dovegreyreader scribbles

The Greedy Queen - Eating with Victoria ~ Annie Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boil to 280

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

The Summer Book ~ Tove Jansson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

The Gown ~ Jennifer Robson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

The World of Wolf Hall

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

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

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

'Please do take one,' said the assistant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd better confess to this though...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is anyone else planning a reread...

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

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

Or maybe you struggled with them...

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

A Single Thread ~ Tracy Chevalier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tove Jansson

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

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

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

I was in need of An Autumn Reading Project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were the Moomins part of your childhood too...

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

And what about handwritten letters...

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

Can e mails possibly hold the same magic...

 

And the winners are...

The names are out of the cat-hat and a copy of Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie will be on its way to...

Check your inboxes you lucky people.

Magnus xx

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

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

February 15th 2015...

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

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

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

Is it the place where you were born...

Is it the house you grew up in...

Is it the house you make your own...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And how is Philby going to react...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

A Day Out From Tinker's Cott... Morwenstow

I've been a bit lax with reports of excursions on here of late for which my apologies. I tend to put a few pictures over on Instagram <<<< and move on without really paying more attention to the finer detail, so expect a few day trips to feature again here.

Apart from meeting some wonderful people, one of the things we have loved most about sharing our little corner of the Tamar Valley with visitors to Tinker's Cott this year has been sharing some of our favourite places too. Over the years we have accumulated a great repository of guide books and information which we have put on the shelves for our guests, because our location on the boundary between Devon and Cornwall makes exploring both counties on day trips entirely feasible. We can offer suggestions and ideas if people want them, and also good stopping places along the way...witness this trip.

Bookhound and I have been making the most of the fine autumn weather and quieter roads to get out and about, and on Friday we headed up to North Cornwall with Alex Woodcock's book King of Dust in hand, to explore a church or two. There are umpteen routes north, either faster roads or country lanes, but perhaps the 'best' (from my point of view) is the road past Cowslip Workshops. As we turn left for Egloskerry at the top of St Stephen's Hill in Launceston it's time to sow the seed...

'We could stop at Cowslip for coffee/lunch if you fancy it...' I suggest.

This allows just enough time for Bookhound to realise it is an excellent idea before we see the Cowslip Workshop sign at the top of the farm lane and down we go. 

Suitably fortified, and with a browse in the shop and catch up with Emma who works there (and whose baby that I used to put on my scales as a newborn is now doing his A Levels) we headed off the beaten track, along leaf-strewn country lanes and through tiny Cornish villages towards Bude, and then further north along the Atlantic coast to the tiny church of Morwenstow. I'm sure I've taken you there before, but that was in a previous life when the Romanesque was dead to me whilst now of course, thanks to Alex Woodcock, I am an expert.

There can be no more beautiful setting for a church than that of  St Morwenna.

Set in a wooded hollow with a deep valley leading seductively to the Atlantic ocean beyond, the South West coast path winding up the side of the cliff, and on a day when there is ne'er a cloud in the sky, it is quite breathtaking.

It is said that back in the day of sailing vessels, if a ship was caught inside Hartland Point with an off-shore wind it was doomed to founder here (thank you to Philip Martyn's excellent little history of the church for that nugget) and the churchyard at St Morwenna's is a sad testament to that. The eccentric but much-loved Reverend Hawker, incumbent from 1834 - 1874, took it upon himself to recover the bodies and provide a Christian burial to any sailors who drowned along the coast and there are indeed many graves to 'unknown sailors'. I can just imagine the atmosphere here in the teeth of gale, but can't begin to imagine the terror of being out at sea in one.

We wandered around the outside before going in through the Romanesque porch...

...stopping to admire the Romanesque font before looking at the Romanesque carvings on the Romanesque columns and I have to admit I was seriously impressed.

The font, dating back to 950 AD, and all I could wonder was 'how many babies'. Water for christenings is still drawn from the nearby St John's Well, as it always has been...

Then the columns, quarried from the local cliffs and dating to about 1130, glistening a sort of Neptune-y-sea-blue-green in the Cornish sunlight..

And then the twenty-six beakheads for which St Morwenna's is celebrated.

Bird and animal heads carved from the stone and looking for all the world as new and as crisp now as they day they were worked in the twelfth century. 'A dizzying array' as Alex Woodcock suggests...

Alex Woodcock also debates notions of the primitive, observing that the simple lines of these carvings could suggest  a lack of sophistication and with it the assumption that rugged backwaters may know no better, nor command superior workmen. It is Alex Woodcock's own experience as a stonemason that swiftly puts such a notion to bed; mistakes are much easier to hide in the highly decorative and the ornamental than in the straight lines, flat surfaces and precise symmetrical curves of these carvings. Suggestions of a hippopotamus hiding somewhere led me here...though even I'm not quite sure how they knew of them in twelfth century Cornwall. Someone will tell me.

Patterns everywhere and almost a thousand years of history to embrace, and all encased in a single building; this visit was certainly a welcome escape from the news, an antidote to modern times and a reminder that we are but a speck...

It is good to see that churches like this are still living buildings...there were the service sheets for a thoroughly modern wedding wedding held last Saturday. The bride walked down the aisle to Eianaudi, the congregation sang One More Step, the couple walked out to Say a Little Prayer For Me, the church breathes on in new and creative ways. I'm guessing that quite soon the harvest celebrations will follow and so the round continues. There's nothing to beat a good belfry either (this looking upwards) and with a peal of six bells, just imagine that wedding day at St Morwenna's and all those that had gone before.

The guide book (thank you E.W.F. Tomlin) suggests that church towers often doubled as look-out posts during the middle ages and were especially important 'in sea-girt' parishes, though they could also be seen as a risk by the powers that be for the assistance they could provide to hostile shipping, or to summon rebels (a sort of medieval Facebook I suppose). Following the Cornish Rebellion of 1549 (Prayer Book issues) when 4000 Cornishmen were killed as they marched towards Exeter, a very close eye was kept on the Morwenstow bells. It seems the bells stayed but minus their clappers (a bit like confiscating your phone charging cable). All six bells are inscribed but perhaps Reverend Hawker's Treble speaks the truest...

'Come to thy God in time
Come to thy God at last'

Plenty of stained glass to please the eye too, and on a sunny day can the sight or the colours be bettered...

Opposite the church is the famous Rectory Farm Tearooms, and we had fully intended afternoon tea as a sort of late anniversary early birthday treat (I'll be the bingo caller's 'Clickety-Click' later this week), except neither of us felt we could do it justice having already 'done' Cowslip. No matter, this will still be a wonderful day out on a cold winter's day, because seeing these places in all seasons is always fascinating and tea will always be waiting.

Meanwhile, if you've had a good day excursion lately we'd love to know about it...

 

 

 

 

Surfacing with Kathleen Jamie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ach.

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

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

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

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

Honestly the stories we invent. 

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

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

My eyes actually welled up at this.

Never so true.

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

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

How on earth did my mum survive that.

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

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

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

Books that will make you see and think differently.

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

Scroll down for gifts...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prize draw copies of Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

Hello Chums...

Well I hope you've had a good summer. I've had a magnificent hunting season but will soon have to drop hints about my basket going back on the kitchen windowsill for the winter...

You'd think they'd know wouldn't you, but no, I have to do a lot of  staring at that stupid plant and that gormless hare thing before they get the message...

I will prevail...

Anyway, listen up...

Thanks to Sort Of Books, there are FIVE hardback copies of Surfacing, by Kathleen Jamie, ready and waiting to go to new homes (UK ADDRESSES ONLY)  so add a comment to this thread and I'll do the draw dreckly as usual.

 

Armchair travel plans

Having taken you on an exciting journey to Mytholmroyd it is time to set my sights on some more travelling  and I have a few excursions lined up from the comfort of my armchair...

In no particular order, because it will depend on the prevailing reading winds, I plan to sail along the western coast of Ireland and Scotland in search of islands with Philip Marsden and his latest book The Summer Isles - A Voyage of the Imagination. 

"In an old wooden sloop, Philip Marsden plots a course north from his home in Cornwall. He is sailing for the Summer Isles, a small archipelago near the top of Scotland that holds for him a deep and personal significance. On the way, he must navigate the west coast of Ireland and the Inner Hebrides. Through the people he meets and the tales he uncovers, Marsden builds up a haunting picture of these shores - of imaginary islands and the Celtic otherworld, of the ageless draw of the west, of the life of the sea and perennial loss - and the redemptive power of the imagination. The Summer Isles is an unforgettable account of the search for actual places, invented places, and those places in between that shape the lives of individuals and entire nations."

I enjoyed Philip Marsden's last book, Rising Ground so I'm looking forward to this one.

 

and Barry Lopez's new book Horizon is waiting for me too.

"Taking us nearly from pole to pole – from modern megacities to some of the earth’s most remote regions – and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that describes his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.

Lopez also probes the long history of humanity's quests and explorations, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today's ecotourists in the tropics. 

Throughout his journeys – to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe – and via friendships with scientists, archaeologists, artists and local residents, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world."

This is big serious book and one that is going to require some serious attention, but I will know when the time is right to embark.

 

A slightly easier journey might be This Golden Fleece - A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History by Esther Rutter.

It's autumn (I admit it) and time to cast on and knit my way through some evening TV watching. In my usual get-on-with-it fashion I knitted a cardigan last winter from a lovely pattern (Macauley from Blacker Yarns). It's my own fault. I didn't do a tension swatch, just proceeded on the basis that it looked about the right size, which it turns out would be a lovely fit for Twiggy, but sadly not for me. I should have stopped but I didn't because I was hooked on Killing Eve and just ploughed on. It wasn't an expensive mistake, but nevertheless it pours a big dollop of guilt all over me every time I come across the bag of pieces, so I should probably undo it at least.

Meanwhile Esther Rutter is to be applauded for her staying power because by the end of the first chapter she has knitted a very complicated pair of gloves (often during a train journey) in her pursuit of the story of wool's long history around the British Isles. There are highland walking socks, haps (shawls), and a fisherman's gansey to come, so apart from the fact I'm likely to feel a bit inadequate by the final page, I will at least be very well informed and I can't wait to cast on and cast off...if you see what I mean.

Tavistock's history is steeped in the wool trade too so I'm hoping to do some local discovering alongside. I had already wondered why our village parish burial records from the late 1600s made reference to ' Burial In Woollen Affidavit' and thanks to Esther Rutter I now have the answer...

'Responding to a depression in the wool trade...Charles II passed an act in 1666 making it illegal to bury 'any corpse in any shirt, shift, sheet or shroud...in anything than what is made of sheep's wool only.'

This statute was only repealed in 1814 and the swearing of affidavits by two people in front of a Justice of the Peace within eight days of the burial was a legal requirement. 

Whether anyone double checked is another matter.

Meanwhile I'm wondering if anyone else has any armchair travelling planned...

Any exciting journeys that don't involve setting foot outside your door...

And any casting off disasters to report or am I the only one who doesn't swatch...

 

 

 

Under the Rock -The Poetry of Place ~ Benjamin Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Empty Nest...

It’s been the oddest few weeks and it has taken me a while to realise why...

I’ve got Empty Nest Syndrome.

I’ve felt every shade of melancholy at the dispersal of the owlets and we are missing our owl spotting walks along the lane at owl-light. We're missing the evenings spent sitting out watching them fly, or the parents flying in to feed, listening to their wheezy calls and generally marvelling at the privilege this has been. Half a year of daily dawn and dusk vigilance, blankets and cocoa out in the garden has come to an end. Of course we knew it had to, and how lucky have we been to see three new barn owls at least survive to leave home for new territory, but nevertheless we realised that every day, every time we looked at the box by day (which I now do out of habit from every window) we knew they were sound asleep and safe in there and that somehow felt good.

Now it is empty and we have no idea what happens next.

We hear the shrill call of the adults most evenings, occasionally see a silent pale ghost fly across the garden, so we know they are around, but as far as we know they are not roosting in the box and don’t know whether they will stay here or go. Though barn owls generally pair for life and stay in their known and familiar hunting grounds and gravitate towards their safe nesting place, this is dependant on them both surviving so all we can do it watch and hope.

And I must pull myself together and Get Over It.

Thank goodness that Village Show week is always lovely. The sun shines (it did) and we keep a watch on the flower beds wondering exactly what will survive/ flower in time for picking on the Saturday morning. The day before I help set up the village hall and that evening a group of us sit down and sort all the entries. It involves putting  names in small envelopes to be placed under each and every entry so that, should prizes be won, names can be filled in, points awarded and totted up to find the trophy winners. This year over 300 entries so it was a longish evening and then up early next morning to sort our own entries.

There is always an autumnal feel to the garden on that morning. The grass will be damp, the colours are turning and we will have to look hard for things to fill vases, thank heavens for the dahlia bed now coming into its own.

Thomas Edison had been keeping us guessing all week. Would it, or would it not give us three beautiful blooms...

It did...

And so did everything else...

We take it in turns to enter the flower classes rather than compete against each other with flowers from the same plant and this year it was Bookhound’s turn. He also entered the art class and did well there too (its my picture that's wonky not his)...

I had a dabble in the flower arranging classes which is always high risk. If I knew what I was doing I’d be dangerous, as it is my entry, the sole occupant of the Wildflower Arrangement Class, was judged ‘unbalanced’ and awarded a second prize, which is probably better than not being awarded anything. Bookhound meanwhile was busy scooping firsts, seconds and thirds and as joint winner won two halves of two cups; Most Points in the Flower Classes and Gentleman With Most Points in Show. He graciously sent the trophies home with the other winners based on the fact he wouldn’t be the one polishing them on the Friday night again in 2020.

We arrive home exhausted but happy after a long day ( I was on kitchen sink duty ..who knew a village could drink so much tea) with vases full of flowers arrangements we might never usually concoct and the house positively glows for a few days afterwards. We hang the rosettes in the Rosettery ...

...and marvel at how wonderful it is to catch up with every one. We sat with a pot of tea and exchanged all the news we'd heard (hatches, matches, dispatches, feuds, disputes, victories, sadnesses and joys, squirrels in lofts...the usual things) knowing we’ll all meet up again at the village play in November and carols in December. In fact it will be much sooner with the Blessing of the New Bell Ropes at St Mary's in a few week’s time.

And so the cycle goes on and I feel so much better...except I think the swallows are gathering to say goodbye any day. Two new broods from our veranda nests and an awful lot of guano.

They will fill the telegraph wires en masse and all circle the house until suddenly there is silence and they are on their way. And though I have managed to extend summer's lease from August 1st until now, even I have to admit game's almost up, soon be time to get the logs in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Fleishman is in Trouble ~ Taffy Brodesser- Akner 

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

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

Brideshead Revisited ~ Evelyn Waugh

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

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

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

 

The Photographer ~ Meike Ziervogel

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

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

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

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

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

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

King of Dust - Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture ~ Alex Woodcock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round arches...

Solid masonry walls...

Small windows...

Bulky Columns..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

suggests Alex Woodcock...

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Touching base...

I thought I'd just check in and see how your holidays are going?

I hope you are all getting some rest and relaxation and enjoying the sunshiney Vitamin D while we have it.

We've been very busy here welcoming visitors to Tinker's Cott and getting into the routine that is Change Over Day. We love doing it and especially sharing what one family called 'our paradise.' It does seem silly to keep it to ourselves and reading the Visitor's Book after people have left is a real joy

August Bank Holiday weekend looks set fair and hot here in the South West and we are making the most of the light evenings, which I refuse to acknowledge are getting shorter. The barn owls are still here, looking very grown-up but behaving like noisy teenagers.

We think can tell them apart now, different shaped faces and flight paths. Apollo always first up and out (very pointed heart-shaped face) and turns right, Biggles (rounder, paler face standing above) and Buzz (peeking out) both turn left and mess about in the field behind the shed for a while before perching back on the box as it gets dark and singing in harmony. 

This was Friday evening. They all look to be in prime condition so we are assuming they are either finding food for themselves or still being fed. I've read up on dispersal and it's likely to be soon, though I just can't imagine them not being there.

I have invested in the most superb book, Owls by Mike Toms and published as part of the Collins New Naturalist Library series. Founded in 1943 and now comprising well over a hundred volumes, I was lent a pristine and beautiful copy of Owls (thank you Malcolm) and donned the gloves to open it before quickly realising that we would need our own copy and eBay obliged. It is a definitive, referenced, research-based book which answers every question, as well as making us realise (as if we needed reminding) what a privilege it it to be watching and observing all this at such close quarters. We have kept a daily journal and who knows what that might turn into...

The garden is tipping over into autumn which means the dahlia bed is now saving the day and coming into its own. I invested in another batch of new tubers this year, Thomas Edison, Genova, Vancouver, Little Robert and Pink Magic and they are all thriving. It is the Village Show in two weeks and fingers crossed that we will have some perfect blooms to exhibit.

This is Pink Magic and it's an absolute beauty. Palest blushy pink, really subtle and pretty.

Meanwhile the apple trees are groaning under the weight and the hedgerows are starting to shout blackberries, except I still have a freezer full of last year's which I really meant to jam-up through the winter but somehow never did. I can't waste them so I have a Spiced Bramble Jelly week planned. I should say most of the apple trees are groaning except for the espaliered Cox's Orange Pippin which is groaning for different reasons. It has had a bit of a traumatic time with the woolly aphids...all advice from those of you in the know would be very welcome. We broke our non-pesticide rule and sprayed it, after gallons of soapy water and daily hosing failed, but that hasn't worked either. 

I've had a bit of a lazy reading time having done more listening of Lord of the Rings whilst I sew than actually picking up a book, but I have lots of projects planned for the winter including a read through of Tove Jansson. I've been re-reading a chapter a day of The Summer Book through August (what an absolute delight it is)  and have made a start on Boel Westin's biography Tove Jansson - Art, Life, Words and have the joy of the Moomins to revisit and her adult novels too. I am very grateful to Nat at Sort Of Books (they also publish Kathleen Jamie) for keeping the faith and sending me Tove's books for many years and for filling in the gaps recently...

'The Finnish-Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson achieved worldwide fame as the creator of the Moomin stories, written between 1945 and 1970 and still in print in more than twenty languages. However, the Moomins were only a part of her prodigious output. Already admired in Nordic art circles as a painter, cartoonist and illustrator, she would go on to write a series of classic novels and short stories. She remains Scandinavia's best loved author.

Tove Jansson's work reflected the tenets of her life: her love of family (and special bond with her mother), of nature, and her insistence on freedom to pursue her art. Love and work was the motto she chose for herself and her approach to both was joyful and uncompromising. If her relationships with men foundered on her ambivalence towards marriage, those with women came as a revelation, especially the love and companionship she found with her long-time partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, with whom she lived on the solitary island of Klovharu.'

I'm quickly very enamoured of Tove. Her work ethic, developed at a very young age alongside a precocious talent for drawing, balanced with an insistence on her art being pleasurable, make for fascinating reading and I want to know and discover much more about her.

Well that's you up to speed on me and my summer and I'll be back with regular posts on September 2nd...

Meanwhile it's over to you....how's it all going over your way...

And of course for some of you it's winter but look, we're slowly handing over the sunshine baton. It's heading your way ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not all those who wander are lost...

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

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

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

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

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

All that is gold does not glitter

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

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

 

 

Summer's Lease...

I've been reading, in step with the year, The Wood by John Lewis-Stempel. I love his writing, his observations and above all, as a farmer, his pragmatism about life in the countryside. It's an outlook that chimes with mine. much as Juliet Blaxland did with The Easternmost House. However John and I had a minor disagreement on August 1st.

Having pointed out that it was Lammas Day, the day when traditionally the hay is safely gathered in and the cattle are allowed out on the newly-shorn grass, and my having duly noted that, whilst the owlets slept snug in their branwolery, the cattle were indeed out in the back field, and in all the twenty-five years we've lived here I had no idea that this was a done thing specifically on August 1st...

and then, having expressed his dislike for the 'lassitude' of August, John said this...

'On the lane-side hedge, the ladders of goosegrass are still in place, but grey with weariness and dirt. The cow parsley and hogweed, dry and gone to seed...

And you just know summer's lease is finished.'

'Noooooooo....' I cried before shifting into complete denial that it was so. In fact that very morning I had opened the curtains to see the particular mist that somehow heralds not sweltering heat but a pivotal point in the year, that sense that the year is turning its face to autumn, but I had decided to ignore it. 

I love August, wonderful memories of bringing our firstborn home from hospital and realising she wasn't a puppy and we were now parents. My first batch of terry nappies fluttering on the line, that sort of thing...

The greenhouse full of scarlet geraniums and glowing marigolds...

The swallows busy feeding their second brood on the front veranda...

Enjoying our share of the Painted Lady butterfly once-every-ten-years hordes that have arrived across the UK...

Lazy days when it is perfectly allowed to spread the quilt on the grass behind the summer house and be a little bit idle...even read a book all morning...

Anyway I'm refusing to believe that summer's lease is finished, or that the evenings are getting slightly shorter, because I want a lot more of summer yet before I am prepared to surrender. I'm all for a bit of lassitude me.

That said we are very happily busy with Tinker's Cott bookings through to October (a few vacancies in early September if anyone fancies a few days in the country, when I declare it will still be summer)

and, as the garden loses its early shape, the dahlia bed with its hedge of cosmos in the cottage garden (god bless the Tinker, my Dad, for starting us off on this dahlia craze) is coming into its own and looks beautiful from the Tinker's Cott kitchen window (that's the shed behind....not Tinker's Cott). I added another six new dahlia varieties this year along with a crowd-planting of those I had grown from seed and a row of sunflowers along the back. The bed is bursting at the seams with flowers and buds that will hopefully see us through to first frost, maybe even some first prizes at the Village Show because we have two trophies to defend. 

I'm majoring on pom-poms this year...here are Wine Eyed Jill, Genova and Little Robert 

In the Owlet Department we have had our first sighting of all three owlets peeking out from the box together and have been watching them learn to fly. I'm also in denial about the fact that eventually they will leave to find new homes (though the parents may stay) or be prey to any number of hazards out there. Can you believe that we take the rotary washing line down every evening for fear of finding a tangled owlet trapped in it the next morning, and my current concern is wondering how they learn not to get their feathers wet, other than to get their feathers wet, survive and think 'I won't do that again.'  So we are just enjoying them for as long as they decide to be here and as I am writing this, it is dark and I can hear them 'talking' to each other across the garden...

In fact, living here, along a beautiful country lane miles from the bustle, it's quite easy to be in denial about just about anything, so I'm making the most of this eternal summer and will be ready for autumn at a time of mine own choosing.

Over to you, how is the lassitude of August shaping up where you are...

Anything you particularly like (or loath) about August...

Have the Painted Ladies arrived with you yet...

 

 

 

 

Owlets & a summer intermission

My apologies for not catching up with replies to all your comments on 'Sisters'. I will, I will, because there is so much I want to add to all your suggestions, and thank you for them, but this Owl Watching lark is all-consuming right now because the owlets started to emerge on Sunday. This seemed very apt because we had been reliving the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing all weekend and being sixteen again when suddenly there it was...one small step for owlet, one giant leap for owlkind (sorry, we just couldn't stop ourselves) and we've almost called it Apollo, or Buzz, or something, except we promised ourselves we absolutely wouldn't name and claim them...but all the same...

It's become a habit over the last three months, to glance up at the pole box wherever I am, either indoors or outdoors, so knock me down with an owl feather when I just happened to look up and there it was...

 

We reckon this must be the oldest and largest owlet so they've made great progress towards fledging in the three weeks since they were weighed and checked..

If all goes according to age and size the next one to find itself able to jump up and out of the box should be the one I held...

I'll stop by with owlet updates and brief posts through August but am going to put book thoughts on hold until September when you are all back from your holidays.

I have a fabulous stack of books read, enjoyed and to share with you including...

Under the Rock by Benjamin Myers

King of Dust by Alex Woodcock

The Remedies by Katharine Towers

Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters by Sarah Watling

Constellations by Sinead Gleeson

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Photographer st Sixteen by George Szirtes

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

They will all come with a recommend but On Chapel Sands is the one that had me gripped start to finish, so if anyone else reads it we will have plenty to talk about. This summary from You Know Where...

"In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them at home. It was another fifty years before she even learned of the kidnap.

The girl became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet of the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. So many puzzles remained to be solved. Cumming began with a few criss-crossing lives in this fraction of English coast – the postman, the grocer, the elusive baker – but soon her search spread right out across the globe as she discovered just how many lives were affected by what happened that day on the beach – including her own. 

On Chapel Sands is a book of mystery and memoir. Two narratives run through it: the mother’s childhood tale; and Cumming’s own pursuit of the truth. Humble objects light up the story: a pie dish, a carved box, an old Vick’s jar. Letters, tickets, recipe books, even the particular slant of a copperplate hand give vital clues. And pictures of all kinds, from paintings to photographs, open up like doors to the truth. Above all, Cumming discovers how to look more closely at the family album – with its curious gaps and missing persons – finding crucial answers, captured in plain sight at the click of a shutter."

I was awake into the wee small hours finishing it.

Meanwhile I hope you all have lovely summer hols.

Anyone off somewhere nice, or are you stay-cationing like us...

And what are you planning to read...

I am now reading Scoop and maybe more by Evelyn Waugh after the surprise that was Brideshead Revisited, and can't resist when respected Twitterati declare 'a book of the decade' so will be wading into Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

How about you...

 

 

 

 

 

Invitation to the Waltz ~ Rosamond Lehmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sisters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps you have some suggestions there too...

 

 

 

Gallimaufry of life (mostly)

I don't know where to start...cricket...tennis...Grand Prix, but wasn't Super Sunday just what the doctor ordered if you are lovers of sport, as we both are. We've only just recovered having not watched cricket since it went to pay-per-view. My Dad taught me all I ever needed to know to get by at a cricket match but this was something else.

I'm not that into the car whizzing around the circuit however many times but Bookhound is. We had two TVs going and I kept guard over the tennis while he did the Grand Prix and the cricket and we just kept shouting 'Come and watch this...' or ' It's all going Pete Tong' in here'. There were probably easier ways to do all this, like the Kayaker who had all the screens open on his computer at once, but we don't have neighbours so shouting is fine. Anyway, by the end of the cricket we were both chewing the kitchen table and congratulations to England for that win and huge commiserations to New Zealand.  Offspringette was watching in Christchurch too so it felt like the olden days when we'd put the tele in the garden on a summer's day and all sit and watch some great sporting event as a family, except on Super Sunday we were about 40 miles and 12,000 miles apart. 

To cope with the stress through the afternoon I set up an indigo vat...as you do. It's a fair-weather, outdoor occupation and the day was too good to miss. 

I set one up last week and had a lovely time exhausting the blue with some Japanese Shibori and, having since found some good-enough quality cotton in Ikea (54" wide £3 a metre) I was keen to see how it performed. I donned the mask and gloves, measured my five litres of water (three cold, two hot is roughly the right temperature) mixed in the soda ash and the hydros and then sprinkled on the indigo granules and watched the magic happen. The secret to indigo is agitating as little as possible because oxygen is the enemy of the vat, so stirring very gently with a stick and then quickly covering the surface with cling film to let it stew in the sun for an hour before running in to see how Roger and Novak were doing. I think I was rooting for Roger because I wanted to see his two sets of ecstatic twins at the end, but all hail to Novak.

Doesn't that shade of blue make your heart sing, so the answer I think is that the vat and fabric performed splendidly and was well worth the blue grass and the blue hands. Mind you, this is the joy of spring water and garden space I thought as I spread the dripping dippings across the grass to oxidise from green to blue.

I now have a lovely stash to see me into winter projects and lots of ideas as to how I will use the pieces.

On the owlet front all I have to report is that they wake up at about 9.30 pm and start their wheezy calls for food. The parents start to fly in at about 10pm, winging back and forth with delicacies and savoury morsels which ups the noise levels considerably. If this routine holds up we reckon we might see an owlet emerge in a couple of weeks, but meanwhile it has been perfect barn owl weather (warm and dry) and the grass fields have just been cut, so lots of varmints on the loose.

On the garden front it's all gone berserk and we are loving it...

We decided no more weedkillers on the gravel and no more slug pellets and the result is beds of clover buzzing with happy bees and poppies everywhere. We're having some success with coffee grounds on the slug front, which is probably because they don't get a wink of sleep and are too tired to eat anything. The Bee Friendly Meadow seeds from Higgledy Gardens are the success story of the summer, especially now the cornflowers have appeared, along with the 'Solstice' variety sweet peas from The English Sweet Pea Company which I've been picking daily since April, and the dahlia bed with the new Peter Nyssen additions, and the sunflowers, and the ...oh it's all a glorious riotous muddle of flowers.

This is 'Genova', a new and particularly pleasing pom-pom..

On the cat front. I made a 'thing' for the sofa...a sort of log cabin 'thing', out of some Jinny Beyer fabric strips I had cut out about thirty years ago, and spent the years ever since wondering what to do with them. I machine quilted the 'thing' onto a fleece backing and we had bets on how long before Magnus claimed it as home territory.

It was about an hour...

Now I need news from you...what happenings and occurrences do you have to report...

 

 

 

 

 

The Easternmost House ~ Juliet Blaxland

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

 

Time Song by  Julia Blackburn
The Easternmost House by  Juliet Blaxland

Our Place by  Mark Cocker

Thinking On My Feet by Kate Humble

Underland by Robert Macfarlane
Wilding by Isabella Tree

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

And I loved it for that.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

I understood this conclusion exactly...

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

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

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

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

 

Spring by Ali Smith

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

 

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, what have you all been reading?

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

 

The Owlets...

I'm not sure I can accurately convey the excitement that was Tuesday.

The Barn Owl Trust came to visit, to have a look in the pole box and if they found any owlets they would be weighed, measured, ringed and put back. Assuring us that the owlets were 'bomb-proof we were on the proverbial tenterhooks as Rick, having quietly blocked the entrance way, climbed the ladder and very carefully opened the inspection hatch. 

We were fairly sure that the mother was still roosting in the box by day because we see her coming out each evening, but our estimates about owlets varied. Some evenings all was quiet, certainly no noise by day.

Did this mean they were well-fed and happy...

Or perhaps god-forbid they were fading away.

I seek regular reassurance from Elaine, 'the Owl Whistler' over on Twitter, who has been a constant source of advice and encouragement since the barn owls first arrived back in March.

Except our nightly Barn Owl Watch suggested regular incoming flights with food and a chorus of little wheezy thank-yous...but all the same, no way of knowing.

'The female's in here...'

'How many babies Rick...'

'Two...'

'Yes two...'

'No THREE.'

TRIPLETS...we have triplets.

We all held our breath as very slowly and very quietly (and skilfully) the owl and then the owlets were put into cloth bags and brought down and, for the owlets, outside into the world for the first time. 

Little Owlet - the smallest of the three

Perfect little owlets, impeccably behaved, not in the least bit bothered by this bit of excitement

Middle Owlet

Rick weighed each owlet in turn, smallest first, measured the wings, checked them over and estimated they were about 4-5 weeks old. Eggs are laid at intervals and thus hatch every few days.

Black eyes  and little beaks stared out at us from miniature, perfectly formed heart-shaped faces. 

Large Owlet

Surprisingly large claws  with growing talons...

Downy feathers...

Middle Owlet

Wing feathers, proper flying gear, starting to form...

Seeing the female close-up, she who we have stared at day in day out, was a real privilege. I'm amazed at how docile they all were though Rick says it's not always like that.

Who could argue with the sheer beauty of this from afar, but then when you can look closely...

Weighed, wings measured, ringed and put back, the box was left with the entrance still blocked for ten minutes to let them all settle down. We went into the kitchen for a cup of tea, and so, with two barn owl experts trapped at our kitchen table, we asked countless questions and got loads of invaluable information.

The next key stage, probably towards the end of July will be the Flying Lessons. The depth of the box is designed to keep the owlets safely inside until they have to be able to semi-fly to get out, but we could have a dodgy few days when they might hit the ground before mastering the art, so we will need to be very vigilant.

But for now much joy about July 2nd 2019, Owlet Day, a day we will never forget, and as for this moment, well how special was this... me and Middle Owlet saying hello briefly before it went back in the box. It's still too soon to tell whether male or female, but the memory of that handful of plump breathing baby owl and warm downy feathers will stay with me from now until forever 

And with thanks as always to Tommy Hatwell for the beautiful images

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Munnings in Cornwall - Midsummer's Day in Penzance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Summer in February ~ Jonathan Smith (redux)

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

 

March 31 2014

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

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



and sitting on those very rocks...



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

I wonder if you have preferences about this??

Book first...

Film first...

Not bothered...

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

So I started the book...twice.

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

Then the film was out there...

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

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

The beautiful Florence is nicknamed Blote.

Blote??

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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



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

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

Munnings painted Laura painting...



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

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

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

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

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

My thoughts on the Munnings in Cornwall exhibition dreckly.

 

More anticipating... Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, have you read Findings and Sightlines...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

It’s all made me revisit the poem...

 

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

   Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense

Of being in a hurry gone....

 

 

Anticipating...

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

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

The Offing ~ Benjamin Myers ( 22 August 2109)

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

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

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

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

 

This is Happiness ~ Niall Williams (5 September 2019)

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Single Thread ~ Tracy Chevalier (5 September 2019)

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

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

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

 

The Dutch House ~ Ann Patchett (24 September 2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

The Lost Words ~ Spell Songs

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Silence

all silence

owl hunts in silence...

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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A Journal of the Plague Year ~ Daniel Defoe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public gatherings were also seriously curtailed 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any good reading recommends...

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

 

 

 

The June Odyssey

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Wainwright Prize Longlist 2019

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

The 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize Longlist:

Underland by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton)

Wilding by Isabella Tree (Picador)

Lanny by Max Porter (Faber & Faber)

Landfill by Tim Dee (Little Toller Books)

Time Song by Julia Blackburn (Jonathan Cape)

Our Place by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape)

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

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

Thinking On My Feet by Kate Humble (Aster)

Wild Woman Swimming by Lynne Roper (The Selkie Press)

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

The Easternmost House by Juliet Blaxland (Sandstone Press)

Ghost Trees by Bob Gilbert (Saraband)

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

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

Have you read any of the longlist...

Any recommends...

Wild swimming anyone...

Good Listening...

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

Erebus The Story of a Ship ~ Michael Palin.

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Lost Man ~ Jane Harper

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

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

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

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

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

 

Let Me Lie ~ Claire Mackintosh

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

 

Pompeii ~ Robert Harris

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

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

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

 

 

Remembering my Mum...

It would have been my Mum Vera's 93rd birthday today, same age as the Queen, though she died twenty-two years ago. And then I think of Hilary Mantel's pearl of wisdom that in a sense you are not dead if someone still talks about you.

Now I know not everyone might have had as happy-an experience with their mum as I did as a child, but I thought it might be nice for anyone who wanted to to add a comment about their own mum, or a recollection of a good memory you have of them because I would love to know about them.

I've mentioned this before I know but mine is singing along to the radio with my mum  as she did the housework and I was probably playing with my Fuzzy Felt Florist's Shop. We had two very most favourite songs for which we would both stop what we were doing and just sing. The minute I hear the opening bars there we are, the pair of us and my mum pretending to catch stars and put them in my pocket...

And then there's that twiddly bit in the middle which we never ever fluffed, when I'd carry on singing and my mum would sing the other bits...

Your turn...

Branowelery Update

So sorry (not sorry) to go on about it but a quick Bank Holiday Branwolery update for you. People stop me in town now (waving to Rebecca) and ask 'How are the Wols?' and Rebecca and I had a quick catch-up outside the Edinburgh Woollen Mill on Saturday.

As I said it's all quite nerve-wracking in a way. Like having children because you worry about them...

Might something happen to one or other of them...

Might Mr just not appear one night...or the next night...

Might we actually be staring at a nest box devoid of anything but a rising mountain of dead voles, harvested and gathered against famine by a kleptomaniac solo barn owl...

We've seen red kites around recently and we are buzzard central, supposing one of them gets attacked by a raptor...

They've cut and baled the grass for silage this week, supposing the voles have all moved out or worse, been silaged...

To this end one or other of us makes sure we keep an eye out for Mr Barn Owl every evening. Thus far we've resisted giving them names, tempting though it might be to pluck a famous couple and have them flying around our garden. It's something about possession and claiming them as 'pets' when actually they don't belong to us which doesn't seem quite right. It's most unlike me because, as Bookhound will tell you, I name everything from goldfish to chickens to cars. But these barn owls feel a bit special, they are not ours, we're just the residence of choice for the time being.

We walk along the lane at dusk, in the dimpsey light, and usually see him gliding low, quartering the fields..

and then we head back indoors to watch the nest box and see him bringing food, dropping it off inside, doubtless giving cooking instructions before popping out, sitting on his balcony for a stare and taking flight again. He looks so compact and small sitting there and then these huge wings spread out and this pure white dream-liner glides silently past and off...

I stood underneath the nest box for a while today.

Nine years-worth of storm damage is clear to see but the Gamekeeper reckons the dilapidation has been the main attraction. I stood there very quietly just listening and eventually heard the unmistakable sounds of life from within. Probably just a shuffling and ruffling of feathers against the wood, no sounds of owlets yet, but there's definitely a resident. We think Mr is probably roosting elsewhere which we were told is normal, and if owlets arrive Mrs will leave them in the nest after about three weeks to start hunting for food too.

I had a very lucky encounter one evening too. Standing on the boundary with the back field, tucked under a tree, camera at the ready, he flew across the hedge right before my eyes. All fingers and thumbs, and too 'in the moment' to look away, it was a while before I managed to get him in my camera lens, and even then blurry with excitement, but hopefully you can get the gist..

So now we must wait and listen because any day we might hear sounds of owlets. You will of course be the first to know.

 

 

 

 

 

A Stranger City ~ Linda Grant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Simon Armitage - Poet Laureate

Having had a delightful ten years steeped in poetry and thanks in some part to Carol Ann Duffy, our last Poet Laureate, I am hopping around with delight at the selection of Simon Armitage as our next one.

I’ve made my way through much of Carol Ann Duffy’s oeuvre, even championed The World’s Wife on the radio ( A Good Read, some years ago now) and benefited hugely from the way that poetry is given greater exposure thanks to the Laureate’s different and developing role of providing more than an ode to mark a National Occasion. Mind you, weren’t we all grateful for Carol Ann’s reflections on David Beckham’s pre-tournament achilles heel injury...

Achilles
(for David Beckham)

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 prophesised,

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 . . .

 

and I’m probably the only one who still reads and loves Ted Hughes’s Rain Charm for the Duchy., his 1984 'paean to the West Country rivers,' celebrating the occasion of Prince Harry’s christening. 

To digress, while we are on the subject of Odysseus you might remember that  through June last year I read a book a day of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey and then told you afterwards (in case I didn't manage it). It was a marvellous reading experience, a wonderful summer journey and I'm planning to do it again this year though perhaps with a different version...maybe even Simon Armitage's. If anyone wants to read along too please do. There won't be any great literary merit to any posts...probably just occasional nice pictures of rosy fingered dawns, but it's always good to feel that I am part of something a bit bigger as I read. If you've always meant to tackle The Odyssey and never quite managed it, well this might be your incentive...that and the fact that the paperback edition of Emily Wilson's Homer is very covetable indeed.

Ted Hughes was frequently ridiculed and derided for accepting the laureateship, his poetry lampooned, but what a good job he did of dragging the role into the modern age, followed by Andrew Motion (who never quite took to it) then Carol Ann Duffy and now here we are with Simon Armitage and the whole thing thoroughly upgraded. This, from the Faber website cheered my heart no end 

'It’s a huge honour to be appointed Poet Laureate, one of the great high offices of literature. Over the past two decades the laureateship has become a working role, with previous laureates actively involved in the promotion of poetry and in numerous initiatives to identify and encourage talent, especially within education and among younger writers; I hope to build on the work of my predecessors with energy and enthusiasm.

Since the laureateship was first conceived many hundreds of years ago, Britain has changed enormously and the position of Poet Laureate has changed accordingly – I want to celebrate and speak on behalf of the variety of voices who contribute to the rich chorus of British poetry from a wide range of personal, literary and cultural experiences, and to help poetry explore its potential in a multifaceted, multivocal and multimedia age.

The poetry of these islands is one of our greatest achievements, and, as well as being proud of its traditions, I want poetry to feel confident and at home in the contemporary world and to demonstrate that, in a hectic and sometimes frenetic age, the combination of considered thought and crafted language is more relevant and vital than ever. I hope poets, readers and audiences will support me in my efforts.’

Yes, yes and yes, consider it done here and I have my Armitage shelf at the ready...

Last word to Matthew Hollis, Poetry Editor at Faber...

'Simon Armitage cut his own cloth from the outset. His boyish, fresh-faced poems made an unmissable impression upon the 1980s: political, tough-minded, astute, funny, realist and surreal in opposing measure. They persuaded readers that no barrier should curtail their adventure, no dogma and no gatekeeper. They spoke to the experiences of our streets and our schoolrooms, and walked around in the lives about us, marking a place for popular and literary cultures alike, freeing our vernacular from the locked cupboards of received learning....

It is more than a quarter-century since Faber & Faber became the proud publisher of Simon Armitage. Over that time he has led countless readers to new territories and made maps for a better nation. We cannot wait to see where he takes us next.'

 

Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile ~ Alice Jolly

Imbecile - A stupid person.

Mid 16th century (as an adjective in the sense ‘physically weak’): via French from Latin imbecillus, literally ‘without a supporting staff’, from in- (expressing negation) + baculum ‘stick, staff’. The current sense dates from the early 19th century.

I thought I'd better look up the meaning and origins of the word 'imbecile' because its one of those words that has floated along and possibly changed its inference down the years. I'd suggest used mostly as a form of friendly mockery or intense frustration of or with a. n. other person these days, but used quite seriously in Mary Ann Sate's day. Turning to Wikipaedia ...

The term imbecile was once used by psychiatrists to denote a category of people with moderate to severe intellectual disability, as well as a type of criminal.... It included people with an IQ of 26–50, between "idiot" (IQ of 0–25) and "moron" (IQ of 51–70).

What became clear as I read my way into this fictional 'found memoir' of the life and times of Mary Ann Sate was that she was none of these.

It was my pleasure to be invited to 'champion' a book from the current Rathbones Folio Prize short list prior to the announcement of the winner on May 20th, and I was delighted when my plea for Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile was granted. The book had crept quietly onto my radar not via the review pages because none had reviewed it, but via a couple of prize lists thus confirming the importance of their existence. Published by Unbound and therefore crowd sourced, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly has been long-listed not only for the this prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize but also commended by  the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Yet no press reviews (until very recently) and its absence from the Women's Prize long list will remain a mystery to me, but then perhaps being passed over in this way segues well with the narrative of Mary Ann's life, because here is a book that gives a voice to the 'unheard' as the elderly maidservant Mary Ann Sate writes the  story of her life throughout the nineteenth century.

In 2008, in the very early days of the scribbles, I was invited by Oxford University Press to share a platform at the Oxford Literary Festival with Mark Thwaite and Professors John Mullen and John Carey. It was one of those nerve-wracking (for me)  'Bloggers v Critics' events when comparisons and inevitably criticisms of the latter day amateurs were being made and I was braced for the onslaught. We were seen to be scaling the ivory towers and it was all very contentious, however John Carey saw all this very differently (as you might expect from the author of  The Intellectuals and the Masses Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939)). He had read here extensively and was very complimentary about the way that the voice of the people was now becoming a matter of record. 'What we would give to hear the voices of the ordinary people from earlier centuries.. ' he said. At the time the scribbles were being digitally archived by The British Library as a social record for the future (they may still be, I gave permission).

Back in harness to a member of the family she has served in the past and who is now dying (painfully) Mary Ann Sate writes her own story alongside that of her 'master', though his takes second place to hers. Mary Ann privileges her own experiences, looking back on her life and creating tantalising shadows of events yet unknown and still to be explained. Set in the valleys around Stroud in Gloucestershire it quickly becomes clear that facial disfigurement is the cause of much misjudgement of Mary Ann's abilities and prejudice against her; she has been born with a cleft lip...

'A Devil Hare did cross your mothers' path...'

Destined to a live a life of struggle and servitude, first at The Heavens and then at Stocton Hall, where her employer Mr Harland Cottrell has taken her in as more of an interesting and useful oddity, there is little doubt that Mary Ann is in firm possession of all her faculties and no slouch at using them. Cottrell , a man of kind heart but uneven temper and possibly even more 'uneven' medical practice, employs Mary Ann as an unpaid servant and, against a backdrop of social change and civic unrest (Chartist riots, the 1832 Reform Act ) life in the mill town through Mary Ann's eyes is slowly but steadily revealed. Cottrell gives Mary Ann the opportunity of an education as well as repairing her cleft lip, and written in short stanzas the book  creates a vivid picture of the traumas and threats of change, and the dangers of the nineteenth century, especially for those living in poverty.  I was reminded of Hilary Mantel's words at Budleigh Literary Festival a few years ago...

'My greatest joy is to take a name and give them person-hood...a particle of being...doing honour to what is lost...'

Don't be phased by the size of the book at 600 pages, nor the vernacular which soon becomes familiar, nor the versified layout, but this was a book that required my full attention while I was reading it. I ended up setting everything else aside to concentrate on this one life, paying time to check into the spaces, the gaps that Alice Jolly creates in which to visualise the characters, the landscape, the work, the trials and the challenges, the smells and tastes too. And relishing the opportunity to get to know the indomitable and pragmatic Mary Ann.

The narrative is a tour-de-force, a stunning achievement, beautifully paced and measured, often as slow as the times, but how often have I looked at the tithe map and wondered about the people...seen the names in the village churchyard and conjured up the people here ...their life in this house, and yes, their deaths too. 

This is a book that transported me there and more.

There is a wonderful moment when Mary Ann realises she can read...

'Sudden it all clear as drops of dancing water
The words flow away from me
I know them all
My eyes fly down the lines
Inside I am leaping
For I can read

I leapt with Mary Ann because I wonder if you can remember the moment you knew you could read...I can. Literacy, never to be taken for granted in the nineteenth century, will be Mary Ann's shining glory and her greatest asset.

The impact of industrialisation and the threat it created for the workers is profound. There are no safety nets, life is precarious for many and punishment for protest and dissent is severe. Looking through the archives for our local press there are plenty of notices of transportation for poaching on the Duke of Bedford's land here too, as in Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, many a villager dispatched to Van Diemen's Land. There is scorn for the lower orders and a mocking of new ideas, but Mary Ann is made of strong stuff. The poor woman's lot is not a happy one; powerless and subservient and at the mercy of one and all, but what she may initially lack in self-confidence Mary Ann makes up for in resilience and resourcefulness and most importantly survival.

Arguably there are parallels here with modern times, the impact of change, and progress in its nam