dovegreyreader scribbles

We’ll Meet Again...

It’s is the seventy-fifty anniversary of Victory in Europe today. A day that marked the end of World War Two in the West at least, after almost six long years of conflict. Perhaps some people are thinking it’s time to let it go, move on, except we're far from thinking that. The lane is dressed overall and we are ready...

My dad always said he could never fully share the elation of VE Day, having just been posted to a ship that would be heading to the Far East where the war was still be decided...and they had been prepared and trained for serious fighting. The Tinker (Len) was under no illusion that this could be to the death. In the end events took a different turn in August 1945 and his ship was tasked with bringing the survivors home from the POW camps in Singapore...something he never forgot.

Having recently put those hundreds of letters that Len write to my mum (Vera) away for now I took out a few dated May 1945 just to get a feel for the mood of the moment. They have known each other about a year. things have been a bit on and off but there is talk of 'getting engaged' though Len isn't quite sure what he's supposed to do because he's never been 'engaged' before...does he have to ask someone...how can they buy a ring if he's miles away...is it fair on Vera if he's going to be away for several years which seems likely.

Len is now in the fighting ranks of the Royal Marines (rather than a bugler) on board a new ship in Portsmouth waiting to sail and has watched a training film entitled ‘Existence in the Jungle’...‘Hopeful isn’t it’ he writes to Vera. That same week he goes ashore and sees Flanagan and Allan in Dreaming which was ‘alright’ followed by White Cliffs of Dover which made him ‘ a bit on the sad side’

...which he didn’t need because he was feeling sad enough at what was ahead, and being parted from the love of his life for goodness knows how long. 

Then I read this, and remembering Len was a mere twenty years old...

'I expect by the time you get this the war in Germany will be all over and you will be getting back to peace routine again. It’s wonderful to think that all the danger to folks back home is over and you haven’t got to worry about bombs, doodle-bugs and rockets. You might think I’m soft but I’m going to church on Sunday to offer a few prayers of thanks for seeing my family, your family and a lot of other people’s families safely through the night. I think it’s about the second time I’ve ever been to church willingly, the other time was when I was christened, but I’m sure He will forgive me for that....’

Incidentally given that he had left school at fourteen I am very impressed with my dad's spelling, not a single correction required.

Then something that made me smile...

’Mum says that they have taken down the shelter in the back room and are decorating with big Victory ribbons...’

My grandparents, eschewing the discomforts of a cold damp air raid shelter in the garden, had built theirs in the dining room right in front of the fire, and kitted it out with all mod cons.

Len goes on to say...

'I think I have forgotten what a street fully lit and all the other things that go with peace look like...'

He's also been reading in the press about how many medals he will get...he thinks five. There then follows a bit of a diatribe about Hitler having taken his own life when it’s clear Vera and Len had a few choice things lined up for the man who had stolen their teenage years ...‘It’s not fair is it’ says Len, and I found myself agreeing. I think they were entitled to those feelings, but I also found myself understanding the importance and sheer enormity of the moment. The relief and the nation's need to rejoice and celebrate must have been profound. 

We might all be stuck at home but we’re safe enough where we are right now. For six years no one had felt safe anywhere and certainly not in their homes. No wonder they kicked up their heels and let rip and it sounds like they do certainly did...

'I have had a letter from home and it seems like they celebrated with a vengeance. They all had a tea party in the road and once the children had finished the grown ups sat down to tea, cleared away and everybody had their wirelesses out in the street and they danced until four in the morning. How I wish I could have been there...’

This picture of my grandparents says it all I think, whether it was taken on VE day or not they certainly loved to dance.

My poor dad missing out on all the fun at home, though it seems there was a bit of a knees up on the ship after all...

'I am only just beginning to recover from the VE celebrations. Oh boy!! What a week, we've had to stop as the flowing bowl floweth no longer...we had a victory march through the town yesterday and as you can guess it ended up in the rain...but there was much merry-making.

The night finished off with fireworks and bonfires. Some of the bonfires weren't satisfied with stopping at bonfires, they burnt a few houses down in the end I'm afraid, much to the enjoyment of the people watching, except the people in the house! I think they were in the state where you get past worrying about such petty things.

I bet London had a real crazy night though, I wish we could have been there...I can just imagine what Piccadilly and Oxford Circus were like that night. I bet it was bedlam and some fat heads next morning too'

So anyway, in solidarity and with remembrance and thanks, that’s why we’ve draped the hedge in bunting today and hung out the Union Jack. We'll be getting as near as we can to the village for our daily excursion, this to coincide with a socially distanced national minute's silence at 11am where we have been asked as a nation to remember, but also to think of those who have lost their lives in recent months too. There will be the playing of Last Post and Reveille and we’ll be having a jolly good Victory Tea Party of our own when we get home.

We’ll be singing We’ll Meet Again from afar, with the rest of the nation, and we’ll raise a cup of tea (or a glass of ginger beer) to all of you too, wherever you are and to absent family and friends as well...
 
Meanwhile, here's Flanagan and Allen singing Dreaming (to a horse it seems) from the film that my dad thought was 'alright'. 

As his letters show, he and my mum were doing a lot of dreaming in those years they were apart... my dad has heard there will be 100,000 prefabs built...maybe they could get one (they didn't)...lets think about curtains and carpet he suggests. If only they could have known then that they would eventually be together for over fifty years.

Botanical wanderings...

I bet I’m not the only one out there who spends a moment or three each day finding the positives in our Stay at Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives life. In the words of Terry Waite, a man who knows plenty about isolation, we’re not stuck at home, we’re safe at home, and no matter the hardships people are living through, and I know they are manifold, I have been quietly amazed at the ingenuity and spirit that is fuelling this strange time for so many. In our little corner of the world I have a regular marvel at wildflowers and I know I’m not alone.

One of the interesting things about our little corner at the moment is that, though it is usually very quiet even on a busy day, now we are blessed with walkers and we are really happy about that. People have discovered our beautiful lane and they are happy to stop and talk. We lost count of the number who stopped at the gate for a  socially distanced conversation on Sunday and quite a few were carrying armfuls of wildflowers. Now I know, I know, you’re really not supposed to pick them but we have to cut ourselves some slack right now and I think the hedgerows can cope. Besides which we have no access to any other flowers for vases and is there anything lovelier than a profusion of wildness on the kitchen table. 

I had thought I was a reasonably observant wild flower wanderer until all this happened. I’ve started slow-walking around a few fields that have been left alone for a couple of years and have been amazed at what I have noticed beyond the obvious. We’re in that happy colour phase of red, white, blue and yellow as the red campion, stitchwort, bluebell and buttercup light the way. Waiting in the wings are the foxgloves, and the woodbine (wild honeysuckle) and meadowsweet will soon be dousing the lane with their scent, but look closer and I have found all sorts of unknowns.

This week’s mystifying plant has been a strange yellow one. Pictures were duly dispatched to Fran H-B and Carol and discussion, and much poring over the books, followed. Meanwhile Bookhound Googled ‘Yellow plant bit like a brassica’ and beat us to it with confirmation that it was Yellow Rocket or Wintercress. 

Fran also confirmed Bush Vetch which I had never really noticed before and now see everywhere. 

I unearthed my I-Spy Wild Flowers because this school prize for 'Effort and Progress' when I was about seven is definitely where it all began, along with the cards we used to collect from the packets of PG Tips tea leaves. No such thing a teabags back in our day...how on earth did that whole thing happen. and to the extent that they have almost eclipsed loose tea.

It has been a resplendent year for buttercups too, the fields are gleaming...

 

The violets are almost done but I found a few lingering in the shade..

And the cow parsley is doing much prettifying of the hedgerows too...

More buttercups just because...

And now I'm thinking that you might all have been noticing things you might have missed before and not necessarily wildflowers. Please do share in comments...

Family Matters and Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract...

Everyone’s family is extraordinary in its own way. This much and more I discovered in all those years of listening to family histories as a health visitor. It was important to get a feel for where a family had come from, the experience, the highs the lows, the tensions, the ‘issues’ and it wouldn’t take more than a few open questions and saying yes to a cup of tea to learn more. I look on it as one of the privileges of the job, and it was one of the aspects I loved the most and found so fascinating. People’s stories shared and respected.

Translate that love into books and it is understandable that I am always drawn to the family memoirs. The secret to success is for the writer to make their own extraordinary family seem likewise for me the reader to whom they might otherwise be ordinary...if that makes sense, and it wasn’t hard to wander around my shelves and find a selection of those I have enjoyed most in recent years. I think I have written about all of these in the past so please do follow the links if you want to know more about each one..

Hancox - Charlotte Moore

The Baroness - Hannah Rothschild 

and an interview with Hannah at Port Eliot Festival here

The Valley - Richard Benson and an interview with him at Port Eliot Festival including sight of the knitted farm knitsuke 

The Great Western Beach - Emma Smith

On Chapel Sands - Laura Cumming...how did I not write about this? It was one of my best reads of 2019...

The Three of Us - Julia Blackburn 

The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal who I was also lucky enough to interview at Port Eliot Festival...happy days

Forty Autumns - Nina Willner

And then there was the astonishing and very beautiful book American Style and Spirit by Jane Bradbury about her Aunt Augusta and the Roddis family, their lives, their fortunes and their clothes. A picture of Augusta sits on the shelf above my desk and you might remember Jane  very kindly sent me a bunch of flowers as thanks for that post. The hydrangeas in the vase lasted so long they eventually put out roots and I was able to nurture a plant. Augusta’s Hydrangea has been through a few torrid times...I planted it out too soon and almost lost it...this year it dried out in the cold frame and I almost lost it again but, like Augusta's clothes, the plant has survived and is thriving again, and I am mightily relieved because it felt like a challenge at which I mustn’t fail.

It was the arrival of another book to add to this selection that made me think more carefully about their attraction. Perhaps, at the moment, it’s about immersing myself in someone else’s life and history instead of my own. It’s quite hard not to overthink all this, especially when the diary is empty and the next thing to get excited about it is the entire nation singing We’ll Meet Again together from their lockdown homes on VE Day. Actually, I am quite excited about this, because any sense of togetherness doesn’t go amiss right now. 

Richard Atkinson contacted me to ask if I might be interested in seeing a copy of his book Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract - The Story of a Tangled Inheritance. Published very recently this one of those books that could so easily be consigned to the wilderness in the midst of the current situation, and that has to be heartbreaking for any author who has committed a huge part of their life to writing it. In Richard’s case ten years or so, having found a box of old family letters...

'Richard Atkinson was in his late thirties, and approaching a milestone he had long dreaded – the age at which his father died – when one day he came across a box of old family letters gathering dust on top of a cupboard.

This discovery set him on an all-consuming, highly emotional journey, ultimately taking him from the weather-beaten house of his Cumbrian ancestors to the abandoned ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica.

Richard’s searches led him to one forebear in particular, an earlier Richard Atkinson, a brilliant but flawed West India merchant who had shipped all the British army’s supplies during the American War of Independence, and amassed staggering wealth and connections along the way. ‘Rum’ Atkinson died young, at the height of his powers, leaving a vast inheritance to his many nephews and nieces, as well as the society beauty who had refused his proposal of marriage; forty years of litigation followed as his heirs wrangled over his legacy....'

I'm about a hundred pages in and both intrigued and engrossed. So many of these writers have no choice but to address the 'something nasty in the woodshed' and Richard's family is no exception. He will have to confront involvement in slavery, but his ancestors were also witness to a backdrop of some of the most momentous times in history and I am re-visiting so much that I once knew. The Treaty of Paris...who knew the barest shreds of that were still lodged in my memory.

Meanwhile there must be scores of family memoirs deserving of a mention and already I realise I have forgotten to include Elisabeth's Lists by Lulah Ellender...

Lulah Ellender quotes Hilary Mantel...

'What is to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?'

And I was reminded of an evening spent listening to Hilary Mantel. I hunted out my notes and here's what I jotted down...

'...As soon as somebody dies they become fictional, they become a narrative construction, preserved in memory but in a sense you are not dead if someone still talks about you. The thought hollows you out with a sense of waste and loss for those not known...my greatest joy is to take a name and give them person-hood... a particle of being... doing honour to what is lost...'

I am sure you have plenty more suggestions to share..

 

Greenery - Journeys in Springtime ~ Tim Dee

Every year we make a note of the date. Not the date when someone else sees a swallow in the village, but when our first one arrives and heads into the veranda knowing they are home. Variously April 28th, 15th, 17th, last year the 20th and this year Easter Sunday morning, April 12th but so far just the one. 

We thought he/she had been here before because there's a little perch they have made their own. It's a tangled up bit of electric cable that we always meant to wire up to an outside light but never did and there it sits. A complete eyesore if you look up and to the right of the front door but of course now we daren't change a thing about it. And so our single swallow arrived and there he has been sleeping for the past weeks waiting for the rest of the nest building team, and I'm wondering whether he is one of these. Last year's fledglings on the day they moved from nest to rafter with their first flight. 

Alongside the annual conflict is gathering. The wrens, who have been with us all winter, purloin a vacant swallow's nest and start loading it with mossy furnishings of their own, claiming squatter's rights, and there's nothing we can do about what happens next. It will be Armageddon out there because for all its diminutive size, Troglodytes troglodytes has the voice of a klaxon and will make its displeasure known when the Hirundo rustica mount their invasion and reclaim their property. It's usually a day to go out and leave them to it. We'll go for a walk instead and come home to a pile of moss on the deck, wrens in retreat back to their hedgerow nests and swallows back and forth with their preferred decor of mud, grass and white feathers.

 

This all brings me back to where I meant to start which was with Tim Dee's new book Greenery - Journeys in Springtime recently published by Jonathan Cape. I'm afraid I bought my copy from You Know Where to be sure it arrived soonest. My need for the real book in hand was yesterday once I'd read the Kindle sample.... 

'One December, in midsummer South Africa, Tim Dee was watching swallows. They were at home there, but the same birds would soon begin journeying north to Europe, where their arrival marks the beginning of spring.

Between the winter and the summer solstice in Europe, spring moves north at about the speed of swallow flight. That is also close to human walking pace. In the light of these happy coincidences, Greenery recounts how Tim Dee tries to travel with the season and its migratory birds, making remarkable journeys to keep in step with the very best days of the year, the time of buds and blossoms and leafing, the time of song and nests and eggs. After South Africa, we follow European migrants staging in Chad and Ethiopia, and on across the colossal and incomprehensible Sahara. We accompany storks venturing the Straits of Gibraltar, honey buzzards dodging Sicilian hunters, and tiny landbirds finding haven on the curious island of Heligoland. A diary of the spring spreading through Britain with a magic trinity of oak-tree-loving birds interleaves the continental greening. We read of other determined spring-seekers: D. H. Lawrence and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We hear from a Sámi reindeer herder, a barn-dwelling swallow-devotee, an Egyptian taxi driver, a chronobiologist in arctic Norway. There are bears and boars and bog-bodies too.'

 

So many books must be slipping into obscurity before they've even taken their first breath at the moment, and I can't quite imagine how the publishing world will regroup and get back on track after this, but it would be a real shame if this happened to Greenery because it is becoming, for me, the iconic book of this moment in my life. That sounds a bit dramatic but something similar happened with Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, which I read through my dad's last few weeks. Looking back I see I wrote one post here knowing my dad would be reading it, and mentioned it in another here, a couple of months later knowing sadly he would not.

Arctic Dreams was a book that took me somewhere else, to another place that I didn't even realise I wanted to visit, but the memory of it, and the state of grace it created, has stayed with me...and I think Greenery will do likewise. Tim Dee's writing is bringing perspective, focusing my wandering attention and extending my horizons, and all at a time when the natural world has been giving some space to rest and breath.

I didn't know I wanted to go to the Sahara Desert but now I'm there, trailing the swallows as they travel north. 'We all, more or less, must be vernalised - and go through dark times in order to be born into light' suggests Tim Dee of our transition from winter mood to spring mood, but perhaps the same applies to moments like now. I think we'll all grow and change through this, in small ways, maybe in much deeper ways, the world will be different, no question....but some things won't change, like swallows migrating and barn owls nesting (deo volente).

I mentioned when 'our' swallow arrived 'home', but as Tim Dee points out with migratory birds, who do they belong to and where is home...

'Where are they at home? Whose swallows are they? Can anyone, in any case, lay claim to a bird?'

We talk of 'our barn owls' whilst knowing they are no such thing.

Greenery is punctuated with literary and poetic references that have thus far sent me scurrying in search of W.S. Merwin and Elizabeth Bishop, Shakespeare and Nadine Gordimer, Wordsworth and The Odyssey, and I'm only on page fifty six. The margins are unashamedly littered with pencilled thoughts as they flash into my mind. 

Meanwhile,  whilst I have discovered another book to add to the 'of the moment' reads in my life I'm thinking some of you might  have discovered yours too. And if not books for the now just yet, perhaps books from life-moments past whose power and effect has stayed with you.

Please do share them in comments...

And perhaps this beautiful film from New Zealand will help too. I would just have arrived home now, struggling with jet lag, but I'll be back there again one day....in the meantime Papatūānuku is breathing...

 

Leonard and Hungry Paul ~ Ronan Hession

It seems like some sort of minor miracle that I have finished a novel, a newish one at that.

Back in early March a parcel of lockdown books arrived from Susan Hill, and Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession was included. Susan has always been a very reliable source of reading recommendations, with her finger on the pulse of the publishing world, what's current and what is worth reading....mostly. We might have disagreed about Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser- Akner last year, but it does't happen very often. 

It was a while before I opened it, (March 24th, I've written the date inside, it seems oddly important to do so at the moment) but as soon as I did, and had read the first paragraph, I knew I'd have to be rationing Leonard and Hungry Paul to a chapter a day...

'Leonard was raised by his mother alone with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth. Though she was not by nature the soldiering type, she taught him to look at life as a daisy chain of small events, each of which could be made manageable in its own way. She was a person for whom kindness was a very ordinary thing, who believed that the only acceptable excuse for not having a bird feeder in the back garden was that you had one in the front garden.'

Consequently it was April 19th before I finally allowed myself to finish Leonard and Hungry Paul, and I think I could probably start over and read it again just for the book's gentle humility and the innate goodness of those who see life through a different lens; people who have different expectations and reactions to the norm. It's a book to make a reader question 'the norm' and who decides 'the norm' anyway. I've often wondered and suspect many of us, in our different ways, are doing some, if not a lot of that right now.

Leonard and Hungry Paul, both mature men are good friends. Leonard's mother has recently died leaving him alone in the house and the life they happily shared, whilst Hungry Paul (I could only assume this was probably a name given to him as a ravenous baby) still lives with his parents nearby.  There are simple certainties to the lives herein. Both Leonard and Hungry Paul work, they meet regularly to play board games, Hungry Paul's more worldly sister Grace is planning her wedding, people buy books in shops, meet for lunch...normal (well, the Old Normal) things happen and yet underpinning the whole book is a sense of goodness that I find it hard to describe.

Given how suspiciously minds are often encouraged to work today it would be so easy to jump to conclusions about both men... the mummy's boys, does the 'friendship' conceal something more, ultimately place them both on the autistic spectrum, job done, Sorted, pigeon-holed, move along, and yet Rónán Hession challenges assumptions and prejudices at every turn, denies a reader their judgements and I emerged from the final page completely grateful to have read this book. It's not slushy or sentimental but it made me question so much about myself, and at a time when we're all questioning so many other certainties too.

I'm bringing you news of this one this minute because it is a mere £1.89 on Kindle at the moment. Now I know (as a reading friend pointed out the other day) that some of us are currently racking up Kindle spending on a par with the GDP of a small nation, and that there will be a reckoning, so perhaps download the sample first and read the first chapter before you commit. And even if you do commit and then don't like, you can always return a Kindle purchase for a refund if done within a certain time frame. 

But I don't think you will be disappointed.

Meanwhile, as we all chug along in our respective restricted worlds, please do share any other good Kindle or otherwise reads that you have discovered.

 

 

 

 

Confessions...

Honestly, here we all are trying to read good books...books that I can hold my head up and be proud to say I've read through these challenging times, and then what happens...

This...

The trouble was that in an effort to avoid switching on the lunchtime news one day I persuaded Bookhound that now was a good time for me to see just one episode of Malory Towers. The BBC have generously made all episodes available at once. I loaded it with caveats...I'll watch the rest on my iPad.... it will probably be awful... you'll hate it but you mustn't mock.... 

And so we watched the first episode...

The next day we watched the second episode...

On the third day Bookhound says 'Is it time for lunch and 'your' serial...'

Note the 'your'...

And so it has carried on and Bookhound will possibly slaughter me for revealing this...but he gets as excited as I do about the lacrosse match, and the Open Day...and what will happen to nasty Gwendoline next...and who will Darrell lose her temper with now...and there you have it. It's a whole new world for a man raised on Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings and the world of Biggles, but it's a return to a familiar world for me as life at Malory Towers, the Cornish clifftop school, unfolds.

First Term at Malory Towers was published in 1946, and the series has never been out of print since, I'm now wondering if there is some sort of theory about the penchant for books about girl's boarding schools in the period immediately after a war.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This occurred to me having recently read Erica Wins Through by Josephine Elder published in the 1920s. Maybe its about security and safety and re-establishing the order...perhaps creating a new version. I'm sure someone has written a PhD on the subject. Various new themes have been introduced to the Malory Towers TV series, including a back story for Darrell and a bit of scandal at a previous school. And whilst pranks prevail discipline is still paramount (and matron is vile) but girls are encouraged and praised for standing up for what is right and fair in the finest traditions of boarding school stories.

Reading very lightly around the subject  I was interested to find a piece, in a collection of essays on the subject of  school stories, by Rosemary Auchmuty outlining the undreamt-of educational opportunities that these schools represented for girls...

'a chance to study seriously, perhaps to aim for university or a career, which in turn offered an alternative to marriage and money of one's own. Games brought girls the comradeship of the team and new physical freedoms. It is easy to underestimate how revolutionary all this was in the 1920s when only a quarter of all girls enjoyed a secondary education.'

Girls could be successful because all things were possible within the all-female educational environment, and the scope of a girl's ambition (or lack of it) is a contrast neatly played out between Darrell and Gwendoline in the TV series.

For whatever reason the indoor scenes were filmed in Toronto whilst the outdoor scenes were filmed at Hartland Abbey in North Devon, and the setting is pitch perfect having also been used for the upcoming film of Rebecca, Sense and Sensibility, The Night Manager and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

It's all a right old wallow I can tell you, smart uniforms, predictable plots, midnight feasts, wandering ghosts and happy outcomes but entirely enjoyable.

I read the books over and again as a child, copies long gone, but for old time's sake I downloaded a sample to my Kindle, started reading and before I knew it I'd found a bargain box set on eBay and couldn't stop myself. Six in the series written by Enid Blyton and another six sequels added at a later date. Enid Blyton was forbidden reading at my state primary school, considered to be a 'poor writer' by the headteacher, though fortunately my parents saw it differently, and the library had an endless supply. It was much later in my life that my dad confessed that he had read them all while I was asleep so that he could join in the conversation with me...and that he had loved them all too. Needless to say our own children were suitably inducted into the world of Enid, both books and videos, because shouldn't all children experience that sense of freedom and adventure so beloved by the Famous Five.

I smiled when I read this recently in the monthly Letter sent out a by 'a publisher'...

'And we were SO surprised when a very very intellectual friend of mine said she was hugely enjoying Anne of Green Gables on Netflix....'

Don't be in the least bit surprised I say. Firstly Anne is the absolute heroine and aren't we all Kindred Spirits right now, and even the 'very very' intellectual need something that offers consolation and safety and certainty. Malory Towers is proving to be our unashamedly nostalgic antidote to so much else at the moment and I'm wondering if you have found your antidotes too...

In that little book of essays on school stories there is a delightful one by Adele Geras. Adele has this to say about the pleasure of reading books like this...

'I do not think it's possible to over-emphasise the pleasure - sometimes a rather guilty pleasure - of having no roughage at all to chew on in a book ..it's just like eating meringues all day long...the last thing we liked was the distinct possibility that we ourselves would end up in a school just like Malory Towers...'

Sadly Adele's re-reading of In the Fifth at Malory Towers as an adult found them distinctly lacking, and she suggests they are best left behind in childhood...too late, I've bought them now, but maybe Adele didn't have a plague in progress, and after all the charity shops will be open again and in need one day. I'll have a go.

Meanwhile, it's perfectly fine to confess your secret antidotes here because I'd love some more suggestions...

 

Stitching a path through...

I hope you all had a good weekend and thank you for all your lovely Easter greetings, and for emails from those saying how pleased you are the scribbles is here. Can I just add how thankful I am that all of you are out there too, keeping our worldwide conversation going, and keeping each other on an even keel when any one of us has a wobble. I had a bit of a moment on the evening of Easter Saturday. The sudden thought that we wouldn’t be seeing the family for heaven knows how long and Easter egg hunts of the past just washed over me unexpectedly and in a flash. 

I doubt I’m alone with these moments.

I woke up on Sunday morning and decided the only way up was quilting. I’ve run out of fabric for The Knot Garden so that is stuck on my sticky fleece wall and on hold..

And I’d been reluctant to start anything new fearing it might always have plague associations...but then quilting is all about stitching whatever is happening in your life into what you are making, so I decided I needed to just woman up, eat chocolate for breakfast as per Easter Sunday tradition, and get on with it.

And so I tasked myself to get properly into Jen Kingwell’s Gypsy Wife Quilt.  This is Jen’s version...

It’s fiendishly complicated as you can see.

I had bought the pattern book ages ago and made a half-hearted start before realising that this thing needed planning, uninterrupted time and masses of concentration.

Then I thought I’d join one of the regular online groups that start in January and make this quilt to a monthly schedule through the year. 

That didn’t happen either.

Well I have no excuses now and by the end of Easter Sunday I’d had lovely chats with our three chicks, all fine in their various worlds, apologised that the Easter Bunny hadn’t quite made it round to all of them (even though they are all in their thirties) and I was soon in the flow with the cutting and piecing. Having added more to my half-hearted beginnings of backalong I’m now well on my way.

I have amassed a good selection of indigo and Japanese fabrics and decided to use these in various permutations...

...and it’s all quite pleasing. Reds, blues and yellow ochres play right into my happy colours so this is feeding good things into my soul.

Meanwhile I hope perhaps some creative projects have seeped into your life, though only if you find them helpful... they are definitely not compulsory.

Or maybe the elusive reading concentration has crept back...

Or perhaps something entirely new and unexpected has helped...

Apparently jigsaw puzzles are in huge demand and we have a 1000 piecer  saved for an emergency moment. 

PS Our first swallow has arrived. Just the one, the advance party, sitting on the wire. He’s sleeping on his own in the verandah waiting for the rest of the team.

 

 

Eastertide

In keeping with tradition the scribbles has rest over Easter, a throwback to my childhood when playing out on Good Friday and Sundays was definitely not allowed.

It seems strange to think that we are ALL coping with the same situation this year, staying at home, flattening the curve, social distancing and many of us missing time with family and friends. But by doing it we know we are winning for Team World and getting to the other side, wherever we are.

Nature has been very kind to us here in The Shire this week. Blue skies, warmth, exquisite sunsets, and that super moon, along with good barn owl watching and I hope that you have had some special times too. Having time to notice them more than usual is a bonus. 

I've also been reading a chapter a day of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis and can’t tell you what a delight it is to walk through those fur coats and out into Narnia. I first read it on holiday in Tintagel when I was about seven. Staying with one of those aunts and uncles your parents gained for you from wartime friendships. Auntie Pam was a teacher at Delabole Primary School and there was always a big pile of books waiting by the bed. What a magical place to read such a magical book. 

So here’s wishing you all the happiest and gentlest of Easter weekends and sharing a few of this week’s best nature moments (including the Belle Époque tulips) for those who might have missed them on Instagram.

 

Mr & Mrs Ravilious

The poster from the exhibition is framed and on the wall because Bookhound called into the Fry Art Gallery at Saffron Walden, when he was up that way backalong, and had a wonderful browse. Mr & Mrs Ravilious proved to be a real treat with so much of Eric and Tirzah’s work on display.

Along with catalogues various my best gift was this. A tea towel far too lovely to use, so instead it is pinned up in my sewing room as reminder that a mere ten yards away is the barn owl nest box with sleeping owls within. This an Edward Bawden illustration.

I’m finding there is much to commend Eric and Tirzah’s work at the moment. They both encapsulate something about a firm foundation to a way of life that we’ve seen temporarily turned upside down. There’s a certainty about it.

Children will walk to school again...

The White Horse won’t have galloped off...

Cuckmere Haven will still be there for the looking at...

The lighthouses will carry on shining..

Our barn owls have been much quieter in the evenings than last year, but apparently this is probably because our pair are already happily matched and there is no need for too much of the mating game to be played. No week-long relentless calls from the nest box as one of them tries to attract another one, that bit’s all done and dusted and with any luck, as long as they both survive, our pair will stay put in their known residence and hunting grounds year on year. They will also want to keep their nest off the radar of any predators so silence is an intentional phase. 

We've been mastering the art of the new digital Wi-fi night vision binoculars, my Mothering Sunday gift, and can now watch what is happening on my iPad screen and take pictures. The quality will improve once we dispense with the window and set up outside, currently the glass blurs the image slightly, but we are still mesmerised at the sight of this...

And watching the owls walk along their newly repaired platforms is a huge relief after last year’s balancing act on a few dilapidated and decidedly precarious broken remains. Ten years-worth of storms had taken their toll so Rick and Mateo from the Barn Owl Trust came to install a new platform back in January. 

But just how long could we go on saying ‘That’s the male ...’ or ‘ Is that the female.’ We’d resisted naming them last year because it felt a bit possessive and, well somehow not right. But we have relented this year, and it was the exhibition poster and the consolation of the art right now that clinched it.

Meet Eric and Tirzah, Mr & Mrs Ravilious (last year’s picture).

Meanwhile I’m wondering whether art or perhaps music is working positively for you right now. 

Please do share in comments, and let us know how you are too...

Pleasings...

It felt like the right time to resurrect Pleasings and I have a few, so please do share yours in comments...

Scoring a supermarket delivery slot might have been my highlight of the century so far. A chance log in at 5am (early bird catches the worm etc) saw me sitting up in bed ordering easy peel clementines, disinfectant (hopeless, sold out weeks ago) and other sundries. We are a fair distance from any sort of shop here so we have always shopped as if for a mini-apocalypse when we do go to save on extra journeys. We are going to try and use local shops too, now that they are setting up and coordinating deliveries.

I booked a hair cut in early March thinking I’d be going to New Zealand (this week). ‘ Go short’ I said to Ed, ‘she’s bound to take me off wilderness camping so the less of it I have to worry about the better.’ Offspringette and I had actually planned a road trip to the very south of South Island, to get as near to Antarctica as we could, so the camping and long drop toilet facilities would have been inevitable and a delight. Of course the potential for this situation to last several months means only one thing...I’m going to have to let Bookhound cut my hair eventually because it drives me bonkers once it’s back down past my ears. I have this vision of us all emerging from confinement looking like the Count of Monte Cristo or Miss Haversham or in my case Worzel Gummidge.

And talking about New Zealand. Offspringette had the brainwave that, in the absence of the real thing, we share a virtual month together. Each day we decide where we are going and what we are doing and we send pictures. I actually get quite excited about it and can’t wait for the  Sheffield Pie Shop and Walking Bealey Spur Track day, plus I expect we’ll stop at Cass Station too.

My sweet peas, sown last October, have had a lovely winter and are now raring to be planted out. We’ve done one lot and just need to build a couple more twigwams for the rest. They are Solstice variety which don’t need long hours of daylight in order to flower, so I could be picking these by the end of April. Vases of sweet peas might just be lifesavers this year.

As well as watching Spooks from episode one (2002) we’ve started watching The Nest, a new series on BBC 1 on Sunday evenings. It’s one of those that quickly takes a hold and we are gripped. A Glasgow couple, desperate for a baby, take up the offer of a surrogacy from a teenage girl who has recently been in care. They know precious little about her but decide to to risk all with their last available embryo. Of dear...what could possibly go wrong. With so many series now on hold, so no Line of Duty or Call the Midwife in the making, there is going to be a dearth of these in the autumn so we are filling up on them now. It’s all about having things to look forward to and distract at the moment too, so that is our viewing sorted for a while.

Good news. I’ve started a grown-up book and am loving it. A copy of Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession arrived in a book parcel from a friend, and if ever there was a book for the now I think this might be one of them. 

Plenty of other good things are happening and this evening (Thursday) the National Theatre are making the first of several productions available to watch for free on YouTube. Tonight it is One Man Two Guvnors starring James Corden. One of the downsides of rural living far from the centre, is the prohibitive cost of getting to that centre for anything like this, so we are looking forward to a night at the theatre. Imagine if someone were to show the stage production of Wolf Hall...we can but hope.

If you have news of any other good things being made available please do share them, and of course do share your own Pleasings in comments too. The bar is never very high because Pleasings is about finding a bit of light in the ordinary day to day, so finding that forgotten bar chocolate (or bottle of gin) at the back of the larder would be right up there with the best just now.

PS Today’s virtual day in New Zealand is a visit to the hot pools in Hanmer Springs

and while we’re there we’ll nip into the deserted but beautifully preserved Queen Mary’s Hospital next door. It won’t be blossom time in Southern Hemisphere April but we’re overlooking minor details like that.

 

 

 

 

Erica Wins Through ~ Josephine Elder

I doubt I’m the only one who has sat down with a pile of books recently, searching for the right one to read, only to find they are all probably the right books, just at the wrong time. In fact quite a lot of my projects seem to be wrong for the moment so there’s been a lot of juggling here.

You might recall I was very excited to settle down and start reading my Dad’s wartime letters to my Mum a while back, having been inspired by Gillian Tindall's The Pulse Glass . The path of true love did not run smooth in the early days of 1944, and things were very on-off-on and off again. My mum was in Liverpool, my dad was doing gunnery training in Kent and it was all quite intriguing (and largely unknown to me). I was also busy investigating what life might have been like for my mum in wartime Liverpool, had made contact with her old school and was really enjoying the whole thing. Then all ‘this’ happened and out of the blue and unexpectedly (though hardly surprisingly) it all made me very emotional. That is the very last thing my parents would have wanted for me...I could just imagine them telling me to ‘put them away’ and so I have. There will be a right moment but again, it isn’t now.

I had somehow thought that every available ounce of emotional energy was needed for the present rather than the past, none of which explains why the shelf that eventually won me over was my modest Girls Gone By collection. Republished girls’ fiction and I settled on Erica Wins Through by Josephine Elder written in 1924, because it sounded as if Erica, the semi-feral child from Dartmoor, is going to have a baptism of fire at her new boarding school but will emerge triumphant.

It's a theme I am assiduously applying to the here and now... that we will get through this 'thing'.

She really only has herself to blame, because Erica has basically gone on strike since being left at home with a governess, this after her brother John is sent off the boarding school. A bit of a protest ensues which culminates in Erica cutting off her long hair , at which point her despairing father relents and off she goes. There doesn’t seem to be a mother, which is an interesting angle left unexplored by Josephine Elder but open to all sorts of musings for the reader.

On arrival at boarding school all does not run smoothly as you might expect, but it does end happily, as you might also expect from the title. There will be a lot of beastliness towards Erica, who again doesn’t make life any easier for herself by being a bit of an enigma, as well as streets ahead in Latin, but ultimately this is a book about friendship and compromise and meeting friends half way. I'm thinking friendships are more precious than ever in people's lives right now and perhaps some of yours, like mine, do go back to school days.

When class horribles Betty and Joan go to Head of House Margaret to tell tales about Erica there is a moment of pure deliciousness as Margaret challenges them mercilessly. Margaret, who apparently plays hockey like a whirlwind and tennis like a daffodil fairy, is also very fair-minded and will have none of it, dismantling the flimsy evidence and sending the pair off with fleas in their respective ears. Sustained by Margaret's wise counsel Erica makes two very good friends in Pen and Evelyn and suddenly life improves. Whilst the story does descend into some jolly japes towards the end it really didn’t matter. I can only begin to imagine how cheering books like this must have been for young girls who were emerging from the devastation wrought by the First World War, and Josephine Elder is certainly instilling a bit of gumption and ambition into their lives. 

There is also a wonderful hockey match which took me right back to my days as Centre Forward and sometime Captain of the First XI. I really can't believe how much I loved running up and down in a gym skirt in the freezing cold, pelted with rain, splattered with mud and nursing bruised shins. Orange boats at half time and tea afterwards with chocolate swiss roll. We'd play against all the local schools, Tiffins, Rosebery, Wimbledon High, James Allen's, City of London Freemen's, Sutton High, St Philomena's Convent, Wallington Girls, and us Nonsuch Girls were fearsome opponents. If any of you went to one of those maybe we first met on the hockey pitch, in which case I'll apologise now for that clout around the ankles. 

With so much happening it's taken me an age to read this single book, but it's also been a wonderful retreat into a bygone era. I am unashamed to admit that its been a pleasant escape and I'll be doing more of it.

Meanwhile, if you have scored any reading or audio book successes please do share them in comments..

And were you a hockey fiend too...

Or netball, or gymnastics, or tennis, or athletics or anything else... 

Or was hiding in the cloakroom more your thing (I've done that too).

 

 

 

An Outing ~ St Raphael, Huccaby

I think we could all do with a bit of an outing today don't you and maybe a nice pot of tea and a slice of cake...

It is almost twenty years since I read Miss Garnett’s Angel by Salley Vickers, but as we wandered around the tiny church of St Raphael - Huccaby, up on High Dartmoor a while back,  I remembered the book and its story of Tobias and the Angel Raphael which unfolded alongside Julia Garnet’s journey around Venice.

That morning we’d actually seen a glimpse of sunshine whilst sitting at the kitchen table and decided we’d better hotfoot out somewhere nice and enjoy it before it rained again. The light seems to have been quite unusual this winter. On lots of days it’s felt like a total eclipse is in progress, you know that sort of diminishing half-light that drops very quickly and has you dashing to put a light on before the gloom descends. We ended up driving across Dartmoor and out around the Dart estuary to visit Coleton Fishacre as our first proper National Trust wander of the year.

Coleton Fishacre, on the south Devon coast, was once owned by the D’Oyly Carte opera family and its 1930’s Art Deco design perfectly suited my reading of The Acceptance World, the third book in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. There is a spur of the moment weekend invitation for Nicholas Jenkins to Peter Templar’s house in the country and Coleton Fishacre could so easily be that house. I could visualise it in an instant, and here’s a glimpse..

and here’s the room where I could imagine Nicholas and Jean embarking on their grand affair...

And at this point I must ask forgiveness because I think we might have to shelve The Dance to the Music of Time project for a while. I thought I'd be able to soldier on with it, but I think my attentions are needed on too many fronts to do it justice.

I'm prioritising... I want to keep writing posts for all of you here, and answering comments, I want to keep talking to family and friends whenever I need to and I've offered to be an NHS phone volunteer. I want to go walking around the fields when I can, keep the home front going and fall asleep on the sofa at 11.30 am if I need too. I suspect we are all pacing ourselves through this and its really important that we do that. It's something thirty years working in the NHS taught me well and so I am paying good attention to it.

I'm so sorry, I hate to default having set it up but hope you will all understand. We will pick it up again when the Old Normal returns.

On the way back from Coleton Fishacre we stopped at St Raphael’s church at Huccaby to see the snowdrops. Ours had been and gone but the High Dartmoor ones flower much later and these are famous locally and there were carpets of them...

The church was built in 1868 by the Rector of Lydford (just a few miles from us here) for people who lived too far away to attend the parish church at Lydford, and was designed to be used as a school during the week and for worship on Sundays. He built another church at nearby Postbridge, St Gabriel's, and we have St Michael's Brentor near us here. I like to think of the archangels being the guardians of us all right now.

The church still has the Victorian school desks (with inkwells) and which still function as pews.

Unprepossessing from the outside but light and bright inside. Perishing cold on the day we visited but there was a huge stone fireplace with a wood burning stove that must heat it nicely when the church is in use.

I had half-planned a re-read of Miss Garnett's Angel but events overtook and suddenly it didn't fit my mood. But no matter because it was the battalions of snowdrops that took my breath away, and thinking back now to those heady days of freedom I just thought I'd share them with you as a reminder that they'll be up again next year... same as every year. 

PS Keep an eye on the Instagram feed over here <<<<<<< and please do join me there if you would like to, because I’m trying to go on a daily ‘outing’ on foot with a little commentary. 

 

Busy doing nothing...or so it seems...

I always remember my mum and dad singing this song as a duet in a church pantomime many years ago, and me of a young enough age to be proud rather than embarrassed. 

We're busy doin' nothin'
Workin' the whole day through
Tryin' to find lots of things not to do
We're busy going nowhere
Isn't it just a crime
We'd like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time

Thank you so much for all your tips on routines, and what is working for you in this Strange Time that just gets stranger by the hour. We have read and implemented quite a few of your suggestions ourselves. We've both found ourselves thinking that we have to be productive in this time and not waste a minute, in fact be very productive, so we were making big plans each day...Bookhound would paint the house, I would make a dozen quilts, but somehow it doesn’t quite seem to work that way, so we’ve narrowed down our expectations.

I’m quite pleased to have potted up the new dahlias to get them started; some beauties from Peter Nyssen including  Downham Royal, Black Jack and Edge of Joy, while Bookhound, having watched a YouTube video, is currently ‘shearing’ and grooming the dogs himself. The post-winter trip to Pongo’s Salon is deferred. Armed with a pair of clippers he is doing them in instalments, because apparently it’s exhausting, so they do look a bit unusual and I can see this might end up being like painting the Forth Bridge. By the time the tail end is reached it’ll be time to do the ears again. Both dogs adore the whole process and lie there in the sun blissfully unaware that they are not about to win Crufts, fur is flying round the garden and will probably end up in bird’s nests. Next will be the baths, following which they will both jump in the next trough of muddy water they see to show their gratitude.

Possibly the best bit of our day is the afternoon walk to the woods, and right now they are looking stunning, though the next best bit is the fields on the way up.

We’re not that good at crop recognition (or birdsong) so we’ve been watching the four fields we walk through to the woods with interest. Ploughed and sown last autumn after last year’s barley crop (we eventually recognised it as barley in about June) we’ve watched green cabbage-y looking shoots emerge...maybe it’s a nitrogen crop we thought...surely not four whole fields of kale or something. It was about a week ago that the buds started to appear and having decided it wasn’t broccoli either (told you we were useless) it finally dawned on us that it was oil seed rape. Now like it or loath it, and I know it’s an allergen for many, what a brilliant piece of good fortune this is, because if ever there was a year when we absolutely needed to see Fields of Gold it is this one.

This week’s sunshine has really stepped the countryside up a gear. The hedgerows are starting to flower (celandines), trees reluctantly and then rapidly edging into green, the shoots in the woods holding promise of another carpet of bluebells, nature doing its stuff century on century. Good old reliable nature.

According to the 2019 diary the swallows returned on April 12th. We waved them off in September and every year, as they do their farewell circuits of the house and leave, I always wonder what might have happened by the time they come back. I hadn’t quite envisaged this, but goodness me they will be very welcome visitors this year.

And then there are the barn owls.

I’m pleased to report they are very noisy every evening at the moment, though we can’t see them because it’s dark. You only say that sort of thing to the Gamekeeper once and before you know it he’s round on Mothering Sunday, two metres of agonising social distance on the verandah, with a pair of wireless and Bluetooth digital night vision binoculars as a present. I’m that excited I can’t tell you, because once we’ve figured it all out ( more youtube videos) we can set them up on a tripod and watch the comings and goings on an iPad screen, as well as recording what we see on a memory card. This all bodes well for sharing the excitement here through the summer. 

So that’s us but how about you. I’m sure you are all being incredibly and amusingly resourceful too...please do let us know of new innovations in your life. 

And I’m hoping you are all able to get out for a walk if you want to...I’d love to know where you go and what you see...

And is anyone else listening to The Archers?

We all want to move to Ambridge because they don’t seem to have heard of C-19 yet, and I’m really hoping they decide not to introduce it into the script. It would be lovely to have a place to go where it doesn’t exist, and in the meantime there are other good storylines developing. 

PS I almost forgot to say that I defrosted the freezer too, have you done anything quite as exciting?

 

 

 

NHS volunteers...

Many are needed very quickly, as we knew they would be, and there are a range of options. 

For those self-isolating at home maybe think about signing up as a phone volunteer? 

The link for England is here.

Public Service Announcement Three - Routine

Someone sent me a lovely message saying ‘Have a good weekend’ and I thought ...weekend??

Is it the weekend??

in fact it is Mothering Sunday today and many of us won’t be able to hug or see our children, or our mums, but I’m sending a bunch of primrose everyone’s way because I refuse to leave anyone out. We all ‘mother’ in one way or another, especially at the moment.

But isn’t it strange that I barely know what day it is and am wondering if you are finding the same. Suddenly all the weekly markers have disappeared beyond the bin men on a Wednesday, and it was at this moment that we realised we needed a bit more of a routine...because suddenly time doesn’t matter really and it’s easy to slip into an existence.

I’m sure you will all have lots of tips and advice about what is working for you, so please do share in comments. There are no rights or wrongs but it might help others to know. 

I think there has been so much news to absorb and so much certainty removed from our daily lives on a worldwide basis, that it has the potential to create a state of shock from which we need to quickly contain anxieties if we can, regroup and reorganise. Perhaps control the things we can and acknowledge and somehow let go of the things we can’t. 

We are making sure we get out for a good, long,slow walk each day and are finding ways to extend it beyond the usual basically because we are not rushing back in order to be somewhere else. We don’t see another soul but I am very aware that some of you may be more confined to barracks by circumstances than we are, so please do share any tips about how you are dealing with that if you want to.

And then there’s the news....

From being a Fear of Missing Out person embracing everything on every channel and in every newspaper, I have become a much more discerning reader of the news so we have now created a cut off point for ourselves if possible of no news after the 6pm bulletin. We are trying to watch a good engrossing box set or recent series (The Split at the moment) each evening, or Bookhound and I migrate to our working corners and read etc. Again what is working for you...please do share, especially suggestions of good TV series to watch. We do have Netflix which would be great if our broadband was full speed but currently it is snail’s pace. 

I’ll be honest, reading hasn’t been easy, concentrating seems quite difficult at the moment but I feel sure this will settle down. Right now keeping in touch with family and friends in ways various is proving essential...it will all balance out soon I’m sure.

This brings me onto sleep.

If you are still managing your nightly average that is brilliant, if you are not it can be really hard. Waking in the night with that darkest hour just before dawn, fretting about family and friends, or ourselves, or have we got enough dog food, or OMG I’ve forgotten to get any disinfectant ( I really had). Sleep experts out there will know much more than me but isn’t it about thirty minutes or so before your circadian rhythms come around again and you feel sleepy. Kindle reading or drifting off to an audio book helps, even putting out a post among my circle of Facebook friends to see if anyone else is awake has worked this week. And it is an amazing comfort to know you are not the only one. 

And maybe you have more tips for sleep or night-waking so please do share them. We have become advocates of the Anytime Nap. If Bookhound or I feel overwhelmingly sleepy at any moment during the day, we don’t fight it, we slink off for a quick power snooze and wake up refreshed and recovered. This might not be for everyone but we are working to different rules for different times.

Meanwhile I hope you are all managing to cope with this new normal and please don’t be afraid to say if you feel you are not. It’s entirely understandable and I’m sure there will be lots of help and support and suggestions here that may help. Those that feel able please do respond to others in comments if you want to and I’ll be in there as usual.

And here’s a thing....

I’m rightly proud of my NHS career and will admit that I am really feeling the pinch now, because every instinct tells my generation to get out there and man the pumps in times of crisis, and yet the best help we can be is to stay out of the way and not become a liability. There are other ways to help and the next generation have taken over. I’ll bet quite a few of you have family or friends on the front line ( and not just in the NHS) and are feeling immense pride mingled with fears for them. The daughter of one of our ‘godmothers’ decided to change career a few years ago and do her nurse training, she qualified last year and chose to head into a career in intensive care, (good idea I said at the time, they’ll want you anywhere in the world) and here she is at the pointy end at Derriford in Plymouth.

Rosie is the pint-sized one holding the words ‘stay home’ 

She sent me a message, ‘You have put enough time in, stay home, stay safe

Bless all of them and here’s a lovely rainbow, guarding the sleeping barn owls, just because...

All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well and fingers crossed for the return of the swallows soon and owlets to come.

Tuck boxes at the ready...

...look what’s coming  

For those of us in the U.K. the BBC have brought forward their twelve part series of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series to start next Monday.

Fear not those across the seas who might feel they have not been chosen for the team... we will be talking about it here and sharing the pillow fights and midnight feasts with you all.

 

The Simon & Garfunkel Story

A musical diversion today, in fact an outing, and please stand up and take a bow Andrea Hoile (in fact have a medal too) because I have you to thank for this...

Andrea mentioned, on the post celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Bridge Over Troubled Water, that the stage show The Simon & Garfunkel Story was playing for one night only at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth on Sunday March 1st. We're quite fond of the place but had lapsed recently and not checked the programme, and so dashing on line instantly to find it was all but sold out was a bit of a moment. Hardly any seats together, just two which we put our mark on and then went to pay...

Panic verging on hyperventilation when the card wouldn't go through (me)

'I HAVE TO BE THERE...'

Measured refreshing of screen and starting again (Bookhound)

And breath.

We quite thought they'd be the worst seats in the house, behind a pillar, partial view of the stage, something like that, but at least they were in the Circle, rather than the Upper Circle which is so vertiginous in the Theatre Royal that I feel one forward tilt of more than five degrees and I'd be falling over the edge. Imagine our surprise when we eventually sat down to find the seats were so good we'd actually book them again. Oh alright...I'll tell you because we won't be going that often ...F3 & F4.

On the drive into Plymouth we bet serious pretend money on how the show would open. Mine was on a darkened stage and a solo voice singing 'Hello darkness my old friend'.

I won.

The funny thing was that the place was packed and heaving with clones of us. All our age, our era, all silently lip synching and word perfect and such a wonderful atmosphere, as if we were all old friends. Talking to the person next to you about your Simon & Garfunkel life. The woman next to me had been bought tickets by her daughter as a present. The poor daughter was there and hadn't the first clue about the music, thought she might recognise some of the later songs...her mother and I looked on in pity at a life devoid of The Sound of Silence and Homeward Bound and Kathy's Song...just imagine the levels of deprivation. The mother agreed she'd failed to convert her to the cause, unlike our three exposed in utero and ever thereafter, poor things.

The two performers had the duo down to a tee, clothes, mannerisms, pitch of voices and arrangements were as as close as could be, with occasional added zing from backing musicians and a commentary from the two about their life from the 1960s through to the 1981 reunion concert in Central Park. That bit was clever because we were made to feel part of that 500,000 strong event. Meanwhile, in 1981, I was completing Offspringette's in utero and post-natal indoctrination of the best music she'd ever hear and how grateful she would be to me...maybe.

Several songs stick in my mind as the stand out moments of the evening

Kathy's Song was sublime, always one of the simplest and most beautiful, and how many of us wanted to be 'Kathy' and have Paul Simon sing that to us and about us when we were sixteen...

Oh just me maybe.

For Emily Whenever I May Find Her, and I think originally a tribute to Emily Dickinson, but unaccompanied and in perfect tune sung by 'Art'.

Old Friends and there were Bookhound and I and  'it's terribly strange to be seventy' and thinking did we ever imagine that we'd be three years off  seventy (him three, me four) and I'd first learned to play those chords at seventeen, five years before I had even met him. I might have had a tear in my eye.

The Only Living Boy in New York  it was explained, was written by Paul Simon when Art Garfunkel left him to go and make a film in Mexico. 'Tom' was Art's name when they first set up as the duo Tom and Jerry. It was wistful and melancholy and the words and chords ebbed and flowed around the theatre. It lives on in my mind and now in the car, because Bookhound bought me the CD of the show and we now singalong as we drive.

And then of course there was Bridge Over Troubled Water. I actually went and found Dominic Potts, who was playing Art Garfunkel and signing programmes in the foyer afterwards, to tell him that I'd heard Art Garfunkel sing that live at the Albert Hall in April 1970 and he had matched it note for note and to perfection.

It was standing ovation time by the end, and the friendly atmosphere spilled over into the queue at the ticket machine in the  car park. I think we all had a bit of a funny feeling that this might be one of our last crowded space gatherings for a while, but hey ho, we will always have the songs.

If you have seen it too please do share your thoughts in comments...

And do you have a favourite Simon & Garfunkel song, or a moment that a song reminds you of..

And how about this from the Central Park concert of 1981 because I suspect a lot of people are Homeward Bound right now...

Public Service Announcement - Two

I’ve been reading all your comments and thinking of you all and our different situations whilst sharing the same fears and unknowns, and marvelling at the way we can do this. 

This after an exasperating day of no broadband and very limited mobile signal, while BT replaced some of the cabling between us and the exchange three miles away. It might be nice if they warned you sometimes but mustn’t grumble, we must be grateful it’s done. We are the last telegraph pole on the run and I think by the time the signal gets to us it’s exhausted, so we might see some speed improvements now which would be good. I tell you I hold my breath some days when I write a blog post, press save and that little wheel spins. Bookhound can probably remember the days when it gets lost in the ether...they are usually memorable.

But at least I did get the freezer defrosted. You know the moment when the iceberg the size of the Titanic is stopping the door from shutting so it has to be done.

And I shouldn’t moan because the sun was shining and there was a very rare sighting in our garden...

Heaven knows what it is. If you have any ideas do let me know...

Your comments are amazing and very moving thank you for them. They show, despite those different and varied situations,  how ‘in the same boat’ we all are and how much it helps just to know that and share it. What extraordinary times we are living through 

Elaine Oswald has very kindly typed up the list of reading suggestions... thank you Elaine, though I think I might already have thanked you three times in one e mail sentence, so I’ve cut and pasted below. And thank you to Pye and Fran who did likewise. If anyone would like me to send them a copy please just email Reading List to dovegreyretreats at gmail dot com and I will send it across to you.

And  I have a few other exciting shared reading things planned for us too, and have inveigled a ‘well-known’ author to help, so watch this space.

Meanwhile here’s a starter for ten with your suggestions. Elaine’s careful italics for the titles seem to have got lost in the cut and paste, but hopefully you can sort it all out

Claire Lombardo Most Fun We Ever Had

Mick Herron

Anne Tyler
Jane Austen

Philip Pullman

Elly Griffiths Ruth Galloway series (and others)​

Roger Deakin Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
Madeline Bunting Love of Country
Adrian Bell Corduroy
Joanna Rakoff My Salinger Year
Barbara Kingsolver Unsheltered

Alexander McCall Smith

A Gentleman in Moscow

Lanny

A Suitable Boy

Maggie O'Farrell

Matt Haig The Humans

Hilary Mantel

Georgette Heyer

E F Benson

Benjamin Moser Biography of Susan Sontag

Frances Hodgson Burnett Secret Garden

Dorothy Whipple

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Beth Morrey Saving Missy

Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure

Charles Dickens

Diary of a Nobody

Adrian Mole

Pursuit of Love

The Secret Commonwealth
The Confessions of Frankie Langton
The Other Bennet Sister
The Dutch House
A Single Thread
Rebecca
Milkman

Sybil Marshall A Nest Of Magpies 

The Other Bennet Sister 

Mary Stewart Thorneyhold

Rumer Godden

Rosemary Sutcliffe Blue Remembered Hills

Arthur Ransome

Decameron

Elizabeth Goudge

Gail Honeyman  Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Sue Monk Kidd

Helen Hanff 84 Charing Cross Rd

Vernon Coleman Country Doctor

Louise Penny Inspector Gamache

Alan Bradley

Patrick Taylor The Irish Country Doctor

Gail Bowen
Terry Fallis The Best-Laid Plans

Amanda Jette Knox  Love Lives Here. 
Joan Oliver Goldsmith  How Can We Keep From Singing: Music and the Passionate Life

Alison Uttley A Traveller in Time

EM Almedingen

Ruth M Arthur

Isobella Tree Wilding

Rosamund Young The Secret Life of Cows

Robert and Suzanne Massie Journey

Louise M Alcott

Maigret

Laurie King

Niall Williams This is Happiness

Vernon Coleman

Fiona Stafford  The Long, Long Life of Trees

Michelle Obama Becoming
Helen Taylor Why Women read Fiction (in which DGR gets a whole section!)

Three Men in a Boat

1066 and all that

Terry Pratchett

P G Wodehouse

Stephen Leacock Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town 

Elizabeth Strout

Maeve Binchey

Elizabeth Strout

Adele Geras  Love, or Nearest Offer

Harry Smith biography?

Jane Harper The Lost Man

Jan Struthers  Mrs Miniver

Wind in the Willows

Bernadine Evaristo Girl, Woman, Other

The Iceberg
On Chapel Sands
The Moth Snowstorm
The Secret Barrister

Poetry

Kathleen Jamie

Jane Kenyon

Rainer Maria Rilke

Tom Hennen 

Mary Oliver

Raymond Antrobus Perseverance

Marianne Moore 

Brian Bilston

Podcasts

https://www.slowdownshow.org/

Public Service Announcement

Please wash your hands...

I could pretend nothing unusual is happening but in the end I decided that as we've had to pull on our big pants here in the U.K, I really should come and ask you how you are all doing out there. 

Covid-19 is upon us all and isn’t it the strangest time. The greatest public health challenge in a generation and as a practitioner trained in the art of community preventive medicine, I’ve know for weeks that we would reach this point. Shelved it in the back of my mind until now, but ‘tis here. 

We did our usual shop the other day which is based on the fact we are self-isolated at the best of times and so keep well stocked up. It was clearly fashionable and British to only have about a dozen things in your trolley, and then there was the one pack of toilet roll sitting on an otherwise empty aisle. We passed it twice and clearly no one wanted to be thought to be panic buying and seizing it. We caved at the third pass to frowns and tsking and fled to the checkout feeling like traitors to the cause.

The truth was, and I hadn’t said a word to any of you, but my flights were booked and on or about April 2nd I was just going to post a surprise picture from the top of the Port Hills in Christchurch to tell you I was in New Zealand visiting Offspringette for a month and to keep an eye out for nice pictures, because that was the plan.

I feel sure it would have looked something like this...

Sadly and for obvious reasons that is now not the plan, I’ll be here planting out my sweet peas and greeting the arriving swallows in April instead, and doing my bit for the nation, whatever that may be.

Oh yes and watching the barn owls because our pair seem to have survived the deluge that was February (we, like many of you, had over 300% of our usual rainfall) are very happily settled in the nest box again.

Anyway, it never rains but it pours and having just listened to the latest press conference we know we are in for a difficult time here in the U.K. and that we all have a responsibility to keep calm, help each other, do the right thing at the right time and follow the science-based advice that we are being given. We are now adding new words to our vocabulary like ‘flattening the curve’ and I have absolute confidence in Public Health England to get this right whilst being quite smitten with Prof Chris and Sir Patrick. Buying time could help us enormously here, research is happening at warp speed and there are already promising signs of treatments for the acute phase.

I don’t want us to get into any political debate about rights or wrongs of strategies if we can help it...would you mind? Each country must deal with this in the way that they see fit for their population and according to their own advisors. And I’ve replied (nicely) to enough people on social media who think it’s been ‘silly hysteria’ or ‘media hype’ or ‘just like flu’ so again, forgive me, we are now beyond that. We have the facts and for now we don’t have the immunity, we must all take this seriously and protect the vulnerable even if our own encounter with it might be slight.

But what I do want to do is offer this opportunity to share and contain the anxiety load amongst each other if there is any. Especially if you do live alone, or are far from family, or are generally fearful, or have anything going on that makes you more vulnerable and you are worried. 

Here’s a space to share it and maybe we can all support each other, and of course all tips and suggestions very welcome. Deciding to control the things we can control is often a good plan. We’ve bought a huge jigsaw puzzle, some Vicks Vapour Rub for inhalations, cough mixture, enough Paracetamol to do serious damage and we have a house to sort out after the winter and a garden waiting to be planted up. Plenty of distractions, and lots of fresh air and fresh fruit and vegetables to boost immune systems and keeping in contact with family and friends and neighbours.

Oh yes, and good old fashioned soap for hand washing because it destroys the oily layer on the outside of the virus and hastens its demise.

But now’s the moment ...

Comfort Reading...your best suggestions.

Let’s put a list together of books that will sooth and calm. Books that will distract and engross when it can be hard to concentrate. Fiction, non-fiction, children’s fiction, poetry... anything.

You suggest and I’ll compile the list and post in a few days time. Maybe not Journal of a Plague Year or anything like that. Mind you, I read it last year...it was an absolute revelation.

And of course I’ll try and keep it to business as usual here, books and bookish thoughts as and when, sewing, gardening, quilting etc. But I didn’t want to go further without acknowledging the elephant in the room that is Covid-19. 

So how is everyone doing...

Please do leave a comment if you want to and know that I am sending you good and positive anti-viral thoughts xxx

 

The Mirror & the Light...

Firstly, thank you so much for all your wonderful and very kind comments on the dovegreyreader scribbles fourteenth birthday. Bookhound has done the washing up and flicked the Dyson round, so all is calm again.

And no, don’t panic, I haven’t finished it, but have just put The Mirror & the Light down for a rest at the one hundred page mark having suddenly wondered what it must be like for an author to know that thousands, even tens of thousands, of people are reading your book at the same time...over a wet and windy weekend in March.

The thought has a certain power to it and one I’m sure Hilary Mantel must be aware of.

I’ve heard that her event at the Southbank Centre was nothing short of magnificent, and I’m sure many of you watched the TV programme on BBC 2 on Saturday evening which was equally so.

Meanwhile I now have the book in triplicate, hardback, Kindle and audio.

The ‘fetch’ from the bookshop in Plymouth was as exciting as collecting any book you’ve waited years for could be. I’d preordered and thus supposedly saved £7, except we drove an eighty mile round trip to get it, got stuck in a slow traffic jam for half and hour with the engine running, had to pay £2.80 to park the car, ended up needing sustenance in the M&S cafe and so I think came out of it in financial deficit. 

But at least I can say I was there on the dawning of the day.

The book sat there all day but the Kayaker called in briefly after nine weeks in Africa so I had to do the good mother thing, plus with extremely poor timing it was the day the sour dough starter was ready and I had to make my first loaf...what was I thinking...

I was thinking this will be a Good Thing but holy moley what a palaver of feeding the starter, and stirring and dividing and feeding some more, and now that I’ve given it life it seems to be like having a baby in the fridge that I must nourish every five days. If I’m honest I think I might have skimped on the kneading and knocking back phases because I was busy talking and hearing about the nine weeks in Africa. It was 9pm before it had risen twice and gone in the oven. Suffice to say, flavour delicious, texture needs a considerable amount of work.

Talking of babies, weighing in at 2lbs 13ozs, The Mirror & the Light is a good sized premature one at odds with the book’s gestational age of several years, and I’ve had to arrange book pillows etc to avoid tendinitis of the the wrist or compromising the blood supply to my feet. Anyway I finally settled down and managed twenty pages before I fell asleep...but what a first twenty pages it was. 

I had thought to have another book on the go at the same time (Women in Black by Madeleine St John has arrived, thank you for the recommend) for some respite, but it soon became clear that I was in this one book for the duration and with no wish to leave 1536 for sunnier climes.

So that’s me, anyone else out there reading...

Hilary Day and the dovegreyreader 14th birthday dawns...

I honestly only meant to write this thing for a few months, if that.

I felt sure I'd run out of ideas...

No one would read it...

The novelty would wear off.

How well I remember my joy the day the stats showed that twenty people had read it, only to tell my Dad and for him to confess that probably eighteen of those might have been him because he was so pleased I was doing it.

Anyway here we are, still here fourteen years on and  millions of words later; 4517 posts, 4,177,464 visitors and I think some of you might have been here from the very earliest days for which I thank you, along with all those who have found and joined in with this little corner of the internet since. A place to share our love of books and so much more.

Bookhound has kindly laid on a little celebratory spread so please do help yourself...

But really today is not about me, it is all about Hilary.

Hilary Day is here at last and I will be off somewhere to buy my copy of The Mirror and the Light.

Anyone else...

 

 

Bring Up the Bodies ~ Hilary Mantel

Continuing with Hilary Week as we move towards our Hilary Day Party on Thursday. It is July 2012 and I am (eventually) breathlessly excited about Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel...

 

There were several false starts. Sixty or so pages in (for the second time) I had mistakenly transported Bring Up the Bodies to Orkney and back thinking it would be great holiday reading, except on this occasion I was wrong. Clearly my book brain does what I need it to and switches off dramatically when I am on holiday to allow my looking brain to take over for a while. 150 pages in and perhaps I could have taken the book anywhere and managed, as I had discovered with Wolf Hall (will I never learn).

The reader is the interloper here, the 'foreigner' whose initial presence raises suspicions, conversations might be a little guarded, information cloaked in secrecy, and the reader will need their wits about them if they are to immerse themselves invisibly into the day to day flow of things, which barely seem to have missed a stride to let them in the door. Then the task is to blend in seamlessly as part of Hilary Mantel's Tudor fabrics and furnishings, and with eyes in the back of the head just watch and listen and figure it all out as the conspiracy. the plotting and the intrigue and the fear gathers pace around them.

The secret of success, I have discovered, is to relax into the book, to feel and smell and hear it, something which Hilary Mantel makes incredibly easy as her brush moves effortlessly back and forth from the particular to the general. This world so familiar to its inhabitants must be made likewise for the reader, and once I spotted the little whispers of inclusion that were offered I was in...

...heard the rustle of the satin sleeves,

...noticed the way someone's status, upwardly mobile, is denoted by their clothing as it moves from canvas to worsted to damask,

...tasted the food... the lemon cakes flavoured with lavender, the elderflowers simmered in sugar syrup and poured over halved strawberries...noticed the primrose petal on the cheese cake.

...wandered through the noisy St George's Day celebrations with the cloth and paper dragons swaying through the streets.

...spectated and gasped as the jousting unseats yet another who has failed to break his instinct, because given a chance the that instinct will always be to swerve at the last minute.

...looked on as that minxy Anne Boleyn falls out of favour,



...and meek Jane Seymour waits patiently in the wings.

So I have now finished the book after reading the first sixty pages three times, but on the third occasion I had cleared the reading decks properly, only allowing interventions that offered respite, as I made my way back in time and back into the heart and mind of Thomas Cromwell, Crumb to his friends, Cremuel to those for whom English is not their first language, and me stepping nervously towards the end of the book. I could hardly bear to imagine how Hilary Mantel, no slouch when it comes to writing up a bit of eviscerating blood and gore, would deal with all this... i.e. the be-heading bit, to the point where I had to make sure I timed this right. For example I suspected it wouldn't do to read the final fifty pages last thing at night and then expect to sleep any time soon.

I was right.

Of course we all know the outcome in general terms but quite how the story of Henry and Anne happens day to day has to be up for discussion and some surmising, something which Hilary Mantel elaborates on in an author's note at the end of the book...

'The circumstances surrounding the fall of Anne Boleyn have been controversial for centuries. The evidence is complex and sometimes contradictory; the sources are often dubious, tainted and after-the-fact. There is no official transcript of her trial, and we can reconstruct her last days only in fragments, with the help of contemporaries who may be inaccurate, biased, forgetful, elsewhere at the time, or hiding under a pseudonym...'

And what of Cromwell himself..

'Where to begin with Cromwell? Some start with his sharp little eyes, some start with his hat...wherever they begin, the final impact is the same: if he had a grievance against you, you wouldn't like to meet him at the dark of the moon...'

And I am instantly reminded of the man so well established in my mind from Wolf Hall, and now from Bring Up the Bodies, with the most wonderful and evocative opening to a book imaginable, reminding me of those significant life events that may (just may) have made Cromwell into the man he has become. As he watches 'the girls'... the hawks soaring and swooping, birds of prey out on the hunting grounds, on a day...

'so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.'

and the birds become a transmigration of the souls of his dead wife and daughters, Cromwell's grief is writ large and I imagine it like sign-writing in the sky that is going to hover over everything he thinks and does in the next 400 pages.

This is what I love about writing like this, a catalyst that allows my imagination to soar off on a frolic of its own, and I was gone a while, because though it may have been an invention of my own I then constantly envisaged Cromwell as a hawk too. A man of prey with that hawk's-eye view overseeing everything, missing nothing, pouncing and swooping on his own victims when they came within his reach and his need.... and I quickly diverted to Ted Hughes's poem from The Hawk in the Rain... Hawk Roosting..

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. 
Inaction, no falsifying dream 
Between my hooked head and hooked feet: 
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. 

The convenience of the high trees! 
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray 
Are of advantage to me; 
And the earth's face upward for my inspection....

Much later in the book Hilary Mantel confirms what I think I already know...

'He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your rib cage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.'

This, like so many points in the book, a moment when I had to close it and think about what I had just read carefully, dwell a while on the implications, though truth be told I was also procrastinating about finally finishing a book that I didn't want to end...perhaps because I knew the axe thing was coming...but also because I almost can't bear the wait for the final book of the trilogy. 

The end when it does come is mercifully swift for both Anne and the reader and involves a well-concealed four-foot long sword rather an axe, whilst the plotting and machinations to achieve it all are breathtaking in the extreme. Cromwell, doing Henry's dirty work for him is quietly terrifying and if ever there was a book that ensured you feel the fear of those that come under his gaze... well this is it.

It all sent me back to Ted Hughes and the final stanza of Hawk Roosting... 

The sun is behind me. 
Nothing has changed since I began. 
My eye has permitted no change. 
I am going to keep things like this.

And, whilst Cromwell may well yearn for the day (to borrow from Ted Hughes) that his 'eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this' we all know there may be trouble ahead. Cromwell may be the master at keeping one step ahead (sorry) of the game when he sits on top of the world, but has already admitted that his head feels a little wobbly on his neck. Thomas Cromwell of all people knows how precarious and potentially untenable his position may become, so I am impatiently and deliciously intrigued to see how Hilary Mantel will ultimately present his downfall.

 

Wolf Hall ~ Hilary Mantel

Well the day has almost dawned.

The day I have been waiting for since I wrote this first post on here about Wolf Hall back in July 2009, and I think the only thing to do is work towards Hilary Day on Thursday March 5th with a revisiting of my un-contained, unbridled excitement  of eleven years ago, at having read the first of what was to become a trilogy.

March 5th also happens to be the dovegreyreader scribbles fourteenth birthday so I think we should have a virtual party don't you...a double celebration with a jolly big urn of tea, Cromwell Cakes and Dove Doughnuts or something. You're all invited of course, and we can all sit and stroke our copies of The Mirror and the Light. Forget the party games of old, we're all grown ups now, we'll hive off into our corners and start reading.

And so here it is. Me and Wolf Hall July 2009...

 

 

No apologies for a post about as long as the reign of Henry VIII because this is a vast book and I don't seem able to do it justice on the turn of a groat. 

In the end there was only one reading method that seemed to suit Wolf Hall. Sitting on the bed with the book well-propped and a plate of bacon toasted lark's tongue sandwiches and a pot of tea to hand, which is why, after 650 pages I might have been the size of Henry VIII but for that fact this has taken weeks of reading, so I've done a lot of other things in between.

In fact the whole process has been not unlike a Tudor royal progress, timely and measured with lots of treats and stop-overs along the way.

But how pleased am I with myself for turning the final page when in the early days I quite thought my lack of Tudor insider info was going to be my downfall. Much of what I thought I knew can only have come from the pen of Jean Plaidy about forty years ago. I wanted to be a nurse, this didn't seem important, but take heart any fellow history lesson slackers, you'll have it all at your gem-encrusted fingertips by the end.

Once I got a grip and waded in it was like visiting a house full of semi-strangers. After a few days you start to get to know them, know what happens at the dinner table and about the washing up, whose turn it is to use the shower and by the end you're pledging to meet up every year.
In fact Henry gets to use the shower first, but 300 pages in I suddenly realised I had become part of the furniture, I knew everyone, knew which house I was walking into and who might be there, knew who to trust and who not, the first half slotted into place perfectly and I wanted to strangle Anne Boleyn but probably won't have to (sorry spoiler).

I also understood Henry VIII in a way that I hadn't before having previously picked up all the gouty off-with-her-head myth and mystery down the years, but perhaps not the true desperation and turmoil of the inner man.

The cast is vast, almost one hundred characters and if Hilary Mantel used Post-it notes for plotting their whereabouts then I hope she has shares, because Wolf Hall feels like an awesome accomplishment, a feat of huge narrative daring and complexity. There is word alchemy and rare sleight of pen afoot here because it's beyond me to describe how it's done, but to make a reader feel like a participant in this emerging social world, a world still trying to find its feet and know its direction, feels like true writerly, spell-weaving magic to me.

I shouldn't even really try and pronounce on events of which I know so little but it would seem England and Agincourt are history, the glory days are done and not for the first time before or since has the country sunk into something of an embarrassing and parlous state.

None of this helped by Henry's desperation for a son and heir and his slithery wriggling out of the marriage to Katharine of Aragon with some very devious manoeuvring, thence to pick up with Ann Boleyn, the tease of the century. After six years of waiting (might be seven) Henry like a slavering dog by the time Ann is finally installed on the throne and into the Royal bed.

When the baby arrives and it's a Princess, Henry does at least shout call it Elizabeth and asks if she's healthy before heading off hunting or jousting or something.

Meanwhile in the background, easing whoever needs to be eased, plotting the downfall of those who stand in the King's way, oiling whichever wheels seem to fit the courtly bicycle (and I thought about that analogy) at any given moment, Thomas Cromwell.

Don't for goodness' sake ask a history klutz like me to be able to have honestly known the difference between Thomas and Oliver Cromwell if you'd asked me to explain. I'd have waffled on about Roundheads, warts and the Civil War for one and known nothing of the other.
Thomas Cromwell, sometime Henry's right hand Mr Fix-It, apparently much-maligned by history but re-visited by Hilary Mantel as a man with a heart and soul, borne of an abusive childhood, stalked by tragedy, yet a caring father-figure to his children and countless other waifs and strays. Always with an eye for the shrewd move around Court, the blacksmith's son who does indeed 'make his own tools', it is Thomas whose life is central to this book, a man whose perception of self seems greatly at odds with how others see him, his dismay is unwritten but evident when his son confirms that he does indeed look like a murderer. 

'A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face.It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.'

Always Hilary Mantel seems to offer perfectly good and logical reasons for Cromwell's behaviour, often episodes from his past,

'One fear creates a dereliction, the offence brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point when the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing.'

I was verging on tears towards the end as Thomas Cromwell searches in vain to find an honourable way out for the incarcerated Thomas More, a principled but cruel and deeply flawed man, hell-bent on heaven but overtly terrified about quite what variety of punitive death will transport him there. No matter who's about to be thwarted in love or political ambition, char-grilled or parted from their innards, the light and the shadows always reflect well on Thomas Cromwell and, even in the final analysis, the light falls favourably on those like More who it's hard not to have loathed from the off.

Hilary Mantel makes quite sure we understand why, often by saying very little indeed.

That apart there is so much more to say it could take me the reign of Elizabeth I too, but this being me, I loved the costumes and the textures of the fabrics and those discreetly conjured up wardrobe details offering something quite sumptuous and special.
Someone walks into a room, hops onto a barge or heads for front-row seats at the disembowelling in suitable raiment; a Lemster wool jacket or sable trimmings, gowns of figured damask, a black wool cape with lambskin lining (I want one) and then Hilary Mantel adds in a snippet of crimson velvet or some tawny silk to assuage my need to feel a book like this between my fingers.
Picture Lord Rochford doing this and be there,

...what fascinates him is the flame-coloured satin that is pulled through his slashed velvet over-sleeve. He keeps coaxing little puffs of fabric with a fingertip, pleating and nudging them to grow bigger, so that he looks like one of those jugglers who runs balls down their arms.'

Other characters gained momentum as I came to know them, the blustering Duke of Norfolk could always be relied on for some brash abrasiveness, almost a comic character, then Thomas Wriothesley, known throughout as Call-Me-Risley and I was there and basking in this entire Tudor innovation, because this book is history made fresh, both renewed and different. Sequels are promised and we can but keep calm and wait patiently when really I feel like jumping up and down and wanting the next book yesterday.

A Buyer’s Market ~ Anthony Powell ( A Dance to the Music of Time - Book Two)

First things first, Happy Leap Year, and if you’ve decided to propose to anyone I do hope they’ve said yes.

The opening sequence to A Buyer’s Market, the sale room, somehow epitomised for me what these books are about. Disparate, unconnected objects united by their presence in the same room and under the same roof, all seemed like an analogy with the people various gathered within Anthony Powell’s extraordinary novels.

‘The odds and ends harmonise quietly with each other.’

And yet a funny thing happens when I am reading A Dance to the Music of Time.

I read for a while, a few pages maybe, and I blink and think, and wonder what have I just read...

Somehow something tells me it hasn’t sunk in..

I soldier on thinking I’m feeling my way in a place I really don’t know, and who on earth are all these people anyway and was this really a good idea. I gave myself a prod and say ‘Concentrate’ and read on. Nothing distracts me, but is it really making sense.

But then an even funnier thing happens.

Several hours later the whole thing is absolutely crystal clear in my mind. 

If you asked me how Anthony Powell, with his often fairly convoluted sentences detailing the minutiae of life, manages to achieve this, I’m not sure I could tell you. What sleight of pen is at work here remains a mystery which perhaps one of you has unlocked. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

This month A Buyer's Market and take as an example the party at Mrs Andriardis'. It reminded me of heady days in London in the 1970s and I wonder if this sort of thing still happens. There you are standing in the street having been to one bash and someone you know comes along and invites you to another one and you think ‘oh why not.

And so, several hours after I’d read through the party, there it was crystal clear in my head. The place, the house full of people; downstairs, on the stairs, up the stairs, people everywhere, mingling, talking and then the extremely drunk person (Stringer) coming up with a completely ludicrous idea and making an idiot of themselves.

i think it might be how my student nurse roommate and I ended up travelling back to Bloomsbury at some ungodly hour, in our Laura Ashley frocks, with our umbrellas up, sitting on the tube train. It’s not worth me even trying to remember why, or how, but it was 1973, we’d definitely been to a party in Hampstead and must have been compus mentus enough to at least realise we had to go to on duty the next day. Amazing how safe we felt in London back in those days...whether we actually were on not is an entirely different matter, we were young and invincible.

Go on...tell all. I bet you did something mysteriously daft too. You can tell us, what’s said on the scribbles stays on the scribbles...we won’t let on and it was ages ago anyway...

I loved the coincidences that Antony Powell concocts too. They are often scorned as too contrived in fiction. I mean what were the chances of Jenkins bumping into Stringer like that when they hadn’t seen each other for so long. What were the chances that they’d both be on that London Street at that exact moment..

Except it happens. Many years ago Bookhound and I were in London, walking across a crowded Trafalgar Square when who should walk around the corner by St Martin-in-the-Fields than our friends from the village who we hadn’t seen in ages. We roared at the idea that we hadn't  bumped into them down here in ages and yet there we were in the middle of London. A similar occurrence a few years later as I turned the corner from Marylebone High Street into Oxford Street and actually physically bumped into another very good local friend. 

Dear Widmerpool pops up again and then there's Gypsy Jones. In case you missed Anna's comment. on the A Question of Upbringing post I will mention it here. There is a real danger in doing what we had both done and looked up a bit more information on Gypsy in Hilary Spurling's Invitation to the Dance.

Beware, there be spoilers.

Enough thoughts fro me, I'm wondering how anyone else is doing...

Do you have any reading tips to share...

I'm finding I need to get into the groove, get a few pages under my belt, this is definitely not start-stop reading but onwards to The Acceptance World. I’m a little ahead of myself with Book Three, and if anyone was having doubts about whether to continue with this read I would say stick with it because I think suddenly Anthony Powell gets into his stride. I’m loving it and can’t wait to pick it up each time.

Meanwhile, if you are still there please do declare...

 

 

 

 

Business As Usual ~ Jane Oliver & Ann Stafford

The arrival of the post can sometimes only add to my reading dilemmas, though in the nicest possible way. Either I have ordered a book from somewhere, or a publisher has very kindly sent me one. I have, over the years, managed to cut down the number of books that arrive (it was once up to fifty a week) and rarely ask for them now, preferring the freedom of making my own choices, but I do make exceptions.

I’m not sure Handheld Press were entirely on my radar. They may have emailed before but that whole inbox thing runs away with me sometimes too, but anyway I noticed the most recent message and I would urge you to check them out, because Handheld definitely publish our sort of books. The book in question they were promoting was a novel, Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford.

The description was enough to draw me in...

‘Business as Usual is a charming 1933 novel about the Selfridges book department and its library. An illustrated novel in letters, it tells the story of Hilary Fane, an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the resentment of her surgeon fiance. After a nervous beginning looking for a job while her savings shrink, she finds work as a typist in the London department store of Everyman's (a very thin disguise for Selfridges). Through luck and an inability to type well she rises rapidly through the ranks to work in the library, where she has to enforce modernising systems on her entrenched and frosty colleagues.’

Anyway, I requested a copy of Business As Usual and was delighted when it arrived tissue-wrapped to reveal that delightful cover. It was one of those to open at the breakfast table, start reading and carry on.

Hilary Fane is quietly determined to fill the year between leaving university and marrying her surgeon fiancée with a bout of financial independence and so heads from Edinburgh to London in search of work. Written in the form of letters (and the format works like a dream) Basil is unimpressed and this much becomes apparent from Hilary’s letters to him. Finding employment for women in the early 1930s was nigh on impossible and, passed from one interview to another, Hilary finally ends up at Everyman’s department store as a stand in for someone who has succumbed to appendicitis. Her first job will be completing address labels for the books being sent out from the store...for nine hours a day, for week after week and all for the princely sum of £2:10:0 a week. Promotion based on her failings eventually comes Heather’s way and she is soon working in the store’s library.

If you enjoyed books like High Wages by Dorothy Whipple or Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola (follow the links to my thoughts on here) then you will certainly enjoy Business As Usual, not only for its wonderful insights into life in a London department store but also for insights into women’s lives in the 1930s. The men rule the roost in the store and below them the spinsters who have been in post since Jurassic times, all with their set ways and mysterious and inexplicable systems. Hilary has a wry eye for the amusing and her comments in her letters to Basil and her family are a delight to read. Budgeting to the nearest halfpenny whilst knowing that, though her life wasn’t going to depend on it forever, that was certainly not the case for the women she worked with, Hilary creates a moving and believable image of the lives of these lone women holding body and soul together for year on year. This the generation affected by deprivations of the First World War and the shortage of men. 

And now of course it feels as if the department store in 2020 might be doomed, they no longer seem to be the bustling and essential places they once were, making books like Business As Usual an important part of their history. 

And alongside all this two prolific authors who I had never heard of. Kate Macdonald’s introduction reveals all. Meticulous research has unearthed a wealth of information about the lives and writing of Jane Oliver (Helen Rees nee Evans) and Ann Stafford (Anne Pedler). 

I have almost finished Business As Usual and will be sad when I turn the final page. Sometimes, when the weather’s awful and the world seems in turmoil, it pays to fill the hot water bottle and head for the sofa with a book like this. I’ll call it comfort reading for now, though that does Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford a disservice. The issues they raise under the guise of humour deserve much closer scrutiny, making this a great basis for a book group discussion. 

So how about your comfort reads...

And books about shops and shopping...there must be more...

 

 

 

A Reading Situation...

Truth be told I’ve been a bit ill-disciplined with my reading of late and have created a bit of a reading situation here. Bright sparkly new books appear, I open them and then have a terrible job putting them down. The upshot is I end up reading too many good books at once, and it occurred to me to ask whether you are a 'One Book at a Time' reader or a 'Several on the Go at Once' reader like me. I used to work on the principle of something old, something new, something borrowed (library) something true (non-fiction) back in the days when I was very organised. Now it's all a lot more hit and miss, though reading themes and trails still emerge.

I’m not sure if I mentioned some time ago that I was going to tackle the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh. I read Men at Arms last summer, and now that I’m reading The Letters it’s rekindled my appetite for a bit more background to World War Two, especially the ridiculously bureaucratic aspects which I know my Dad also encountered, and as I am discovering in his letters to my Mum. There’s a particularly amusing account of his twenty-four hour training exercise... being dropped off in the middle of nowhere, navigating to a spot six miles away that turned out to be a farm. Instructions there were to do two hours work for the farmer and get a note confirming it had been done before heading off to another location a further six miles away to camp for the night. The task was stacking bales and by that night my Dad is itching all over, doesn’t sleep a wink and to cap it all they have to be back on the parade ground in full uniform ready for inspection by the adjutant at 9am. Clearly all good preparation for warfare (maybe) whilst including some free labour to appease the locals. Evelyn Waugh recounts this world exactly so I’m really enjoying the second book Officers and Gentleman. 

It's an incredibly readable book. Funny whilst highlighting so many of the follies of wartime, my Dad would have loved it. It is also huge but thankfully the sort of book that copes well with intermittent reading, goes back on the shelf and can be picked up again for another foray a few weeks later. This surely a testament to the quality of the writing, that the characters are so well established in my mind it is like meeting up with old friends again.

But why does it feel a like like a heinous crime to pick up a book and read it in this seemingly disjointed  way. I'm not sure, but sometimes, with some books, it absolutely works. In the end I stopped fretting and they've both gone onto the Slow Reading section over here >>> along with They Were Counted, the first in the Miklos Banffy Transylvanian Trilogy...another very easy book to jump back into. I will definitely finish them both, I'm just not quite sure when.

As if this wasn’t all enough I had added in a preview copy  from NetGalley (on my Kindle) of Square Haunting by Francesca Wade because I kept hearing good things about it. Mecklenburgh Square was a stone’s throw from Great Ormond Street and so this is my familiar corner of London. Guilford Street gets a few early mentions and I spent four years walking along there and slipping into the door of the nurses's home, which connected to the hospital, to go on duty. Taking the lives of five women who lived in Mecklenburgh Square, Francesca Wade explores life in this part of London in the first half of the twentieth century, the need for a 'room of one's own' and its impact on the women and their work.

It's a great read, or will be at the right moment which turns out not to be now. Anyway, I have invested in the actual book and it will have its turn.

Meanwhile how about you...are you a One Book at a Time Finisher or a Several Books on the Go at Oncer...

Can you even bear to think about putting a half-read chunkster back on the shelf and 'resting' it for a few weeks...

 

 

 

 

Flora of the Silk Road

Having walked the Hindu Kush with Eric Newby I decided to stay put and travel the Silk Road with Colin Thubron.

Firstly can I say that 'walk' and 'short' are the ultimate and intentional irony in Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (which means Indian Killer apparently) because Eric and Hugh climb, scramble, limp, hobble and generally stagger their way around and I was quite relieved to be sitting in an armchair.

It was a short hop for me to hit the Silk Road, something that has always held huge and mysterious fascination, and especially since reading Peter Frankopan's book a few years ago.

I wasn't sure how ready I was for back-to-back reading journeys but never fear, Colin Thubron and Shadow of the Silk Road put me at my ease and I settled in immediately. History alternated with reality as we wandered around our starting point, Xian in China, visited the terracotta armies and met with the locals. It's a blend that feels well-balanced and works perfectly.

But it all reminded of a talk I went to on my last trip to New Zealand and an evening meeting of the New Zealand Alpine Gardening Society.

When I mentioned on here years ago that Offspringette was moving to Christchurch I had an email from a reader saying she lived there and to tell Offpringette to get in touch if she wanted to. Hilary lives and works in Christchurch, Offspringette did get in touch, firm friendships were made and it was Hilary who took me along as a guest to a talk on The Flora of the Silk Road given by Christopher Gardner (really) and his wife Basak. 

I had planned to take notes and got as far as 'Four main genus, Iris, Fritillary, Tulip...' before they switched the lights out for the slides and I couldn't see to write, but I've never forgotten the talk, or the evening.

150 plus people all devoted to and knowledgeable about their plants

A display table where people exhibited their plants for some competitive judging...

A seed sale..

A request for pollen from auricula for cross-pollinating...

Planned trips up into the Southern Alps to see the plants...

I'd just flown over those mountains and now I could add plants into the picture...

A supper of cups of tea and the best egg sandwiches ever... 

And then there was the scent as we walked in the room. Astonishing, delicate and the most beautiful plants. I’ve never seen or smelt anything quite like it before or since.

Thinking about our own planting plans for this year had heightened my awareness, so I have been on the alert for mentions of plants and trees as I have been reading. Eric Newby had spotted primula, potentilla, blue nepeta, golden ranunculus, hollyhocks, wormwood,  juniper, flowering tamarisk and willows along with a healthy array of pollinators, butterflies and bees as he walked through the mountains of Nuristan. 

Meanwhile, feeling a bit nostalgic for that experience, and those colours and scents, I ordered Christopher and Basak Gardner's book The Flora of the Silk Road from Devon Libraries. With apologies to whoever had to heave it off the shelf and get it across the county, I had no idea it weighed that much and wished I'd taken a wheelbarrow with me to get it to the car. But I'm having a wonderful wallow in its pages and now I’ve moved onto a book that has been on my shelf awaiting its moment...

Primrose by Elizabeth Lawson is sorting out all my primrose, cowslip, oxlip , polyanthus confusions and is enthralling with its tales of the plant hunters heading into Central Asia in search of rare species. I’m seeing them with new eyes, so with the primroses just starting to appear along the lane you can be sure I’ll be back with pictures of my own and much more about this beautiful book soon.

Meanwhile I hope the weather is being kinder to you wherever you are, I’m loath to tempt fate and say we still have a greenhouse because I feel sure there is more to come, but I hope you too are safe from anything it’s throwing at us right now ( and sorry to go on about it, but we are British after all, it’s what we do). The flooding around the country looks awful and hearts go out to anyone affected by it. Please do report in. 

And any more Silk Road reading recommendations gratefully received along with news of any green shoots to cheer... our daffodils are on the brink, the next warm sunny day should do it.

Footnote : We have had ongoing phone and broadband issues since a bit of an encounter with a bolt of lightning a few weeks ago, so my apologies for any spacing glitches with this post and delayed replies to your comments. We’re getting to know the repair men quite well and we are winning. 

Starve Acre ~ Andrew Michael Hurley

Bookhound had been out shopping and as he came in the door said...

'I've just been listening to the most amazing book on the radio, think you'd love it. Something about a strange tree and a dead hare...'

It didn't take me too long to find out that the book was Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley, one that had been bleeping away on my radar after a few interesting mentions on Twitter. Adele Geras in particular had rated the book for its unsettling spooky scare factor, and David  Parks' puff  likewise,

'a story that shivers itself deeply into the consciousness.' 

I was in.

I have to say too, that this is a book that might have sold itself to me thanks to Joe McLaren's cover alone. Distinctive, compelling and instantly recognisable on my shelves.

I often check the name of the cover artist but following up on Joe McLaren led me to a post on Spitalfield's Life about his work. If you don't know of Spitalfield's Life hie thee there forthwith because The Gentle Author offers a daily glimpse into London life and you won't be disappointed. I met said Gentle Author at Port Eliot Festival, and knowing they prefer anonymity I will say no more, but  it is a wonderful glimpse into a life fast disappearing. Thank you to whoever sent me a link there because I was enthralled by a series of images from inside the now empty London Hospital building. I shared it around all my student nursing colleagues who had done a stint there with me in the 1970s and we had a good old nostalge about Cavell Home, the 'Big End' and the day Evel Knievel's Wembley jump went wrong and there he was in casualty.

It's now about like three hours since I started this post what with all the diversions (I've had lunch and sorted the washing too) but back to Starve Acre. 

Robert and Juliet Willoughby have moved back to live in Richard's family home at Starve Acre where they are now trying to come to terms with the tragic loss of their five year old son Ewan. Opposite the house is a field where Richard, on bereavement leave from his teaching job, is conducting some mysterious digging works inside a pitched tent. It transpires he is searching for the roots of  the Stythwaite Oak, a long-lost tree, and, despite veiled warnings from neighbours about not meddling, he continues relentlessly with his quest under the guise of academic research. When Richard unearths the skeleton of a hare things start to take a bit of a turn for the considerably worse. 

Honestly you won't believe what happens next...but in the context of the book you absolutely will. Andrew Michael Hurley makes the impossible and fantastical quite plausible.

Slowly the back-story of Ewan emerges; once a normal happy little boy who loved playing in the field but who suddenly turns into the devil incarnate, capable of extreme cruelty and the oddest behaviour. Countless appointments with the child psychologists offer no explanations or diagnosis.

And these two strands of the story weave in and out before eventually merging into the most macabre and ultimately shocking story imaginable, so of course I can't tell you much more about it. When a grieving Juliette calls in a group called The Beacons, and their medium Mrs Forde, prepare for an unusual twist. Starve Acre is all things malevolent, sinister, gripping and tense, and at its centre the traditional symbolism of my beloved hare is maxed out on every level by Andrew Michael Hurley...fertility, rebirth, rejuvenation, resurrection, intuition, life through death, crafty wisdom ...oh my word it is all in there.

I was reminded of several other books too, especially Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel and Lanny by Max Porter, but also Masquerade by Kit Williams with its buried hare, but ultimately this is a unique book, and one in a league of its own for the final denouement. DO NOT READ THE LAST LINE UNTIL YOU GET THERE...DO NOT ...but brace yourself and prepare to put the book the book down and think 'What the *^&%$' .Starve Acre is one of those books that leaves you with an after story to be resolved too, because all I could do was sit there and wonder how on earth this was going to sort out.

If you have read Starve Acre I would love to know your thoughts sans spoilers. I should have added it to my Top Shelf Best Reads of 2019 but it was by my desk waiting for this to be written. Now I've written it I want to read the book again and that so rarely happens.

And any other macabre reading suggestions...

Books that really pull it off...

I read Don't Look Now for our Daphne Du Maurier book group theme last month and there's another one that absolutely nails it too.

 

 

 

 

Spring Inklings

With the greenhouse out there, bandaged to within an inch of its life and under siege from Storm Ciara, I’m sitting indoors and sending good vibes to my sweet peas and hoping they don’t all end up in Wales. My poor old greenhouse, now heading into its seventh year. We have fond memories of the day Bookhound dug out the ground and he and the Tinker raised it...all in a freezing cold, biting wind...

From that to this...it was very pleasing

One of the joys of winter gardening is thinking ahead to next year’s planting, and with the doors to Tinker's Cott (and its garden) opening to holiday guests again in May, and the Barn Owls back in residence, I must start some planning.

Did I tell you the Barn Owls were back. 

The Barn Owl Trust came to repair the box a few weeks ago and two flew out when the ladders went up. We hear them most evenings and have seen them going in at dawn. Can you bear to go through it all again...

Anyway, I’ve been looking back through my gardening journal.

For the notebook fiends out there, this is an Ogami notebook, the paper made of 80% calcium carbonate 20% non-toxic resins. One of the wandering children brought it back from their travels years ago, and its waterproof paper is ideal if I’m out in the greenhouse. It’s also as smooth as ice to write on, I love it

I keep a general record of what goes in when and how it does, barn owls, when the swallows arrive, when things flower and what work we do when, which is all surprisingly useful year on year. It avoids the ‘when did we prune the wisteria last year because it worked’ sort of conversations. Last we heard it was supposed to be February and June, but then we did it in December one year and it was amazing. A lot depends on whether a late frost massacres the buds too, but year on year it seems to survive and last year definitely its best flowering in twenty years or more, scenting the front of the house from quite a distance.

Last year, as well as adding in six new dahlia tubers, I grew a lot in pots from seed which were a happy success. Small terracotta pots and tall flowers all summer long...

Bishop’s varieties various and all formed nice tubers by season’s end so they will hopefully do good things again this year as do all the others...

These a mix of Arbatax, Wine Eyed Jill, Little Robert, Genova and Pink Magic.

But I’m trying to add in new each year so had a lovely time wandering around the Peter Nyssen website choosing a few more. I give them to friends for birthdays and special moments too.

One last year to a friend and ex-work colleague, whose son died tragically in September a few years ago, but whose birthday was in March. I used to leave a pot of flowering bulbs on her doorstep in March (because aren’t those birthdays without the person the hardest thing, and so often forgotten by others). Then last year I thought ‘dahlia’. I handed her this rather sad looking dahlia tuber which she nurtured in a pot in March, planted it out in May, had beautiful flowers to remember him by all summer, and a glorious vase full to pick on the day none of us will ever forget in September.

This year I’ve added in Downham Royal, Rebecca’s World, Jowey Joshua, Cornel Brons, Black Jack and Edge of Joy to our own collection and I can't wait to see them flower.

As for the sweet peas, well last year was my best year ever. I’d sown the solstice variety in October, in pots in the greenhouse, pinched them out regularly, was a martyr to them when we had a frost, and was rewarded with copious fragrant long-stemmed flowers from early May right through to September. I’d often envied those people who said they picked a huge bunch almost daily...well last summer I was one of them.

Vases of them all over Tinkers Cott to welcome our guests and that scent wafting through the house.

This year I’ve added in new (to me) sweet pea varieties Wuthering Heights and Ebony & Ivory (because I liked the sound of them) and have put in a docket to the works department for at least three twigwams to grow them up, if not more. Sowed in October they seem to be thriving...so far.

I grew a few more plants from seed last year too. Several of you recommended Nicandra and I grew plenty but sadly the slugs were on them within seconds. 

The sunflowers however were another lanky triumph.

From seed sown in large pots in the greenhouse in March, and we didn’t plant them out until they were about eighteen inches tall at which point they just shot away and flowered like troopers behind the dahlias and the cosmos. This is the bed in the Tinker's Cott garden (that's the shed, not the cottage) that we dug with my Dad and which was his pride and joy...we're doing our best to keep it up to standard. That row of cosmos seems to deter the slugs. They don't like it and don't seem to explore beyond it to the juicy tender dahlias

Several visitors to Tinkers Cott were met with a jar of sunflowers on the kitchen windowsill. It was good to have enough to pick.

Meanwhile we took a bit of last-ditch risk with the roses last year. Always grown in pots because they never seemed to thrive in our soil, these were they in happier times...

But last year, despite topping up, feeding and pruning, they were poor for a second year in succession and we felt sure they were pot-bound and yearning for freedom. So we ‘beefed up’ (as my dad would say) the best south-facing sunny bed, to the front of the house, and have released six of them into the wild. They’re out there now, facing the onslaught so fingers crossed they survive and thrive.

Your best ongoing rose-growing tips would be most welcome.

Also your woolly aphid remedies for apple trees. The espaliered Cox’s Orange Pippin provided the little blighters with hours of amusement last year and no amount of spraying with anything helped. It might have been down to weather conditions but it would be good to greet them with a deterrent (preferably non chemical) early on this year. 

We need it to look as happy as this again...

Meanwhile, if you have planting plans or recommendations, or news of great successes, please do share them.

PS We are now taking bookings for Tinker's Cott for this year. We had a splendid year of visitors from around the world last year so we'll be doing it again from May through to early October. Please do email Bookhound at dovegreyretreats at gmail dot com if you would like us to send you the all-singing all-dancing pdf with more information and lots of lovely pictures, and if you click on the link at the top of the sidebar >>>> or here it will take you to a blog post

Those in the US might be interested to know that Plymouth is celebrating the Mayflower 400 this year and we are within very easy reach of the city and its delights, and of course the famous Mayflower Steps, the Pilgrim Fathers' final point of departure. 

Film 2020

We're always threatening to go the cinema more often, keep up with new films, stray beyond the parish boundaries to the bright city lights, but somehow we never do. The odd film here and there and then we sink back into the sofa again and watch a box set. But then word reached us that things were afoot in the metropolis. The Vue cinema on the outskirts has had to up its game in the face of competition from the big new all-singing all-dancing cinema in Plymouth City Centre (did I hear £15 a ticket plus £5 to park). To this end all the seats have been replaced with spacious electric recliners and the tickets are a standard £4.95.

There's no stopping us now. 

First up we went to see Just Mercy. A Deep South courtroom drama based on a true story; a sort of hybrid of To Kill a Mocking Bird and The Green Mile, as world-renowned civil rights defence attorney Bryan Stevenson works to free a wrongly condemned death row prisoner. In its own right a superb film (and apparently an even better book) that had a packed cinema on the very edge of their comfortable reclining seats. Actually it was as if I was floating in a parallel universe, completely unaware of the seat, the surroundings, the annoying person with the crinkly sweet packet, the person with the terrible cough...all distractions faded into the background and I think it might have been the same for every person in that packed cinema. I didn't even think to make sure Bookhound hadn't dropped off to sleep (he hadn't). There were several moments in the film that were gasp-inducing, and one in particular, a moment of huge disappointment for the main protagonists, when the entire cinema groaned as of one. I think we all learned a great deal and everyone left that cinema talking about the film. 

Next up was The Personal History of David Copperfield. Now this has had rave reviews over on Twitter and whilst I enjoyed it I'm not sure I loved it as much as everyone else seems to have done. And if it's any gauge of a film's staying power Bookhound dropped off not once, but four times.

It was all a very clever premise, mixing in the adult David brilliantly played by Dev Patel, watching the trials and tribulations of his younger self and there were some very familiar faces in the cast. My unique problem is that I can't quite settle until I remember where I've seen them before, and Bookhound of course much prefers Paul Whitehouse fishing on the banks of a river with Bob Mortimer to seeing him as Mr Peggotty. Mr Micawber was Dr Who, Mrs Peggotty was the rather dense girl in This Country, Jane Murdstone was Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones...and so it went on. There was a great deal of comedy, which masked the utter misery of parts of the book, but I was happy enough with it all and we'd had a lovely afternoon out that had managed to sneak in a visit to Waterstones for a book browse as well.

Anyway the next film choice is down to Bookhound, as long as it’s Military Wives (I know, I know, but for some feel good factor, I'm not hopeful) or Emma.

Meanwhile, have you watched any good films lately...I'd welcome some recommends.

Was The Goldfinch any good...

Miklós Bánffy

A huge great big enormous thank you to those of you who sang the praises of Miklós Bánffy in comments a while ago.

I had never heard of him, let alone the Transylvanian Trilogy, but I know your judgement out there is impeccable and so on the strength of it I ordered Book One, They Were Counted.  Published in 1934, this huge tome arrived and my heart sank a little, only a little, and very briefly when I saw the size of it, along with the thought that there are two more. I added the Kindle version for £1.99 and that has been a blessing on trips out....because I don't want to stop reading.

But let the size of this not deter any potential readers of dear Miklós Bánffy because I have warmed to him as a writer and a person (he had the most unusually soulful eyes) and very quickly become embedded in the dying days of the Habsburg empire (of which I don't know a lot) and the lives of Count Balint Abady and his cousin Count Laszlo Gyeroffy.

I didn't know a thing about Count Miklós Bánffy de Losoncz (30 December 1873 — 5 June 1950) either, but discover (thank you internet) that he was a Hungarian nobleman, liberal politician, and historical novelist living in a very nice castle indeed until the political situation took a turn for the worse in the Second World War...

Miklós Bánffy populates They Were Counted with alacrity, almost to a point where I felt overwhelmed, but it was a party, it was inevitable and all added to that sense of walking into a crowded room of people, all of whom know each other...but you know none of them. I quickly realised that there was no point in a nicely drawn genogram, it would take me forever, so I have relied on the author's skill in guiding me through the voices and personalities and he does it to perfection. Mild confusions are rapidly ironed out and the most wonderful panorama of a story starts to emerge.

Someone suggested gliding through the politics and enjoying the rest, and to some extent I have done that, though a bit of me would like to understand all this better. Better than 'what' I don't know, because I have no base line for Transylvania and Hungary in 1904, so I am learning new things. In a strange way it segues with my Silk Road reading for all the genetic mixes that the trading route created across the steppes of Asia and into the far reaches of Europe. It is also only a short thirty-five year hop in time, and a slight drift east, to the world of Olivia Manning and The Balkan Trilogy.

Whilst I realise the country was sliced up again after the First World War, the 1922 Bartholomew atlas has come in handy again too and confirms the presence of Banffy...

I would love an audio version of this but to date I don't think there is one, please let me know if you find one, but in the meantime I am wallowing in the book and its world.

Now then is it just me, living down here in the back of beyond, who hadn't heard of Miklós Bánffy or does his name trip off your tongue every time someone asks for a good book recommend...

And thinking along Austro-Hungarian empire lines, does anyone have any more reading suggestions while I'm holed up in this part of the world..

I suppose I really should read Dracula again...

And there's always Joseph Roth's Radetzky March...

But there must be more, and maybe some travel writing too.

 

 

 

 

 

A Question of Upbringing ~ Anthony Powell ( A Dance to the Music of Time - Book One)

‘It doesn’t do to read too much,’ Widmerpool said. ‘You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors ...but it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.”

 

Bless Widmerpool for this and I'm wondering whether anyone else has had any luck with Book One of A Dance to the Music of Time...

If not take heart because it was fourth time lucky for me so this might just not be the 'right' moment for you. It was with some determination that I sat down on New Year’s Eve with A Question of Upbringing (1951) and told myself this just had to be read if I was going to set up this wonderful book-a-month project to launch a new decade of reading. Previous fails saw me no further than page twenty or so and even picking up the book gave me heart sink.

Isn’t it amazing what a different copy can do....and also a pledge to come back here and write about it at the end of the month. Good  font, line spacing and the much-loved no-tussle floppy pages in this newly-jacketed edition from Arrow Books.

I will add that, as usual, a read like this often takes me off in one direction and it is that trail I will share here each month. If you are reading along you may have taken an entirely different path, seen completely different things (in fact I hope you have) and that is absolutely fine and how this works best. Nothing 'gospel' or erudite about my pronouncements, just a starter for ten, so please do add your own thoughts and trails in comments if you want to.

I’m a bit of a genogram person, even with the most straightforward of books, so I was in my element with Nicholas Jenkins, his slowly-expanding social circles and my new Muji notebook with its beautifully smooth paper.

First at boarding school, thence to France and then to university. I'm always mildly amused by all this ‘going up’ and ‘going down’ and ‘sent down’ university lingo, but I’ve also enjoyed being a bystander to Jenkins’ life, and those invisible power struggles in a room full of people. The verbal slings and arrows now observed by a mature Nicholas Jenkins, but largely unnoticed or interpreted differently by his younger self. All those competing personalities vying for attention and the little glimpses of reality...why has 'Quiggins' hirsute leg' stuck in my mind....I've no idea.

And then some really sensitive observations of friendships and how they end..

'One of these parting of the ways that happen through life.'

'Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.'

Maybe it was this that made me sit down and write (with pen and ink and paper) a long letter to a 'friend' of many years ago whose Christmas letter seemed replete with anxiety about a terrible year past and uncertainty about what the future may hold. Ours a friendship that saw us through some interesting years in our young lives but suddenly the ties felt tenuous and I didn't want to let them unravel. Whether she will feel the same who can know. I said please don't feel obliged to reply, and if she doesn't we'll just stick to Christmas cards and carry on regardless. 

And then there are the vagaries of public school life for boys in that immediate period after the First World War.

What had gone before seemed to take the shape of the 'unsayable' in A Question of Upbringing, mentioned at a slant, but I sensed it somehow, especially in that scene in the school chapel, and felt it even more keenly when they sang a verse from one of my favourite hymns...

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. 

Whilst all eyes are on the return of Le Bas mine were casting a much wider net, for the place and the atmosphere, to the gentle tones of  The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended with a descant provided by a group of boys sitting behind.

I was there.

Just thinking about the number who had died in the Great War, the heroic mantle bestowed on the dead, and quite how that legacy of sorrow impacted on the life of the school and those that would have to follow them, led me to another book on my shelves. Public Schools and the Great War - The Generation Lost by Anthony Seldon and David Walsh offers fascinating insights into an aspect of the war that has been the subject of much debate...

'The Great War is deeply imprinted on the sense of history and identity of every public school, its inescapable presence felt in the many familiar places which commemorate it - memorial chapels and halls, plaques, photographs and statues...'

and this...

'The public schools have not emerged well in the representations of the Great War, the predominant impression being one of callous staff officers who operated a long way behind the lines, and bumbling junior officers.'

Now I think about it, this has almost become the received opinion and this book works hard to reappraise these perceptions, exploring the 'codes of service, courage and loyalty, meriting our respect rather than our derision.' There are a few telling and relevant observations which I connected to A Question of Upbringing, especially this...

'Several headmasters and housemasters were broken by the losses of so many of their young men,'

And that had me wondering about Le Bas, the draconian housemaster...

'He merely seemed to Stringham and myself a dangerous lunatic, to be humoured and out-witted...'

We know little about Le Bas's history but...well maybe I'm investing too much in it. we'll see.

Anthony Seldon and David Walsh go on to explore the impressions of the officers in the Great War shaped by media productions such as Oh! What a Lovely War and the TV series Blackadder Goes Forth, outlining the various portrayals of men 'lacking brains, leadership or courage'.  They step in with a timely comparison to Journey's End, the play by  R.C.Sherriff written in 1927.

And perhaps this, another observation, holds true for Jenkins' school...

Exhausted and traumatised by over four years of war, the schools returned to a curriculum and way of life that was reassuringly familiar.

And of course Antony Powell is writing in the 1950s, well-removed from those early days, but, broader perspectives aside, I surprised myself (based on previous attempts) and enjoyed honing in on this world through the eyes of a single narrator in A Question of Upbringing. I feel myself well-launched onto the eleven remaining and am really looking forward to Book Two A Buyer's Market.

If anyone else is reading along with A Dance to the Music of Time 2020 please do share your thoughts, and even if you are not reading along but have read this far (thank you) all comments are most welcome. 

 

 

Bridge is Fifty Years Old...

Forget that it is forty-five years ago this weekend since I met Bookhound...no, the really important anniversary of the weekend is this...

It was fifty years ago today, January 26th 1970, that Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel hit the record shops.

I bought my copy for 25/- from my Mum’s Trafford’s catalogue and paid it back at 2/6d a week from my wages as a Saturday girl in Woolworth’s on Wallington High Street. I still have the LP (of course I do, this is me)

...though I doubt much sound comes out of it these days because I played it into oblivion, but no matter because I’m probably still word perfect on every song and Bookhound and I have now decided we really should treat ourselves to a record deck and play some of these LPs again.

‘El Condor Pasa’ .. of course I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail, who wouldn’t..

‘The Boxer,’ the poor boy whose story’s seldom told.

Who can forget ‘ So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’ ...so long who? We’d never heard of him, and what’s all this harmonising ‘til dawn. Architects may indeed come and go but Frank has stayed lodged in my consciousness forever thanks to that song.

‘Cecilia’ and my mum frowning ever so slightly at the rather risqué lyrics.

I’d get in from school, my mum would be there, we’d have a cup of tea and sit on the settee together, put the LP on the radiogram and have a listen.

And that beautiful ‘Song for the Asking’ and the wistful moment when it ended and I would turn the record over and start it all again.

Nor will I ever forget spending an entire DAY dialling (on an old telephone with the circular number dial) the Albert Hall in London to get tickets for the Simon & Garfunkel concert there in a April that year. My friend June and I had seats in the choir, overlooking the stage and Art Garfunkel sang the most perfect version of Bridge Over Troubled Water that I would ever here.

How sad that it all ended in jealousy and acrimony, and mostly over that very song. I choose to ignore that bit though, Bridge Over Troubled Water mains one of the theme tunes to my life. Another one would of course by Blue by Joni.

Anyone else have a Bridge memory...

 

Full Tilt ~ Dervla Murphy

You could be forgiven for thinking I’ve just been sat here staring out at the rain and gloomy grey skies all winter, but no, indeed very much no.... I’ve been cycling from Dublin to India with Dervla Murphy, and I didn't even know I wanted to go. Admittedly Dervla’s been doing all the pedalling but I’ve been cheering her on from the safety of my armchair. Truth be told, though I've stopped short of donning the padded shorts, I have fallen back on memories of my hundred miles along the Otago Rail Trail in New Zealand back in 2016.

Full Tilt - Ireland to India with a Bicycle was a chance encounter. Eland travel books are not such an easy find in the bookshops down here, (though Exeter Waterstones are increasing their stock) so when I came across this one and saw the cover I was intrigued. It reminded me of the Kayaker’s pictures taken in the NW of India. 

Both images lure me in. I want to travel that road.

I didn’t know much about Dervla Murphy but there seem to be so few journey books like this by women in the past that I decided it was worth pumping up the tyres and setting off. Dervla set off in January 1963, in the midst of Britain’s coldest winter in recent times. It snowed on Boxing Day and we didn’t emerge the other end until a March thaw as I recall. I was nine and heaven knows how we kept the house and us warm. Arriving at school with frozen feet in wellies and knee high socks comes to mind as well as ice inside the windows and the purchase of an extra blanket (very jazzy Aztec)  each for my brother and I which I still have and use.

I'm sure you will have your own memories too...

But how unusual was it for a woman to embark on a journey like this in the 1960s; cycling alone across Europe before heading out across Persia (as it was then, now Iran) Afghanistan and onward to Delhi. And what a character and wonderful travelling companion Dervla turned out to be. Born in 1931 and raised in Lismore in Ireland, Dervla was given a bicycle and an atlas for her tenth birthday. She left school at the age of fourteen to care for her mother (this seems to be a recurring theme for so many women of this era I’ve read about lately) but she would regularly manage cycling trips around the U.K. and Europe. When both her parents died Dervla found herself a free agent and set off on this the first of many journeys around the world.

Self-effacing and modest, resilient and resourceful, courageous and long-suffering, I quickly grew to like Dervla. I’d say the perfect travelling companion but I’d probably have got on her nerves because show me a hill and a bike and I immediately require a battery, and I suspect Dervla much prefers her own company anyway. A woman uniquely aware of her own limitations but prepared to push them to the limits and able to cope with extremes... unlike me who’d be asking ‘Are we there yet?’ And needing another ‘rest’ under the guise of ‘admiring the view.’

I was reminded slightly of A Time of Gifts and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s walk through countries in the 1930s, now much-changed by war and circumstances. Persia and Afghanistan, the places and the people, viewed through Dervla’s eyes in the 1960s came to life in the most extraordinary way. Dervla has that happy knack of countering anything that could be seen as a criticism, or even remotely judgemental, by layering it with gratitude and understanding. The smelliest, filthiest people (and there were a lot of unwashed of long-standing) are the kindest and most welcoming, though tactics various for declining food were a must.

It was as I settled into the journey, the places and the people, and thanks to Dervla’s beautifully descriptive writing that I realised it was segueing with another image in my mind. On my last trip to New Zealand I had timed my return flights to come back into daylight; this having made the night flight into darkness mistake once before. As the plane flew towards the Caspian Sea I had the most breathtaking view of this vast and desolate territory

I hadn’t quite realised how that landscape had seared indelibly into my imagination until I started to read Dervla’s account. Her descriptions brought my mental image into being...

'...This stretch is just about the most beautiful part of the Hindu Kush I have seen. The glory of those mountains makes one feel that it must all be a dream. Every peak and slope and outcrop is different in shape, texture and colour, the rock and shale and clay shaded purple, rose, green, ochre, black, pale grey, dark grey, brown, navy and off-white...'

What a palette, what a place.

About half way through Full Tilt I realised my need was great for an old atlas, and by some miracle Bookhound found an old Bartholomew tome dated 1922 on his shelves. The maps are sheer, old-fashioned perfection...

Tiny print, and I need a magnifying glass, but it made a huge difference as I started to follow the trail across great salt deserts and mountain passes, whilst giving myself a much-needed geography lesson at the same time. I now have the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram and the Himalayas perfectly aligned in my head. 

I’m all about the Hindu Kush now and my next journey has set off with Eric Newby and A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. For some reason I (and it would seem others) have always had this down as a serious book, one of those venerable reads that will 'do me good.' It's certainly doing me good but mainly because I am laughing so much, I had no idea Eric Newby was so funny. I will follow this with Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road. There is something about these travellers, setting out in the days before the internet and mobile phones and GPS,  that I am finding very engaging. Proper job explorers these. 

 

So that's me and my travels from the armchair...

I'd love to know if you have read any of these, Dervla, Eric or Colin, and who else you might add to the pre-cheating days of travel writing. People who had to use a map, write letters, send telegrams and generally think on their feet rather than send a text message.

And then there was the winter of '63... were your feet cold in wellies too...

 

Almost Gone With the Wind...

We have been almost gone with the wind this last few weeks, with the greenhouse bandaged up against a succession of storms and trees down in neighbouring villages. Such an event brings out an acute case of Log Covetousness in Bookhound who, despite a nicely full woodshed of his own, can never resist the thought of squeezing in a few more. He dreams of someone ringing up and saying' Come and help yourself,' which of course doesn't happen because every storm-gained log is accounted for in these parts, but he slows the car down to 5mph as we drive past in order to pay his respects to the glorious vision.

I think it's a Man Thing.

Mary Azarian understands..

Mary Azarian kindly gave permission for me to use some of her images here in the early days of the scribbles and I have loved them since the day I discovered them, they never lose their appeal. I hope the season is being kinder to you now wherever you are...not long until that February day when the light floods back in.

I recommend plenty of this until that day...

Meanwhile I have made a start on The Letters and came across this...

'Went to the cinema to see "Buffalo Bill" the other day and it was very good too, but I would have enjoyed it much better if you had been with me. I hope to see "Gone With the Wind" tomorrow, I've seen it once but I must see it again.'

I can't tell you how thrilled I was to read that. A letter from my Dad to my Mum, and written on June 9th 1944. He's had to leave his happy ship King George V, and my Mum, behind in Liverpool where they've met a few months previously, and is now stationed with the Royal Marines at Portsmouth where he's doing more training (bugle replaced by guns now) in readiness for a posting to a new ship which will be heading to the Eastern Front.

My Dad also comments on the big events of the week... 

'What do you think of the news about the second front, wonderful isn't it. I hope the boys go right through now...'

D Day has happened and perhaps the tide will turn on a war that he's been on active service with since the age of fourteen in 1939, but he's now nineteen and he's off to see Gone With the Wind again, isn't that wonderful. Now quite what my Mum would have thought of a cinema outing to see Buffalo Bill I can't imagine, but she loved Gone With the Wind and I think he knows that, and that the barest mention will win him points. It's the thought that counts.

I was thrilled because by coincidence I had started to re-read Gone With the Wind over Christmas, and Helen Taylor is to blame for me picking the book up again after a gap of fifty years or so. First time around a single paperback copy did the rounds of Form 4C at Nonsuch Girls, and it seemed the whole class was smitten. But in December I had started on Why Women Read Fiction - The Stories of Our Lives, Helen Taylor's new book (and for which I am very honoured to have done an interview) and in the first few pages of the book Gone With the Wind gets much attention...

'Since the novel (1936) and then film (1939) came out around the start of the Second World War (when families were torn apart and homes and lives destroyed), women of a certain age found it comforting and inspirational...they said they had learned from this book (and later the film) about love, loss, and courage...'

In researching a previous book, Scarlett's Women : Gone With the Wind and its Female Fans, Helen had discovered a legion of women for whom Margaret Mitchell's tome was a very special book.

Helen argues that women, whilst questioning the 'reactionary racial agendas' and rejecting the 'rosy picture of American slavery and the Civil War', were able to identify with Scarlett as a feisty feminist, and also with other 'fresh female role models and new ways of thinking about masculinity and romantic love.'  Helen also points out that whilst men may have seen the film, fewer of them have read the book. Given that I doubt my Dad would have wanted to be seen reading Gone With the Wind in the rufty-tufty environment of a wartime military barracks, he was by now madly in love with my Mum so who can know what he took away from the film. He was more of an Ashley than a Rhett, but perhaps he was becoming a hybrid of the strengths and finer points of both of them now I think about it.

Anyway I was immediately enthused to revisit and settled down with Gone With the Wind on my Kindle, my Mum's weighty copy nearby, and whisked through the first 500 pages in no time...and then the prevailing wind died down (sorry) and I ran out of steam. Christmas and New Year were done, the decorations were packed away, Scarlett has arrived back at Tara and found it standing but only just, and I decided to stop for now and make it a book of two volumes.

I will read the second half when the mood comes around again, but meanwhile I'm wondering if Gone With The Wind holds a special place in your life too...

If so can you remember when you read it and what you thought...

Or maybe not...maybe there's a different book that fills that space..

Please do leave a comment because I'm sure Helen Taylor will be interested too, and I'd love to know your thoughts if you read Why Women Read Fiction . I'll have much more to say about it through the year I'm sure.

 

The Horseman ~ Tim Pears

Apart from the fact that I always get the author Tim Pears confused with the author Iain Pears, I had wondered where Tim and his books had been all my life and so I made a start. Well, this was back in 2018 and a summoning up of any draft posts behind the scenes revealed this written in July 2018, when the sun was shining. It seemed a shame to waste it, and I reckoned a memory of summer would be just the ticket for those of us in the midst of a Northern Hemisphere January, so eighteen months later herewith...

The Horseman, the first in Tim Pears's Westcountry Trilogy had been on my radar for a long time. Words like 'hypnotic' and 'pastoral' and 'bucolic' were floating around in my consciousness, and several of you emailed or mentioned the book in comments for which I thank you because I got there in the end.

'1911. In a forgotten valley on the Devon-Somerset border, the seasons unfold, marked only by the rituals of the farming calendar. Twelve-year-old Leopold Sercombe skips school to help his father, a carter. Skinny and pale, Leo dreams of a job on the estate's stud farm. He is breaking a colt for his father when a boy dressed in a Homburg, breeches and riding boots appears. Peering under the stranger's hat, he discovers Miss Charlotte, the Master's daughter. And so begins a friendship between the children, bound by a deep love of horses, but divided by rigid social boundaries - boundaries that become increasingly difficult to navigate as they approach adolescence.'

This is definitely a book to read slowly, at the pace of life at the time in which it is set. I read it in short instalments over several weeks and was actually reading one day sitting up behind the summerhouse.

It was surprisingly 'noisy' for our little corner. One tractor was baling up the hay in Outer Down and another was ploughing up Long Acre. Two men, two tractors, one afternoon doing a job that would have taken who knows how long and how many men back in 1911. If you missed the video over on Instagram you can watch it here.

Nowadays, with a subject such as this...farming in the early twentieth century, how easy it is to extract the poetic... the beauty and the scenery and the seemingly leisurely pace of life, whilst ignoring the realities. None of the realities are lost in The Horseman so brace for some early scenes that might make you wince a little, but you will be quickly disabused of any notions of sentimentality and can proceed with the rest of the book under no illusions about the hardships of the life. 

We often think about it around us here. We watch the hedge trimmer flail and smash its way along the lane in a day, doing the work that would have taken countless men countless days...

Indeed, during the winter we can still see that careful hedge-laying handiwork of the past...

We also know that the 'carters' from the farm lived in our cottages ( we were once two but are now one) and it was a bit of a revelation for me to find out what being a 'carter' really involved, along with the profound and crucial importance of the horses in their work ploughing and harvesting. The horses needed people who understood them too so I will be intrigued to follow the life of Leopold Sercombe in the next two volumes of this trilogy

There are several deeply poignant undercurrents flowing through The Horseman and I am intrigued to see how these will play out in The Wanderers and The Redeemed which I have yet to read. Whilst mechanisation is starting to arrive in 1911, and with it the requirement for a smaller workforce, we know that the workforce is about to be decimated by World War One. And not only that but the horses will be taken too.

I was reminded of a beautiful picture we saw at Torre Abbey a while ago..

The explanatory notes alongside had been helpfully corrected by someone who obviously knew their ploughshare from their harvester, 

...but there is an undeniable sadness in the innocence of this idyllic scene, during the summer before the war, saying so much of the unsayable and the unknowable at the time. And of course, we know what lies ahead.

I know quite a few of you have read The Horseman so please do share your thoughts in comments...

And also the next two books, I really am way behind so this is a series I must catch up with.

 

 

The Pulse Glass and the Beat of Other Hearts ~ Gillian Tindall

‘The cycle from prized object to discarded one to rubbish, and then to extinction is a well-established one...’

Firstly my thanks to Avis who emailed a while back about The Pulse Glass thinking I might enjoy it. With a healthy accumulation of spendable points burning a hole in my Waterstones loyalty card, I wandered in for a browse while Bookhound was enjoying his birthday treat with the menfolk watching Pymouth Argyle lose at football (again). There was a long story to this New Year’s Day involving a lot of walking, no buses, sausage sandwiches, Plymouth rain, a taxi, a Park & Ride bus full to the brim with football supporters topping out at 8mph and me very grateful for a hot bath when we finally arrived home.

But I won’t go into all that, just the happy outcome from Waterstones which was a copy of The Pulse Glass  and the Beat of Other Hearts by Gillian Tindall. I should add that it is always worth checking the Waterstones App because the book was half price to order online but not in the shop, and of course they honoured that at the till.

Taking a series of disparate objects Gillian Tindall builds a changing picture that I suspect most readers will be able to fit into some aspect of their lives. Whether it be the childhood toy, the old letters and diaries, the unnamed photographs, an old map; whatever it is it holds a story for the person who 'knows' it which may remain lost unless told. Gillian Tindall broadens the scope of each object by weaving in history around it.

And nor did I now what a pulse glass was.

It is a tiny hourglass, about the size of a stick of chalk but 'an exact half minute glass' designed for taking a patient’s pulse, and from the days when pocket watches didn't have a second-hand.

Starting and ending with the sudden death of her brother, small details emerge of their lives and family throughout the book, culminating in a searingly honest account of events in the final chapter. For Gillian Tindall this must have been both harrowing and cathartic, the stark revelations, the admission of true feelings about cataclysmic childhood events and those who instigated them. Nevertheless, in the context of what has gone before, it was somehow uplifting to read... to have the courage to face the truth and the realities, rather than be beguiled into false sentiment by the objects. As I turned the final page I knew I had discovered my first Best Read of the 2020 with my very first book; onto the Top Shelf it goes.

The Pulse Glass is a book that consistently allows for reader involvement at a personal level. I doubt many will read it without either scurrying up into the loft to find things, or wonder where things have gone, or look at known objects and suddenly see them in a new light. Ultimately the hidden story of the object remains just that unless told, or shared, or written about.  Someone has to want to know that story and to want to keep that object. Likewise the box of unlabelled photographs that I'll bet many of us have stashed somewhere could ultimately become meaningless bonfire fodder to future generations unless properly marked.

Now you know me by now. Nothing knowingly discarded if it holds a story and I am ably abetted by a very large and accessible loft...or perhaps it's a hindrance...perhaps it would be easier not to have kept all this stuff.  Anyway as the Christmas decorations went back up I had asked Bookhound if he could find the box of letters that my Dad wrote to my Mum (I'll call them Len and Vera for a minute) from when they met in early 1944 to their marriage in 1947.

'How much do you really want these found and brought down?' said Bookhound as he donned the head torch and prepared his ascent. I think he was hoping for a 'No don't worry now,' response but all he got was a look. There was a lot of rummaging and shifting of boxes until he finally emerged triumphant with these...

Hundred of letters posted to Vera, living in Liverpool, from Len as he sailed all over the world.

My Mum had died and my Dad ( I couldn’t keep it up for long) had given them to me long before he moved into Tinker's Cott with us here. I had picked out a few and read them before making a conscious decision not to read any more while he was still alive. Then of course you can't bear to look at them and so ten years or more has passed. I think it felt intrusive at the time and we never talked about them again, but inevitably I'm pondering that decision now because I have a growing list of questions after only twenty letters to which I may never get an answer. 

And what happened to my Mum's letters...

He would never have thrown them away, but was keeping hundreds of letters in the confined space of a ship just too difficult...

Were they in the shed and did the mice eat them as happened to Bookhound's fishing journals...

And did I ever know some of the things that I am now discovering.

Gillian Tindall talks about notions of memory...

'Memory, and in particular the fallibility of memory, has today become something of a fashionable subject. One has to agree that memory is obviously selective, that much is readily transposed, simplified or recalled over time with altered emphasis - which is not to say  that the reworked memory is necessarily a less valid version of what originally happened than the immediate memory was. Sometimes it can turn out more essentially focused...'

This was all food for much thought for me, a caveat to my assumption that I was remembering everything correctly. And so an inspiring book has led from one thing to another and here I have sat for the past week or so making some semblance of order of everything I have about Vera Griffiths and Len Chester. Photos, cards, certificates, school exercise books and I've started reading the letters. Already there is a story to be told, and if I don't sort this out for our children (who tell me they want it) no one else can. 

And so after five hours one afternoon the letters are now in date order, let the mission commence.

This is all Gillan Tindall's fault so beware, if you read The Pulse Glass you may be overcome with a similar situation.

Meanwhile, has anyone else read The Pulse Glass...

Does anyone else have a stash of old family stuff that needs sorting...

If so do you have plans for it...

Or maybe you have already done it...

Maybe you decided to get rid of it. There's no right or wrong here, just what feels best at any given time.

I took a great deal of trouble to sort out all our family photographs of the children before we moved here. Remember the 1980s when we all sent them off to Truprint and accumulated masses. All beautifully ordered and catalogued by year and as the removal man carried the box out to the van the bottom fell out and there were hundreds of photographs strewn across the Old Launceston Road. I haven't had the heart to go back and re-sort them in twenty-five years...until now.

Bonfires were mentioned in Gillian Tindall's book, conducted by well-intentioned people to whom the 'stuff' holds no meaning, tells no story, or perhaps tells a story they feel is best left alone. 

I think that word 'bonfire' might be what has spurred me on.

 

 

 

2019 Listening Gallimaufry...

Some of you might recall (because I have mentioned it before) that among the first declarations to Bookhound,  as we were walking back to the car park at Heathrow, after my first flight back from New Zealand were the words, said with much emphasis..

'I'm never doing that again without noise-cancelling headphones.'

You had all told me as much when I asked, but I thought I'd get away with the £20 Sony things and how wrong could I be.

So before the next flight we took a trip down to Curry's in Plymouth where they have a fine display of headphones located underneath a speaker that simulates the noise of an aeroplane. I'd actually set my heart on a pair of Bose, because they're a bit on trend aren't they but, when it came to the testing, the beautifully crafted Bose might have made me look the bees knees but they weren't a patch on the Sony. This was going to amount to about three birthdays and two Christmas presents combined, but Bookhound persuaded me to buy the Sony MDR 1000X  and I have to say two years on they have been the best investment ever. Not only do they block out all noises, engines and people, on a plane, they also block out the drone of a sewing machine when I'm back on the ground...

...as well as the sound of  Bookhound coming in the door to tell me there's a cup of tea and scaring the living daylights out of me.

I now announce that I'm going into 'headphones' so he knows.

But this all means I can listen to audio books while I sew and I  notched up 100 hrs-worth last year, not all of which may have been mentioned here but even so all worthy of a mention as Good Listens. For many of you the library will be the perfect place to borrow audio books for free. My problem is having to return them after three weeks so I subscribe to Audible on and off and keep my library nicely topped up. Audible also let you return a book for any reason which helps because I've had a few turkeys...

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

Jane can do no wrong in my eyes. I have loved each of her three books, set in Australia and as a listen they are atmospheric, gripping and well-plotted.

"He had started to remove his clothes as logic had deserted him, and his skin was cracked. Whatever had been going through Cameron's mind when he was alive, he didn't look peaceful in death.

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...."

Pompeii by Robert Harris

One of you recommended this and though I obviously knew the outcome, I didn't know the route Robert Harris might be taking to get us there.

"A sweltering week in late August. Where better to enjoy the last days of summer than on the beautiful Bay of Naples? All along the coast, the Roman Empire's richest citizens are relaxing in their luxurious villas. The world's largest navy lies peacefully at anchor in Misenum. The tourists are spending their money in the seaside resorts of Baiae, Herculaneum and Pompeii. Only one man is worried.

The engineer Marcus Attilius Primus has just taken charge of the Aqua Augusta, the enormous aqueduct which brings fresh water to a quarter of a million people in nine towns around the Bay. Springs are failing for the first time in generations. His predecessor has disappeared. And now there is a crisis on the Augusta's sixty-mile main line - somewhere to the north of Pompeii, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius..."

 

Let Me Lie by Clare Mackintosh

This was recommended as a good read by the Village Book Group but, like many psychological thriller / crime novels, it works brilliantly on audio too.

"The police say it was suicide. Anna says it was murder. They're both wrong.

One year ago, Caroline Johnson chose to end her life - a shocking suicide carefully played out to match that of her husband just months before. Their daughter, Anna, has struggled to come to terms with her parents' deaths ever since.

Now with a young baby herself, Anna feels her mother's presence keenly and is determined to find out what really happened. But as she looks for answers, someone is trying to stop her. By digging up the past, she'll set in motion something that can't be stopped and will soon discover that sometimes it's safer to let things lie...."

Erebus by Michael Palin

One of you recommended this one too and it was superb. I had several weeks of excursions to Antarctica and then the  Arctic on the Franklin Expedition and would emerge from each session with much to tell Bookhound about. Lots of 'Did you know....' and 'You'll never guess what...' going on and all read in Michael Palin's warm smiley voice...you know the one where he's seen the funny/odd/eccentric side of something and hopes you see it too in the inflection. He will always be Monty Python to me and has never lost that cheekiness.

"In September 2014 the wreck of a sailing vessel was discovered at the bottom of the sea in the frozen wastes of the Canadian Arctic. It was broken at the stern and covered in a woolly coat of underwater vegetation. Its whereabouts had been a mystery for over a century and a half. Its name was HMS Erebus.

Now Michael Palin - former Monty Python stalwart and much-loved television globetrotter - brings this extraordinary ship 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. He explores the intertwined careers of the men who shared its journeys: the dashing James Clark Ross who charted much of the 'Great Southern Barrier' and oversaw some of the earliest scientific experiments to be conducted there; and the troubled John Franklin, who at the age of 60 and after a chequered career, commanded the ship on its final, disastrous expedition. And he vividly recounts the experiences of the men who first stepped ashore on Antarctica's Victoria Land, and those who, just a few years later, froze to death one by one in the Arctic wastes as rescue missions desperately tried to reach them."

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

I've listened to rather than read all the Jackson Brodie books and without exception all have been fine listens, this one included.

"Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village in North Yorkshire, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son Nathan and ageing Labrador Dido, both at the discretion of his former partner Julia. It's a picturesque setting, but there's something darker lurking behind the scenes.

Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, seems straightforward, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network - and back into the path of someone from his past. Old secrets and new lies intersect..."

 

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

My dad was a huge Tolkien fan; read Lord of the Rings every year, listened to the book every year on a set of cassettes that we had bought him and so embarking on a listen was quite the nostalgia trip. I almost think better listening than reading with the beautiful singing of the songs by narrator  Rob Inglis. Tom Bombadil comes to life in a way he never quite did in the book for me and I can see exactly why he was my dad's favourite character.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I'm listening to this while I stitch the Knot Garden quilt as revision before the third and final part The Mirror and the Light is published on March 5th 2020. I'm about half way and am finding so much to notice that I feel sure may be relevant in that final book. It's also good to be reminded (as if I needed it) what a meticulous and thorough writer Hilary Mantel is.

 

Hours of very enjoyable listening and who knew I'd done that much sewing. If you have listened to any of these please do share your thoughts...

And please do recommend any more audio books that you have enjoyed and that will see me through more sewing marathons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Australia...

I’m doing another shout out to you because things don’t look any better since the last time I asked. I’ve been following the news and also fundraising updates via the amazing Celeste Barber’s Instagram posts. Celeste has raised an astonishing amount of money very quickly, but the situation looks precarious and very frightening, so our thoughts are with you.

Please stay safe and do let us know how you are if you can.

Let’s face the music and dance...

'Let’s Face the Music and Dance' is actually one of the book group’s themes for a book choice this year and I haven’t yet decided what my choice might be, but in searching for a title for a scribbles post here I’ve happily mangled up the words for a reading choice that I have made through 2020.

Before I progress I have to be allowed a brief diversion to say that Let’s Face the Music and Dance always but always reminds me of Torvill and Dean and that wonderful 1994 Lillehammer Olympic ice dance comeback, when 23 million people sat gripped, only to watch them slip into Bronze medal position. The skating duo went on tour that summer and a twelve-year-old Offspringette and I trekked off to see them at Wembley (I think). We were die-hard fans and I still get a bit of a shiver when I see them dance. Lasting memories of Offspringette’s precious programme slipping down underneath the tiered seating never to be retrieved (there were tears) and Bookhound ringing later that evening to tell us that our offer on this house had been accepted. I bought another programme and we moved in here two months later. 

Anyway, now to the book. I don’t announce this sort of reading thing quite so often these days because I can end up tying myself down to a book I may not necessarily enjoy, and then the reading becomes a chore, not a pleasure except I’ve already told you all I’m reading it, and some of you join in. To that end I’m really sorry about The Magic Mountain. I just got stuck half way up and lost my reading pitons. However I have been promising myself a read of Anthony Powell’s twelve volume masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time for years now, having started and stopped the first volume A Question of Upbringing three times. Each time I kept asking myself was I really interested in this paean to the lives of men, but it was a chance remark from a friend (thank you Peter if you are reading this) who commented at a Christmas social event (Peter and Margaret’s Kitchen Warming, thank you again, it was lovely and so is the kitchen) that I don’t read many books by men. I had a think and a check back and have to admit that the percentages are indeed somewhat disproportionate, so twelve volumes of this should sort that one out.

I decided to first read A Question of Upbringing beyond page thirty before declaring and committing to another eleven volumes because it’s apparently the trickiest one to get into, but A Dance to the Music of Time is a series that begs to be read at a book a month starting in January, and there were some very encouraging noises when I tentatively mentioned it on Twitter. Bless Adele Geras who rates it so highly and whose approval was enough to spur me on. I also invested in the newly re-jacketed ‘floppy’ edition as an added attraction, and hey presto I was through and into the world of Nicholas Jenkins. The consensus is that these are books about human behaviour and it's taken me a while to sit back and watch, but in the words of Anthony Powell...

'The narrator Nicholas Jenkins, is merely a vehicle for expressing how people and happenings struck him during a period of some sixty years...'

Likewise he readily acknowledges the role of the reader in potentially making a different judgement to that of the narrator so there's another trick to look out for.

I had also invested (first attempt around) in Hilary Spurling’s handbook to the series, Invitation to the Dance which is a sort of vade mecum who’s who of every character, and which acts a handy reminder of their origins when they crop up again several volumes apart. And I have ordered a copy of Hilary Spurling's biography of Anthony Powell because nothing she writes disappoints. 

So I am hoping to read a book every month through 2020 and report back here at the end of each month which would allow for discussion in comments. But be warned, if we've started with a Torvill & Dean digression there are bound to be plenty more extraneous trails to pursue because who knows where the narrative will lead me....remembering with fondness our previous shared year-long reads of  Middlemarch, Ulysses and War & Peace.

Meanwhile, if on reading this you fancied joining me in this particular dance you would be a very welcome partner. 

Sunrise on a New Year...

I'm sure for many, if not most of us, it might have been a year of mixed blessings and 'bumps' as Her Majesty said on Christmas Day, is any year any different ... and who can know what next year holds, but be sure whatever happens (DV) we'll all be here sharing books, reading, life and the rest on the scribbles.

I've timed this post for 08.18 on January 1, the exact moment the sun rises here, so from us to you, wishing you all a quiet sunrise on a gentle and peaceful New Year.

The Year by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

End of Year Gallimaufry...

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

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

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

Are you keeping up...

Does anyone else do this?

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

No I couldn't. 

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

Time Song by Julia Blackburn

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

Lanny by Max Porter

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

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

 

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings

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

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

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

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

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

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

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

Forty Autumns by Nina Willner

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

The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen

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

Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly

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

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

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

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

 

If you are on your own today...

...or even if you’re not but want to leave a comment, please do. I’ll pop in and out and reply through the day as usual. 

Meanwhile after another bout of grey gloomy weather Christmas Day dawns all light and bright.

From us to you....Christmas Blessings

‘I have stolen some of the light which drenches you this midnight,
to wish you all the islands in the world,
and everyone a different kind of peace.’

Northern Lights - Jo Shapcott.

Woodcut by the inestimable Mary Azarian.

I’m listening to Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s and have heaved a sigh of relief that the chorister hit the top notes perfectly in his opening solo. We had our village carol service on Sunday evening, all of us squeezed in the tiny church and with last year’s new-born baby Jesus promoted to a toddling angel. It was all a delight and a lovely way to start Christmas week. Parcels have crossed the world and arrived safely both ends, Bookhound has set up the train set (tradition) and I have finally found the stockings, so we are all set. 

I hope all is settled and calm with you too, and from our home to yours may we wish you all a peaceful and light-filled Christmas. 

 

 

A Solstice Day Gallimaufry

At last we're there. Winter Solstice, the Shortest Day here in the Northern Hemisphere, and though it always seems an eternity until the light comes back  it's nice to know that it will do eventually.

My thoughts are with the Southern Hemisphere too, and especially with those of you in Australia. We are following the news here but please do let us know you are safe if you can. While you have scorching we have drenching and flooded lanes all around. We live at the top of the hill but the 'dips' (as we call them), both east and west, are lakes and we can hear the Tamar drumming from the house.

I'm imagining you are all, like me, busy with Christmas preparations and with ne'er a minute to pick up a book, but perhaps all that will change over the next few days so I thought we could have a 'Christmas Reading' conversation in the run up and beyond. I've been welded to my sewing machine for the last few weeks, running up a 'secret' for the GK's GF (who is far too busy to read here) and which I'm hoping she will like. All I can say is it's pieced, machine quilted (yes, gone to the dark side) and the beautiful colours match their new beautiful curtains in their new (to them) and very lovely Gamekeeper's cottage.

Whilst the Bernina has been droning away on mile after mile of stitching I've had the noise-cancelling headphones on and been listening to Georgette Heyer. I'll confess I've never particularly warmed to her books, mainly because I missed out on them as a teenager when I think, like Agatha Christie who also missed the moment, they might have entered my formative cannon of life-long loves. As it is Daphne Du Maurier elbowed all others out of the way. But honestly, Regency Buck...what's not to love and laugh over, and perhaps it is the narration by June Barrie that pitches it so perfectly. It's so funny, so diligently researched and so involving, creating a welcome interlude to my revisiting/ listening of the very serious and intense Wolf Hall.

My Christmas reading has already begun because a copy of Why Women Read Fiction - The Stories of Our Lives by Helen Taylor (published by Oxford University Press)  has arrived, and much to my excitement there is a dovegreyreader chapter. I did the interview so long ago I'd quite forgotten about it, but, mine apart, there is a wealth of fantastic contributions which Helen has pulled together into a brilliant analysis of women and reading. I'm nodding in agreement with every sentence.

And talking of life-long loves, Helen's introduction quickly had me reaching for my mum's copy of Gone With the Wind, before realising it weighed a ton and downloading it to my Kindle instead, for a Christmas re-read. One paperback copy did the rounds of Class 4C in 1969 and I have never forgotten reading it on the 408 bus from Wallington Green to school in Cheam,  and at every other available moment because there was a queue waiting for it. The impact of both the book and the film on a sixteen-year-old me is imprinted. I will have much more to say about Why Women Read Fiction in 2020 I am sure, but alongside I'm looking forward to dipping back into the world of Scarlett and Rhett. I'll be interested to see how far I get and whether the book bears a re-read, or would I be better leaving it resting happily in my memory. We'll see.

 

So how are the preparations coming along...

Are you OK in Australia, please let us know...

If you have you read Gone With the Wind did it leave a lasting impression...

How about a re-read...did it hold true to that original feeling...

I'll admit I'm nervous.

And I'm sure there must be a gazillion Georgette Heyer fans out there so I'd love a recommendation of what to listen to next...

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she sings,

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

J.L.Carr 1992

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do we have one I