'Some writers have the gift of simply letting you know you can trust them, Mark Oakley has this gift in abundance...' 
Rowan Williams

Mark Oakley winged his way onto my radar via Bel Mooney.

Having shared my enthusiasm for Brian Doyle and One Long River of Song - Notes on Wonder, Bel had recommended Mark Oakley. Previously Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, Mark Oakley is now the Dean of St John's College Cambridge and has written a series of books. Brian Doyle was a very successful chapter-a-day read through May and I quite surprised myself with how much I was enjoying a bit of ...dare I say...meditative reading and directed thinking.

Having been a devout C of E attendee for many years I'm now a bit lapsed, none of which ever stops me from loving the liturgy and the presence and availability of the buildings (and missing them hugely during recent months)  but I proceeded with my usual caution over any religious writing.  I downloaded a Kindle sample of  My Sour Sweet Days - George Herbert and the Journey of the Soul by Mark Oakley and decided it was all a bit too much for the current state of my soul (which felt reasonably calm and OK ) and maybe I wasn't ready for the depths of George Herbert.

In the meantime I had a complete reorganise of the poetry shelves one day because I had nothing else pressing to do. The diary was an empty void and suddenly I needed to carry books halfway round the house to new homes.

I know for sure it isn't just me that does this...

Own up now all you book movers...

It was so good to see all the poetry books again and get them all into order and sit and browse a few, pull a few old friends and new-to-me poets off the shelf for a closer look, and how thankful I was that I had stocked up backalong in case of a future dearth. A charity shop in town had taken in a huge collection of as new contemporary poetry books and was selling them for 50p each, thus swelling my shelves by a quarter as much again.  Doubly pleased too that I'd rescued them because some weeks later the shop and it's entire stock was destroyed in a flood (floor mop jammed down a toilet in the flat above).

And then Bel recommended The Splash of Words -Believing in Poetry also by Mark Oakley,

'This beautiful and wise meditation centred around the soul language of poetry opens new windows in the shared house of both poetry and belief". 
Carol Ann Duffy

...and this time the Kindle sample was enough to convince me very quickly to splash out on the book (sorry).

'The phrase 'splash of words' is a good description of poetry. When you read a poem there is an initial splash like a pebble thrown into a lake. The words disturb your surface and have their impact...' says Mark Oakley in his introduction.

Yes, I could identify with that, so far so good...

'Then, as the poem begins to do its work, the ripples of meaning head out towards your shore, often slowly but relentlessly, and you realise that these words are shifting your perceptions...'

Yes I could see that too...still so far so good

'...and consequently even transforming who you are and how you understand.'

Whoa, steady on, lets wait and see.

There is a month's worth of a poem-a-day here with a commentary to accompany which, whilst obviously it does have a religious theme, doesn't beat you over the head with it...consequently twelve days in, at the time of writing this, I am coping and really enjoying the selection. Though I might not always segue neatly with Mark Oakley's spiritual stance or interpretation I think that's entirely Normal For Poetry, so we are having a jolly good to and fro about it all.

But there is another huge advantage to a book like this for someone who has just reorganised the poetry shelves. Each poem sends me there to see if I have said poet in a collection and so far I'm doing pretty well.

Jo Shapcott, W.H.Auden, U.A.Fanthorpe, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, Liz Berry, Mary Oliver, Alice Oswald, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Fiona Benson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, R.S. Thomas, Carol Ann Duffy...

It also demanded a new poetry notebook. The last one full to the brim with notes I’ll probably never look at again, but it’s somehow nice to have a record of meandering thoughts and brief quotes...

That picture of the shards we've dug up in our garden over the years feels like a perfect picture for those fragments of thought that occur as I read.

But likewise Mark Oakley is finding new poets for me too, and I was so spellbound by Jen Hadfield's Paternoster that I immediately ordered her collection Nigh-No-Place .

Mark Oakley starts his book with Paternoster and that feels entirely right. It is a poem that cannot be rushed...in other words sets a reader's pace for what is to come, holding the steady rhythm of the plough horse, the swaying of the head, the sounds, the time honoured labour of man and horse. I don't even like horses that much, but I love this one a great deal. It brought to mind that other plough-horse related poem by Edward Thomas, As the Team's Headbrass. I've read Paternoster over and again and feel as I've ploughed the equivalent of Long Acre in front of the house in the process...

This on Jen Hadfield, who now lives in Shetland, from The Poetry Archive...

'Her poetry is found where the secular and non-secular converge: ‘Paternoster’ is the Lord’s Prayer as uttered by a draft horse, and one can almost smell the mix of grass and mash on its breath as it repeats the words “it is on earth as it is in heaven”.

And here the opening lines...

Paternoster. Paternoster
Hallowed be dy mane.
Dy kingdom come.
Dy draftwork be done.
Still plough the day
And give out daily bray
Thought heart stiffen in the harness.

'The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper,' said Bertrand Russell...

'Good poetry makes the universe reveal a secret' said the Persian poet Hafiz (another of the choices in The Splash of Words) but like many I sometimes struggle to find it, or to sharpen my wits, so I am really enjoying Mark Oakley's light shining a deeper understanding over these gems.

Oh...right...

'...and consequently even transforming.... how you understand.'

Meanwhile, any new poetry discoveries to report...

Any favourite collections jumping off the shelves at you lately...

Moved any books around the home from A to B to C, and those that were at C to A,  and those that were are B to C recently...

 

 

 

 

Hair today & gone on July 27th...

Have you all had the phone call...

The one we’ve all been waiting for, at least here in the UK...

Did you trip over on the way to pick up the phone because you couldn’t see where you were going...

’Hi Lynne...it’s Ed...’

’EEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDD’

Ed is my hairdresser. He’s a good friend of the Kayaker and I had sent a nice message along the lines of  ‘tell him to ring your mother.’

I’ve been through the rumpled messy Carol ‘Gardener’s World' Klein look and am now heading for the full 1970’s page boy. it was almost time to get out the flares and the platform clogs. 

1975 I think. I'd just won a goldfish at a fair on Hampstead Heath, for which I bought a tank and luxury fixtures and fittings only for it to die a week later. Please note the Felicity Kendall 'The Good Life' dungarees and the 6" turned up hems, but also the page boy haircut. We used to go to the Jingles Hairdresser Training School, where their apprentices would practise on you for £1. I'd had the ignominious honour of being 'evicted' from the seat because a page boy was 'too ordinary and boring' for the up and coming student stylist.

Anyway, nothing fancy ever required for my hair these days. No colour, no foils, no highlights (age seems to be providing those without help) Just chop it to above my ears, sweep it sideways, don’t layer it to much or I look like a hedgehog, no thank you to the hairspray, quick ruffle with the dryer and off I go. 

As luck would have it I’d had my hair cut shorter than usual in early March thinking I would be going to New Zealand, and which was sure to involve some wilderness camping. Last time I went to New Zealand I made this amazing discovery at Cascade Creek that my hair could be washed (without shampoo) in a stream and would dry by itself without a hairdryer.

And again at Lake Hawea..

A skill once learned that I readily transferred to Dartmoor

Extraordinary.

As it is we seem to have been on a different ‘wilderness’ experience this last few months and although the fringe goes sideways it still has the power to annoy me when it grows too long,  but years ago someone taught me a cutting trick that never fails...

You carefully separate off whatever constitutes fringe, gather it together, twist it and twist it into a tight bundle and just chop off the end. Hey presto. you can see where you’re going again and it annoys you slightly less.

Someone said at the beginning of all this that after six weeks people would realise there is no such thing as natural beauty. Now being a person who worries more about my dahlias than my eyebrows I wasn’t too worried, but I suspect plenty of people have quite enjoyed a rest from the treadmill, maybe rediscovered something that had been lost in a sea of habit, even found a new style, who knows.

But hasn’t the unruly, over-long hair also become a badge of Lockdown Survival. We’re seeing it left and right on the TV (no names, no pack drill) and as Bookhound approaches the moment when he might need a pony tail it’s all become quite hilarious here.

Anyway, I’ve got my appointment, how about you...

How are your lockdown locks doing...

Anything else that you surrendered graciously and may never bother with again...

Anything that has driven you crazy and you are first in the queue...

 

Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) - A memoir of love, exile and crosswords ~ Sandy Balfour

'Like a crossword clue, history never makes sense at first reading. The surface is plausible, but discordant. We need a second reading to impose order.'

I honestly don't know what I'd do without you all.

How would I find books like this if one of you didn't email and suggest I read it.

It was one of those mornings when I was in need of 'different' then in whizzed an email from one of you suggesting I read Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) - A memoir of love, exile and crosswords by Sandy Balfour. It took me less than a nano-second to be convinced and order a copy...perhaps a sort of reverse version of what I do to some of you sometimes...maybe.

Here's the blurb...

Half a million people a day do it in the Telegraph. The Times claims almost as many, and the Guardian 300,000. Most people remember their first time, and everyone has a favourite. You can do it in bed, standing up, or on a train. You can do it alone, with a loved one or in groups. The Queen does it in the bath. It is not illegal, immoral or fattening. In fact it tops the Home Office list of approved entertainments for prison inmates. Crosswords are a very British obsession.

Crosswords are a very British obsession. Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is a personal reminiscence and a guide to solving crossword puzzles. But it is much, much more than a 'how-to' book. Each chapter starts with a clue, and uses anecdote, history and autobiography to solve it, in the process describing something of what it means to love England. In the process, we encounter The Best Crossword Clue Ever, The Most Beautiful Clue in the World 'Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose' and the eccentric personalities behind such legendary compilers as the Guardian's Araucaria and The Times'Ximenes.

The Queen does the crossword in the bath??

I can't pretend to be an expert, nor obsessed, but crosswords do fascinate me whilst also making me feel that there's a whole world of knowing that I am excluded from. It is this knowing when you are looking at an anagram, when you are not, when the word is hidden in plain sight in the clue, or when you've got to really stand on your head and turn your logical and ordered world a little upside-down, and think way beyond the box. Sometimes I get into the mindset, sometimes I don't, so it was good to read that it took Sandy Balfour years and years before he felt at ease in the world of the crossword.

I hadn't realised how traditional the whole thing is either. Famous compilers who garner a reputation and a following, one of  earliest of whom was the nature writer Adrian Bell (Corduroy, Silver Ley, The Cherry Tree, Men and the Fields)

One of the lasting memories I have of sitting as an observer in a workshop on memoir writing with Julia Blackburn and Penelope Lively, was their suggestion that all memoir needs a scaffolding. Once you've found it the book takes shape around it and Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose is that clever memoir that has used its scaffolding well. 

Born and raised in South Africa Sandy Balfour's journey begins in 1983 when he and his girlfriend leave Cape Town, avoiding army conscription and apartheid, and with a plan to hitchhike to London. The journey takes him around the world but effectively into exile, in search of a place he can belong and which he would like to call home...

'I have only a desire to be on the move. I have cut myself off from friends and family. I have discarded my past. It feels like a kind of death. All that is left is myself.
I am not sure that is enough.'

Weaving through the quest are the crosswords, a quest in themselves, and if I could remember all the details I think I could probably smash out the Times crossword in hours rather than the days it would take me if I stuck at it, rather than surrendering. It felt as if I'd stumbled into a new world that has always been a mystery to me...

That each newspaper has its own style...

This whole network of compilers who go by pseudonyms like Rufus, Araucaria (a Monkey Puzzle tree) Bunthorne, Hendra, Custos, Logodaedulus. Gemini, Quantum...

That the editor has the final say if they feel a clue doesn't play by the unspoken rules...if it isn't 'cricket'...

And that cricket itself is a compilers dream providing a plethora of clues and solutions...

Sandy Balfour's journey woven around the crossword clues, of which there are plenty to solve, was indeed a great read and highly recommended if you fancy not only a  life-journey but also a glimpse into this mysterious world of wordplay.

So tell me...are you a crossword guru who knows all the tricks...

Or, like me, have you spent your life in the half-light not quite understanding the rules of the game...

Do you ever cheat and look up the answers online...

 

PS Thank you again to the recommender and what about the answer to the clue which is the title of the book... shall I spoil it...no maybe not just yet...

And what about these...

'The real reason for the meeting of Volkswagen and Daimler (6, 6)'

And this apparently one of the best clues ever set...

'Amundsen's forwarding address (4)'