dovegreyreader scribbles

Borough Market

It was a medium-length stride from the Fashion and Textile Museum and Kaffe Fassett's exhibition, past Guy's Hospital towards the station at London Bridge, and where directly opposite, whilst I might have missed the Shard, I couldn't miss Borough Market. One of London's oldest markets, historically selling fruit and vegetables but now a microcosm of specialist artisan food suppliers too, and perhaps another example of up-marketing in a previously run-down area of London.

From one palette of colour and patterns ...

 to another...

...and from Kaffe Fassett's vegetable designs...

...to the real thing, and with little doubt in my mind that it was all art in its own right...


...and some it quite mouthwatering.
Piles of cheese, some of which came home with me for Bookhound...

and one of these for the Gamekeeper to crunch as he... well, as he goes deer stalking I suppose.

This next came as quite a surprise. 

I have missed a very big trick, we have traipsed through acres of wild garlic this Spring... £1 per 50g, I am clearly as green as I am cabbage looking not to have set up stall somewhere.

Related articles

Kaffe Fassett - A Life in Colour 50 years of Textile Art

Writing Britain : Wastelands to Wonderlands at The British Library

I am already totting up more exhibitons to see on future London trips, and Bookhound and I will definitely be scheduling in Writing Britain : Wastelands to Wonderlands opening at The British Library today and running until September 25th, for our Summer Day in the City. I travel up and down to London solo many times through the year, but we try to fit in a together day every so often too. 

And I feel an affinity because the last I heard the British Library were archiving dovegreyreader scribbles for future reference material... heaven help anyone trying to find their way around it all, and on checking the archive for the first time ever, because I had completely forgotten that fact, they do seem to have 198,600 entries about us, which seems enough to keep any poor student busy in 2112.

Team Old Ways are busy reading their copy of Robert Macfarlanes' book The Old Ways and readying for their walks which they will be introducing on here very soon, and having just finished the book I can see how well this exhibition will segue into that reading.

Examining how our landscape has shaped our literature feels like a natural extension to Robert Macfarlane's quest to see how landscape has shaped ourselves, and with it comes a reminder that not every writer had such a 'religious or reverent response to the countryside,' this according to Genevieve Fox in her exhibition preview.

One hundred and fifty works will be on display and the range sounds awesome from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Angela Carter's Wise Children and everything inbetween and including first editions, original drafts and author's notebooks. 

Genevieve Fox suggests the notebooks will be like entering a writer's inner landscape, though if you looked at mine you could be forgiven for thinking you had the map inside out. I keep notebooks with me constantly for quotes I see that I want to remember, but know I will have forgotten even where I saw them five minutes later, and for ...er... conversations I might hear...or  for taking notes when I am at a literary event (this is often as much to keep me awake during that early afternoon slot as it is to make sure I offer all of you a reasonably accurate account)  and for notes when I am wandering around the places I visit. I haven't always been such an avid notebooker but I am very conscious of the danger of remembering things that I may never have actually seen and that wouldn't do at all. And then Bookhound will take it off me and do a sketch so I am now insisting that he has a sketch book with him at all times because what could be better than a resident artist.

This being me I can't just accept that a notebook is a notebook plain and simple and leave it at that, I have to customize them with my 'love' of the moment. The first one is almost full, the next one is ready and waiting. I think you can all probably work it out... from my Angie Lewin year to my Eric Ravilious one.

I absolutely have to go if only to see George Eliot's manuscript for Middlemarch, which was on display for years but then suddenly disappeared. I always used to marvel at the thought that George Eliot wrote it by the light of a candle or perhaps oil lamps and with a scratchy old feather or something, and with hardly any crossings out.

Returning to the British Library, the exhibition will be thematically arranged bearing in mind that it is not always nature that inspires, so the industrial revolution will have its place... Rural Dreams, Industrial Muse, Wild Places and Waterlands, Cockney Visions and Beyond the City, whilst The Thames will feature as a character in its own right, so I am excited to see what that will draw into the displays. 

There are plenty of events running alongside the exhibition including one with Robert Macfarlane on June 26th and I see a Bloomsday event on June 16th  you very lucky London people. Robert Macfarlane will be at Port Eliot this year so I am hoping to lure him along to the dovegreyreader tent with the promise of a cup of tea and cake served by the catering corps (Bookhound and the Weatherman have put in a request for an urn this year.) 

Please do report back if you see the exhibition or get to any events, we'd all love to know more....is anyone planning to go??

A Visit to Dennis Severs' House

At the time of writing this it is two weeks since my twilight visit to Dennis Severs' House at 18 Folgate Street in Spitalfields. Yet I can still see and smell so much of the house which makes me think perhaps I did manage to glean something from an experience that felt like no other.

The game is that you enter the house as if you have interrupted the lives of the Jervis family, early 18th century Huguenot silk weavers who were in mid-meal when a time-traveller from centuries hence crept into their house having paid £14 for a good look around.

 Dennis Severs was 'an artist who used his visitors' imaginations as the canvas' and who apparently lived in the house until his death 1999 in much the same way as the original occupants might have done in the 1720s. I can vouch for the fact that a visit is a truly memorable and extraordinary encounter. If the intention is to have passed through the surface of a painting then I most definitely did my best. 

No photography is allowed inside the house and this feels right. To have been distracted by my camera would have felt completely wrong, as would have been any reproduction of those pictures here...I needed to see it and feel it, smell it and hear it all and let that leave an impression on my imagination which it most certainly has.

My visit started at 6.15 pm with a brief introductory talk outside from the curator who asks that I remain silent, no talking and definitely no mobile phones, thus making for a visit of complete concentration. I did make some notes and interestingly the notes revealed something afterwards of which I may have been unware at the time.

You don't need to to be able to read what I wrote...but just look at pages one and two...

and compare with pages five and six...

The whole house is candlelit, but to varying degrees and when the visit starts down in the kitchens, in the cellar, the crowded table laden with food and manuscripts, the delft tiles around the sink and the range glowing and radiating warmth from a real fire, with the freshly baked scones on the griddle, are all just barely visible to the eye. This is 18th century light and with the ceiling a scant three inches above my head below stairs, as I moved on through the house and through time, (because the final room brings the visitor into the 19th century) that light had gradually increased, but in a way that I might have missed but for my notebook.

This is still-life drama, the chance to become lost in another time, and not so much what you see as what you imagine too, and little signs and notes constantly upbraid the lazy visitor...

'You either see it or you don't...you are looking at the thing rather than what the things are doing...'

and a few rooms later another reminder...

'What! You are still looking at 'things' instead of what 'things' are doing...'

and then...

'Would you recognise art if it fell out of a frame...'

and suitably chastened I vowed to try harder.

There are bells peeling and footsteps, the floor creaks and the clocks tick and chime and then you catch background whispering which had me looking over my shoulder and about to say 'Shh' to other visitors who must have been talking ...except they were about to say the same to me, and it dawns that this is the family who have just left. As you approach they depart, as you depart they re-enter.

Then a voice off-stage says ...

'Rebecca, we'll need more fuel in the morning, keep an eye out for someone peddling it on the street..'

And a very unnerving moment when I coughed and so did the invisible resident... I'm telling myself that was a coincidence.

The smells were a heady mix of ginger and spices various and coming as a consistent and gentle reminder to use all my senses as I then heard a baby cry and bird song, and noticed the wig on the chair and upstairs in the withdrawing room, the half-toasted waffle still on the fork, the broken tea cup perhaps knocked over by the ladies of the house wearing their large hooped dresses. The sewing basket lay open, the music cast to one side..they had been singing 'Mrs Spriggs Gave Parties' just before I walked in it would seem, the little house of cards behind the chair...perhaps that was the children.

And I desperately wanted to sit down and watch and listen to what my imagination was telling me, but of course that wasn't allowed. I was a bird of passage not a resident.

Up into the bedrooms and an imprint in the cushion in the window seat...someone had seen me approaching and disappeared... leaving behind a full chamber pot I hasten to add which I decided not to sniff.

I moved on up to the attics and clearly a time of poverty has descended on the family. The light was stark, the air noticeably cooler, the fire a mere flicker in the grate though still real, and everything much grimier, crumbling lathe and plaster giving way to gaping holes in the ceilings, washing hanging on the landing, the rugs rumpled enough to snag my feet on and make me look down, a plate of oyster shells on the table perhaps not the luxury food then that we view it as now, and in the background gunfire. At this point I knew that explanations would follow if I looked hard enough and sure enough this is 1837, the King has died a new young Queen is about to ascend the throne.

The final room back downstairs and a Victorian parlour crammed to the gunwhales with all that wonderful Victorian clutter, the smell and the light different again and I realised this was the oil lamps.

I did a great deal of standing and staring which is built into and an acceptable aspect of the visit during which you are never made to feel rushed or hurried, if you go to walk into a room, or approach a stair case having missed a room, someone just silently stands in your way. In fact everyone was overtaking me but my imagination wanted its moneysworth and most certainly got it.

As I emerged blinking back into the 21st century I did have that sense of the disorientation of time travel were it possible, with every inch of my imagination out on stalks and  working overtime as I walked back along Folgate Street....

and then around Spitalfields where so many of the old buildings remain and signs of a bygone era are in constant evidence..

until in creeps the 21st century with quirks of its own..

I even managed to preserve that imagination through a journey on the tube back to Bloomsbury and into the next day and a visit to Sir John Soane's Museum, more of which soon.

But if you are in London please don't miss a visit to Dennis Severs' House, it really is magical

 

 

London Under ~ Peter Ackroyd

I am currently in London for the three days of the London Book Fair, still in touch here thanks to the technology, and will be speaking on Wednesday as part of a panel on the subject of Social Reading. My sincere thanks to The Reading Agency for the invitation as well as the opportunity to be sitting on a panel with the legendary tweeter who is Orkney Library.

I love going to the smoke because, though I was born in Exeter, I grew up on the very outskirts of London which, cost permitting, made it readily accessible to us as children, and for school trips, and whilst I may feel my heart has been in rural Devon for a long time now, there is always a bit of me that thrives on the London buzz....and then the coming home. 

So in amongst all the Nature Table reading I am keeping my eye on the city life too, and when Peter Ackroyd's book London Under arrived I was intrigued. Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways (update on Team Old Ways very soon) is already making me acutely aware of what may be beneath my feet as I walk, whilst Bookhound's recent DIY redistribution of the garden, in the final landscaping after all the building work, is making us both acutely aware of what lies beneath our feet.

A shed-load of earth is what...

It is only when we (as in the Royal we) do a job like this that we sit in the midst of the gigantic molehills during Bookhound's alloted tea break and ponder firstly why we are never the lucky people to find the cracked pot yielding so many Roman coins that it takes two of you to lift it out of the ground. Like this one we saw at Bristol Museum, and which a man found whilst digging a fishpond... a fishpond I ask you ...we've gone half way to Australia and found one bit of a broken plate, a doll's arm and a teapot spout.

I am so disappointed in the ancestors.

Peter Ackroyd suggests that

' the temptation to bury precious objects is very strong especially in times of danger.' 

Clearly not enough of that around these parts.... have you ever found anything interesting??

I'd be really happy to know at least one of you had.

Anyway, once we get over that let-down we sit and wonder about the hand labour that would have been involved in the fields around us in years gone by, and having now read London Under I am marvelling at the idea that there really can't be much earth left to dig out beneath the metropolis and so much of it done pre-JCB.

I am afraid this is one of those books that is chock full of 'Did-You-Know...' moments and I have regaled Bookhound with a bevvy of those followed by plenty of 'Guess-How-Much...' 

It had just never occurred to me that whilst London sits on a bed of sand, gravel, clay and chalk making it eminently possible to dig down, Manhattan is established on layers of hard rock meaning the only way is up. And it would seem that London has never been able to stop itself digging down even further; vast sprawling networks of tunnels, chambers, catacombs, rivers, sewers (I'll come back to those) vaults (the Bank of England vaults hold the second biggest horde of gold bullion on the planet) command spaces and complete subterranean worlds.

Secret London accessed by invisible, unnoticed portals.

Who knew that 100ft below High Holborn there is a vast underground structure accessed via a very insignificant door at No.31. A lift will take you eight floors down to a network of tunnels, rooms, dining rooms, communal living areas and private cubicles... and that all connects via more tunnels to Covent Garden and thence to Trafalgar Square, a 'miniature city' according to Peter Ackroyd. I feel like I may be giving out classified informaion, but it is all in the book so fair game.

Each successive digging reveals more history too, a Roman Baptistry discovered underneath Oxford Street in 1865, a flight of sixteen steps down to a room with red brick walls and arches, a pool with spring-fed water in it to a depth of six feet... all destroyed and probably now the site of Top Shop or something.

And all far more than just the London Underground network and a few Cabinet war rooms as I had imagined. The Underground itself a very chaotic mess of obsolete tunnels too, I didnt know there used to be a tube station called The British Museum for example, and apparently if you look carefully as you leave Holborn Station travelling west you may catch a glimpse of the old tiled walls. The iconic tube map meanwhile a designer's effort to make some sense of it all, as you will know it you have ever tried to walk what looks like that short hop from Earls Court to Olympia because there are no trains running.  

I love the idea that a man with a wooden leg was employed to ride up and down the first escalator in 1911 because everyone was too scared to use it... such a good advert. Yet each tube line has its own identity, almost a personality, and this made for fascinating reading... did you know that the Bakerloo line is 'disconsolate and brooding' and now I consider it, yes it is, and the Northern Line is 'intense and moody'.

But it was all the connotations of the underworld that Peter Ackroyd brings to life here that held my attention too. The way that life heads into the ground any way it can when it feels threatened and needs to feel safe, thus the war bunkers and the rush for the tube stations during the Blitz. The sense of foreboding attached to any notion of 'being underground' coupled with the sense of foreboding I felt as I read that London is slowly sinking into its foundations as the groundwater rises. I don't want to worry anyone living there, especially ahead of London 2012, but 15,400,000 gallons is being pumped out daily.

And then there are the sewers.

Living as we do without mains drainage and courting our close companion the septic tank, and with my background in ghastly diseases, I am always interested in sewers.

Did you know that London has Mr Bazalgette to thank for its 82 miles of main sewers and 1000 miles of minor ones built in the 1860s and still intact ??

And did you know that the deposits of fat gripping the sides are, in places, 40 inches thick??

And that picture at the beginning is after the cleaning...

Here's the before...

You learn things here.

 

In search of the London Hospital Museum...

Having spent a few hours wandering around Spitalfields a few weeks ago, and with about an hour to spare before I needed to be somewhere else, I decided to set off in search of The London Hospital Museum.

It will always be The London to me, I can't be doing with any of this Royal stuff, but seconded to the hospital from Great Ormond Street for a year to do our general training we had been taken around the museum back in the 1970s, and I was keen to find it again. It was the squeamish person's worst nightmare, shelves of unmentionable, unbelievabale things floating in formaldehyde, but fortunately we all had cast-iron stomachs. We gazed in awe and wonder (and I'll own up also with some young, unseemly and womanly mirth) as we realised there was nothing, and I mean nothing of the human anatomy which couldn't be pickled and put in a jar.

I was convinced I knew the way to the hospital and so wasn't phased by the fact that the maps in my Moleskine London book assume that I won't want to stray beyond Aldgate East. Mr Butt had already given me instructions from Brick Lane but I had only half-listened because I felt sure I knew, but as I reached the top could I remember whether I should go left or right and then where??

No I couldn't.

So I trekked on in one direction and was waylaid by The Whitechapel Gallery which all seemed hopeful.

After a wander around there I emerged and had completely lost my bearings.

Right??

Left??

... and everyone I asked pointed in different directions.

And can you believe it was a roasting hot early March day and I was getting hotter and hotter.

In the end I slid into Aldgate East and did one stop on the tube to Whitechapel because for sure, once I walked out of the station there would be the hospital bang opposite me, I'd remember where East Mount Street was and I'd be sorted. In fact I had London completely upsidedown in my mind and thought I was approaching from the east not the west.

Why won't Bookhound be suprised to read that.

So as I emerged from the tube station imagine my surprise when faced with this...

The old place completely boarded up.

I then succumbed to a state of even more confusion.

No access to the front of the building, or the main steps where the 'tramps' (as they were then called) would throw themselves down as we showed them out of casualty after stitching up their head wounds. This was in order to try and really do some damage and score a bed for the night, even though we had done our best to get them a Sally Army hostel bed before they left ...so sad when I look back on it. Mostly men and with ex-Cambridge professors amongst them... whatever happened to Mr Sunshine, Henry, I often wonder. Sufficiently inebriated and thus requiring no local anaesthetic, the suturing was always given to us students as practise, which made a change from the polystyrene head that we had already smocked and quilted. We did a careful job for which they always seemed unfeignedly thankful, promising us the earth in kind if rather incoherent blessings, and I always felt much more capable and comforted knowing that they really couldn't feel a thing.... and I got quite good at stitching in the process.

I see my Pink Book training record shows that I also dealt with a sub-ungual haematoma, which means I heated a straightened paper clip and stuck it into someone's finger nail to release the blood underneath ...and I also partook of gastric lavage, which would have either been someone who has overdosed or jumped in the Thames or both....and would have involved carrots and cabbage...they always did.

I'm not sure I can envisage myself doing any of that now, how odd that I did it all so willingly in this building at the age of twenty-one.

I am grateful to the security guard who opened the gate to let in a lorry and let me in too as I begged to be allowed to pay homage to Edith Cavell in light of my volte-face recounted here, and  take a picture of this on the front wall...

But where on earth had the hospital gone...what about all those old wards..Charrington, Paulin, Royal (where I met Bookhound) Turner...

Nor could I see any sign of East Mount Street or Cavell Nurses Home, but as I followed the 'Royal London Hospital has moved' arrows and rounded the corner, nor was I expecting this...

or this..

The hospital completely rebuilt and no one had told me.

It is a very arresting site, quite astonishing in fact and almost beautiful in that way that Victoria Findlay's book Colour, Travels Through a Paintbox is making me so much more aware of colours chapter by chapter. Unfortunately this sight came during 'Black and Brown' week but I have stored it up in my mind's eye for the 'Blue' chapter. I must have looked a complete dork with my jaw on the floor staring at it for ages whilst thinking 'There's a quilt in that'.

But plus ca change, it was still a hospital and this I knew because there were patients walking outside in their pyjamas and gowns cussing and swearing about their bowels and having a smoke. I passed a very rubicund old gentleman, who looked and behaved very familiarly and of the 'No Fixed Abode' genre I remember of old; he was patiently steering himself around in circles in a wheelchair, singing at the top of his voice, one arm clutching a bottle of unknown origin or contents, one good leg paddling the ground and doing the work, one plastered leg not helping. 

Now hopelessly lost and in danger of going round in circles myself, I just sort of wandered, so it was luck more than any good sense of direction that saw me on the doorstep of the museum tucked away here.

But it was really worth the visit if only for one thing alone, the 1968 recruitment of nurses film, more of which soon and I think I was quietly relieved to discover that the pickles are now stored in the Medical School.

And afterwards, as I walked back around, uncertain whether I would even be able to find Whitechapel station again, I thought about Edith Cavell's plaque and hoped it would be re-homed somewhere prominent on the new build, and as I passed that towering blue edifice there was my friend, still singing and still going around in circles.

 

 

 

Beautiful Book Alert ... Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author

I know I have mentioned it already, but I hadn't actually laid eyes on a copy then. Now that I have I am compelled to mention it again, because every once in a while a book just takes my breath away as I open the package.

It will need to pull off something spectacular to do that, there will need to be difference, and having been eagerly awaiting the arrival of my bought copy of Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author I can't tell you how delighted I was when this thing of beauty was revealed.

It's the square bound spine and the sizing at 6" x almost 8" and 428 pages that all make it so satisfyingly chunky. With high production values, quality paper and illustrations by Mark Hearld (he of that grey doveflight fabric I am coveting) Lucinda Rogers and Rob Ryan (of papercut fame) and greyscale photos throughout I am utterly convinced this will become a book to treasure for me and for many out there. A silk ribbon bookmark (preferably of Huguenot origin) would have meant complete happiness but I can forgive and will make my own, because this is the most perfect book to keep to hand and read one chapter a day through the year as there are 365 of them, The Gentle Author's first year of blog posts.

I mentioned that I have been following Spitalfields Life since reading the recent Random Spectacular journal, and this book is a compilation of those daily blog entries which follow the life, history and culture of Spitalfields and environs, and at the heart of which must be the beautiful market.

But this book is not solely about history past because The Gentle Author includes the 'here and now' as well as the 'there and then'... an important record, the history of the future I suppose, the car washers, the rappers, the stall-holders I stood and watched on my walkabout all feature here, as does Tubby Isaacs who I was delighted to find is still there too..

Tubby Isaacs was a landmark when I lived in Whitechapel back in the 1970s, some things never change...namely the fact that there still exist those strange inexplicable people in the world, Bookhound being one, who adore jellied eels. His family are Bethnal Green born and bred, I suspect he may have been weaned on them.

Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church, built between 1719 and 1729, is writ large on the Spitalfields skyline..

and seems to peek around every corner...this Brick Lane and Fournier Street...

First new I-didn't-know-that fact learnt from the book ... Spitalfields the name is a derivative of St Mary's Hospital Fields which used to be located here, and the history is fascinating as The Gentle Author tracks the legacy of the Jewish families, the Huguenots and the silk trade, the Irish weavers, those fleeing the Russian pogroms who had meant to go to America but stopped over in London and stayed. Then in the post-war era, as the Jewish people moved to more prosperous areas of London so the Sikhs, Pakistanis and Bengalis arrived and made Brick Lane the multi-cultural centre it is today.

Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane obviously came to mind as I I wandered around there last week and discovered a wonderful haberdashery emporium with the friendliest, most helpful man imaginable behind the counter....Mr Butt I presume.

Nothing was too much trouble as I browsed and tracked down webbing for bag handles at £1 a yard and then bought two scarves I couldn't resist at £2 each, having passed on the £30 ones in John Lewis the day before.

As The Gentle Author suggests, the acceleration of change in the East End is very rapid and Spitalfields Life aims to record those changes with a daily post to record that transformation, and through the medium of a blog (I like) with its 'nascent literary form... unique qualities and potential.'

But the book is the thing and Spitalfields Life evidence, were it needed, that though it is all there and free to read online, there is still something very special about the book in the hand, especially when it is a work of art in its own right. I will be cradling, stroking and reading this one, and commenting on it here throughout forever I expect.

I walked from Brick Lane to explore my old patch around The London Hospital and to seek out the hospital museum; who knew I could get quite so spectacularly lost around streets I thought I knew like the back of my hand... no one told me the whole place had been rebuilt while my back was turned, more soon.

 

Spitalfields Market

If you are in London I can certainly recommend a visit to Spitalfields Market.

A feast for the eyes if you love bric-a-brac, or if you have run out of pigeon-racing certificates and rosettes or hanker after a Bakelite wireless...

or perhaps you have run out of knives, or are most annoyingly missing that one crystal drop from your chandelier, or you fancy a rummage around some old photos...or you want to create your name out of old print blocks..

or perhaps you want to add a new song to the repertoire..

or you have felt for some time that life is just not complete without a cat on your head...and I'll admit I did a double take and had to give this a gentle poke just to be sure (yes, dead)

or perhaps you are just browsing without purpose as I was, and soaking up the atmosphere and the colour.

A note for anyone who is Pinterested or for anyone who may be wondering what is this thing called Pinterest... it is a pin-board style photo-sharing website where you can create and manage theme-based image collections. You can find my embryonic pinboards here or by clicking on this button which is also on the sidebar over here >>>>>

Currently you can add and share any pictures you may particularly like from here to your own pinboard using the pin-it button at the base of each post (keeping in step with the zeitgeist) and dovegreyreader will automatically be acknowledged as the source. Though Pinterest is not about self-promotion I do take far more pictures than ever make it onto here so it might be my repository for some of the excess, a sort of virtual version of the suitcase on that stall. But already I am seeing a few pictures extracted, re-shuffled and gathered together under new headings like Patterning and adding more form elsewhere, and thinking it might make me look even more keenly through my camera lens.

Meanwhile to see how it should be done check out Kate, who I know visits here sometimes. Now Kate really does know a thing or two about this Pinning lark, and if you are a Pinner too please add your link in comments and this novice will trail around after you to pick up some Pin-tips and nab some of your pins.

And if you think the last thing the virtual world needs is somewhere else that demands your attention, and eats away at your time, then please just ignore all that.

 

PS The Pinterest button now reduced to this because the larger one just didn't suit my decor...

En route..

..to London again with technology in tow though apologies for anything that may not look quite right, it's still in the experimental stages, but I am very much looking forward to tonight's event at The Biographer's Club. Three hours to think about what to say in my 'three minutes but no longer than five' introduction about what I do and books etc, and then some interesting questions to ponder around the topic of book reviews in general. My favourite sort of debate and I know some of you will be there so it would be great to chat afterwards if you have time. Diana, if you have made it from California I am going to be seriously impressed...

Talking as we are of biographies, and for anyone with a Kindle, today's Daily Deal is Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis, a steal at 99p and thank you to Curzon for the tip-off.

The good news is I am sitting on the sea side of the train, I have hot chocolate and a wireless connection and time to browse a few sites too. News of one has just arrived this morning, a site for Nordic Women's Literature, http://nordicwomensliterature.net/ and I feel some new reading directions coming on... Selma Lagerlof... can anyone advise??

 

 

 

Dickens's London ~ Peter Clark

White rabbits..there, that's got that out of the way. let March commence.

One of the aspects I most enjoy about my trips to London is the walking.

People think because we live in the country we must be in walking heaven, well yes, 'tis true I certainly am, and I am not complaining. I get out almost every day, across the fields, along the lanes or down to the River Tamar and yesterday was glorious...

...even tempting to think Spring might be springing, but many a slip 'twixt first warm day and first swallow in the nest. It must be National Hedge Cutting Week or something too because I dodged four of these...

but it has to be said for all the mess they make they do smarten the lane up a bit, and good to get it all done before the birds start nesting, the wild flowers start appearing and the crops are sown.

But I love city walking too.

Charles Dickens apparently walked at a steady pace of about four miles per hour which I have worked out I can do if I get a move on, but it's a fair old lick, I'm not sure I could keep it up for too long, but no need because you can do it all from your armchair with this little treasure.
 
Dickens’s London, published by Armchair Traveller at the bookHaus, is a really special little book, sturdy and clothbound, mapping walks around the city that take in some of the locations and the sights and sounds of both Dickens’s life and his writing including novels, letters and journalism.

As Peter Clark states quite clearly, whilst much of Dickens’s London is to be found in his fiction, and is therefore not ‘reportage or documentation’, and whilst many of the original buildings have long gone, it is down to Dickens’s descriptive powers that those boundaries between fiction and fact readily blur. Dickens himself would take friends to the places where incidents in his novels had taken place, so we can hardly be blamed for wanting to do likewise and I am a complete sucker for any literary connections to a landscape or a place. And because Dickens knew London so well, as Peter Clark also suggests, ‘there is rarely any ambiguity about locating sites he had in his mind when he was writing…’

I doubt any of us who have read the novels would have too much trouble conjuring up the vision of narrow, squalid streets or to imagine The Strand for what it originally was in pre-Embankment days … a beach, or to envisage what is now Victoria Embankment Gardens as an area that was regularly flooded. I only need to stare at the Thames to think of Our Mutual Friend and Gaffer Hexham and his daughter Lizzie pulling a corpse out of the ‘deadly sewer’.

Peter Clark suggests taking whole days to cover each walk, and Number Two – From Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the Mansion House would seem to be the best one for a Bleak House moment. The book offers general rather than detailed maps so you might need an A-Z to hand, but there is written commentary, what to look out for, what still remains, what has been lost along with the history of the buildings and pointers to tucked-away places that I would certainly have missed … the little chapel at Lincoln’s Inn for example. Women used to abandon their babies here and, though they were all taken in and cared for, they were all called Lincoln, which can only have been confusing. This is the sort of book to stop off and read up (and aloud if you have a walking companion) at various coffee, lunch and tea stops along the way and would make for some really interesting London days.

There are walks around the first suburbs too, Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Highgate, Hampstead and Limehouse and I have walked some of those. Chelsea always fascinating for its blue plaques along Tite Street, and Cheyne Row for Carlyle’s House at number 24, (which Carlyle rented for £35 per annum) and number 4 Cheyne Walk, the house in which George Eliot died, but I had no idea that Chelsea was actually a fishing village in the 1830s. Very separate from London, considered to be ‘in the country’, a place to get away from it all for some peace and quiet and St Luke’s Church, Chelsea the venue for Charles’s marriage to Catherine Hogarth on April 2^nd 1836.

So to date I have lived up to the publishers name and been an armchair traveller with this little book, but it is compact enough to tuck in the rucksack and that is where it may well be on future London visits.

 

Temple Place to Doughty Street...

The final destination for our day was the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, so we set off from Temple Place on foot, making our way up Chancery Lane and quickly realised that we were treading in the footsteps of the man himself, who probably did this walk across to Holborn and home countless times.

Cursitor Street chimed Bleak House bells with me, and with some slick map reading we were soon in Doughty Street, or so it seemed. More likely that having talked books all the way there we hardly noticed how long we had been walking, but it was good to pay homage to Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby's lodgings a few doors up before heading in for a look at the first Dickens homestead.

Now by this time, I'll be honest, Fran and I might have been a little over-Dickensed to the point where I completely forgot to take any pictures of the outside, but think typical four storey London Georgian.

The house is soon to close for major refurbishment (April Diana if you are reading this, should still be open in March when you visit) thanks to lottery funding which will sadly take the house out of action for the rest of this bicentenary year and also make it unavailable to the massive influx of visitors expected for London 2012.  Apparently this was a 'do it now or lose the grant' situation, so it was good to see the house before anything alters, though it would clearly benefit from a bit of an overhaul and perhaps more extensive exhibiting of the archives that are held there.

Anyway, probably no photos permitted but I sneaked a few for you and will risk the Tower if necessary as long as I can take books in with me...

The rat in the Dickensian wine cellar...

Not real of course or I'd have been out of there.
Then a rather snatched shot of the Dickensian wastepaper bin..

and finally the Dickensian night storage heater...

Sorry, yes, a bit Dickensed-out, but as we walked around it was easy to imagine the family living there and to feel the atmosphere in the first floor Drawing Room looking down onto the street below. Sadly the top floor, probably the nurseries where the children would have lived and played, were roped off as 'Staff Only', which always makes that the bit you'd really really like to see just because you can't.

Two Temple Place... Astor and Morris

Fran and I continued our London Day of Culture to Perk Up the Spirits in Dismal January (and which we enjoyed so much we might make into an annual event) with a short stroll from the Museum of London, along the Embankment to Two Temple Place and the William Morris exhibition. This had been in my sights on my last two London trips but William and I just couldn't co-ordinate our dates no matter how hard we tried... closed on Tuesday ...closed again for a private function on the Wednesday I had planned to visit a few weeks later, so I was relieved to get there just before Story, Memory, Myth closes.

The rest of London, if not the country, if not the world had had the very same idea, and on that day too would you believe it, so the place was heaving.

No party thrown by original owner William Waldorf Astor can ever have involved so many people trying to get up and down the staircase at any one time, and what the famously flamboyant carved Four Musketeers gracing the newel posts must have thought was anyone's guess. I don't know about you but I am fine in crowds until my 'elf and safety' lobe kicks in and I think 'what if there was a fire?'. I don't panic, I just want to clock the exits and start to make my way out quietly.

It happened to me once at a Boden Sale; those pop-up bargain days they used to hold in rural venues and for which they would send out about 10,000 invitations and 9,999 people would turn up. Powderham Castle near to collapse under the weight of loaded baby buggies being passed over heads in order for people to get a foot nearer tables piled high with...well, what looked like a load of jumble. I actually rang Bookhound from the corner I was trapped in to ask him to contact someone at Boden HQ, report the mayhem and send in the troops, and to tell him I may be some time making my escape so don't put the dinner on yet.

Fortunately common sense prevailed at Temple Place and as Fran and I burst out of the doors, carried in the general direction of the exit on a sort of mosh pit of Morris-mania, admission had been stopped and was being ticketed for later in the day. We did manage to get a glimpse of some fabulous tapestries, sketches, paintings, wallpapers and also the Astor house, the perfect setting. I would love a closer look at the house another day, so much carving and panelling, all very sumptuous and Fran and I were both drawn to this wonderful stained glass window.

A closer look reveals really intricate detail but having settled down on the surprisingly empty window seat to study it, only to find ourselves surrounded by the hordes on the guided tour, we quickly moved on and then bought postcards in the shop.

It was all enough to fire me up for the read of Fiona McCarthy's biography, Edward Burne-Jones, The Last Pre-Raphaelite as there was plenty of EBJ in evidence, but I also hot-footed to the shelves when I arrived home to find the book on the Astor family. I read When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan on a seven hour flight back from Houston a few years ago and it was good to remind myself of this excellent read whilst swotting up on the background... death of cousin Jack on the Titanic and dear old William Waldorf, described by Justin Kaplan as every Englishman's nightmare...

'the American invader who bought his way into society, bought estates that were part of the nation's heritage, denied the public access to them...and could outspend, outcollect, outentertain, and outbuild anyone in England.'

Two Temple Place was bought and renovated with added crenellations as William Waldorf Astor's London pied-a-terre and business HQ in the dying years of the nineteenth century.


Serving as a private museum for his art and books collection, apparently including Shakespeare folios, the house was a place where he could also escape his family back in the Carlton Square residence and entertain who he pleased. H.G.Wells who interviewed him there revealed the partial extent of the Astor wealth...

'he was drawing gold from New York - perhaps $6 million a year in rents...as effectually as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit...'

In fact William's inheritance from his parents was estimated at between $150 million and $300 million, give or take the odd million which all meant he could afford a really flamboyant weather vane for the roof as well...

Always fearful of kidnappers and theft, Astor kept a loaded pistol to hand and the building was apparently equipped with a state-of the art security system which at the press of a button would lock and bar all windows and entrances ..which always feels like another fire hazard to me. Of course the wealth also stretched to the purchase of Cliveden followed by Hever Castle, and you can't knock it, at one point he was keeping 840 workers employed in renovations.

Anyway the exhibition was fabulous in every sense, the tapestries especially breathtaking and it was thankfully possible (with elbows) to look at them very closely and see the intricate and complex stitching, as well as brushstrokes and pencil workings for the wallpapers and their designs, and whilst I don't want to be the instigator of a stampede, if you do live nearby it is the final day of the exhibition today.

 

 

 

London calls again...

Thank you for all the Team Middlemarch discussions over the weekend. We are off to a flying start with our year-long read conducted at Victorian instalment speed. Some of us are loving it, others are persevering and if you fancy joining us on board the virtual brougham it is never too late so here are a few housekeeping arrangements.

'Joining' only involves getting a copy of the book, either real or digital, reading Part One Miss Brooke and leaving a comment with your thoughts, or discussing what others have written on this weekend's post here, and to read any previous posts in the build up just click on this Team Middlemarch tag. Part Two Old and Young arrived through Victorian letter boxes on February 1st 1872 so we will start reading that on the same day 140 years later and then gather here over the weekend of March 24th - 25th to share our thoughts.

So back to the real world and the training days last week were actually not as terrible as even the optimist in me had feared.

The course leaders were excellent; engaging, assertive, clear and unequivocal about the issues which is exactly what you need where child protection is concerned, and nicely terrifying enough for me not to even think about taking the prolonged blink which then has you falling off your elbow in the post-lunch session.

I was in a 4* hotel nearer Bedford then Luton so that could have been much worse, and working from home and online I only meet up with my work colleagues twice a year, so it was lovely to see them all.

I found myself sitting opposite a consultant gynaecologist on the way to London. Well the briefcase advertising a world conference suggested as much (unless he'd bought it on eBay of course) ... and his diary, though impossible to read upsidedown looked very full indeed. He was reading Colm Toibin's The Master just for your information, and making copious notes. I did take The Virgin in the Garden by A.S.Byatt and it was perfect reading, both on the train and at 4am in a hotel room with an inaccessible wireless signal and strange pillows that just refused to meet my exacting standards of comfort. Needless to say I dropped off at about 6.50am ready to be woken by the 7am alarm, but only a hundred fifty pages to go.

I had planned an overnight stop in London on the way home rather than arriving in Plymouth towards midnight and had scheduled in an evening of browsing in Foyle's and a day of exhibitions before catching a late afternoon train home the following day and it all went nicely to plan.

Undaunted by the weather on Wednesday morning...

The secret is to go with someone who has been sensible enough to bring a large-scale map which won't need glasses, and to have looked up the bus numbers beforehand...

And so it was lovely to spend the day in Fran H-B's company as we headed for the Dickens exhibition at the Museum of London, passing the London Wall, which to my chagrin I don't think I have ever really noticed before...

Early for our 10 am tickets we nipped into Postman's Park just opposite the museum and behind St Botolph-without-Aldgate Church (the other secret is to go with a professional 'Nanny' who has prammed her way around most of the city and knows these little tucked away corners)
A neat little pond...

and there, surrounded on all sides by the towering City of London, the G.F. Watts's Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice...

Everday heroes immortalised in a plein-air gallery of exquisite, Arts and Crafts-like tiles...




No pics allowed in the Dickens Exhibition but well worth a visit if you are interested, and especially if you want to pay homage to the famous desk and the chair. Given to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in 2008 to auction for funds and now in a private collection but on loan for this exhibition. The commentary of Dickens's essay Night Walks, narrated to a film playing on a loop in a side gallery, provided an interesting backdrop to the viewing, the occasional words would float up and out into the air... houselessness...Newgate... are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lay dreaming... and it would seem completely relevant to whatever I was looking at.

From there we were headed for the William Morris Exhibition at 2 Temple Place (more of which soon) and walked via St Paul's to get there. I pass no judgement whatsoever on the Occupation or the reasons for its existence, but suffice to say we were slightly dubious about a large container of very yellow-brown liquid outside one tent. Fran suggested it was beer, the nurse in me thought more a by-product of consumption.

Anyway here's a picture of the dome with a leafless wintery accompaniment and always a splendid sight.

 

The Bees take flight...

I'm not sure I ever elaborated on the launch party I attended in London, and as I very kindly get invited to a great number of these, and probably manage about one a year, I really should tell you more because if there is one thing I like to do it is share the bounty and the good times with you all.

Carol Ann Duffy's most recent collection The Bees released into the world via a wonderfully warm and vibrant (oh alright then, buzzing) event at Goldsboro Books in Cecil Court, just off Charing Cross Road in London. If you know the area then you will know those little walk-throughs lined with bookshops on either side, and I don't know about you but I tend to window shop and browse the tables outside whilst feeling a bit nervous about going in, knowing that I am unlikely to be able to afford what I find.

All I can say is don't hesitate to go in and have a browse around Goldsboro Books.

Such a warm welcome, the most fantastic selection of beautiful books, and a bookseller who didn't flip and panic when it transpired that a bowl of olives had somehow upended itself and drizzled best oil over best books. The rest of us meanwhile were having kittens and using the nearest posh frock to mop it up.

Carol Ann Duffy was in fine form, talking to everyone and generously sharing bottle after bottle of her stipend, the Laureate's Choice sherry.

I was given a full bottle to bring home for Bookhound (now slightly less full) and an empty as a souvenir of a really enjoyable evening with plenty of great conversation. I clunked them home in one piece on a packed train and they now have pride of place in the Poet's Corner of my Bookroom.

From the label on the bottle this...

'From 1619 the Poet Laureate received as payment a Butt (720 bottles) of Sherry from the Crown. The custom ceased from 1790 until 1986 when the Sherry Shippers of Spain revived the custom for Ted Hughes, to mark the centuries old link between Sherry and the United Kingdom.
Carol Ann Duffy, 22nd Poet Laureate and first woman to hold the title, was invited to sign her Butt of Sherry in Jerez, where she wrote this poem...

At Jerez

Who wouldn't feel favoured,
at the end of  week's labour,
to receive as part wages
a pale wine
that puts the mouth in mind of the sea...

and not gladly be kissed
by gentle William Shakespeare's lips,
the dark, raisiny taste of his song;
bequeathed to his thousand daughters and sons,
the stolen wines of the Spanish sun...

or walk the cool bodegas' aisles -
where flor and oxygen
grow talented in fragrances and flavours -
to sniff, sip, spit, swallow, savour...

And finally I have heard  and seen Carol Ann Duffy doing a live poetry reading, because most appropriately she read At Jerez, and the Spanish Ambassador was there too, equally proud of his country's contribution to the evening because Carol Ann had actually had to do two tasting trips to Spain before she could make her final decision about her choice.

Meanwhile The Bees my runaway favourite poetry collection of the year. This is the poetic equivalent of a honey-laden hive stacked out with supers, and I feel sure I will never reach the limits of my understanding or my interest ... there will always be more to find here. If I was only allowed one book this might be it at the moment. I've had it months, been reading it frequently in that time and I'm barely a third of the way through.

Once a poet offers me the gift I grab it with both hands. It becomes mine to invest in as I please, and with each read of The Bees... perhaps only one poem repeated many times over several days, I accrue a little more interest and can withdraw some of the benefits, but so much left in reserve waiting for when I may need it. Each time I return I take away a little bit more as the poem yields its secrets...and it was only as I read the poem Hive aloud to myself this week that I became acutely aware of the carefulness (please can I have that word...it fits) of Carol Ann Duffy's choice of words. The 'v's that rushed me through the busy-ness of the work of the hive, then the long lazy 'nectar-slurred, pollen furred' and the 'milky, waxy caves' that slowed me down to a langorous, sleepy pace, me as drunken on the words as the bees were on their pollen.

And then there's Achilles and I have dwelt long on the mix of contemporary and mythical themes here whilst wondering what readers will make of this one in a hundred years time... and there are copies of this out there online so I'm hoping it's alright to snaffle it for here today.

Myth's river - where his mother dipped him,
fished him, a slippery golden boy -
flowed on, his name on its lips.
Without him, it was prophesied,
they would not take Troy.

Women hid him, concealed him in girls' sarongs;
days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs...
but when Odysseus came,
with an athlete's build, a sword and a shield,
he followed him to the battlefield,
the crowd's roar,
                      and it was sport, not war,
his charmed foot on the ball...

but then his heel, his heel, his heel...

 

Will readers in 2111 know that the 'slippery golden boy' is David Beckham and that

'Without him, it was prophesied, they would not take Troy'

an overt reference to the fact that the England football team, without their star player nursing his injured achilles tendon, probably wouldn't stand an earthly in last year's World Cup. The nation mourned what might have been before it had even begun and not happened (rightly as it turned out of course). What will Class of 2111 make of that little reference to the 'sarong' which he once wore, or the 'days of sweetmeats, spices, silver song...' which harks of his marriage to Victoria Beckham, Posh Spice of the Spice Girls.

Will those 2111 students scratch their heads and wonder what this is all about??

And whilst I can't really share the Sherry with you unless you come to visit, I have managed to secure something a little less likely to break in the post, and it marks a celebration of our own of sorts and one worth toasting.

Now I just sit here in my slippers and write this, it's you who all have to commute your way across the crowded interwebs to read it and leave comments, and some time today one of you will take the dovegreyreader stats counter past the 1.5 million page view mark since it all began. So please accept that every single one of you is a very special 'one in one and a half million', thank you for reading and visiting, and what better way to mark a golden day at the end of a golden week than with gifts of honey-laden poetic nectar, so please do scroll down...

 

 

 

 

A mooch around the British Museum.

Whilst in London, and with a few hours to spare before meeting up with Helen and heading off to her talk at the V&A, I wandered into the British Museum for a mooch.

Really there can be no better place to amble as I discovered on those cold, rather grey wintery London afternoons back in the 1970s when I lived very nearby. Often I would come off duty after an early shift, everyone else would be working a late shift or the nurse's home in Bedford Place would be tip-toe quiet because my room-mate was on night-shift and still asleep, and it was also a bit chilly.

So I'd go to the British Museum for a wander.

In those days it really was, dare I say it, deathly boring to my nineteen-year old eyes and a mind full of the excitement of London life and this new career I was embarking on, but it was nearby and my feet were usually killing me, and it was free, it was quiet and it was warm. Now of course a bustling, user-friendly and inviting place, still free and if it was good enough for George Eliot (who I am discovering often visited daily) then it's good enough for me.

Being a keen Olympian I nipped up to look at the exhibition of the 2012 medals, this being the nearest I am likely to get to seeing one. Some of the ore mined at Salt Lake City, some in Mongolia, tens of thousands of tons of it to make the 4,700 medals, and each one taking about ten hours to make at the Royal Mint in Wales.

And then I just had a bit of an aimless, map-less wander and isn't it just amazing what you see.

I looked at these for ages, foot guards from umpteen years BC,
and pondered all that careful attention to the toenails and the hinges and wondered when might your average Grecian wear them ...

And then a dazzling treasure trove, the largest quantity of coins ever found in Britain (I think) and I spent a while wondering what it must have been like to be the one to dig this lot up... and I wish I could remember where it had been discovered. It might be the Hoxne Treasure??

After a wander around the Grecian urns I just followed the noise because of course the Egyptian Galleries, devoid of the living bar me on those grey 1970's afternoons, now one of the museum's main attractions for school visits. Harrassed teachers were trying to control over-excited children who were supposed to be drawing things but were mostly playing hide and seek around the antiquities.

But there they were, all me old mates...


Still a source of endless fascination forty years on.

And as I left the Museum thinking it was really time I read Penelope Fitzgerald's The Golden Child again, of course a glance upwards to the spectacular roof which illuminates even the greyest of days.

London calling..the train journey.

The train journey up to London is a bit of a distant memory now until I check out the pictures which I can never resist taking along the way, and don't you just love a good train journey in the middle of half-term week...

Somehow I ended up in a backward-facing seat which is never my direction of choice, but hemmed in on all sides, mainly by Child R, Mother of Child R and their dog, a large lurcher/collie cross called Chippy, I decided to stay put.

I had some nervous moments over R's very precarious and inordinately large cup of juice I can tell you...

And for some reason, probably because I was in the Entertainments Carriage again, I decided to watch something. I was glad of R sitting next to me who at the age of 4 & 3/4 proved completely techno competent on the screen buttons, so I watched out of the corner of my eye as she worked through the screens and lined up Angelina Ballerina for herself and then chose my film.

Now don't ask me why I chose This is It, the final Michael Jackson film, when Julie and Julia was available and I've really been wanting to see that, but I did, and it proved in strange ways not incongruent with the Paul Robeson concert I was to see that evening.

For all his flaws, what a consummate performer Michael Jackson was, meticulous and tireless in rehearsals on stage for the projected fifty venue concert tour he was about to embark on... and there we were, cynics all saying he'd never manage it. Well sadly he didn't, but had he lived, and having now seen this film, I have no doubt this would have been the slick spectacular to beat all slick spectaculars.

I can't believe I'm recommending it so highly but I am and I do, if only for its retrospective on music that, whether we like or not, has been part of our lives since the Jackson Five first hit the charts with I Want You Back in 1969. But also with the trial of his doctor in progress somehow Michael Jackson's tragic and sad demise is in the spotlight once again...and I look at him, gifted in so many ways and wonder quite how awful life and sleeplessness must have been for him to resort to what he did. What utter desperation he must have endured.

I'm not sure if I might have been singing along with my headphones in, which may be why Child R moved across the aisle to sit on on Mother of R's lap (leaving me to stress about the precarious cup of juice) but anyway we approached the sea wall at Teignmouth, and because I was facing backwards I had a completely different view of the sea. Now usually the tide is in, it's dank and overcast and it looks a little murky and menacing, but as Michael started singing I Just Can't Stop Loving You the train emerged from the tunnel and this is what I saw...

My heart wasn't downcast, but if it had been this sight...the beach we would walk along with small children and the Tinker and my mum (who lived for many years in Teignmouth)  plus the music would have been sufficient gladdening in itself.

Chippy (remember Chippy...the lurcherollie dog??) on the other hand was very downcast.

Sprawled across the aisle of the train people had to step over him and lift great huge suitcases over him precariously for the entire journey, and to the FULL VOLUME tones of Owner of Chippy and Mother of R exorting CHIPPY with much exasperation to MOVE...SHIFT...SORRY...STUPID DOG...C-H-I-P-P-Y each time, which was about every thirty seconds.

No matter by this time Michael was onto Thriller and I was gone... almost dancing perhaps.

 

 

London calling ... The Souvenir Press 60th Birthday Concert

Well London was predictably marvellous but after three full-on days, a lot of excitement and many miles walked I was ready for the train home and Devon, but plenty to tell you about.

Tuesday evening was a lovely way to kick off my week with an invitation to the Souvenir Press 60th Birthday concert. Hard to imagine an independent publisher with a more eclectic and unusual list, and run by one man, Ernest Hecht, now in his eighties, and I was honoured to have been invited. I use a lot of Ernest's books in my day job and wrote most recently about Jane Darke's Held By The Sea here. So we gathered for champagne and canapes (I'm boringly tea-total, and even more boringly am shedding some weight having decided that giving birth is no longer a valid excuse when it was twenty-six years ago, so I stuck with water) in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert hall at the Royal College of Music prior to a very special event in the Benjamin Britten theatre also in the college, and I didn't know a soul apart from Ernest. It's not something that bothers me because I'll just park myself next to someone and start a conversation and they can run when I blink if they want to.

Anyway the victims couple I plumped for turned out to be the widow and daughter of the man who discovered the Mary Rose, and what an incredible conversation we then had. Alexander McKee, whose books have been published by Souvenir Press, was long-denigrated for his supposed wild-goose chase which of course eventually found Henry VIII's flagship, and it was wonderful to reminisce about the day we all sat rooted to our TV screens back in 1982 as the ship was finally raised. Alexander McKee's daughter and widow were there of course, watching it all for real but none of us could forget that terrible moment when it all lurched sideways and almost sank again, and as of one the nation gasped.

Next it was into the theatre, an exquisite and intimate venue where we were treated to a performance by Sir Willard White and his 'Robeson Re-Explored' concert...well... quite astonishing. I hope you may be able to sense Willard White's stage presence from this picture, now add in a beautiful bass baritone voice...

Accompanied by a brilliant pianist and guitarist, Sir Willard White sang us through Paul Robeson's repertoire interspersed with dialogue about his life of which I knew very little, but now know a great deal more. There is so much more to the man than Ole Man River which Sir Willard sang as his finale before a much deserved standing ovation, but on the way he took us through spirituals, folk songs (had a job not to stand up and join in with Skye Boat Song and Joshua, both in Vocal Harem's repertoire) some Gershwin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and perhaps my favourite of the evening, Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo. A song I didn't know I liked until I heard it sung by Sir Willard White.

But how grown-up and twenty again did I feel, as I made my way back across London at 11pm to my room in The Penn Club in Bloomsbury, right opposite the old nurse's home I had lived in back in the 1970s. A good night's sleep was in order because if it was Wednesday tomorrow, then that means it was Team Edward Thomas Day.

A really lovely evening and my grateful thanks to Ernest Hecht for the invitation and a truly memorable concert and conversations.

 

Flare Path ~ Terence Rattigan

Well, who knew that Sienna Miller was such an accomplished actor??

I certainly didn't having only really clocked her as a rather glamorous 'it' girl who always seemed to be in the news for everything other than turning in superb stage performances. I think I was probably expecting a bit of a ditzy blond role for her, not the serious leading lady in Terence Rattigan's 1942 play Flare Path, which Bookhound and I went to see while we were in London recently. That'll teach me to curb my pre-conceived judgements won't it.

It was all very lastminutedotcom, off to London and I whizzed a quick e mail over to the Westend Whingers...we were thinking of going to see Blithe Spirit but they'd panned it so what would they recommend..kill to see Flare Path came back the instant reply (thanks Andrew) it's getting well deserved 5* reviews and comes with an unreserved recommend. We dashed onto the website and took out a mortgage on the last two tickets in the Royal Circle at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket whilst reminding ourselves to go to the right Theatre Royal (not the Drury Lane one) on the night.

Don't you just love the old London theatres. The Little Theatre in the Hay originally built on the site of an old inn, The King's Head in 1720 for the sum of £1500, and Henry Fielding's audacious satires are performed there to great acclaim. Surely the inn named in the aftermath of the execution of King Charles 1st just across the way in Whitehall in 1649?

 The current Theatre Royal  designed by renowned Regency architect John Nash and built at a cost of £20,000 in 1820. The place just oozes charm, character and history; a tiny foyer, plush little dark, flock-papered staircases and low ceilings, and to think it opened with a performance of Sheridan's The Rivals. Gaslight arrives in 1843 along with an orchestra pit, a fifteen-year old Ellen Terry performs in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1863. A string of famous actors have graced this stage since; in recent years, Lauren Bacall, Alec Guiness and a bevvy of Redgraves, Christopher Reeve, Ben Kingsley, Peter O'Toole, Jack Lemmon, the list is endless and now Sienna Miller.

I love that moment when we settle into our seats and get our bearings too. We sit and look at the stage for a while and wonder what will be revealed, and I've suddenly changed my mind and do need a packet of jelly babies and a programme, and slowly the theatre fills up around us, and we're almost at the end of the row so we stand up and sit down many times over. We wait for the preternaturally very tallest person to sit right in front of me and when that happens (which it did)  Bookhound, who always has the smallest person in front of him, swaps seats with me. We arrange the jelly babies so the packet doesn't make a noise and that's us poised ready for curtain up.

Directed by Trevor Nunn the action in Flare Path centres on the Falcon Hotel situated near to an RAF airbase in Lincolnshire. Teddy, a young bomber pilot, is meeting up with his actress wife Patricia who has arrived for a brief stay from London. When hearthrob filmstar Peter Kyle arrives unexpectedly we are the first to see his romantic involvement with Patricia, whilst Teddy seems to be the last... but in fact does the naively boyish and hapless Teddy perhaps know more than he can bear to face up to? Surrounding characters include other pilots, including a wonderful Polish Count who has married a local girl who know finds herself a Countess, a typically stern hotel keeper and others various. When the flight crew are called out on a night bombing raid those left behind  must re-examine their lives and their loyalties and when some return the appalling emotional cost on their lives starts to play out.

The special effects were minimal but spectacular when they happened. As the characters watched through the window as the Wellington bombers took off, one by one the film-footage planes appeared in the distance above the stage, loomed closer and closer and louder and louder and we almost felt obliged to duck in the Royal Circle as they seemed to fly over head.

Sienna Miller meanwhile, accomplished and divine as Patricia, it's all in the deportment, and am I allowed to show my age and say you could hear every word she said, clear as a bell...well you could hear the others too, but Sienna really held the stage along with superb performances from Harry Hadden-Paton as Teddy and Sheridan Smith as Doris, Countess Skriczevinsky...Clive Wood as Squadron Leader Swanson (better known as Gloria) had us smiling as did Mark Dexter's wonderfully funny Polish Count. Whilst James Purefoy's louchly slick filmstar is about to learn some new truths and his transformation on stage incredibly moving.

Terence Rattigan had joined the RAF in 1940 having become a celebrated playwright but one suffering from writer's block. Whilst his psychiatrist suggested he needed a dose of discipline and advised he joined the war effort, Rattigan's decision to become a tail gunner, the most dangerous seat in the plane, seemed like a fairly drastic remedy. It paid off and soon restored his ability and his willingness to write and with no shortage of subjects surrounding him from which to choose. Flare Path was written during active service and sent by Rattigan to his parents with the request that they get it noticed which they duly did and it opened in 1942. An instant success playing for 670 performances to a public well- attuned to the sorrows and stresses of war, even Winston Churchill saw it and commented thus..

'I was very moved by this play.It is a masterpiece of understatement. But we are rather good at that aren't we?'

Well we saw it almost seventy years later and decided it was still brilliant.

 

 

Vintage thinking...

Lots of well-deserved plaudits around the blogosphere for the Vintage Classics Day held at Foyles in London last Saturday, so there must have been lots of bloggers in the room and I only managed to catch up properly with Kimbofo which could mean I really am way out of the blogosphere literary loop these days. And whilst I was doing that Bookhound was out and about doing cultural London and making friends with stray cats in Covent Garden... this one quite mistook him for 'that bloke out of Abba' and they did a little rendition of Money, Money.

I don't have the time or the inclination to get navel-gazey or uber-analytical about blogging, nor am I prone to blog-introspection or stats-anxiety. Feeling detached isn't about being haughty either (it has been suggested) it's about time (not enough) and distance (too far) and the day job (too busy) I suppose, but writing this is as normal as eating porridge (practice nurse please note) for breakfast in my life, ploughing my own furrow down here in Devon and more importantly than anything else, carrying on loving the reading.

It was good to meet up for tea and cake (practice nurse please ignore) with the Vintage team the day before and talk through some books that I am really looking forward to later this year especially Bird Brain by Guy Kennaway, man gets shot and is reincarnated as pheasant with added bonus of more brain than the average game fowl... what's not to love for this hunting, shooting, gamekeeper's household. We also talked around the ethos of reading for pleasure that still pervades chez dovegrey and always will. Sorry still no plans to waste time looking for what I don't like about a book when writing about what I do makes me want to sing, and for that be thankful there is no 'sound' on here. I sometimes close a book and realise that I just can't wait to write about it once my thinking week is up.

So apart from the pure pleasure of some literary talk in Foyles and the aroma of freshly printed books wafting around, who'd have thought that one of the outcomes of the day would have me pondering why I am suddenly doing all this at this time in my life. It was something that Rose Tremain said as she talked about Eugenie Grandet, by Balzac, her choice of novel for the Orange Inheritance series, and as luck would have it, the only Balzac I have read, and also her most recent novel Trespass, which as more luck would have it, I have also read.

Rose Tremain talked with sincerity about that moment that may or may not happen in your life, when you properly come of age, perhaps in your fifties or early sixties when you suddenly see the shape of your life sufficiently well to be able to frame it and reframe it. Time to make assessments, transform, make reparations, value what you have, change directions, perhaps do those things you always meant to have done, and most of me had a very hard job to stop the rest of me leaping to my feet and declaring to the affirmative that I knew and had experienced my own version of that very self-same moment.

I probably should have just knuckled down and written a novel five years ago when it happened and then spent the last five years trying to get it published before shoving it in the loft for the mice, but that takes a certain confidence in your own abilities which I didn't possess, and though we have the mice I started dovegreyreader scribbles instead, sensing that I had suddenly had more pieces of the lifetime of reading and experience jigsaw in place than ever before. Asked why she wrote, Rose Tremain replied that despite knowing that it may be an honourable but doomed profession to embark on, she would be insane if she couldn't write and perhaps writing is also a way of living life twice over.

A little later in the day Sebastian Faulks recounted his arrival at the 50th birthday and the sudden realisation that is was time to play a few shots, to worry less about the snark and just get on with it all. He also made a very sobering observation, that in twenty years it may not be possible for people to make a living solely out of writing, adding that no one has a God-given right to make a living from writing books.

I suddenly realised that I'd go barking (more so than usual) if I couldn't come here and write too, and though that may not make me a 'writer' in the true sense of published author, it feels like enough of one to be going on with...30,000 words a month has to be called something. Blogging gives those of us who have always wanted to write, but never entertained the idea of being paid for it, the platform to do that, and with the added bonus of that immediacy and instant two-way dialogue with all of you. The process still comes in for an awful lot of flack and criticism with added sniping, along with accusations of social inadequacy and a friendless lives etc but most of us are certainly moving in the real world too, so no pretensions or delusions of grandeur (I have children who make that an impossibility) and I'll keep the day job too, because I have a funny feeling the two are mutually compatible, if not essential in maintaining that balance and informing each other.

So my thanks again to Vintage for the day and Rose Tremain for that insight, and if you are coming to the du Maurier literary festival in Fowey, and perhaps stopping by at my event there...dovegreyreader in conversation on Friday May 20th at 2.15pm, perhaps we can talk some more about it all there.

 

 

Catching up...

Just back in the door after a fantabulous weekend in London, warm coat-less weather and many thanks to Random House and especially the Vintage Classics team for the invitation to the Vintage Classics day at Foyles on Saturday. I don't need much encouragement to go and sit in Foyles for a day and listen to the likes of Rose Tremain, Lionel Shriver and Sebastian Faulks talking about books (Lionel about Revolutionary Road ) and writing, so much more about the events soon, especially Rose Tremain who made some very insightful observations about life and getting (a little) older which really rang true for me.

Bookhound came along to carry my extensive amount of luggage, and did galleries and bookshops while I imbibed a welcome dose of literary-ness and inhaled the scent of books, and we were also able to drink in London on foot together too, staying as we were just ten minutes walk from Westminster Abbey and but a few minutes from Tate Britain. In London by happenstance for the one Friday a month that the gallery is open until 10pm.

Last time I went to Tate Britain everything I wanted to see was in storage so a relief this visit to find a room housing the gems of the collection ready and waiting for our perusal, just something about seeing the real thing isn't there.

And Bookhound decided that this family...

would welcome an addition...

and accepted the blessing of the Father's hand with good grace.

And we went to the theatre too, much more about Flare Path the 1941 Terence Rattigan play starring Sienna Miller to follow, but I'll tell you that the play completely lived up to the 5* reviews it is getting at the moment, we loved it and my thanks to the Westend Whingers for the very last-minute recommend.

OK brace everyone, it's almost Team Tolstoy time.

 

 

A rare public sighting ...

"The publishing business is by nature a public activity. Reading and writing are essentially solitary.. when the reader recommends a book her or she has enjoyed to someone else, the act is the most powerful single factor in the book business: the word-of-mouth."

I was browsing John McGahern's book of essays Love of the World this weekend and that seemed like a good quote to use to tell you about a forthcoming dovegreyreader 'appearance' on the London bookish scene in September as a guest of English PEN and which might be of interest to readers and fellow litbloggers alike...

Everyone's a Critic?

Thursday 23 September, 6.30pm

Venue: Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3GA

In association with FLOW - the Free Word Festival

The book pages of UK newspapers are under threat. Literary editors are facing huge changes in the way that they review books, yet at the same time our choice of reading matter is bigger than ever before. Whose recommendations can readers trust? Is the blogosphere a shot in the arm for reviewing culture or does democracy mean dumbing down? Join Sam Leith, former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph, Lynne Hatwell, aka top books blogger (I didn't say that, they did)  dovegreyreader and Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times as they ask if there is there still a role for the professional literary critic. Chaired by Alex Clark.

Tickets: £6; £3 concessions and PEN members.
How to Book: Call the Free Word Centre on 0207 3242 570 or visit www.freewordonline.com

I'm very much looking forward to the event and it would be lovely to say hello to any of you who might be able to be there, but even better tell me what you think about the subject in comments, because though I know what I think, in this democracy that is book blogging I'd love to be able to share what you think too.

A London Day.

Wishing a very restful Bank Holiday to everyone here in the UK, hope you've all had a lovely weekend so far.
We'd awarded ourselves a holiday for that entire week a while back, so as if traversing the country to Aylesbury wasn't enough we also had the whistle-stop day in London, for which we sensibly let the train take the strain. We'd scooped First Class tickets weeks ago at the cost of our normal cattle class travel.
I think Great Western's latest refit has allocated even less square inch-age per passenger in Second Class, whilst we fair sprawled around up the posh end, and who doesn't love traveling First Class when a cost-effective opportunity arises. So we made the most of the free refreshments and arrived in London feeling remarkably chipper for our 6am start.
With time to spare I wandered off around the V&A after the quilt exhibition, far away from the crowds to mull it all over quietly and found the fashion and textile galleries with a few nice moments along the way. Something different always catches my attention in the V&A, it really is a very special place and I've added a link over here >>>> under the heading Discoveries... because so much of the collection is now viewable online. You can even design patchwork from your own photographs here
Here's one I tried earlier.

Incidentally, don't miss Ben Wright's The Literary Index, on that sidebar too,  it is a fantastic resource with links to excellent online essays on a wide range of authors.
But as I strolled around the V&A, a beautiful statue of a mother nursing her baby by Aime Dalou (1838-1902) which I hadn't noticed before...

An Elizabethan shoe...

How can a shoe transport me on such fanciful flights of the imagination, but it did, I couldn't stop looking at it and wondering.
Then a ceiling... because I always have to remind myself to look upwards here

...and downwards

A piece of fabric instantly recognisable to me as designed by ....

You'll guess it too I'm sure.
A tapestry I'd have likely started with great enthusiasm in whatever century and then sent  off to the Tinker for finishing. He might even have stood a chance in the Village Show with this one.

Bookhound meanwhile had tripped off to do fishy things at The British Library and so we met up later in the day at Russell Square and forced ourselves into Patisserie Valerie, because my blood sugar was in need of active support and the strawberry tarts in the window could not be left there untested. Bookhound then had more fishy things to do in the Faber archive whilst I had a very fine time talking books and all things reading elsewhere in Faber HQ.
Finally just enough time for a London supper and a blue plaque wander around Bloomsbury on a warm May evening.

before settling in on our late and very Marie Celestesque train...



I had asked Faber if they could supply a good book, one that would keep me awake on the journey (I hate falling asleep on trains) and they had kindly sent me on my way with a copy of this

which was indeed perfect, far too engrossed to drop off, and my thoughts on Whatever You Love, Louise Doughty's new novel later this week.

Quilts 1700 - 2010 Hidden Histories, Untold Stories ~ Ed. Sue Prichard

Firstly, this quilt wasn't in the exhibition, copyright issues prevent me using any of those I'm sure, but I can't write about quilts without showing something so I'll have to use my one and only antique exhibit to create the ambience. This is our rescue quilt found grubbing around at the bottom of a box of greasy old tools on a Tavistock market stall years ago and bought for £10.

It had been torture ticking off the days until our trip to London and my visit to the V&A because everyone else has been coming back with glowing reports of what must surely be the most lauded exhibition in recent years and certainly the best quilt event that I think I've ever been to.
Quilt exhibitions are heavenly places if you love quilting, and sometimes even if you don't it's hard not to admire the work and infinite patience and technical expertise involved in the making of a massive Baltimore Album quilt or similar.
At this point I have to take gentle issue with Norma Clarke's otherwise thorough review of the exhibition in the Times Literary Supplement (my new subscription comic for this year) and her assertion, whilst giving credence to the labour-intensity involved, that

'In truth there is not much to be said about the technical side of quilt-making and patchwork...'

Sharp intake of breath, I wonder if Norma's made a Baltimore Album quilt?
So I pitched up for my 12.30pm entry slot and had to make the instant decision about whether to hire the audio guide or just wing it and hope for inspiration.
Actually it was a no brainer because I've never hired an audio guide around an exhibition in my entire life, each to his own but I can't think of anything worse for someone like me to have someone else telling me what I'm seeing when I want to figure that out for myself.
Heaven knows what I've missed down the years for being so stubborn.
But not everyone feels like that and so the flock of audio-guide wearers held silent sway, many women of a certain age (mine) trying to figure out how to work the iTouch. This is an incredibly popular exhibition and I had been warned about the impenetrable hordes of people clustered silently around each exhibit, rooted to the spot.
I had to indulge in a bit of un-quilter-like shoving to get a glimpse, but I was born with elbows I managed.
I actually wanted to discover what this exhibition might say to me, how might it inspire me, and despite the crowds I wasn't disappointed because this is an intelligent quilt exhibition with depth and meaning, and curated to ensure that if you want to find that meaning it's there for the taking.

For me the themes of 'confinement' surfaced above all else.
Confinement in the context of childbirth firstly and the quilts made for new babies. Some exquisite pieces that you'd perhaps show to a baby and then put away safely for eternity, far too precious to be sicked on.
But confinement also in the context of  women's lives in history.
Those quilts made by women confined by wealth to a life of boredom and much whiling away of the hours required. Money no object so access to the finest fabrics, the silks and the chintz, no problem.
All contrasting powerfully with the women confined by poverty and quilting for pragmatic reasons, both to earn a living but also to keep a family warm and scraping together whatever materials came to hand.
I had no idea that the reason for the mining town base for the British quilting tradition was down to the lack of any other work for women trapped in those pit towns, thus giving us the Durham and Welsh quilts so familiar to anyone who has followed the history of the craft here in the UK.
Confinement also exemplified by the Fine Cell project, cleverly filmed and exhibiting the work of the inmates of Wandsworth Prison, the men who have found a creativity they may never have discovered but for their crime, what a strange juxtaposition of life events, a sort of cause and effect and the untold benefits self-evident.
There was so much breath-taking beauty here it could all have been too much to take in, and that is often the case at national quilt festivals, the eye quickly feels sated with cleverness, and a sense of inadequacy in the face of so much expertise quickly filters through. But, as if to rest the gaze, interspersed here were paintings featuring quilts alongside modern exhibits that spoke about so much more than their face value.
The antique quilts often cleverly displayed to show the reverse with the papers still in place.

This is the reverse of ours...

...and we have spent hours not only marveling at the front and the intricacy of the cutting and piecing but poring over the papers still in place.
On this visit (because I think I plan a return) three exhibits that really captured my imagination.
Firstly the Changi coverlet.
No crowds around this one, it was a bit tatty, dirty and very simple, no nine stitches to the inch quilting technique to admire, or colours to step back and praise. It was made by a group of young girls aged 8-16 incarcerated as prisoners-of-war in Changi , Singapore in 1941 and who had set themselves up as covert Girl Guide unit. The quilt was a simple Grandmother's Flower Garden arrangement of hexagons cut from bits of their dresses and any other fabrics they could find.
I had this corner to myself for ages and just gazed.
In the end I read the story it was telling me without the aid of the audio guide or any labels, what an anchor of reassurance the making of this patchwork must have been and I could have wept when I looked at the rough stitches and the grubby marks and the embroidered names and just wondered... Nellie Symons, Olga Morris, Bessy Sanger, Evelyn Harris, what happened to them, did they live through that hell,
It somehow exemplified the potent, concealed and often timeless message of any quilt and also that what is happening in the life of the maker is simultaneously being stitched into the quilt and sometimes those stories shine out from the most unassuming objects. This one will never lose its power.
Then there was a simple quilt made from strips of pyjama fabric from a local factory by Annie O'Hara of County Tyrone in the 1940s.
It was so basic that again people passed it by, but somehow it resonated with me...how many times have I created something similar with odds and ends. I know I have an immoral fabric stash to compete with the rest of them now but twas not ever thus, and not what quilting has been about for me... buying a whole lot of expensive fabrics and backing the quilt with yards of even more expensive stuff and using the finest wadding that all costs an arm and a leg, it's often been about utility and I've been as proud of those as any of the others I have made.
Finally the Rajah Quilt made between 5th April and 19th July 1841 by the 180 women convicts on board HMS Rajah during their transportation to Van Dieman's Land, and with provisions supplied by Elizabeth Fry's prison reformers. So how do you make a quilt over 3ms square on a wave-beaten convict ship...

So I reached the end of the exhibition and wished I could retrace my steps because I'd missed a few, and I tried but you can't; the hordes are bearing down on you relentlessly, there's only one way out and it delivers you fairly and squarely into a very dangerous place for the unwary. The V&A have created a quilt shop, with books, fabric and all manner of things quilty and as if surviving that labyrinth of excess wasn't sufficient unto the day, you then have to walk through the perils of the V&A bookshop.

Alright, so I didn't really need the catalogue, as in life would have gone on the same without it, but I did emerge with one which I've since read and can highly recommend. It's scholarly, investing meaning and shedding fascinating light on a craft often misguidedly deemed simplistic and I also now know all the things I doubtless missed on the audio

... oh alright then, just a few little bits of fabric too and it could have been a whole lot worse but I have a few special gifts to make for people this year..
...and the pencil?
Well it was a nice one, just right for scribbling on books as I read
...and the book of quilt block designs?
Surely I have hundreds of those on the shelves already?
Well, yes, but...

Postcript :: My thanks to Mary C who read this and has sent me a link to this incredibly moving interview with Olga who was just ten years old when she helped to make the Changi quilt

Whistlestop London

My trip to London this week really was very whistle stop but I have to say a big thank you to anyone living in  London right now.
You are doing a stalwart job of coping with all the pre-Olympic disruption so that people like me, who have loved the Olympics for ever (me since Rome 1960) can revel in 2012. London is being rebuilt and refurbished whilst life carries on around it, and only 856 more days of it to go I see from the countdown clock on the Telecom Tower. We've registered for tickets this week and I'll sell everything to be there, I'll watch anything and I'll sleep on the underground if I have to.

You might wonder how I got that shot...not the hotel, that was tucked behind Euston station and I listened fondly to the platform announcements from my room, nor the 'day job' staff meeting venue, that was Holloway Road, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
It was my complete good fortune to discover that David Vann was in the UK and doing a reading from his novel Legend of a Suicide at the To Hell with Books  on Tuesday evening, which as luck would have it was within pigeon spitting distance of my hotel and only required a minor dash through Bloomsbury to get there.
I had a quick literary moment as I took in Gordon Square, one time home of Virginia Woolf and imagined her walking across here too.

I wasn't the only one who had to be there to hear David Vann either, the place was jam-packed and steaming-hot and we can only be thankful that I had decided to leave off my long sleeved thermal vest thinking London is always much warmer than us here in the middle of nowhere.

As it is I only lost one stone when with the vest I might have lost two but would have needed an ambulance.
I managed to sneak a shot of David Vann around the heads and also get my copy of the book signed, and by the time you read this we know that David sadly didn't win the Sunday Times Short Story Award last night for which his story had been short listed, and which he read us and which we laughed at and loved.

It was also a real pleasure to meet these hands that blog too.

Yes that's fellow NTTVBG bloggers Simon of Savidge Reads and Kimbofo of Reading Matters.
And it was also a real pleasure to meet and chat to Evie Wyld author of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice which I've promised to read, it's had stunning reviews.
Another work day and then as luck would have it an early evening invite to a gathering of bloggers at Headline Books, on the 16th floor of that building and thus that stupendous view across London.
Good to meet Simon and Kim again...that's life, you've never set eyes on someone before and then you see them two days running, and I came away from Headline clutching amongst other things a copy of Andrea Levy's The Long Song for which I am also very grateful.
By the time I sink into my train seat there's a real risk I'll be unconscious before Berkshire and unlikely to wake up at Exeter, so I have to do things to keep awake, because I have this nightmare vision of Bookhound on the platform at Exeter shouting 'Hold the train, she's asleep in there' and him having to come on and drag me off.
My 'real book' concession along with the e reader was Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell and fortunately I had no wish to fall asleep as I read.

I just had to keep stopping and thinking about what makes this book so amazing, thus far it's the way William Maxwell ends his chapters with an observation or a single moment or gesture, carefully refracted and at a slightly oblique angle allowing the reader to invest the significance, I could have carried on reading all the way to Penzance...imagine that
'Hold the train, she's reading in there...'

The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy (and prize draw copies)

So my first 'meeting' with Stella Duffy was the Virago birthday celebration at the du Maurier LitFest last May and I decided that any author who could laugh like that probably wrote good books too and I'd have to read them.
Now I wish I hadn't taken quite so long getting around to it because The Room of Lost Things Stella's latest novel has been such a precious reading experience I now can't wait to read the lot.
This is London in all its twenty-first century glory and I will be interested to hear how non-Londoners react to this book.
You may recall I read the much-vaunted Netherland by Joseph O'Neill and fell flat on my face at all the New Yorkery. I've never been to New York and Netherland for all it's undoubted skill and deftness left me feeling sadly excluded from a city that it must be possible to know something of from the pages of a book. None of which may have been Joseph O'Neill's intention of course so we won't hold that against him.
I am familiar enough with the London of old, far less so with the London of today but I think Stella Duffy has miraculously scraped off the veneer, all the old layers and layers of polish and varnish burrowing beneath the surface to give me the essence of the city through Loughborough Junction. I think the place resounds and echoes with familiarity whether you know London or not.
Robert Sutton has decided the time has come to retire, to hand over the perchlorethylene along with the keys and the premises and move on from the South London dry cleaning business he has run for years inheriting from his mother Alice before him.
Doesnt that sound boring?
Do not be deceived because what plays out is a little microcosm of London lives, ordinary people, many of them from an older generation coping with the influx of the new and holding onto that fading sense of community, lives spread right across the spectrum.
Akeel Khan, the young Muslim who Robert plans to sell the business to, Patricia ageing and coping with her increasing forgetfulness, Dean the wide - boy now feeling the pressures of life flitting 'twixt the Brixton and the Peckham firms, Stefan the dance instructor coping with the homophobic locals, Helen the young Australian Nanny. Then there's the poet come prophet who rides all day on the number 345 bus, Charlie and Dan who live on the old sofa under the arches and wait for it...Marilyn, the HEALTH VISITOR!!!
Not only are health visitors an increasingly endangered species out there in the workplace but they seem to be invisible in fiction too. I only know of two other books with a fully formed health visitor character and not just a bit part, on reflection that literary dearth quite strange because health visitors are actually very interesting people :-)
Robert's shop acting for many as one of the little hubs of day to day life and Robert of course knows and understands far more about his customers than they realise because clothes have pockets and you'd be amazed at what gets left in pockets.
The Room of Lost Things is one of those books to savour not scoff down in a matter of hours and I spent an age reading it knowing full well I didn't want it to end, because the residents of Loughborough Junction had quickly inveigled me into their lives and that old familiar London feeling ruled.
There is a pervading sense of unspoken grief and loss woven into Robert's life, that room of lost things is as much locked inside Robert's mind as it is in reality, the room above the shop where he stores all the pocket finds.
That sense of melancholy barely a fingertip's reach away to me as I read.
The revelation as befits a man who superficially at least appears sanguine and pragmatic was gradual, often unspoken and in the end deeply tragic and on reflection heartbreakingly so, if only for the fact that this was a millstone that Robert had carried around his neck for many years. Stella Duffy handles all this with a precision that quite defies the laws of narrative, that sleight of pen again, you can't quite figure how it's done.
So much more I could say about this wonderful read but you'd be here until tomorrow, though I will add reading it alongside London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins has made for a  brilliant duo, but have no fear, Virago have three copies of The Room of Lost Things ready and waiting to send to three lucky winners here.
Names in comments as usual and Rocky has agreed to be Dick Whittington's cat for the prize draw.
And as if all that wasn't enough, Stella Duffy has very kindly agreed to submit to the penetrating glare of the standard lamp and do 'dovegreyreader asks...' very soon so that's us sorted.

Prize draw entry now closed