dovegreyreader scribbles

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 wonder...

Anyway, if you are in need of a smile read How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup and I promise you will...even if you don't really like football.

And have you read any more of J.L.Carr's books...

 

 

 

The Franchise Affair ~ Josephine Tey

I was struck, when reading about the life of novelist Josephine Tey, by the similarities in her life to that of Nan Shepherd of The Living Mountain. Both women born in Scotland just three years apart in the 1890s, both writers, both reticent about publicity and both committed to caring for elderly parents, perhaps sacrificing some of their own personal ambitions in the process. I wonder if they ever met.

Born in Inverness, Josephine Tey (the pen name of Elizabeth Mackintosh), like Nan Shepherd, would receive a solid education that enabled her to qualify as a physical training teacher and led to employment in schools in Liverpool, Oban, Eastbourne and Tunbridge Wells before finally having to return home in 1923 to care first for her dying mother and then to keep house for her father. Josephine would outlive her father by a mere two years, dying at the age of fifty-six, but in that time she wrote some splendid novels and several plays (under the pen name Gordon Daviot)  and I can hardly believe that I have only just discovered them.

Sir John Gielgud, who would act in several of the plays, became a life-long friend of Josephine's saying this of her 

'...an elusive character who shunned photographers and publicity of all kinds and who gave no interviews to the press, was deeply reserved, and was 'proud without being arrogant, and obstinate, though not conceited'...'

Many of you will be way ahead of me on this one so please do add your thoughts in comments, but having plumped for The Franchise Affair when faced with a shelf-full in Waterstones the other day, I quickly ordered another three once I had finished it. 

When local solicitor Robert Blair is called in to represent a mother and daughter accused of the abduction and beating of a young girl, Betty Kane, in order to make her work as their maid, a deep sense of mystery and intrigue surrounds their house, Franchise, and the town of  Milford. The Sharpes live on the outskirts of the town in  their dilapidated and secretive house, inherited without the means to maintain it and, thanks to high walls and solid gates, visible only from the top deck of a bus. Yet Betty Kane, having apparently made her escape and with the bruises and a convincing account of her treatment, seems to know every detail of the house, the interior, the attic in which she has been imprisoned, its contents and more. The situation predictably runs out of control once the national press get their teeth into it and suddenly everyone has an opinion and becomes judge and jury.

Having eschewed contemporary fiction for a while for all its ticking of the PC boxes, it is serves me well to remember that fiction has done this since forever, maybe its purpose, amongst many others, is to immortalise the now for the future. Meanwhile The Franchise Affair, published in 1947, laments the single letter of five thousand written to Scotland Yard that might be worthy of police attention...

'Letter writing is the natural outlet of the "odds". The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties -...also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet... they can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it...But I do remind you that the ordinary intelligent citizen writes only one time in five thousand.'

Likewise the press come under equal scrutiny, and when the word  'FASCISTS' is painted in large capitals along Franchise's wall, and bricks are lobbed through the windows...well this could have been one of many moments in recent history.

The story cracks along apace as Robert Blair, beguiled by the younger Miss Sharpe steps well beyond his brief in support of the women, and in an effort to prove their innocence...or are they guilty. Josephine Tey cleverly kept me guessing. I really couldn't predict which rabbit was going to be pulled out of the hat, and without giving anything away it is an irony that the newspaper much maligned will feature large in this final courtroom conjuring trick.

The Franchise Affair felt like a book that has stood the test of time despite its occasional non-2019 attitudes leaving me keen to read the rest of Josephine Tey's novels, except I'm now stuck for choice as to which of these to pick up next. They seem to have had a very favourable make-over, with delectably subtle covers and floppy pages and binding which are my new best friend. All suggestions gratefully received and now over to the Josephine Tey fan club which I'm sure is out there amongst you and itching to confirm in comments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We need to talk about.... Trousers

You know what it’s like by now. Something comes into my head and we just have to have a conversation about it. Mostly walking trousers today, but also trousers in general, how I hate shopping for them. It’s the standing in front of the mirror and seeing the new bulges,

...or the skin tight legs that won’t go above the knees, and this whole ‘sits comfortably below the hips’ thing...does anything ‘sit comfortably below the hips’  and not sap a mature woman’s confidence.

Or the shops who have the sizing or the shape ALL WRONG....it’s not me obviously. 

Nor do I like to think of myself as a ‘label’ snob, but honestly, once you’ve shopped for outdoor clothes in New Zealand, in shops where it takes you hours to walk to the other end and where the brands are of the highest quality and the sales are legendary, well, shopping for the same here in the U.K. is a bit of a let-down. 

Meanwhile my legs were freezing. This was because I had spent last summer in communications with Rohan about the very expensive fleece-lined ‘Winter Roamers’ and the broken leg pocket zips on both pairs. Already replaced and broken again it was clear we were going to have to call it a day. To be more precise it was the very delicate-looking zip tag that had snapped in the washing machine, rendering the most useful pocket absolutely useless. Now these hadn’t been cheap. I’d seen them as a good investment based on ‘you get what you pay for’ in terms of quality and longevity. I have Rohan skirts that are now coming of age at eighteen after all. Summer after summer I heave a sigh that they still fit, having worn and washed them endlessly and having no trouble with the exact same zip tags. The joke was that my Walking Friend had bought a pair of walking trousers in Lidl for £9 and the zips on those were fine.

Eventually Rohan and I came to a satisfactory arrangement and I got a full refund on two pairs of trousers, plus, after a bit of persuasion, a £30 gift voucher for having to part with my beloved trousers in which I had climbed ‘mountains’ in New Zealand. 

And yes, I am in the picture twice, Clever eh, but I deserved to be after climbing the Bealey Spur track for that view.

As is the way of these things the money disappeared into central funds and now I haven’t got any winter trousers for walking out on Dartmoor, or wearing on very cold days, so Bookhound and I went to Plymouth in search of a pair.

’I am not buying Peter Storm,’ I warned him as he steered me towards Millets.

For those who might not know, Peter Storm is a brand at the budget end of the outdoor clothing market. Perfectly adequate but absolutely not for me. I’d look at Rab, Craghoppers (maybe though they are an odd fit on me), Berghaus...all very acceptable. We did Cotswold Outdoor and found zilch and so Bookhound redoubled his efforts regarding Millets.

’I am NOT buying cheap and cheerful Peter Storm,’ I muttered as I skulked my way down to the shop.

Maybe you can see where this is headed...

The racks in Millets were laden with all sorts of fleece-lined trousers.

I started with the Brashers and had the same problem as the Craghoppers. Some too low on the hips, others too high on the waist; some skin tight, some way too baggy in the leg; mostly sludge-coloured which depresses me no end. Eventually Bookhound (bravely I have to say given my mood) handed me a pair of black Peter Storm Soft Shell Fleece Lined Trousers...sound dreadful don’t they.

You’d imagine something tracksuity and...well just awful.

’Alright,’ I sighed, ‘I’ll try them on, but for £26 (Rohan were £90) they can’t be any good.’

After a session of pulling and heaving on all manner of unsuitables (I’m a UK 14 it shouldn’t be that difficult) I wasn’t hopeful. Except they slipped on easily, zipped up nicely, sat perfectly on my waist, not too baggy, not too tight. In fact they were a really nice shape, warm, comfortable, the only drawback being the words Peter Storm embroidered on the leg. No way could I pass these off as anything more exclusive.

’I’ll have two pairs,’ I said, swallowing my pride and bedecked with hubris, as I emerged from the cubicle to the shocked faces of Bookhound and the shop assistant who had obviously picked up my mood. Here’s the thing though, these shops now only stock a single pair of anything and are restocked one-for-one so I had to make do with a single pair. 

‘Probably sensible,’ I said on the way home, ‘there must be something wrong with them, probably not breathable, I’ll overheat and need an ambulance.’

Anyway all I need to do is give them a new name, so how I love my beautiful Meps Rotter (Anagram of Peter Storm obvs and we’ve decided exclusive Finnish outdoor wear) and what a lesson it all was.

Do you have this problem with trousers...

Am I the only label snob in the world...

Meanwhile, have you tried to buy a pair of jeans in M&S lately...you'll need a degree and a bucket-load of patience. If it's any help, after wading through about thirty racks  I found ankle grazers in a nice, not too tight style which I just bought in Long so they grazed my foot instead.

 

 

And the winners are...

Thank you for entering everyone. A copy of Frost Fair by Carol Ann Duffy will be skating its merry way to the ten lucky winners who should all have received an email by now. If you send your addresses at warp speed Picador will post the books out in good time for Christmas.

Advent Sunday Prize Draw : Frost Fair ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Advent Sunday is here, we can sing Hills of the North (and South) Rejoice and say the word Christmas at last. We’ll be bringing in our bough for the kitchen today and will start decorating it having decided that we will enjoy a full season of Christmas cheer this year, especially given the skies are grey and the rest etc. This will involve a trip up into the loft to find the deccies and yes, it doesn’t seem like five minutes since Offspringette helped me to pack them away before she flew back to New Zealand last year. 

And if it’s Advent Sunday then it’s time for another scribbles tradition too. The prize draw for a copy of Carol Ann Duffy’s annual Christmas offering very kindly offered by Picador. Every year I ask and every year (except last year, there wasn’t one) they say ‘Christmas wouldn’t be right without it.’ 

And then there were ten, so this year ten copies of Frost Fair to be won.

 

It is a snowy London day in The Great Winter of 1683. We follow our bold narrator as she explores ‘the town on the Thames’, a thousand tents and dancing fires lit on the frozen water with jubilant residents and lively festive revelry. All is a fete upon the ice as she sees jugglers, dancing bears, palm readers and even a merry wedding. Her journey leads her to meet many new companions with whom to spend a starry night upon the river, where they sleep with no inkling of who will be looking down on them in the morning light . . .

Carol Ann Duffy's new Christmas poem, Frost Fair is inspired by the fairs held on the River Thames in London as it froze over in the uncommonly cold winters of the Little Ice Age. This delightful, moving new poem captures the inventiveness of a great city and the drama of winter. Beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, Frost Fair is an irresistible read for our festive season.

If you would like to be in it to win it, (and these can go worldwide), please do leave a comment on this post and Magnus will engage his Choosing Paw dreckly.

Incidentally Magnus has declared winter, and after a bit of sign language we finally realised it was Basket on the Kitchen Windowsill Season. No fool that cat when the Aga cranks up.

 

Footnote: comments are now closed and Magnus is doing his choosing.

Olive Kitteridge ~ Elizabeth Strout

It has taken me no less than ten years to make the acquaintance of Olive Kitteridge.

I bought the paperback in good faith backalong even though I loathed the cover. It stayed on the shelf until I read My Name is Lucy Barton and realised I had to fill in the gaps. Elizabeth Strout's writing first came onto my radar with Abide With Me in 2006 and I was an instant fan. Having overcome the cover  in 2016 I then started to read Olive Kitteridge only to find the font was miniscule along with the line spacing and I gave up, three years on and it seemed even smaller. It's happening more and more often so perhaps it's my eyes, but once you've relaxed into adjustable font Kindle reading it's hard to struggle on...

Except Kindle books, unless bought via the Daily Deal, are no longer as economical as they were and upwards of £5.99 seems a lot to pay for a book I already own. But it was late one night, I'd read the sample and realised how a great writer draws their reader in very fast. These were interesting people and I absolutely had to read the rest.

So that is the story of how I have finally met the amazing Olive Kitteridge in 2019.

Olive the maths teacher is married to Henry the pharmacist, they have one son, Christopher and all is not sweetness and light. Olive speaks her mind and seems to dominate, Henry seems meek and hen-pecked, while Christopher is just plain awkward and ungrateful. The action rapidly jumps ahead by twenty years and my curiosity about what may have happened in the interim was insatiable. It is through a series of stories, in which Olive and Henry make sometimes fleeting cameo appearances, that the events of their lives unfold. It is beyond clever and beyond compelling as Elizabeth Strout creates a huge web of interconnected lives, shedding light on the couple's place in the community as those lives overlap, revealing what the community thinks about them via these different perspectives. With Olive as the common denominator there will be loves and cruelties, dramas and disappointments and through it all stomps Olive...by all accounts larger than life, big, tall, heavy, outspoken, assertive, knowingly flawed (aren't we all) but with limited insight or self-awareness into the effect she has on others. It is through the eyes of those around her that the reader is privy to much that Olive is not. 

From that description you might think there is everything to dislike and nothing to laud about Olive but I loved her. The moment when she lays on the bed in Christopher's house, after his marriage to a woman he had known only a few weeks, the house that Henry and Olive have had built for him, and Olive is overcome by heaven knows what and does something vengeful and churlish to vent her feelings. So many moments when somehow Elizabeth Strout allows something unexpected to shine through and illuminate. 

I spent a happy hour in Waterstones in Truro (very nice cafe) recently, browsing the Elizabeth Strout shelf, sympathising with another browser at the same shelf with the same tiny font issues and the same Kindle solution. It seemed we both wanted to check the books for real because they have been revamped in simple but very appropriate covers. I had got a refund on my lovely signed copy of Olive, Again  (back to my Kindle) having failed to check the font/line spacing issue in Waterstones in Plymouth and now settled on a copy of The Burgess Boys as a replacement (font etc fine) just so that I have a real book to show for this renewed flurry of Elizabeth Strout reading.

If you have read Olive Kitteridge I would love to know your thoughts, and about any other of Elizabeth Strout's books too...

Have you watched the film version...should I...

I wonder too if you have books like this which for reasons various you have resisted reading. I have another, it's The Go Between by L.P. Hartley in the New York Review of Books edition and another cover I can't abide. I'm being ridiculous I know.

And the font/line-spacing thing...is it just me...

 

 

 

My Name is Lucy Barton ~ Elizabeth Strout (redux)

Having finally succeeded with Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (it's a long story) I had a delve in the scribbles basement to remind myself about My Name is Lucy Barton and to revisit what had so enamoured me with Elizabeth Strout's writing at the time. I plan to read it again but thought it was worth sharing those thoughts again before Olive bursts onto the scribbles stage later this week....

This was from February 2016...

Hospitalised for nine weeks following complications post-appendicectomy, married mother of two Lucy Barton is surprised to wake and find her mother sitting by her bed. Surprised because Lucy has been estranged from her parents for many years, and in any case her mother is not renowned for the sympathetic or caring gesture. For five days the two re-explore and re-kindle their mother-daughter relationship before Lucy's mother abruptly departs at a crucial moment never to be seen or heard of again.

It is no spoiler to reveal this plot line because My Name is Lucy Barton is one of those tantalising novels where the future is openly revealed before being given any context or reason. In fact ultimately a reason may or may not be given, leaving the reader to forage for clues and hints which I think I found but of course won't reveal.

And it all raised so many interesting questions as I read..

What are the roots of inferiority...

Is it deeply embedded in childhood deprivation or can it be overcome...

Is self-esteem and confidence set in tablets of stone early in life or can it be found later on...

By her own admission Lucy might be an unreliable narrator...

'This must be the way most of us manoeuvre through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true....so much of life seems speculation.''

She is hospitalised and unwell (though it would seem to be an illness of unknown origin) perhaps making her observations and perceptions of her childhood all the more distorted, whilst the presence of her mother and their conversations shed new light for both on long-held certainties. As a reader I hovered around the edge of the family secrets half-expecting and hoping for a clear disclosure given that Elizabeth Strout reveals so much about the future.

Did I pick up on one (or two)...well I couldn't possibly say.

But it all made me think about the intricately woven book, the phrase bandied around and often hard to explain. It is as if Elizabeth Strout has started weaving from a different side with My Name is Lucy Barton because suddenly the book turns in on itself as Lucy attends a writing class where the tutor gives an appraisal of the book I am reading.

It all took me somewhere different and unexpected...

'This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this : You are not doing it right.'

Amongst the paeans of praise always littered around a proof copy is one from the Literary Review concerning Elizabeth Strout's ability to home in on the dropped stitch of the family fabric. It is a wonderful and apt analogy...some unravelling required but with it comes the ability to pick up the stitch, repair the hole and knit on. Lucy's life knits on with some shaping and decreasing and increasing of stitches. The chapters are measured and short, the book flows and having been sent this copy by a friend in with a Christmas card I started reading it at the kitchen table and was instantly engrossed.

It's what I want from a novel these days...draw me in and I will stay; sadly piles of books seem to be falling at this first hurdle these days.

I am streets behind with my reading of the novels of Elizabeth Strout having loved Abide With Me and for some reason dipping out on Amy and Isabelle, Olive Kitteridge and more recently The Burgess Boys (which several people have recommended highly) so I am looking forward to a bit of a reading retrospective.

Meanwhile any more Elizabeth Strout fans out there...

And what about the book that intentionally telegraphs what is ahead...do they work for you...

And do you persevere with a book if those first twenty pages don't pull you in... how long do you give a book to impress.

 

The Knot Garden

Happy Stir-Up Sunday everyone. We're all supposed to be making C*******s puddings, though the day got its name from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer Collect for the Day, the last Sunday before Advent,  "Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people". Yes and that too, but happy stirring.

On other fronts, whilst things haven't been frenetically productive in the completer-finisher aspects of the needlework department, I have been slowly making progress with my quilt group's 2019 Block of the Month project. This is as much about having 'things' for next year's exhibition as sharing a project, but the sharing bit has been lovely as once or twice a month we all sit around and stitch and natter and admire each other's efforts. I expect the exhibition to be spectacular because there are a fine crop of Knot Garden wall hangings in progress, every one different according to the maker's choice of fabrics and embellishments. The idea is that each piece provides an opportunity to try a different method of patchwork and quilting so in effect creating a sampler. For those that are new to the whole thing it's a challenge, for those that are old hands it's still a challenge....as you'll see.

My first decision was not to buy any new fabrics but to make from stash. There's the obvious thrifty sensible upside to that, matched by the poorly planned downside which means I've made just about every bit of this twice as I kept changing my mind about colours and overall effect. It's quite hard to visualise an endpoint and things kept looking generally wrong, or out of place until I got into my stride with the right palette. But no worries because I have listened to audio books various, mostly the first book of Lord of the Rings which I loved, and Wolf Hall for some revision before The Mirror & the Light next March. The latter is proving to be a revelation all over again, and I'm noticing all sorts of detail that I feel sure will be relevant in the final book, because Hilary Mantel is a writer who lays down a fleeting glance that pops its head up again, and perhaps this is even more noticeable in the audio version, superbly read by Simon Slater. He makes each voice instantly recognisable and the whole thing a pleasure to listen to whilst I stitch.

Anyway here are the Knot Garden components to date...

I messed about a lot for a while before eventually deciding to start with a whole piece of fabric (18" square, beige patterned) for the centre panel (green borders added) and applique my bits direct, rather than follow the instructions for four separate pieces that would then need to be joined around the paths and that centre circle. I know me and joining circular bits of fabric, we have history.

I appliqued the paths on twice because I didn't like my first choice of pseudo-gravel patterned fabric.

Then I appliqued green bias for my hedges which looked dreadful but didn't really announce its dreadfulness until I stuck the whole thing on my 'fleece' design wall and stepped back. So I unpicked it all and started again with the flowery fabric which I love.

The Cathedral Window corner was a joy to do, that's when the colours worked and I was on track and the sleeping fox crept in and settled down..

I have just unpicked and re-done the hexagon corner because I'd chosen something far to insipid and suddenly all these rich colours were appearing and felt right...

The Suffolk puffs have nearly driven me insane, I'm still sewing them on and I'm never doing them again...

And having battled to the death for a long evening with the clamshells it boiled down to me or them. I won and retreated to cheating with gathered circles that almost look like clamshells once they are overlapped. There's the fox again and maybe you can find the pheasant...

The centre piece according to the pattern is folded Somerset patchwork and that defeated me too. Well truth be told, it wasn't my thing, but I already had a centrepiece that I had made thirty or so years ago when I thought I'd make a Mariner's Compass quilt (>>>> wallhanging>>>> cushion>>> nothing). This fitted like it was meant to be, so I stitched it in place. Well could I get to to lay flat...no I couldn't, so I unpicked it (again), bound the circle with the bias, spray-starched the living daylights of out it and then appliqued the whole thing down and that has worked. 

Incidentally, my best discovery for piecing and applique thread has involved going to the dark side and using grey polyester Bottom Line. It doesn't melt under the iron and is almost invisible. 

Now for the surrounding border, the outer reaches of the Knot Garden. If you can imagine there will be an 'L' shaped piece on each corner and a different rectangular block at points north, south, east and west that's where I am now.

The foundation pieced Log Cabin diamond was a joy to make and I shall do more...

The Celtic block tripped along nicely too

It was just a shame about the Seminole which went every type of wrong and will have to be remade. Where did those gaps on the edge come from, and my quarter inch is far from accurate which definitely matters with this 8" x 4" piece.

And we haven't been given the fourth block yet but it looks a bit like a maze and might be cut and sew applique.

So there you have it. For all the mistakes and re-sewing I am really enjoying the process and the challenges and sharing that with others. We have to finish them by September 2020 so plenty of time (tell me that in August). 

Now over to you, any crafty activities going on...

Work in progress...

 

The Land of Green Ginger ~ Winifred Holtby

The theme for November's gathering of the Village Book group this week was 'Colour' and vowing, as always, to try and read something new rather than recycling something from the past, I settled on The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby.

It fitted in with my current reading for several reasons, not least that it was set in the 1920s where I seem to be residing right now in an effort to escape the issue-led fiction of the present day. In fact it's proving to be quite a revelation to read the issue-led fiction of the 1920s instead, because the post-war pre-occupations of the authors offer unusual and often unexpected comparisons with the now.

That sense of a nation unsettled...hoping to find its feet again after a period of turmoil...you know the sort of thing.

The Land of Green Ginger had been beckoning for a while on two fronts...the title and the cover. Books that use the British Railways posters, or a likeness of them, are a shoo in for my consciousness, everyone's doing it and everyone's winning my adoration. 

Those British Library murder mystery books...

A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr. I already had a copy but bought another one solely for the cover. Well. that and the fact that I have a well-thumbed much annotated copy and I wanted a crisp new unsullied one to read over and again without being influenced or drawn to earlier thoughts and impressions, thus allowing new ones to creep in (it works). 

And there it is again on Winifred Holtby's South Riding. Ubiquitous maybe, but still endearing...

And then there's the title, The Land of Green Ginger, what warm, sweet-smelling magic it conjures up. I think of  Yorkshire parkin cake and sugar plum fairies and Christmas. That might just be me though.

Born in South Africa Joanna Burton's mother dies a few days after her birth and, realising that he won't be able to cope or continue his work, Joanna's missionary father dispatches baby Joanna back to the care of her maiden aunts living in the town of Kingsport. Kingsport is based on the city of Hull and it is here that the growing child Joanna, skipping along one day, sees the street name The Land of Green Ginger (an actual street in Hull). The magical name plants seeds of wonder in her imagination and, though it won't feature again the book until a brief reference in the final chapter, it establishes a pathway of escape for Joanna throughout her life, a means when times are tough (and my goodness they are) for her to disappear off on flights of fancy as an antidote to drudgery and hardship.

Married to Teddy Leigh before he sets off to war, Joanna has to cope with the return of a changed, damaged and very difficult man as they try to establish a life for themselves and their two young girls on an isolated hilltop farm in Yorkshire. Having failed to tell Joanna of his childhood brush with TB it comes as something of a shock when Teddy is struck down by the disease again, eventually becoming the carping and controlling invalid of the family. But Joanna is the queen at countering the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, the ultimate soaker-up of verbal abuse and maltreatment, and I spent a lot of time railing against her lot as I read. Comparing it to the present day leaves a great deal wanting in Joanna's existence whilst providing real insights into a woman's lot in the 1920s.

Maybe too, it could be argued that The Land of Green Ginger reads as a bit of self-congratulatory apologia on the part of the unmarried Winifred, a justification of her 'spinster' position. By all accounts an absolute angel of a woman, with ne'er an ill thought about anyone, Winifred was nevertheless reportedly distraught when her closest friend Vera Brittain was married. Perhaps this fiction was a vehicle for her to convey the unsayable, a means of saying 'Just look what I have been spared...look how dreadful it would have been...' .

Joanna's hardship is relentless, her flights of fancy to a new life a constant necessity if she is to stay the course. There will be a distracting love interest in the form of a Hungarian refugee whose account of his war around Europe was both gripping and informative. It's easy to forget the vulnerability of neighbouring countries with land borders when you live on an island, and the fast-paced instability and turmoil, the changing allegiances and enmities and the unpredictability of the war were an education. 

There will be an ultimate 'insult' which I can't possibly mention for fear of spoiling (but let's say I was shocked)  and the outcomes will be tragic and life-changing, yet even then Joanna takes the blame and the consequences upon herself (again) loves and forgives (again)  and I ended up feeling quite a wretched person for not feeling quite so loving and forgiving as I read.

So a right old gamut of emotions but, apart from one rather overwrought and melodramatic section on religion, I emerged realising that I had read a really good book. Winifred Holtby excels at creating that sense of place and situating her characters in the midst. It's not hard to feel the chill and the discomfort as Joanna goes about her farm and household chores in her ragged and worn-out clothes, or to feel some relief as she starts to see the light.

Now I'm wondering, after a suitable length of time to recover my equilibrium, which of Winifred Holtby's books to tackle next...

Any more fans of Winifred out there...

Anyone else lured in by the railway poster book covers...

 

 

Dæmon Voices - Essays on Storytelling ~ Philip Pullman

Doing a bit of housework behind the scenes here on the scribbles and I idly clicked 'draft posts'. This is a helpful little feature that allows me to sift 'draft' from 'published' and it sometimes holds nice surprises.

Surely I had already shared my thoughts on Dæmon Voices - Essays on Storytelling by Philip Pullman early last year?

Perhaps this was a duplicate..

I hunted high and low, up and down the side bar and could find no record.

I read the post through again, written in the early months of 2018 and have decided to publish it now, warts and all, given my re-immersion in all things Philip. So please cast your mind back to February 2018...

 

Among my Christmas gifts this year (2017)  Dæmon Voices - Essays on Storytelling by Philip Pullman, and may I say how overly thrilled I am to have discovered that æ symbol on my iPad keyboard; by mistake of course, having pressed that little world symbol and ended up typing in Norwegian for an age before I realised what I had done.  I am very partial to a collection of essays. Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind has held my attention many times over and I am more than excited about a new collection Feel Free to be published very soon. Notting Hill Editions also publish some fascinating collections .

I have been eyeing up Dæmon Voices since finishing The Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage. I will admit to a bit of a love-hate thing with Philip Pullman. Rare glimpses on TV and social media in recent times have conveyed the impression of a brusque, outspoken and dare I say it slightly arrogant persona. There was an impassioned letter from an Independent Bookseller bemoaning Philip Pullman’s allegiance to Waterstones regarding signed and discounted copies of La Belle Sauvage whilst the smaller bookshops couldn’t possibly compete. It was all adding up to a sub-conscious stance of ‘Well I won’t bother reading him,’ in my mind until of course the post-New Zealand jet-lag did its worst and I ran out to buy a book that would be worth being awake for. It was chunky and I liked the cover and needs must and I was enchanted, entranced, engaged and converted. Oh yes and thankful, because the month after I have said goodbye to Offspringette is always hard.

Philip can now do no wrong...mostly, but I’m hoping some of you might understand this feeling (rightly or wrongly acquired and narrow-minded as it might seem) that us mere mortals can sub-consciously find ourselves adopting without quite realising it or analysing why. Now I discover it’s nigh on impossible not to warm to a writer who feels this when talking about the responsibilities of being a writer...

’....and there is a joy too in responsibility itself - in the knowledge that what we’re doing on earth, while we live, is being done to the best of our ability , and in the light of everything we know about what is good and true.’

I’m already sold.

’Art, whatever kind of art it is, like the mysterious music described in the words of the greatest writer of all ‘the sounds and sent airs, that give delight and hurt not’. To bear the responsibility of giving delight and hurting not is one of the greatest privileges a human being can have, and I ask nothing more than the chance to go on being responsible for it till the end of my days.’

Stirring stuff.

Anyway, with stupid prejudices cast to the winds of let’s-move-on and I am reading an essay every few days from a book that I have a feeling will become something of a constant companion, a reminder of why we read and what it gives us.  I’ve made a terrible mess with my pencil on some of the pages but can’t stop myself, it’s the sort of book that makes you want to join in the conversation, add your own thoughts to those on the page, cite your own examples, agree, disagree and generally engage.

A fond example of mine and Philip’s synchronicity would be on the subject of fiction written in the present tense. I can’t quite describe the disappointment I feel when a book I have been really looking forward to is in the present tense but Philip comes close...

’Reading a novel written entirely in the first person and the present tense seems to me like being in a room where they have those Venetian blinds that go up instead of across - you can only see out in vertical stripes and everything else is closed off to you.’

We agreed on plenty more too,

...what I call Emperor’s New clothes fiction..

...that the way to tell a story ‘is to say what happened and then shut up...’ because ‘meanings are for the reader to find, not for the storyteller to impose.’

...how cheated a reader feels when they reach the end of a supposedly truthful memoir only to find it is fiction, an invention. Philip Pullman suggests its linked with ‘the desire not to be made a fool of: the wish not to be shown up as ignorant of a truth that everyone else knows.’ And I understood that.

...about authors ‘being courteous to their readers and their listeners.

...about how so many of us stop drawing when we hit adolescence, lose confidence and feel self-conscious.

...about the perils of interrogating poetry until it confesses and this with reference to and some advice on how to read John Milton’s Paradise Lost (which is on my radar for later this year with the help of Professor John Carey’s book....

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

And that's as far as I wrote in February 2018. Suffice to say Dæmon Voices has been off the shelf ever thereafter, and even more so now as I reach the final chapters of The Secret Commonwealth.

If you too have discovered Dæmon Voices please do share your thoughts, especially on those points above...present tense, feeling duped, courteous authors, stopping drawing...

And is anyone else happily trapped in the world of Pullman? I set The Secret Commonwealth aside for a week or so because I was galloping through too fast and, for reasons various, we are now two episodes behind on the TV series and waiting for a rainy, cold, wet afternoon to catch up.

Pullmanitis continues unabated.

 

 

Oligarchy ~ Scarlett Thomas

It is no secret here on the scribbles that I am a huge fan of the girls' boarding school novel, and aren't we lucky to have such a rich seam to choose from. Whilst the boys had to make do with Tom Brown's School Days and Goodbye Mr Chips and Jennings (there must be more I just can't think of them) us girls were spoiled for choice. I cut my reading teeth on Malory Towers and begged to be sent to boarding school where I thought I'd fit right in. Darrell Rivers and lacrosse and midnight feasts and tuck boxes. I yearned for one of those little tiny trunks to keep my 'tuck' in, leaving my mum quite distraught at the whole idea that I wanted to be sent away. Chalet School (Fran, this is your cue to tell us about your Chalet School bedroom, it can't be told often enough) and the Abbey books weren't for me, but that vague sense of having missed out on something stretched into adulthood. Maybe nursing helped assuage the 'deprivation' a little, as we all pitched up with our trunks to be housed at Rosslyn Lodge in Belsize Park for Preliminary Training School, but I have still loved the books...transferring my affections to St Bride's and the 1920's series by Dorita Fairlie Bruce where the girls get into all sorts of scrapes involving things like rough seas and leaky boats.

There is also a really excellent little book, Terms & Conditions by  Ysenda Maxtone Graham, published by Slightly Foxed, which shines a hilarious light on the truth about life in girls' boarding schools from 1939-1979 and I recommend it if you didn't go, and wish you had, and want to know more. This book might almost cure you, whilst those who did go to boarding school might be nodding there heads sagely and saying 'I told you so.'

'Harsh matrons, freezing dormitories and appalling food predominated, but at some schools you could take your pony with you and occasionally these eccentric establishments – closed now or reformed – imbued in their pupils a lifetime love of the arts and a real thirst for self-education. In Terms & Conditions Ysenda speaks to members of a lost tribe – the Boarding-school Women, grandmothers now and the backbone of the nation, who look back on their experiences with a mixture of horror and humour.'

If that doesn't work then I can highly recommend Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas.

Honestly, I'm completely cured. I'm over the whole boarding-school-yearning thing now.

Set in the here and now, in an unnamed minor girls' boarding school in Hertfordshire, I settled down to be decadent, on a very November-ish Monday morning, lit the fire, stretched out on the sofa and started reading whilst thinking how important it was to do these things now, just because I can. All those miserable November Mondays schlepping off to work, out and about around the Dartmoor farms in the mud and rain to see the new births, running the gauntlet of hostile dogs, opening and closing five gates to get down there.

And then finding it was the wrong farm and the place you wanted was right on the road, so five gates to get back up and out again. 

Perish the memory.

Anyway I digress. Whilst the preoccupations for Daryl and Sally of Malory Towers are sports and midnight feasts, life is a little different for Tiffanie, Lissa, Bianca, Donya, Danielle and Rachel because into their midst comes Natasha the fabulously wealthy daughter of a Russian oligarch. In fact Natasha's wealth is slightly new-found because her father has only just discovered her, but no matter, she does her best to fit right in. These girls worry about diets, beauty, fashion and phone apps and all embrace anorexia as if born to it. Scales are confiscated but no matter...

'On Sunday night the girls break out of their attic dorms and it's like an Enid Blyton book except it isn't because in what Enid Blyton book do girls escape at midnight to weigh themselves on the kitchen scales that they then break. It's Tiffanie of course. Her obese lardarse. The kitchen full of food and no one eating any of it. No normal midnight feast behaviour here.'

The tyranny and dangers of adolescent dieting are forensically dissected by Scarlett Thomas in a book that she says 'came out of nowhere', surprising her and everyone around her. Think Muriel Spark and you will understand how wry humour can so expertly convey serious issues. The girls all have a warped body image, are utterly obsessed by their weight and are both impressionable and gullible in their pursuit of the perfect shape, whilst the school are hopelessly incapable of dealing with it. The arrival of the new and uninformed Biology teacher (to replace Dr Morgan who...well I couldn't possibly spoil it) a case in point...

'She is tall and sporty with thick porridgey calves... 'I know,' says Miss White...'Why don't we look at BMI? Body Mass Index. We can design some experiments. I'll get the scales....the mood lifts a little...

The only people who look uncertain are the fat girls...'

Out come the calipers as the girls are urged to measure and calculate their body fat percentages...

'You've got to hold someone else's muffin-top and basically pinch it, hard, with these metal things...'

Whilst none of the pupils were eating, Scarlett Thomas had me eating out of her hand. How can you not laugh, except you know it's going to end in a meltdown eventually. The book charts a steady course through this world of adolescent girls and their collective behaviours. 

Though internet access is strictly limited the girls make the most of their one hour per evening, downloading new fitness apps to their phones and scouring Instagram for 'thigh gaps' and all manner of 'other' things. All an education in just how much more information young people have access to, and have to process, than we ever did in the 1960s and 70s. Honey magazine and maybe Cosmopolitan were our limit; that and a hot line via a classmate to her mother who was a very broad-minded youth counsellor and thus answered all our questions by proxy.

Ask on a Tuesday, have the correct answer by Wednesday.

There are some acutely funny moments too. The school outing is hilarious...

'They go to Stevenage on a geography trip. What kind of geography trip takes you to what must be the worst town in the history of the universe, well, except for those Soviet ruins of course, and the towns near Chenobyl?'

The girls have their own ideas....

'Then Donya comes out of a department store with a free sample of a new moisturiser and suddenly everyone needs free samples and there is a rampage of these beskirted, long-limbed exotic creatures with great bone structure. They stampede into Debenhams and BHS both of which smell of bad cafeterias and children's nappies and wee...'

Nonsuch Girls'  did at least go to Bude.

There will be a series of very serious events along with worrying undertones, dubious activities that the reader sees and which scream predatory behaviour, but which the girls don't quite understand as such and it's clear it will end in tears, but what a fillip of a book this was and what a brilliant day I spent with Oligarchy. I buy very little hardback fiction these days but this proved to be a splendid choice, so if you are in need something a bit different get onto your library and persuade them to stock it immediately.

Muriel Spark is indeed born again and I loved it.

And now over to you because it's while since we've had the conversation...

Favourite boarding school books anyone...

Or maybe you didn't need to read them because you actually went  to boarding school...

 

 

 

 

 

 

The True Deceiver ~ Tove Jansson

Sailing along happily with my Tove Jansson reading, I picked up The True Deceiver.  First published in 1982 and translated from its original Swedish by Thomas Teal in 2009 for Sort of Books, this is a little gem of a novel. So much tightly bound into one narrative as Katri Kling decides that she and her brother Mats, a boat-yard worker, need money and perhaps the best way to achieve it is to inveigle their way into the life of famous local artist and illustrator of children's books, Anna Aemilin. 

'Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness,' thinks the socially awkward Katri as she lies awake at night...

'...going on and on, like living in a tunnel where dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you're screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. You wait and hide like a tree...'

And , as winter cloaks the remote fishing and boat-building village of Västerby, Katri plots a credible route into vulnerable Anna's life. There will be coercive control and gas-lighting as Katri homes in and slowly takes over the house, the cooking and the administration of Anna's working life, eventually even answering her copious correspondence for her and it's hard not to fall into the trap of judging Katri's actions...but don't.

There was a moment in the book when the whole premise and my assumptions flipped and Tove Jansson gently and cleverly suggested that I have a rethink.  I had to ask myself who was the 'true deceiver' Katri or Anna, and for fear of spoiling not a word more about the plot.

I can think of another book that did this, The Beacon, to my mind one of Susan Hill's finest novellas. Susan sent me a very early version of this many years ago. I read it and sent back instant thoughts...it was a good read, I'd really enjoyed it. Then, at about 3am I woke up with a start and thought 'Blimey...so THAT'S what this book is about.' The massive and unanswerable conflict had initially passed me by, only dawning when I let the book settle in my mind. I've never forgotten my first reading of The Beacon and if you haven't read it maybe seek it out.

There are some wonderful motifs in The True Deceiver...the old furniture, the piles of Anna's belongings that Katri unilaterally dumps out on the winter ice until the spring thaws when the detritus will sink out of sight...

Slowly it degrades within sight, slowly Anna's past life disappears.

And then here is a dog. Katri's unnamed dog with its menacing yellow eyes. From the off I sensibly didn't take my eyes off that dog...

Given that the book was written before all the current research and knowledge about the autistic spectrum Tove Jansson may unwittingly have written with great insight into some aspects of the condition. I found myself asking (myself) whether in setting out to deceive, had Katri done so by simply being herself. This was how she thought, this was a perfectly right way to proceed and ultimately it will become clear that her motives were...well I'd better not give that away.

Incidentally, in the quest for the Perfect Bookmark for my Tove Jansson reading I have settled on this, a favourite postcard from the National Gallery...'Lake Keitele', by Finnish artist  Akseli Gallen-Kallela and painted in 1905. I go and look for it every time I visit and buy a postcard every time I visit.

Doesn't it create the most incredible atmosphere and likewise The True Deceiver took me to an unusual place and made me flex my mind around strange and unusual ideas; no answers, no definite conclusions at the end beyond that old saying 'there's nowt so queer as folk', and Tove Jansson knew it too.

The Remedies ~ Katharine Towers

You might remember that I had a moment of great fortune in one of the town's charity shops backalong. Someone had donated their entire collection of poetry books and I might have been the first in the door, who knows, but I scooped up a few gems for 50p each, poets I'd always meant to explore, along with a few new names that had drifted onto my radar.

I started my reading of this bounty with The Remedies by Katharine Towers and it resonated with me from the first page and the first lines of the first poem The Roses

Because my father will not stand again
beneath these swags of Himalayan Musk
nor  stare for hours to see which stems are safe

and which need tying back...

When the Tinker first moved in with us here, Susan Hill, who had published his memoir, bought us both a rose to celebrate the moment. It was a lovely thought and my dad spent several days deciding which one he would like. He eventually chose Highgrove for its royal connotations, and the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh had written the introduction for his book, something of which he was inordinately proud. Highgrove and my choice Lady Sylvia, duly arrived and were planted with much ceremony and mychorizzal powder to help the roots. Highgrove launched itself up the wall at Olympian speed, (Lady Sylvia was much more sedate) but my dad would spend hours coaxing it along, tying in the right direction and it flourished. A profusion of deep red flowers year on year since, and every time I go to tidy up I find a little piece of the wire he used.

Isn't this one of the great gifts of poetry, its congruence with experience.

From the title alone there is enough guidance for what may be to come. Remedies with their connotations of healing, solution and resolution, ways of making better and when I checked official definitions they added to the meaning with words like treatment and cure, redress for a wrong and recovery of a right.

There is a method and an order to the poems, one handing over the baton to the next. So Beautiful it Must be True explores the idea of a single note played perfectly, the next poem Tinnitus  when those notes are not quite so perfect...

'If only it were church bells
or the early morning chanting 
of choir boys in Latin.

You could even learn to love
your own inner sea -
swishing through the ossicles,

but not this round-the-clock
back-chat of an irritated nerve
that doesn't know it's time to shut up.

Perhaps the one connection that hadn't occurred to me was that of the Bach Flower Remedies.

I'll admit to buying the odd bottle of Rescue Remedy in the past, and thinking I maybe needed more than the standard few drops as I headed into court to give evidence in a child protection case, but beyond that I knew nothing about them so researching this has been fascinating.

Based on remedies created by Dr Bach in the 1930s, and apparently consisting of 50:50 water and brandy (50-80 proof) whilst the dilution means only a single molecule of the flower essence may remain. It is argued by many that the efficacy is purely that of a placebo, together with the benefits of a moment or two of calming introspection on an emotional state, and EU law changed the classification of the remedies to one of 'nutritional supplement'  thus ending medicinal claims, but many people know and believe differently and I wouldn't dream of denying that belief. If it helps, use it.

Katharine Towers explores each flower remedy... Aspen,Water Violet, Early Gentian, Willow, Cherry Plum and several more via the voice of the plant itself and the condition attributed to its efficacy.

Here's Hornbeam - a remedy for apathy

A rumbling in the bones
but I'm too tired for spring.
All winter I have been
as good as dead...

Treating like with like came to mind as human foibles are imposed on the plants, mental torture, pride, self-pity, hatred, jealousy, aimlessness, impatience, and the effect created by Katharine Towers is both haunting and salutary in itself; a chance to step back and ponder the human condition.

As the collection moves towards it conclusion there is Bluebells

'In the way that we cannot be other
than ourselves even in the deep of winter
these woods where bluebells grow

are always bluebell woods...

and I had to agree...our woods only have one name..

And a final poem 'for example' ,with its simple antidote to a fear of dying, somehow rounds off the collection quietly, thoughtfully and perfectly.

What a brilliant and unexpected find The Remedies has been, and reading it again now to write this post I am reminded of poetry as the greatest gift that keeps on giving.

If there is one sadness, and it's a great and miserable one, it is that this very same shop suffered a catastrophic flood a few months ago and the entire stock, including many more poetry books, a superb fiction section along with a fantastic collection of vinyl records, was lost, so I'm very relieved I gave my selection a  home when I did.

If you know The Remedies, or Katharine Towers' poetry I would love to know your thoughts...

Also news of any more good poetry collections that have caught your attention lately...

And Flower Remedies, what's your verdict...

His Dark Materials...

The TV adaptation of His Dark Materials has started here in the UK, to much-generated hype and anticipation  and I'm wondering whether anyone else watched the first episode on Sunday evening, and if so what did you think?

I'm deeply into The Secret Commonwealth and the world of Lyra and the Magisterium and alethiometers and dæmons, so it was an easy transition for me. Having loved La Belle Sauvage I have slipped straight back into the world that Philip Pullman creates. He makes it effortless for a reader prepared to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves, and I was reminded (thank you Kate in comments) to revisit his books of essays Dæmon Voices and now I'm intrigued by the connections between His Dark Materials and John Milton's Paradise Lost. I don't know Paradise Lost at all but have an inkling to explore those links. Philip Pullman offers a book by book resumé and I have a copy standing by so I may be brave enough to dip a toe in alongside a helpful book, The Essential Paradise Lost by John Carey.

However at 8pm on a Sunday evening Bookhound would be the ultimate test. Having no knowledge of the books would he be interested. Would he grasp the storyline which even to me, in the know, seemed a little obscure in the first instance.

Slowly it all became more evident as the episode unfolded and with very little explanation from me...

Daemons and their purpose...and the fact that they change until a child becomes an adult

A strange world familiar in many ways, but then a huge step removed from the familiar in others...

And who are all these people...the gyptians, Asriel, Mrs Coulter...

Who are the goodies and who are the baddies...

I'm pleased to report that Bookhound loved it, remarking 'This is going to be huge,' after about ten minutes and loving the settings and the graphics as well as the characters. By the end of the first episode the atmosphere of this strange world was established and we both agreed that was Sunday evenings sorted for the forseeable.

Once I have finished The Secret Commonwealth I'm planning to re-read or listen to the first book Northern Lights and then  tackle (for the first time) The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass , having armed myself with a beautiful Everyman edition in readiness. (Titles corrected thank you for comments) 

Please forgive our second Philip Pullman conversation in as many weeks but I'd love to know your thoughts about the TV adaptation and whether it worked for you. It's getting great reviews but opinion on social media seems to be divided...

And what about Paradise Lost...

'The way poems and stories work on our minds is not by logic, but by their capacity to enchant, to excite, to move, to inspire...its primary influence is on the imagination...'

...suggests Philip Pullman who freely acknowledges its influence on him ever since he read it at school.

Did you read it at school....

I wish I had...

 

 

We need to talk about... Scent

I mean ‘smell’ too, but scent is a much nicer word.

My first deliberate memory of scent is probably the tin of Dust of the Stars talcum power that seemed to be bottomless, and sat in our bathroom for as long as I can remember. Oval shaped and rusting around the base, it seemed to go on and on. Growing up there'd be a lot of excitement about the box of blue hyacinth bath cubes for Christmas which segued into Aqua Manda...

and Kiku perfume (Kiku matching my bright yellow 1960s bedroom) but as I recall the scent was a bit overpowering.

I'm not a perfume person these days, though when I look back I have certainly had my moments. From 1970's Blue Grass (Elizabeth Arden) to 1980's L'Air du Temps, ( Nina Ricci) a Chanel No 5 phase in the 1990s through to Eau Dynamisante (Clarins) and then suddenly, for some reason that was me and perfume done with. I'm wondering whether it's an age thing... a sort of 'Can't Be Bothered' combined with a sense that, if I'm honest, it all seems to smell a bit rank (cats?) on me after a while. Or maybe it's because just one scent, more a smell really, and the memories it evokes, seems to have superseded all others.

On my first trip to New Zealand Offspringette took me on the road trip to beat all road trips and this included cycling the Otago Rail Trail through South Island. This would be the same me that hadn't even sniffed a bike for about twenty long years who would suddenly gird up in padded shorts and cycle a hundred miles. True, after Day One in thirty degree heat and no shade, and fearing I might breath my last somewhere on the Maniototo plains, my pleas to swap to an electric bike were heeded, but all the same you still have to sit on the saddle and work the pedals.

Mission accomplished and driving on to Queenstown, we pitched our tents in Glenorchy... 

Situated on the banks of Lake Wakatipu, Glenorchy is a beautiful stopping place, especially after four days of cycling...

Lakes, rivers, forest, snow-capped mountain backdrop, this is proper Middle Earth, real Lord of the Rings filming country...

...and even better, Mrs Woolly's Camping Ground had showers and a General Store.

This far into the trip, truth be told, despite lashings of Factor 50, my face was feeling like a bit of old leather, just a bit parched and in need of a high grade moisturiser. I browsed a while in the store and came across a stand with Apicare products. I'd never heard of it but if anything says manuka honey on the tube I'm convinced, so I headed into the bliss of the shower with some shower cream and a tube of the  'Saving Face' moisturiser, and to this day (three years on) I have accepted no substitutes. The shower stuff came and went but the moisturiser stayed. I stock up when I visit and Offspringette bought me another year's supply (three tubes) home with her at Christmas.

And every single morning I slap it on my face and I am back in Glenorchy. Every time, I only have to smell it and I'm there, walking lakeside, staring at the mountains...

It all had me wondering...

I can't be the only one who is transported somewhere by a smell...

And how about perfume...do you use it, and if so which one...

Was anyone else complicit in the 1970's Blue Grass movement...

 

A Reading Gallimaufry

Here we are, on our way towards the Shortest Day, but it doesn’t take much to remind me of summer if it involves memories of a good book. A couple more of my summer deck chair successes, with thoughts from my notebook as I read, so not a full account by any means but hopefully enough to give you the gist. 

Scoop ~ Evelyn Waugh

I am deeply into Evelyn Waugh territory based on my success with Brideshead Revisited coupled with these irresistible new Penguin Modern Classics editions (soft floppy binding so the book stays open, 1.5 line spacing and readable-sized font). My next choice was Scoop the story of the mistaken identity of a hapless William Boot as a top flight journalist who then finds himself shipped off to Africa to cover a 'promising little war' that hasn't really started yet, and might need a bit of help to get going. Satire and irony are timeless, I suspect Scoop reads as well today as it did then and I loved every word.

I've since read the first book in the  Sword of Honour trilogy, 600 pages of pure reading pleasure ahead whenever I feel like picking it up again. More irony, more satire and a book I'd love to run in to the Tinker and say' You'll love this', because it's a world he'd recognise instantly. For the world-weary perhaps it also helps to look back and realise ‘twas ever thus, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well...eventually. 

 

The Offing ~ Benjamin Myers

I often wonder whether authors really like having their book compared to others but two novels came to mind as I started The Offing. The first A Month in the Country by J.L.Carr and the second The Triple Echo by H.E.Bates. Both books held in high esteem here. Pitch perfect sense of place which was no surprise given my thoughts on Benjamin Myers book Under the Rock recently, but here a place isolated and unchanged as sixteen-year-old Robert Appleyard sets out to walk south from the coal mines of the north for a bit of freedom. His childhood has been stolen by war and he needs to breath easy for a while before he to is expected to start his underground working life.

There is a sense of mystery too and whilst I feared one plot, when Robert alights upon the enigmatic but forthright Dulcie Piper on his travels, I was relieved to find it would be something entirely different. A novel about loss and its many guises and how optimism and kindness can triumph in the end.

'You never know what's around the corner. A morning's sunshine can harbour an afternoon's storm clouds. Life is long when you're young and short when you're old, but tenuous at any time.'

Isn't it just.

If you’ve read either of these, or other books by these authors, please do share your thoughts in comments...

And as always, any other good reading recommends too...

And please do tell us what you are reading now...

I’m happy to report that I am completely beguiled and entranced by The Secret Commonwealth. 

I’m going in...

Firstly, Happy Clock Going back Day UK and I hope you are all deciding when to have your special extra hour and what to do with it, as I do. The good news is that the clock in the car is right again for the foreseeable so there’s every chance we all be on time for things again. 

Having watched the rugby and cheered on both teams yesterday, but been very secretly pleased that England won (because, not getting into any debate about it, the nation surely requires a feel good diversion and a sense of recovered pride in ourselves right now) Bookhound and I headed off to Cowslip Workshops for refreshment. I’d actually started making a secret family C******s gift and had run out of fabric. My fault, I chose the fat quarters months ago to match some curtains and needed more, and of course luck was only partly on my side. No matter, we matched and I’ll make it blend, it’ll be fine.

We stopped off in Launceston on the way home, for papers and a wander, and I came away with the book (thank you Bookhound) I’d decided I might not read (reasons various and silly) but my Reading Friend had been adamant when we met this week...

’You have to...he really knows how to write a story, I can’t stop reading it...”

The Secret Commonwealth, Volume Two of The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman.

Suddenly I’m transported back to my last return from New Zealand, where half my heart had already been yesterday, as much so as on any other day, because I know just how much winning at rugby means to the Kiwis. Having said goodbye to Offspringette and flying up to Auckland two years ago almost to the day, I was waiting in the airport for the flight to Singapore. A young man sitting in front of me had in his hand La Belle Sauvage, published that very day and I was overcome by covetous thoughts, spending the next hour plotting how I could possibly relieve him of it without getting arrested....because I’d have given anything to have had it to read for the next twenty-seven hours of my journey and there was no bookshop nearby. As it is nothing came to mind but all was not lost because it was the book that served me so well through the weeks of jet-lag that are always my misfortune after the return home.

So I’m going in and no one can stop me.

How about you...

Any more Philip Pullman fans out there...

Has anyone else read it yet...

And what about jet-lag. I’m hopefully planning another trip to New Zealand next year (DV etc) and I wonder if anyone has any miracle suggestions. I suspect it’s all compounded by the farewells because I don’t get it when I arrive there, but does Melatonin work...should I seek some out...

Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters ~ Sarah Watling

My grumble back in 2006, when I started writing the scribbles, was how difficult it was, when you lived away from the centre, to find the good books to read and, though things have moved on a bit since then, I always seem to revert to one reliable source, Literary Review. I subscribed again last year on the basis that  £3.18181818 a month (£35 a year for eleven issues) represented a good investment if I was to keep up to speed with what is out there.

Each edition arrives and there's a bit of a fight for it. Bookhound, who would agree that he is not really a reader of anything unless it involves fish or catching them, loves it because it saves him reading the whole book. He reports back to me because I tend to skim the reviews and head to the final verdict for fear of spoilers in the first instance. I won't read it properly until I have finished the book and written my thoughts here.

'There's a book in here that you will really love,' he said after reading the June issue.

Coming from him it's a fatal statement that can only have one outcome, because I then want the book yesterday so, any excuse for a trip to a bookshop, we head off and I come home clutching a copy of Noble Savages - The Olivier Sisters Four Lives in Seven Fragments by Sarah Watling. It prompted that post about Sisters a while back and we had an interesting discussion about their proliferation in dedicated biographies like this. 

Born at the close of the nineteenth century, sisters Margery, Daphne, Brynhild and Noel Olivier (Sir Laurence was a cousin and is barely mentioned) are raised as free spirits by parents who live and love by Fabian Society principles. The family are well-connected with in-crowd of the day which reads like something of a Who's Who of early twentieth century society... George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, Bunny Garnett, E. Nesbit and those connections expand as the girls get older to include Rupert Brooke (who was said to love all four of them, but in particular Noel) D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf (who couldn't get the measure of them at all). Meanwhile the sisters develop a seemingly unassailable solidarity... 

'The thing about being an Olivier...was that there were four of them, so they could afford to discard outsiders, knowing that isolation would never be absolute.'

However, times are a-changing for women, their voices are being heard and they are 'asserting a claim in the public realm' and it is clear that there is a world waiting out there for the Oliviers and it must be explored and embraced.

There will be family diversions to Jamaica, where their father Sidney was the governor, but ambitions would set each daughter on a different path and in some cases blazing a trail in a world riven by post First World War chaos and uncertainty. The expected role of women will be to step back, to surrender and sooth the men, and far fewer of them, on their return from the Front.

Daphne will embrace the burgeoning educational philosophies of Rudolf Steiner and eventually set up one of the first schools in the UK.

Noel, against all the odds will train in medicine at a time when many hospitals were closing their doors to women medical students and doctors...

For all the free-thinking upbringing some things hadn't changed and it is Brynhilde who narrowly escapes being the designated daughter who will care for the emotionally demanding parents. Described as 'the great beauty of the four' Bryn will marry (twice) and raise a family that will include a daughter Anne. Anne would marry Quentin Bell and as Anne Olivier Bell go on to edit Virginia Woolf's diaries (among many other accomplishments) 

And then there was Margery..

I'm guessing that 4/4 success stories would be too much to ask and sadly it is poor Margery who succumbs to mental illness and is hospitalised for many years. Sisterly solidarity is all well and good, and the motherly Brynhilde goes to extreme lengths to care for her, but Margery's obsessive, volatile and unpredictable behaviour when convinced that someone is in love with her, when really they are definitely not, will eventually lead to the family's heartbreaking and exhausted decision to have her committed into care.

Whenever I read a book like Noble Savages, whose timeline traverses those years of the First World War, there is always that sudden and overwhelming sadness in the run up that I know what is ahead and they don't. It still seems to be a fruitful source of investigation...everything seemed to be going so well...

'The present is amazingly ours, ' says Rupert Brook to Noel, ' we have inherited the world...'

Noel rejects Rupert Brook's desperate and obsessive love for her in the pre-war years and will have to live with that decision ever thereafter. 

An historian with a master's degree in historical research writing her first book and you'd think there would be endless traps there for the falling into, but to my mind Sarah Watling has sifted and handled her information adeptly. By cleverly marshalling her narrative into seven distinct time frames, omitting those years when life trundles on, because I was left desperate to know how life had treated the sisters in the interim. What had changed, who'd had another baby, who was still married, who was off on a frolic of their own, who had escaped a difficult situation, all making for one very  addictive and fascinating book. The book didn't leave my side for a week. Four women living through times of huge social and cultural change and, as a footnote to the book, I would add there is some interesting background information coupled with honest observations from Sarah Watling about the ethics of a biography like this, which had been resisted by the last remaining sister Noel for many years. 

I'm interested too...how do you find out about the books you might want to read (apart from here occasionally)...

Do you rely on newspaper reviews...bookshop shelves...the library...

And what about biographies...are the famous fair game for a reader’s insatiable appetite to know, or should their reticence be respected.

 

 

 

 

 

The Greedy Queen - Eating with Victoria ~ Annie Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boil to 280

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

The Summer Book ~ Tove Jansson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

The Gown ~ Jennifer Robson

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

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

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

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

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

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