silencing the bell

Cinnamon emergency

2012-02-12T16:05:00.005Z

Having a quiet weekend and doing my usual Sunday morning blog browsing I called over at One Perfect Bite enticed by the picture of these Cinnamon Love Knots. And they are as delicious as they look:

In spite of the americanisms in the recipe I think I did them pretty well. I make a similar recipe of enriched bread dough with dried fruit to make little fruity buns but have never made a dough in this direction: the recipe mixes all the wet ingredients and then adds the flour. I think it works quite well and the dough came out lovely and soft. I was about to roll it out when I discovered that I had run out of cinnamon and so had to jump on my bike to Morrisons to get some tout suite . All in all well worth the effort.

purses and all that

2012-02-09T20:07:00.004Z

My old velvet hippy purse has been gradually giving up the ghost for months now. I knit and felted a replacement ages ago. Then it sat under the bed because I sewed the zip on and it was all wonky. I finally got around to finishing it off. The fabric is nice and robust so it should last me for another ten years.
Dunk is getting a second pair of socks because I started these for my son Lewis, but failed to check his shoe size and I have done them far too big ... oh well, just an excuse to buy some more yarn.

Even the dogs

2012-02-05T11:44:00.005Z

I so much enjoyed 'So many ways to begin' that when I was browsing for an audiobook (to accompany the knitting) I picked up 'Even the Dogs' by Jon McGregor without hesitation, and I spent yesterday listening to it.

(Friday lunchtime I miss-stepped on someone's path and turned my ankle. After hobbling around the rest of my duty and cycling the two miles back to the office I took an executive decision not to go to work on Saturday.)

Here is another book I might not have stuck with if I had read it but the voice reading gave it something that really drew me in. It begins with the description of a dead body in a neglected flat, but the narrator is using 'we', as if there is a whole group of them watching what is happening. The 'we' became important as you follow the story because it really is about a group of people bound together by necessity. It was a slightly shocking diversion from his other books as it takes you down into the world of drug addiction. A couple of times I thought there was something wrong with the CD, then I realised that the sentences that ended abruptly without finishing was deliberate, a trailing off of thoughts, as if it didn't really matter or the narrator forgot what he was saying. In fact that happened a lot, ideas drifting one into another, things only half said. So the story moved backwards and forwards, recounting, from various perspectives, the lives of a group of drug addicts who gather in this flat, belonging to Robert, the dead guy. As we see their history, both ancient and recent, we get a picture of a complex relationship of interdependence and unreliability.

Like the Rachel DuPree book it is not a world that the author is familiar with and so is based on extensive research (he talks about it here in an interview with DGR). I found it convincing because it neither glamourises nor moralises about the life of the protagonists. It does not make excuses or explanations, it just describes what is. And it is thoroughly depressing. It reminded me of Trainspotting. And should be recommended reading for teenagers. Because it is so depressing. I have found this same thing in other references to addiction in novels, that the addict does not strictly have a personality, the addiction takes over their personality, it becomes so all consuming and dominating that there is nothing else left in their life. They have different backgrounds, influences and experiences but all those become submerged under the addiction. This is the story that the book tells. It is the story of what it means to be an addict. It became most vivid when describing two of them begging; their need is so intense that one is repeatedly counting the money so that the very instant they have enough cash to score they up and leave. It describes them waiting by the phone box for their delivery, always having to wait longer than they can bear, but how they must bear it anyway. The desperation and the intensity are both very vivid. The other passage I found most engaging was the description of the heroine being processed in Afghanistan and then the long and torturous journey it takes to the streets of Britain. Sometimes my mind is boggled by the waste of human ingenuity. As one part of the story describes what happens to Robert's body we also watch what becomes of the other members of the group. There are a lot of conflicting emotions, the desire for real human contact but so often a rejection and scorn for anyone trying to help them. They are people who only cooperate when they will gain something, people who trust no one and are utterly untrustworthy, people with a peculiar sense of loyalty but who abandon others in need when there are better offers. I found the contempt for other human beings quite gut wrenching at times, sometimes you can be glad that you can't really see the contents of other people's thoughts.

A world I know nothing of, and am so grateful for the ignorance. Don't risk this book if the word fuck offends, it is most liberally scattered throughout. A really powerful book, and exquisitely written, never puts a foot wrong, the voices all feel genuine and believable.

Three Post Day

2012-02-01T13:59:00.006Z

I am trying to catch up on my book reviews so will get on and do this so I can go back to knitting. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka has also been part of the Orange January Challenge, it having been on the shortlist in 2005 (and was also long-listed for the Booker) (that's a good way to spend an hour or two, checking back over old book review posts to see if they are on any of the various prize lists and labelling them accordingly).

I know nothing about the Ukraine specifically but am guessing that the experience of being part of an immigrant community is commonly a mixture of integration and continuing to identify with their former homeland. The book is written from the point of view of Nadezhada, who's parents arrived in Britain after the war, and while partly the story is about the experience of being an immigrant it is also dealing with universal truths about family relationships. Nadezhada and her sister Vera are not speaking after a dispute over their mother's will but they are thrown back together by a family crisis. Their father plans to remarry, to a voluptuous young Ukrainian woman called Valentina. They are convinced he is being taken advantage of and become determined to put a stop to the whole thing. And so ensues a complex wrangle that leads the participants through a maze of heated emotions and fierce confrontation. Threaded through the modern day drama is the story of her parent's backgrounds, how they came to be together and their sometimes life threatening wartime experience, and her father's preoccupation with tractors and the book he is writing.

What I liked particularly was getting a very strong sense of their cultural identity, and how their experience of being incomers, and their wartime privations, continued to affect everything about how they lived. The reader gets an understanding of a whole different set of assumptions and priorities. This is a description of her grandparent's wedding:

"The Ocheretko men strode into the church in their riding-boots, embroidered shirts and outlandish baggy trousers. The women wore wide swinging skirts and boots with little heels and coloured ribbons in their hair. They stood together in a fierce bunch at the back of the church and left abruptly at the end without tipping the priest.

The Blazhkos looked down on the groom's family, whom they thought uncouth, little more than brigands, who drank too much and never combed their hair. The Ocheretkos thought the Blazhkos were prissy urbanites and traitors to the land. Sonia and Mitrofan didn't care what their parents thought. They had already consummated their love, and its fruit was on her way." (p.63)

There is a strong eclectic cast of characters, who all have an opinion about what other people should be doing, except maybe the enigmatic Mike (Nadezhada's husband), who just listens while Nikolai talks about tractors. The two women have such a contrast of experience, Vera having been a war child and Nadezhada being a post-war baby. The story is very fast paced, lurching from one crisis to another, the two sisters lurching between cooperating in the face of a shared enemy and returning to their lifelong animosity. There is a certain element of what feels like self-parody, and the lengths to which Valentina goes to try and get what she wants borders on the farcical. There is a lot of rushing backwards and forwards, and shouting and threatening. The one thing I might have like would be to have more points of view, so that you could get an idea of her motivation. All we have is the two sisters discussing her, and ascribing their own understanding onto the events; is she really as unfeeling and mercenary as they think. In contrast to the previous book Valentina crashes through their family causing all sorts of disruption and you feel at the end as if she has had a long lasting impact on them. I confess I did not read the bits of the tractor book that Nikolai is writing, I get the impression maybe I missed some political depth to the story. While I quite enjoyed the book I found myself irritated by the people and their inconsistent behaviour and inability to deal with the threat of Valentina. Many reviews described the book as very funny, but I did not read it like that at all. There are bits that are quite harrowing and there is quite a strong sense of the ongoing impact of history. I certainly felt that I learned a lot from the book but it's strength is very much in the interplay of the vital characters; it is one crazy story and you can't help but empathise with poor Nikolai and hope that all those people stop interfering in his life.

How it all began - experimental post

2012-02-01T09:30:00.002Z

Hi from the iPad. Dunk downloaded a Blogger app so I can write posts here and after two lines it is driving me crazy already ... just found the dictionary set to foreign, that would explain it's trying to change every other word.

So I have been reading 'How it all began' by Penelope Lively, a nice quiet undemanding little story, just over 200 pages, partly about the importance of stories. It is a slightly disconcerting style because it self consciously tells you that it is telling you a story, and then at the end recaps the story it has just told and summarises what became of the characters. It's just a device but I'm not sure I like it. She is a Booker prize winner so you tend to expect great things, though I have not read Moon Tiger. The book I really know her for is Astercote, a children's book published in 1970, that I still have on my shelf.

Charlotte, an elderly woman is mugged and the consequences of her injury ripple out via her daughter, her daughter's employer, his niece, her lover and his wife. It is just a gentle tale of people living their lives, and how this little incident kind of changes things, but kind of doesn't, it stirs them up and then the dust settles and life goes on. In fact, yes, the more I contemplate what happens the more I realise it is a story about life staying the same. These are all people who's lives are pretty uneventful. Something, the mugging and it's consequences, disrupt them, but at the end of the book everyone is pretty much settled back into the same little niche in which they started. Unexpected events have an impact, but often much more minimal than you might expect. Except maybe the Polish accountant, I think he changes his life more than the others. It reminded me of a TED lecture I listened to recently, that talked about happiness, and what a small impact even very significant events have on people's lives and how people perceive happiness (always interesting stuff there, but I should try and avoid digression.)

I was trying to pin down in my head who is the main character but it doesn't really have one. It hops from one person to another at random, without focussing on anyone in particular, it is not one story with sub-plots but really lots of sub-plots. The most interesting of them is Lord Henry, a slightly doddering retired professor of history to whom Rose (Charlotte's daughter) acts as personal assistant and general dogsbody. I mean, everyone is self-centred, it's a fact of life, but it's always amusing to read a character like this, it makes you feel smug. He is so stuck in his own version of reality and what is important, and his sense of his own importance, that you kind of enjoy him getting his comeuppance. But of course he creates a new version of reality and settles back down into his life and just tells himself that everyone else is at fault.

It's all very nice and middle class and comfortable. Charlotte is not traumatised by the violence nor afraid to go back to her home, she is just inconvenienced by the injury. Rose will not leave her safe marriage and family. The 'lover' (who's name I forget) wheedles his way back into his nice safe marriage. The niece sorts out her financial problems quite simply.

It was just a nice story but nothing special, no challenge for the characters or the reader. Good books really need to have something more.

The Idea of Perfection

2012-02-01T08:10:00.005Z

The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville won the Orange Prize in 2001. I love this cover photograph and I was left wondering if it was in fact the initial inspiration for the story, since it shows a bridge exactly as she describes it in the book; you can even see the shifting of the timbers as it has been twisted by the river.

This is the story of Harley and Douglas, both landing up in Karakarook, apparently to end up on opposite sides of an argument within the local community. Douglas is coming to knock down an old bridge, Harley to assist with creating a museum and she gets involved with the campaign to save the bridge. So here are two people, very much outside their comfort zones, struggling with the harsh outback environment, who's chance encounters bring them together. Running alongside we have an alternate story, of Felicity Porcelline and her rather strange obsessive behaviour. The two are separate, though they happen at the same time and in the same place and the people in them interact. Maybe it is partly about the isolating effect of the environment; Felicity is an incomer and doesn't quite fit in, though I think her problems are a bit more deep-seated than that.

The book is full of wonderful quirky characters, people who are almost always created it seems in very challenging environments, life is hard so it tends to toughen up the people. I loved the scene where Harley tries to buy a bucket but the old man in the shop will not sell her one from the window display, an extreme case of being stuck in your ways and resistant to any kind of outside influence. And then there is the oppressive heat, and the impact it has on people's lives. It is as if locals know how to live with it. Their environment dominates their lives, and it is so vast that they have to let it:

"It was another planet out here. The city became merely a dream, or as distant as something you had read about in a book: something you could remember, or not, as you pleased. The country made the city and all its anxieties seem small and silly, and yet when you had been too long in the city you forgot how the sun moving through its path was a long slow drama, and the way the sky was always there, big and easy-going." (p.32)

And being in a strange place makes you perceive things in strange ways:

"She thought they must be frogs because what else could they be? But frogs were supposed to croak. This was not so much a croak as a sound like someone hitting a cardboard box with a stick at irregular intervals. Sometimes several people with several sticks hit different sized cardboard boxes all together. It did not sound like frogs, but it must be, unless there were people out there, hitting sticks against cardboard boxes in the darkness." (p.44)

Harvey seems to have partly chosen her isolation, is running away from closeness after the traumatising suicide of her third husband, though her sense of being 'not right' goes back to not fitting in with her perception of her family:

"Her sister, of the fascinating wide mobile mouth, the far-set cat-like eyes, had always been a proper Appleby Savage. She had had the Appleby Savage gift, as well as long brown legs that looked good in shorts. Celeste had known about things at the back being smaller than things at the front without ever having to be told. She had a way of being dreamy, dishevelled, lovely, even in her old pink flannelette pyjamas, thinking interesting thoughts behind her lovely green eyes. Celeste's birds made Father laugh with surprise and pleasure in a way Pixie's never did." (p.198-9)

Douglas wants to get along, he just struggles with how to manage it. I like this description of him trying to be 'one of the lads':

"It was always like this out on site with the men. He made a point of reading the sports pages just for these moments and tried to memorise a few things so he could say Vaughan's peaked, or They'd be better of sacking Stannard. But when it came to it, the conversation always seemed to go in some other direction and needed information he had not memorised, or when it came to the moment, he could not remember if it was Vaughan or Stannard who had peaked." (p.185)

We only get a small amount of background information, it is mainly a story about Karakarook, and the impact it has on these two strangers who come to town. They both have a crisis of confidence and learn something new about themselves, which is always a satisfying thing in a good story, because the place and the experience has a real impact on them. Though you are not sure if they have so much of an impact on the place, in fact whether people at all do, it has a timeless quality, at least the flies do:

"A fly hovered near her eye and she flapped at it irritably. It circled back and tried the other eye. She flapped it away again. It avoided her hand, but languidly, unconcerned. It could do it all day, circle and land, circle and land. It could go on forever. She could not." (p.345)

A lovely book, wonderful sympathetic characters, highly recommended.

Hoodies and all that

2012-01-28T19:44:00.006Z

I have taken five months to finish Tish's hoodie, not that it was particularly difficult, the lacy pattern was quite simple once I got the hang of it, I just got waylaid by other projects. The hood came out a little baggy but she looks great in it. Here she is with her young man, Lee.

The other much smaller hoodie that has taken a mere two days is for Thomas Arthur Glyn, the newly arrived baby of one of my many cousins. I decided to make something a bit bigger rather than a tiny newborn jumper and this was the only yarn I could find in my stash that was machine washable (nobody wants to have to hand wash baby clothes). It is a modified version of this toddler hoodie pattern that I sized down a bit and knit in the round to save the sewing up.
I had a crisis of confidence that the hood opening was too tight so I went back and undid the cast off and used this instruction to do an extra stretchy bind-off around the hood, and then around the sleeve ends too. There is nothing worse than struggling a small baby into clothes too tight.

I have mum and dad here for the weekend and we went up to the Manchester Art Gallery today and saw the Ford Maddox Brown exhibition, which was most interesting, and packed out with people who were prepared to pay real money just to look at paintings. The one that struck me most visually, though it was only about 8 by 7 inches or so, tiny compared to some of the paintings (and had been used on the poster by the museum) is this lovely image of a girl; the reds of her shawl, her hair and the background make it most vivid. Well worth the trip but unfortunately finishes tomorrow.

Another scary movie

2012-01-23T21:08:00.003Z

So Creature and I popped up to Blaydon over the weekend to visit Lewis and Rachel, and Jacob and Jenny, mainly hanging out and eating Chinese food and watching Game of Thrones (not sure I have time to read the books, but Creature has loved them). Lewis arrived home from work with a new addition to the menagerie, a six foot Guyana Red Tailed Boa that had been bought in to be re-homed.

We were awoken at about 7.30am on Sunday to a loud crash and when I checked the reptile room (adjacent to the living room where we were innocently asleep) I discovered that it had somehow escaped from the viv and was busy exploring it's new environment. It was somewhat reminiscent of our 'Snakes in a Galaxy' experience when we transported Trixie and Nix to Tish's new home in Rusholme. Not that snakes are particularly intelligent animals mind you, it had managed to pull the heat mat wires that ran through a plastic vent in the back of the viv, exposing a hole large enough to pass through, but it was accidental. I think that was enough in the way of eventfulness for one year now thanks.

Knitting is much less worrying. I have been doing this lovely multicoloured pair of socks for Dunk over the last week and finally finished this evening, his size 12 feet have been quite a challenge:

Blogiversary Post

2012-01-19T07:20:00.000Z

Time for a traditional roundup of the last year of blogging.

Firstly, it's nice to find how visitor numbers have snowballed ... this time last year I claimed just over 7,000 total visits, the number now shows over 27,000, probably averaging 60 visits a day.

Blog stats:

Posts - 128

Comments - 198

Followers - 69

For some unfathomable reason, without any apparent specific searches, my dad's guest post about Little Bee (from October) has been getting visitors every day and has jumped, incredibly, to being my third most visited post, the top two remain the Lizard Cake and Margaret Atwood poetry.

Three new blogs started: one for 'small stones' started last January, one for creative writing started in September and then another started in May following the concerns of ageing.

Books read - 50 something

Novels written - 1 (unfinished)

It's been a busy year for knitting

5 jumpers

5 cardigans

6 pairs of socks (and one on the needles now)

1 pair of gloves

1 scarf

1 pair baby leggings

1 hobo bag

Some random bits of felting and a few yards spun.

Probably well over 900 (that's nine HUNDRED) miles ridden on my trusty bike.

One new job for Dunk but no new houses, pets or babies, in fact not much in the way of momentous events happened all year. Here's hoping for another uneventful one in 2012.

(Photo from our trip in May to Dunham Massey)

The personal history of Rachel DuPree

2012-01-17T18:30:00.000Z

I have been listening to an audiobook of The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber over the last few days. It was picked out at the library to accompany my knitting, and to go with my Orange January challenge because it was on the Orange Prize long list of 2009.

It tells the story of Rachel, a young black woman who moves from urban Chicago to become a homesteader in South Dakota at the turn of the 20th century. This is the kind of book where detailed research was the key since the author is describing a life utterly different from her own, and that is most impressive since I found the voice of Rachel very authentic. The description of their harsh and difficult life was vivid and the sweetnesses that she wishes for for her children are few and far between. The story itself covers a period of a few weeks, the ending of a drought, the coming of the rain and the imminent arrival of a new baby. In between the current events Rachel tells the story of her previous life and how she came to be married to Isaac DuPree. There is a lot of stuff going on around the story; the issue of racism and race riots that are far away but impact on her family, her sense of being an 'outsider' in the homestead community, but then the way her husband despises the 'Indians', for being drunks and dependent on the white people. It is essentially a story about disappointment and I was left feeling a little hopeless and heartbroken. Isaac thinks that by owning land and working hard he will be accepted as an equal, but that never happens. Rachel marries and enters a contract with Isaac to claim the farmland and thinks that by working hard and doing everything he asks of her he will accept her as a real partner, but that never happens either. It is told by Rachel so we only have her hopes and dreams, her ideas of what life might open up for her and you grow to feel a strong bond with her. She has all these wonderful positive qualities, love, strength, loyalty, endurance, trust, but I felt they were wasted on Isaac. He still blames her for things that go wrong, and never gives her any reason to feel that he values her. She calls it pulling together, but it amounts to her giving way in any disagreement. He never acknowledges her contribution, she has no rights to the land or wealth in her own right, he never includes her in making decisions about the farm or land purchases. He insists on buying a wedding band for her, that she finds sentimental and slightly romantic, a symbol of their being married, but in reality to him it is simply a sign that she is his chattel, as she finally learns at the very end. He appears to make choices on what is right for him and his plans, hardly taking the needs of the family into consideration at all. What the story speaks about most is the position of women in that period, it predates any kind of suffrage movement and the attitudes and conventions are all very restrictive and controlling. When she works as a cook at the boarding house she sees her only way out is to find a man of ambition to marry her, there are no routes for a woman without education to better herself, and few routes for women to be educated. When married she submits to Isaac's decisions even when they have bad outcomes. The only hopeful symbol (in a novel ripe with symbolism) is when Mrs Fills the Pipe comes to her aid when she is alone and in labour, saving her life when the baby is stuck. It is a moment of women bonding together through need, in spite of the male-created antipathy that had divided them, and coming to a new understanding of each other's lives. Despite being left a bit despondent at the end this book was beautifully written, so atmospheric, a wonderful tale of an old life.

Notes on a Scandal

2012-01-06T09:00:00.002Z

I find that I can include 'Notes on a Scandal' by Zoe Heller in the Orange January challenge because it was long listed in 2004. This was pure coincidence as I had picked out the audiobook before Christmas, and have been listening to it with Dunk over the last few days (or rather listening to it in the living room and obliging Dunk to partake, I like to think he got into the story towards the end but you can never tell with him.)

This book was not quite what I expected. I thought it was a story about the scandal, or even about the relationship between Sheba and Barbara, but in reality it isn't. It's a very creepy and enthralling portrait of Barbara, told in her own words. The book takes the form of partly a diary of the events that follow the scandal breaking, and alongside that Barbara's notes about the events in questions, what she claims to be an objective version of them, but which reveals far more about her than it does about Sheba.

So the story is that Sheba is a pottery teacher who forms a relationship with a fifteen year old pupil. Barbara is the school stalwart who has worked very hard to build a close trusting relationship with Sheba, whom she sees as a kindred spirit. In the aftermath of the exposure of the relationship she is the one who continues to support Sheba, seeing it as an 'us two against the world' kind of situation. But from little hints that she drops along the way you get the impression that Sheba is only the latest in a line of 'kindred spirits' that Barbara has forged friendships with, only to be inevitably let down and disappointed. She talks about Sheba, describes and analyses her behaviour, and that of other teachers at the school, but it is Barbara herself who we really come to know. She says very little about herself but what is excellent about the book is that she is revealed/betrayed by her own thoughts. There is at one point a very affecting description of the nature of loneliness, quite heartrending, and you feel deep sympathy for Barbara, but as the situation for Sheba worsens you see that she is getting what she has always desired, a person who needs her more than she needs them. She relishes Sheba's dependency and isolation, her need for Barbara. It made me laugh out loud several times at her cutting but astute observations of the people around her. The story also has some interesting and perceptive things to say about the angst of being middle aged, and the self-involved nature of teenagers, there is not a hint of surprise at the notion that the young man abruptly and inexplicably loses interest in the whole affair. Unusually for me I didn't like anyone in the story, Sheba is weak and shallow and selfish, the men are all obnoxious, but you just can't tear yourself away. A most sad and twisted individual, small-minded, petty, spiteful, angry, but yet also deeply loyal and devoted, Barbara is an utterly compelling character who carries the book with her to the very end.

Find a penny

2012-01-05T07:37:00.009Z

"We are all of us lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Oscar Wilde

but for those of us who spend far too much time tromping the streets and watching the ground in front of them instead of daydreaming there are small perks. It started with a plan to collect £1 and do a lottery experiment, to test if 'lucky pennies' found on the street were more fortunate than earned money, but it snowballed from there and this pile, which amounts to £40.50, is the result of a year of picking up change from the pavements of south Manchester (though one of the fivers was found in the Arndale). This does not include the €10 note that is now winging it's way to Tenerife with Tish or the £2 that I gave to Creature for her bus fare, or the small collection of foreign coins that are no use to anyone. Some are so rusty as to be almost unrecognisable, I didn't think money was supposed to rust, who knows. It feels like (and is in fact) free money, that I am now going to fritter away on something frittery.

Happy 2012

2011-12-31T19:09:00.002Z

It seems silly to kid myself that I'm going to do anything particularly different in 2012. I already tend to do the things that I think are important, I don't have any unhealthy habits, at least not so bad I'm prepared to give up the doughnuts (I have some irritating ones but where's the fun in giving up those), so the only real resolution for this year is to help get Creature through some exams and into college.

On the book front I have decided to partake in a couple of challenges. Firstly the Orange January challenge 2012, reading some books from the Orange Prize, which I have been doing on and off anyway. I have picked out The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville (2001 winner), Home by Marilynne Robinson (2009 winner), A Short history of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka (shortlisted in 2005) and 26a by Diana Evans (winner of the New Writers prize in 2005). And this links nicely with the TBR dare, to read things only from your 'To Be Read' pile, as these are all from my shelves. It is supposed to run until April but I think that I have so many unread purchases from last year I could probably keep going until next Christmas (or until I get fed up).

I found this fun 'resolution suggester' for those of you who are lacking challenges for the new year. Seeing as I already bake cookies from scratch, know how to tie a tie, say hello to strangers and have no desire to wake up any earlier, I thought I would probably take to wearing sunglasses and be a rock star. Or you can pop over to the Skepchick guide to new year resolutions, from where I borrowed the Neil Gaiman quotation.

So Many Ways to Begin

2011-12-28T18:51:00.006Z

So Many Ways To Begin by Jon McGregor

When I was first living really alone post divorce I was living in Chesterfield. To fill my non-working hours I was re-immersing into reading; because I had practically no money and was feeling very financially vulnerable I would sit in the library reading then I would pick out a handful of books, take them home and begin each in turn until something really caught me. One day I was browsing a bookshop and picked up a book called 'If nobody speaks of remarkable things'. This book was new, in hardback, so although the first few pages spoke to me I put it back on the shelf thinking I would look out for it later. The title however vanished from my brain and it was nearly a year later when I found mention of it in a newspaper and was able to seek it out. It lived up to my first impressions and was worth the wait. So many ways to begin is Jon McGregor's second book and is equally lovely.

It is the story of David, who finds his provenance is not quite as he had understood and spends far too much energy seeking something he imagines will be more real, and of Eleanor, who has run away from her origins and seems to be equally affected by the grief of lost roots. It is a quiet story about the unfolding of life, the small things, how things often do not turn out the way we planned, and how it might take a lifetime to appreciate things they way they are. David is a museum curator and the story chapters are headed as if they are descriptions of the listed artefact, each item a means to tell a small part of the story:

"Examination results, Scottish Highers, July 1967

A single sheet of paper, slightly larger than letter-sized, an expensive-looking rough-grained texture with a circular watermark just visible about halfway down the page. The name of the examinations board at the top, an address, a reference number. An official seal at the bottom, lipstick red and frilled at the edges. A ruled table with columns for subject, paper, date, and grade. The thick black type that can change a life. The paper held delicately, at arm's length, as though creasing it or tearing it would invalidate what it said. As though the ink were still wet and could be smudged or removed." (p.136)

It is also a book about history and about memories and how significant small things can become. Everything about the book is slightly delicate, the writing is only just there, completely understated, the characters hint at themselves, revealing little bits in brief moments of conversation or thoughts. Such books are a stark contrast to reads like War and Peace, that encompass huge swathes of people and history, they are just a tiny corner of existence, but it tells you far more about the human experience than Tolstoy does. It's hard to describe the story because it is just their life. It left me with just a sense of plus ça change.

At Paradise Gate

2011-12-28T17:09:00.004Z

At Paradise Gate by Jane Smiley was one of the novels that I bought at the charity shop months ago and has been waiting patiently in the pile. I read A Thousand Acres many years ago and loved it but have never read anything else by her until this. This was written ten years earlier and there are interesting similarities, most notably the three sisters in conflict, and it is again a story at least in part about family relationships.

I find that I like books that are set over a very short space of time, they have to be very concentrated in their effect, every conversation tends to be loaded with meaning because the characters are put in what tends to be a quite claustrophobic situation. Ike Robinson is dying, though you get the impression he may have been dying for quite some time as his wife Anna seems to be worn out by the whole process. Their three daughters, Helen, Claire and Susanna all live nearby and do make some contribution to the care of their ailing father, but he seems to prefer the burden to fall on his wife. The story is told mainly from the perspective of Anna, reflecting on her long marriage and the changes that have come about during her lifetime and her view of life in general. It is a portrait of their marriage and the complex interdependence that has built up between them. Ike has obviously not been a nice man but she has a solid loyalty to him because of their shared vulnerabilities. They are fiercely independent and resist acknowledging how much they rely on their daughters.

"Ike had never touched her like that, had almost ignored the details of her appearance, but had never let her ignore a single detail of his. She had admired him, washed for him, bought for him, made for him, inspected the bald spot he couldn't see, judged the growth of his belly, the atrophy of his muscles, and the tone of his skin until she felt that his body was her primary activity. Not to mention feeding it." (p.132)

Here she is making the bed, it is a nice mix of domesticity, intimacy and the image of her being both practical and very practiced. I particularly like the idea of a benign promise:

"Ike nodded. She set him gently in his chair and turned to the bed, which was quite disarranged. It was terrible in a way, as if he had been thrashing about in pain. She smoothed the bottom sheet and tucked it in, then flipped the top sheet with a practiced snap of the wrists, the blankets, one by one. She made hospital corners and tucked everything in, then arranged the mound of pillows. Ike hadn't slept flat in two years, almost. She loved a newly made bed in the middle of the night. It so benignly promised a fresh start." (p.82)

Anna talks to her daughters very much about their own concerns and current life, but what is going on in her mind and in her dreams is her history, her family and childhood, early married life and her own children:

"And the baby would, of course, know someone who would then live until 2067, or perhaps the baby herself would live until then, drawing Social Security, being photographed in her bed, recalling that great-grandmother, whom she remembered very well, thank you, herself remembered people who were born in 1837, less than a lifetime after the Declaration of Independence. Anna shivered, and her life seemed dwarfed by memory.

With the shiver her body began to revive. She grew sensible of her robe and nightgown twisted around her waist, of one of her slippers half off. It seemed that if she thought another thought, then she would think only of dead people, and even to think why that would be frightening was frightening." (p.73)

The group of women, joined by the granddaughter Christine, fuss and fret over Ike as he huff and puffs his way through the day, they dance on his every need, and he takes them totally for granted. It is as if his intense vulnerability has wiped out the domineering and violent man he was. In spite of obvious conflicts between the daughters there is a sense of a strong bond between them as a family. They work together to prepare and eat quite an elaborate meal. It seems to show how important the togetherness is in spite of any history. Christine drops the bombshell that she wants to divorce her recently acquired husband and it stirs up all manner of mixed feelings and attitudes about marriage and the varied relationships that the women have experienced. I enjoyed this book so much because it was about the history of women's lives, just ordinary and everyday and about ageing and how even though things change the essential stuff is kind of the same. Some kind of paradise perhaps.

"Beyond the pleasure of hot bath or a good meal, beyond the pleasure of church with the windows open in May, beyond even the pleasure of a good mystery story late at night, was the pleasure of a lot of work on a nice day: troweling holes for the pepper plants, weeding, drawing mulch over warm soil, snipping off old flower heads, raking up prunings and grass cuttings, hosing down the steps and scrubbing the porch, throwing away old bottles and magazines, kneading some sweet rolls, half to send to Christine, half for the freezer, letting one long intended task drift into another, such as sorting old clothes, that might have been so long intended as to be almost forgotten, then resting with some knitting or crochet, not idling, never idling, going outside and in, letting doors swing, pausing in the sunlight with your hands on your hips, as if there were too much to do, but really only sniffing the air for that first aroma of heat on turf." (p.198)

Epic book review

2011-12-28T15:00:00.002Z

When I joined the read along of War and Peace back in September 2010 it didn't seem such a tall order, I mean it is a mere 4 pages a day if you take a year over it, but it became a bit of an endurance test for me. I got left behind so stopped visiting the posts about the book, because I did not want to have the plot spoiled, and slogged on alone, reading with my breakfast most mornings. I'm going to be blunt here, I only stuck with it because I had already invested so much energy it seemed a waste not to complete the challenge. I find Russian books hard because of the names being so complicated and unpronounceable, and this one being exacerbated by the fact that there are three people called Nikolay, that was just irritating.

It was long, so very long, and yet relatively little seemed to happen in it. To a certain extent it is a history, and on that front I felt I did learn something from it, assuming that the history is accurate. There is a great deal of discussion about the war, but also about war in general, politics, history and what role war has and if it is a good way to conduct politics. Tolstoy also examines the course of history and the way decisions were made and how the events unfolded. I liked the way he shows that of course history is a reinterpretation of the events in light of the outcome and that often things turned out well (i.e. for Russia that is) in spite of decisions rather than because of them. His closing concluding chapters about the war were not part of the story but were more academic and very interesting. All through the book he makes interesting observations about the politics of favour and how it influences military decisions and actions. I liked this one, a clever analogy:

"All members of this party were fishing after roubles, decorations and promotions, and in their chase simply kept their eyes on the weathercock of Imperial favour: directly they noticed it shifting to one quarter the whole drone-population of the army began buzzing away in that direction, making it all the harder for the Emperor to change course elsewhere. amid the uncertainties of the position, with the menace of serious danger which gave a peculiarly feverish intensity to everything, amid this vortex of intrigue, self ambition, conflicting views and feelings, and different nationalities, this eighth and largest party of men preoccupied with personal interests imparted great confusion and obscurity to the common task. Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, before they had done with their buzzing over the previous theme, would fly off to the new one, to smother and drown by their humming of the voices of those who were prepared to examine it fully and honestly." (p.754)

Another nice analogy on the downfall of Napoleon:

"The Russians at Borodino won - not the sort of victory which is specified by the capture of scraps of material on the end of sticks, called standards, or of the ground on which the troops had stood and were standing - but a moral victory, the kind of victory compels the enemy to recognise the moral superiority of his opponent and his own impotence. The French invaders, like a maddened wild beast that in its onslaught receives a mortal wound, became conscious that it was doomed, but could not call a halt, any more than the Russian army, of half its strength, could help giving way. By the impetus it has been given the French army was still able to roll forward to Moscow; but there, without further effort on the part of the Russians, it was bound to perish, bleeding to death from the wound received at Borodino. The direct consequence of the battle of Borodino was Napoleon's causeless flight from Moscow, his return along the old Smolensk road by which he had come, the destruction of the invading army of five hundred thousand men and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on which at Borodino for the first time the hand of an adversary of stronger spirit had been laid." (p.973)

It is a bit of an impossible task to review such a long book. Apart from the war, the book makes me think of Pride and Prejudice, and I was irritated by it in the same way. The bits that are not about battles are solely about the concerns of the upper classes, their lives, their comings and goings, their money troubles. I had trouble making myself care too much about them because it all felt so removed from real life (see quote here from last year). The women have such narrow concerns, the death and destruction of the battles is unreal to them and the shallow round of balls and parties seems to continue unabated. The upper classes don't do that badly even when they are in the war, someone still seems to bring them dinner and see to their horses for them. The only episode I found interesting was when Natalya, Nikolay and Petya went hunting with their uncle and then return to his house and join in with the entertainment that the servants are enjoying. It was the only time in the entire book where we had any view of what life was really like for ordinary people. The main character in the story is Pierre, he is weak and ineffectual, easily manipulated, but who I did eventually come to like after he is captured by the french in Moscow and spends quite a time imprisoned and finally learns the life lessons he has been struggling with for the entire story, mainly to stop being so concerned with himself.

I recorded several dozen quotes but most of them are about the war and now it is so long ago I am not so sure why I liked any of them. Here is an example of why the book is so long:

"Prince Bagration screwed up his eyes, glanced back over his shoulder and seeing the cause of the confusion turned his head again with indifference, as much as to say: 'Is it worth while bothering with trifles?' He reined in his horse with the ease of a good rider, and slightly bending over disengaged his sabre which had caught in his cloak. it was an old-fashioned one, of a kind no longer in general use." (p.206)

Tolstoy has a tendency to like describing people's movements in minute detail, and always uses at least two adjectives where one would be just fine. In the space of a single page we have smiles described thus: "firm and contemptuous smile", "the smile of a doctor to whom an old wife tries to explain how to treat a patient", "subtly ironical smile", "that smile which said it was absurd and strange for him to meet with objections from Russian generals" and "smiled sardonically". He can take a whole page just to have someone to get up and walk across a room. Although it is not in any way a funny book there are brief moments of humour that lighten the atmosphere: when Prince Kuragin is expecting Pierre to propose to Heléne he just walks into the room and congratulates them as if he has proposed, sweeping the whole moment along to his wishes, and Pierre is so pathetic he daren't contradict him and ends up married. Then, at the end, after his prison ordeal is over, Pierre again:

"he fell ill and was laid up for three months. He had what the doctors termed 'bilious fever'. But in spite of the fact that they treated him, bled him and made him swallow drugs - he recovered."

I have read it admitted elsewhere that Tolstoy did not honestly know how to end the story. It felt more like he wanted to write a history of the period and felt that it would be more interesting and readable if he made it into a story, introduced characters and romance, but then when the fighting stopped he couldn't really be bothered. There is a little bit of suggestion of social reform, with Nickolay Rostov freeing his serfs but really life is just going to carry on as normal, the rich rebuilding their estates and fortunes, the poor getting back to the fields (having been slaughtered in their countless thousands). The whole tale is wrapped up very neatly in the last few dozen pages, erasing all possible complications and marrying off the appropriate people and giving them neat happy families by the end of the book. It was politically and historically an interesting read, but if you want the human interest I would suggest you stick with Miss Austen.

Annual reading list

2011-12-25T21:09:00.005Z

It's been a funny old year, I don't feel like I've read as much as in previous years, and have abandoned several books in disgust or boredom. I feel like I have been trying to find interesting books but failed, it is quite a while since I found something totally engaging, or maybe I have not been giving things my full attention. I have been knitting a sweater for Tish and made no progress in two months. I have lost all my oomph. So maybe a list will help, and remind me of the things I have enjoyed.

What we keep by Elizabeth Berg

The Body by Stephen King

The House at Riverton by Kate Morton

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Italian Fever by Valerie Martin

Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman

The Accidental by Ali Smith

The Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Room by Emma Donoghue

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin

The Thing Around your Neck by Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

The Birth Machine by Elizabeth Baines

A Letter to D by André Gorz

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Risk of Darkness by Susan Hill

Reading in Bed by Sue Gee

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Blue Eyed Boy by Joanne Harris

Jigs and Reels by Joanne Harris

The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson

The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff by Margaret Forster

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

The Rules of Engagement by Anita Brookner

The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks

Seeing Stars by Simon Armitage

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

The Sad Book by Michael Rosen

A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty

Bears in the Night by Stan and Jan Berenstain

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimée Bender

Anno's Journey by Mitsumasa Anno

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

So that is only 49 books, and 15 of them were audiobooks, plus some listed are children's books so not serious reading.

Books I have read and not reviewed:

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill

Best books of the year: Wolf Hall and The Wasp Factory.

Bugger Christmas cake

2011-12-25T20:34:00.006Z

After letting the turkey go down for a while I spent my Christmas afternoon making a Hazelnut Chocolate Meringue cake (it was supposed to get done yesterday but never mind), which was more yummy and much less filling than a slab of fruit cake.

Hazelnut Chocolate Meringue cake:

6 egg whites, whipped until peaky.

6 oz caster sugar, whipped in to the egg whites

+1 tsp of cream of tartar

+1 tbsp white vinegar

Toast in the oven 4oz of hazelnuts, rub off the skins and then finely grind (or buy pre-ground, whatever). Fold this into the meringue mixture.

I divided this mixture into three circles on to three pieces of baking parchment on baking trays (it needs to peel off easily afterwards, this is the best stuff.)

Bake in a cool oven, 130 degrees, up to 2 hours until golden and crisp. You could easily up the quantity of eggs and sugar and make them a bit thicker, these were quite thin, or make more layers, or whatever you fancy really. Turn off and leave to cool in to oven.

Whip 1/2 pint double cream and 2 tsp of caster sugar. Sandwich the meringues together. I put grated chocolate into each layer with the cream and then added a small handful of finely chopped hazelnuts on the top with more chocolate.

And now we have Independence Day on the telly, what more could we ask for.

Having this Christmas off

2011-12-23T17:45:00.003Z

Christmas this year is going to be even more low key than usual as I have opted out almost completely. The weeks crept up and I kept putting things off and in the end there were no cards sent and very limited presents bought. I realised that I do most of my preparations out of habit, as an atheist have no particular affinity with the celebration and decided it was time to step back from the cultural pressures to participate. Creature has already left the house to go and stay with a friend so it will be Dunk, Tish and myself gathered around the free range turkey (I happen to like turkey). I have however made a cake (something else I like) and when I put the marzipan on the other day decided to make some of our traditional favourites.

Coconut Ice:

1 tin of sweetened condensed milk (avoid Nestlés if you can)

12oz desiccated coconut

1lb icing sugar

few drops of red colour

Mix the whole lot in a big bowl. Divide the mixture in half and colour half pink. Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper, sprinkle with icing sugar and press the white mixture in with your fingers spreading it thinly, cover with a layer on pink. Leave to dry for a day and then chop into small chunks. Will keep for up to about a week if you keep it in a sealed box.
Peppermint Creams:

1 egg white

1lb icing sugar

food colour

peppermint essence

Lightly whip the egg white and beat in some of the icing sugar. Keep beating in the sugar until it is a thick dough. Knead in more sugar until it is no longer sticky. Sprinkle a tray with lots of icing sugar, roll the dough into small balls and flatten. Leave to dry overnight, turning occasionally to ensure they do not stick to the tray. Store in a box, will keep quite a long time, except they are less sickly than the coconut ice and so get eaten very fast. The green ones are peppermint, the yellow ones are flavoured with orange essence, I did a batch of each. You can also use lemon or some other to your taste. Can also be dipped in melted chocolate.

have not felted in a long time

2011-12-19T20:57:00.000Z

I haven't done any felting in months but when my dad e-mailed to say that mum needed a cover for her birthday Kindle I offered to make her one. I was surprised to discover how small they are, smaller than a book, a mere 19cm by 12. Felting something down to a precise size is no mean feat. I allowed nearly 50% shrinkage and then made a cardboard cutout to judge when it reached the right size. I hope it fits.

Her Fearful Symmetry

2011-12-11T16:11:00.005Z

'Her Fearful Symmetry' by Audrey Niffenegger.

This book was always going to be a disappointment to me considering how much I loved 'The Time Travellers Wife'. It is described as a ghost story, but I think it is just a story with ghosts in it, because the ghost is neither particularly sad nor malevolent. It would have been a better story of she had been. Coming from a family with lots of twins I might have found it interesting but the whole identical twin thing was overdone and vaguely annoying. I am not sure that that level of intensity between two people would be real, and certainly not healthy, so using the device at the centre of the story made it feel rather contrived.

SPOILER ALERT

Anyway, the story: Elspeth and Edie are twins who have been separated by a rift over a man (who is utterly irrelevant to the story), and Elspeth dies and leaves her estate to Edie's twin girls, Valentina and Julia. Julia is domineering and Valentina is just weak and this is the basis for their relationship. They come to London to live in Elspeth's flat and spend their time mindlessly pottering around shops and tourist sites and eating convenience food. They are not really interesting, they are there to be a set of slightly creepy twins. Then we have the ghost of Elspeth who is floating round the flat trying to get their attention, which she eventually does. At the moment where she and Valentina are playing with the kitten and she accidentally snatches it's soul I knew exactly where the story was headed. On reflection maybe it is a ghost story, because it is her presence that directs the course of the plot and bring the tragedy. Without the ghost of Elspeth the girls cold have developed their new life into something else. Valentina could have broken away from her sister, Julia could have fallen for Theo, Robert could have actually got over his mourning and moved on.

Then there is the whole Highgate Cemetery thing, which mainly just screams 'oh, look I've done a lot of research for this book' and was not at all creepy or atmospheric. I liked Martin, the guy upstairs with really bad OCD, he was real and believable and very sympathetic, though, again, his recovery was a little too dramatic to be credible. I liked Robert, Elspeth's lover and downstairs neighbour, who volunteers at the cemetery doing tours and is writing a thesis on the history of the place. The whole book was set up to be very claustrophobic, all taking place inside this block of three flats, that overlook the cemetery, and all of the people have not much reason to go anywhere: Martin works from home and can't go out anyway, Robert has a private extorted income from being the unacknowledged child of a senior politician, and the twins have money from Elspeth and can please themselves, so no one has to go out to work and they all spend far too much time concerned with themselves.

The writing was lovely, settings and people well drawn, everything about it well executed, but the story was full of holes. The level of dependancy between the twins was just plain weird, and you were left wanting to know far more about Edie than we ever got. The details that finally emerged about the rift were startling but then not believable, why would the husband have gone along with the switch when he was aware of it, and why would Elspeth have gone along with it and then given up her children to her sister? Why would Valentina have wanted to kill herself to escape? The holes in the 'resurrection' plan were just a step too far, a few ice cubes in the coffin were not going to do anything to delay the decay process. I actually thought that Elspeth was planning to steal Valentina's body for her own purposes and live a lie all over again to be back with Robert, in fact I think that would have made a better story, instead she takes it almost by accident. The scene where Robert steals the body from the mausoleum was the creepiest bit of the book, and utterly out of character, his participation in the whole thing, when he was plainly falling in love with Valentina, was unbelievable. So we end up with everything in a huge mess and no one getting what they wanted ... Robert is creeped out by his guilt at having Elspeth back and they have to run away for fear of being discovered, Valentina is stuck haunting the flat where Julia now lives alone, only Martin is happy, he goes off to be reunited with his wife in Amsterdam. I think the whole book was a bit of a warning to be careful what you wish for.

I have been struggling over the last few weeks to enjoy my reading. We had the whole intense few weeks of NaNoWriMo when I didn't read much and now am struggling to find where to go next. I read 'The Bell Jar', but it was depressing, maybe I'll get around to writing about it sometime. I started on 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' by Carson McCullers, and it was really really dull. I get the impression that although I thought I had read it before in my 20's I think I may have abandoned it last time too. I started reading 'The Children's Book' by AS Byatt but that was so so slow and failed to grab me, I was disappointed having read such good things about it and I had been saving it to read and looking forward to it. I read a few chapters of something by Josephine Cox and was relieved to find I write better than her and it's not just the literary snob in me that makes me avoid pulp fiction, it was **really** bad. I read 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' by Milan Kundera, but it was such a period piece and so specific to the experience of his country that I am not sure I could say anything meaningful about it. Creature and I read 'The Man in the Picture' by Susan Hill together since we had both enjoyed 'The Woman in Black', but I did not think it was such a good story.

So, I think I should go back to the knitting, get Tish's sweater finished and get on with the blanket, and I promised to do a felted Kindle cover for my mum, so that is the project for this week.

the winners together

2011-12-01T09:38:00.004Z

Having abandoned her writing part way through the month Creature decided in the final days of NaNo that she would really *really* like a winners t-shirt and so set herself a mammoth task of over 4,000 words a day to finish .... and she made it, with a grand total of just over the 50,000. I had to make her 20,000, 30,000 and 40,000 word cakes in quick succession over a few days (well, the 40,000 cake was a lemon meringue pie). Here we are with our 'winner's' cake yesterday.

And here we are verifying our novels on the NaNoWriMo site and collecting certificates and all that jazz (that's my sister Claire, who I don't think has featured on the blog before):

Well done to all the other people who took part, whether or not you got to 50,000 it is still a great challenge and we are already looking forward and planning for next year. And here is the little winners badge that I can put proudly in my sidebar for all to see:

in the winner's enclosure ...

2011-11-19T14:23:00.005Z

Well ... it has no title so don't bother asking, it has not much of a plot so don't bother asking ... but I passed the 50,000 word mark this morning at about eleven o'clock. It has lots of lovely happy people living quite contented ordinary lives, there was very little conflict or upset. I said to Dunk that you would only really like to read it if they were your best friends, but otherwise it's very dull. Creature insisted I had to make something bad happen or kill someone. So I did. It made the last few of thousand words fly by, so it was worth the sacrifice.

Creature and I went to the library a couple of nights ago and she picked up a book that was in the wrong place and went to put it back. I opened it at random and began reading, and to my delight/horror I find that I write just like Josephine Cox, so I plan on taking it up professionally since according to her (very brief) wikipedia page she sells a million books a year.

I ended up working in the bedroom and the desk looks very sparse as the treats have been thin on the ground, apart from the endless supply of tea that Dunk has bought me over the last fortnight. The story is not done, in fact I am resisting writing the closing scene and am currently going back to fill in a few of the gaps. The story is all over the place and my biggest task is to make a timeline and ensure that everyone ages at the same rate and people don't talk about stuff that hasn't happened yet. But over at NaNoWriMo they don't mind if it's rubbish, I still get to order my t-shirt.

Fridge Neglect

2011-11-17T21:14:00.004Z

We now have an empty corner to our kitchen, all this wondrous empty space in which to rearrange the furniture. All because .... after a year of neglect, we have our proper fridge back in working order. Here it is humming quietly to itself in all it's fridgely glory:
It stopped working when we moved house, some little bit of the motor had blown and the refrigerant did not circulate and cool it down, so we used the tatty old one that the previous tenant had so kindly left behind (along with most of his possessions, a washing machine full of washing and a sink full of greasy grill pan!!) It was annoying, and too small and it was silly having a fridge sat uselessly in the corner of the kitchen taking up precious space. It was top of the 'to do' list. One year later it is sorted.

We will however be still using the only decent thing the previous tenant left ... this very cool Abbey Road fridge magnet:-) It has pride of place next to the chocolately butt fridge poetry, and I'm planning to get the rest of the words out and put them up tomorrow.

The space has reminded me of the next item on the 'to do' list ... draught excluders for the front and back doors. I am determined it is not going to be another winter of howling gales in our house.

In praise of the iPad

2011-11-09T19:19:00.006Z

I have been sharing the computer with Creature over the last nine days as we both tussle with the NaNoWriMo situation. When she is writing I have been using Writer on her iPad and am now an utter convert. The damn thing had annoyed me after I bought it because it didn't like Facebook much and that's what she wanted and so she still kept wanting to use my laptop, in fact it had been pretty much relegated to a games machine, plus the Babe has some lovely interactive story books that she really enjoys.

But this week it has really come into it's own. I signed up for Dropbox which is a freebie (for the minimum storage) where you can send your files up into 'the cloud' and they will be safe there until you want to access them. So I type on the iPad after Creature had taken the laptop off to her room, then I upload them to the Dropbox, and then in the morning, while it's still dark, I sneak in and pinch the laptop back and download from Dropbox and put what I have written into my Scrivener NaNo novel file (and then I update my word count total just to annoy her because I am now at over 23,000!)

I was describing to Dunk this morning how much I was enjoying typing on it, and he described how if you take one to pieces you find that the internal components are so carefully arranged to ensure perfect balance of the iPad while you are using it. It just seems so wonderful that the designers have taken so much care and thought. As a user you would only notice such a thing if they had got it wrong, you just take it totally for granted and it is so essential to how it feels when you hold it in your hand. I use so many things in everyday life that are badly designed that I am truly astonished how much I am enjoying it (and I think Dunk liked it that I was finally appreciating the finer qualities of an Apple product.)

(Very very brief excerpt from the first draft over on the other blog.)

NaNoWriMo

2011-10-31T21:21:00.002Z

NaNoWriMo starts in a couple of hours.

Not sure what's going to happen but it will certainly be an experience.

As the days have crept past I have become more convinced that I can't write anything, let alone a book. Have struggled to even do my 100 words.

My mind is totally blank.

Devoid of inspiration.

I spent the evening a few days ago learning how to use the Scrivener programme, so at least I have achieved something.

Anno's Journey

2011-10-28T20:04:00.005+01:00

Anno's Journey by Mitsumasa Anno is one of my most favourite wordless books. It is a series of pictures that follows the journey of our hero Anno (on his horse) as he travels across Europe:
The book is just for looking at and talking about, the pictures are full of detail, characters and activity that appear from one picture to the next, mini stories going on for you to follow, some quirky optical curiosities. The images are just so beautiful, soft delicate colours, nothing garish or cartoonish, so clever and well thought out. You could (and we have) pour over it all day, and come back the next day and find things you missed.

This picture shows the detail from The Enormous Turnip (which just reminded me of a whole load more stories I want to find):
Here we have a detail from Bathers by Georges Seurat (and there are apparently several other paintings that we have not spotted yet.)
I love the way the shops have big signs outside so you know what they sell ... here is the toothpaste shop:-)
Little things to look out for ... like the escaping prisoner:
but my new favourites are now, the spinning lady:
and the postman:
Available second hand from Amazon for mere pounds (get hardback, it will need to last.)

Pie and Cake

2011-10-28T19:08:00.003+01:00

Creature and I went out to a local NaNoWriMo gathering last night and met some lovely people, and were most reassured to find that hardly anyone had done much novel planning. Sitting on the tram I bet her there would be hardly anyone there ... and I lost, and so had to come home from work and make lemon cake.

Dunk and I are coming to the end of a month without meat, inspired by Vegetarian Awareness Month. It was partly an attempt to get us out of a food rut (you know what it's like, making the same dozen dinners over and over), though mostly I have found myself returning to old favourites from when I was a vegetarian for a few years during my 20's.

Just to prove that sometimes I don't throw things out I have a 25 year old recipe leaflet from 'Maggie's Farm', a wholefood cooperative in Durham, they produced it one Christmas and charged 5p, with recipes contributed by the staff. This is 'Wilf's Raised Pie':
The crust is a pork pie type pastry:

4oz water

4oz margarine

bring to the boil in a saucepan

Add to 12oz wholemeal flour + salt and mix quickly to a warm dough. Roll out and line a 7" pie or cake tin (line the bottom with greaseproof to make getting it out easier). Keep 1/4 of the dough for the lid.

Filling, you can use variations on the theme really, fried together in a pan:

garlic (plenty), red pepper (or any colour really), chopped brussel sprouts, sunflower seeds, pine nuts, seasame seeds, pumpkin seeds.

In a bowl (not cooking these first)

8oz of mixed nuts, half chopped half ground

finely chopped leek

breadcrumbs

herbs (your favourite)

salt and pepper

Mix all together, add 1/4 pint of hot water with 1 teaspoon of yeast extract and 1 tablespoon of tahini blended in (or a bit more liquid if it seems dry, but you do not want a sloppy mixture)

Fill the pie case and put the lid on the pie, then bake hot 200˚ for 20 minutes, reduce heat 160˚ degrees for another 30 minutes. Be warned it is very filling.

Luscious lemon cake

2011-10-27T06:32:00.004+01:00

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.

I started off thinking how lovely this book was and ended up a bit meh. So Spoiler Warning before we start since I have to tell you why.

It is the story of Rose, and her family, and one day she discovers that she can taste what people are feeling in the food they have prepared. So far so good. It is kind of a metaphor for growing up and coming to terms with the difficult things that people experience, except it happens to Rose all at once, which is a bit of a shock. They have this neat self-contained family unit, but a dad who doesn't really know them and a mother who loves them so much she swamps them a little:

"He was cheerful enough when he came home from work but he didn't really know what to do with little kids so he never taught us hoe to ride a bike, or wear a mitt, and our changes in height remained unmarked on the door frames, so we grew tall on our own without proof. He left at the same time each morning and came home at the same time each evening, and my earliest memories of my mother were of her waiting at the door as soon as it was anywhere near time, me on her hip, Joseph at her hand, watching car by car drive by." (p.22)

Since her brother Joseph is as distant (more of this in a minute) as her father she develops a longing for his friend George, who takes her food problem seriously and tries to understand it. I loved this little scene from their trip to the cookie store, all the simplicity and intensity of her feelings (she is obliged by her mother to 'hold hands' whenever she crosses the road):

"...on an impulse, I grabbed George's hand. Right away: fingers holding back. The sun. More clustery vines of bougainvillea draping over windows in bulges of dark pink. His warm palm. An orange tabby lounging on the sidewalk. People in torn black T-shirts sitting and smoking on steps. The city, opening up.

We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street." (p.60)

So Rose learns to adjust her relationship with food, to try not to taste, avoiding eating her mother's meals and surviving on things from packets, that are mostly made by machines. Over time she comes to identify all sorts of subtleties, the ingredients within the food, where it comes from and the feelings of the people who picked it, the disinterest of fast food chefs and the warmth and passion of other cooks. But while still young her feelings are more avoidance and almost blaming the food for it all:

"She set me up with a knife and a cutting board and a pile of green peppers. My mind still clear from the chip bags. I liked this aspect of cooking, being a distant hard-to-identify participant, all so long as I didn't compile or stir anything. Way too scary, to eat a whole meal I'd made myself, but I did enjoy the prep: chopping and dicing, mincing and paring, shredding and slicing, just attacking all these objects that dominated my days even though I knew that nothing would take away the complexity for me, nothing short of not eating them. Still: it gave me such pleasure to grate cheese, like I was killing it." (p.131)

Time passes, their strange grandmother sends them stuff in boxes, the mother starts an affair, the father works and comes home, Joseph withdraws more, Rose makes a friend who just uses her to analyse her feelings. There are a couple of peculiar incidents where the brother 'disappears' but I didn't make much of them, he spends a lot of time alone in the dark in his room anyway. George gets into a good college by Joseph doesn't, he is clever but not an all rounder and has no social skills, so he persuades the parents to rent him an apartment and he pretends to go to a local college. When he fails to call the mother sends Rose to investigate. She finds him in the dark, and on closer inspection he appears to be merging into his chair, she leaves to room to get the phone and when she comes back he has vanished. This was where the book fell down completely for me. It was all too over the top. She tries to argue, through Rose's thoughts, that maybe he was experiencing something like Rose, but on a level from which he could not escape. He reappears briefly and Rose has this conversation with him at the hospital in which we are just supposed to accept that he has been turning into furniture. No. It was all wrong and spoiled a wonderful book. Rose was wonderful and the way she learned about her tasting, how she came to deal with it, she was real and warm and engaging, and then the whole thing with the brother was surreal and unnecessary.

The story pulls itself round and Rose finds new ways to deal with her food problem, coming to meet the food rather than avoiding it. It is a long slow process, just like proper growing up and I was left hoping and caring that she would be ok. So I will avoid all the brother stuff and give you a nice quote about soup, in a restaurant with her father and George after she has discovered Joseph's disappearance:

"My soup arrived. Crusted with cheese, golden at the edges. The waiter placed it carefully in front of me, and I broke through the top layer with my spoon and filled it with warm oniony broth, catching bits of soaked bread. The smell took over the table, a warmingness. And because circumstances rarely match, and one afternoon can be a patchwork of both joy and horror, the taste of the soup washed through me. Warm, kind, focused, whole. It was easily, without question, the best soup I had ever had, made by a chef who found true refuge in cooking. I sank into it." (p.209)

We bought more lemons the other day. It's funny how often there will be no fruit in the house except lemons. I am hoping Creature will get round to doing lemon cake. This is from the original Cranks recipe book, the one they have on the website now is nothing like it:

Luscious Lemon Cake

4oz margerine/butter

4oz sugar

Melt together, in a pan if you like but I use the microwave

Cool a bit then whisk in

1 free range egg

grated rind of 1 lemon

4oz SR wholemeal flour (or plain and some baking powder, I use wholemeal as it gives the cake a nice texture)

The mixture will be more runny than most cake mixtures.

Line and grease the base of a tin, 6-8", and bake 180 degrees for 20 minutes or until golden.

While baking put the juice from the lemon in a small pan with 1oz sugar and make a syrup (but don't reduce it too much, it's okay if you have quite a bit of liquid). When the cake is cooked pierce all over with a knife or toothpick or something and dribble the lemon syrup over, it will soak in and make the cake wonderfully moist. Enjoy.

susurration

2011-10-22T23:10:00.007+01:00

Last night I went to another poetry reading, this time at The Contact, an event bringing together a writers collective called Speakeasy People, a group of young poets from Manchester called Young Identity and Jean 'Binta' Breeze. Although Jean was the main event (and she had held a writers workshop in the afternoon) the whole evening was just excellent, almost an overdose of ideas and images coming at you in quick succession, and it was nice to get to some real forthright political commentary. The theme, unintentional I imagine, of the first half was a rejection of conformist/consumerist society. It was interesting because it was not loud and angry but quiet and thoughtful, and thought provoking, and all the participants had quite distinct voices and styles.

Jean was obviously a practiced performer and it was completely spellbinding. She started off telling us things about her life, when suddenly you would realise that it was a poem. She moved between stories and poems and songs seamlessly, creating a very intimate atmosphere, like you were chatting round her kitchen table. She was equally convincing in the voice of a young Jamaican child as being a world-weary mother, and she gave such a vivid portrayal of her cultural heritage and history. I was left with the feeling that some poetry needs to be spoken aloud and some works well on the page of a book, and this poetry needed to be performed. Her work seemed so integral to her personality I imagined it feeling a little flat as mere written words, so here she is performing one she did for us:

And just for the fun of it here is Bob Marley, singing the song that she ended with, all the audience joining in:

Her books are available here from Bloodaxe Books.

Poetry in foreign

2011-10-20T08:18:00.008+01:00

I have been doing some volunteering for the Manchester Literature Festival over the last week (it ends at the weekend so still plenty of interesting stuff to go and see) and last night I went to a reading of Latvian and Macedonian poetry.

The photo here shows Igor Isakovski, and he was just the most perfect romantic, brooding european poet you could ask for when attending your first poetry reading. He brushed his wild dark hair back from his eyes and held the book balanced casually in his left hand while reading. Listening to him read it made me think that the only other time I have ever heard any language from that region it was in connection with the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990's, angry men on the news talking about politics and violence. He was followed by Latvian Anna Auzina, a lovely dark haired lady who was frequently amused by her own reading. Also Latvian Karlis Verdins looked like an angry young man from the 50's, serious and stylish, with a smart turtleneck and thick framed glasses. Contrary to my expectations he was the only one with any political theme to his writing, contrasting mundane images of life with what was happening to friends who had travelled to the West. The others were all much more lyrical or personal in their writing (though of course we had only a very small sample of their poetry). Last up was Lidija Dimkovska, another Macedonian, petite and younger, and by far the best reader, much more passion and expression in her voice. I liked her poem about nail clippers very much, a very strange kind of symbolism going on there:-)

Not being able to understand I found myself just concentrating on the sounds and rhythm of the language, listening for word repetitions and picking out the occasional english term. Though the poets could all obviously speak some english they chose to have an earnest elderly couple read the english translations, which I was sorry about because I did not feel either of them read particularly well. What struck me most was nothing to do with the poetry but how different the two languages were. The macedonian soft and lilting, romantic, where the latvian was much harder, like a cross between russian and something scandinavian. I was also sorry that the poets did not introduce themselves or say a little something about their writing or motivations, it would have been interesting, they just came on and read and then said thank you. Having said that it was all most enjoyable and I am looking forward to some more tonight when I will get to hear Mimi Kahlvati and Carola Luther (again at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation) and then Jean 'Binta' Breeze at The Contact on Saturday. An organisation called Literature Across Frontiers sponsored this event and it works to bring writing from across europe to a wider audience. The Latvian and Macedonian poetry books are amongst a selection of poetry anthologies published by Arc Publications and are available through their website.

Last Friday I went to hear Roma Tearne, an author I had not heard of but who's book The Swimmer was on the Orange Prize long-list this year. She read a wonderful heartrending passage where a mother hears over the telephone of the death of her son, talked about her inspiration, and then followed a very interesting discussion about both her writing in general and the political history of and current situation in Sri Lanka. The event was so good I think because there was active and enthusiastic audience participation. She is definitely a writer I will come back to.

Birthday cakes

2011-10-19T12:13:00.000+01:00

The Babe had a slightly early birthday party on Sunday. She didn't get 'blowing out the candles' but enjoyed the singing and the fact the nobody told her to stop sticking her finger in the icing.

Creature had a cake made entirely from rice crispies and melted marshmallows and mars bars ... totally yummy.

Little Bee - a guest post

2011-10-19T10:28:00.007+01:00

I was wandering Atlanta airport looking for something not to get interested in half knowing all the time that I would. But it was the challenge, to look at so much tat and not find anything worth turning over. I was sorely tempted with two screwed up balls of paper .. one bright pink and the other brown .. I nearly succumbed to them. But in the end I failed.

It was one of those chromium plated book alcoves that seem to cling to the wall of one of those mindless nowhere tunnels in the hope that some totally confused idiot would pause and, out of some mixture of desperation and pity, buy something. I did.

Chris Cleave wrote Little Bee

well he is a Guardian writer you see
so it was obvious
this little book would appeal to me

It is an amusing horror story
and in parts its rather gory
in a matter of fact sort of way
but once I even turned away

But Little Bee is Nyjeerian who stowed away
and so she lived to survive another day
though she watched and saw her beautiful sister
sent away with the sharp blade of a machete.

As an asylum seeker
she seeks the lady who gave
her middle finger for her life
and that is all I tell you.

Sent to me by my dad, Don Frampton (pictured here), who despite owning a computer for many years cannot fathom out how to leave a comment on a blog:-) but I am glad because I like the idea of having guest bloggers. I have tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get Creature to write about the books she reads. Hopefully it might happen again sometime.

pi

2011-10-18T16:23:00.000+01:00

As the birthdays creep past you can sometimes be caught unawares that in no time at all every single one of your offspring will be 'grown up'. Creature reaches the grand age of 17 today. I am at a loss as to what to do with such an annoying person, who claims to want no plans or anticipation in order to avoid what she sees as inevitable disappointment, but then has to be forcibly removed from the kitchen to prevent her searching the cupboards for ingredients I had just bought for a 'surprise' cake.

She asks for nothing, I mean quite literally, so I have knitted her a 'pi' scarf. It has pi to 60 digits on it, appealing to the geek-girl in her (Yes, I double checked it. After knitting to the '926' only to find I had missed out the second '1' and having to unravel four numerals, I had a moment of panic and went to Wiki just to make sure, then wrote it on a sheet of paper and crossed off each number as I knitted it.)

Cakey pictures to follow, she is off spending the day with her sister.

More on writing

2011-10-17T20:10:00.004+01:00

A couple of days ago I revisited the Guardian article on 'Ten rules for writers' and on the recommendation of Hilary Mantel I bought a second hand copy of 'Becoming a Writer' by Dorothea Brande. Though the opening is very inspiring and encouraging to anyone with writerly aspirations she then says something which was at once depressing (for being so frighteningly true) but which also lays a heavy weight of responsibility:

"The influence of any widely read book can hardly be overestimated. If it is sensational, shoddy, or vulgar our lives are the poorer for the cheap ideals which it sets in circulation; if, as so rarely happens, it is a thoroughly good book, honestly conceived and honestly executed, we are all indebted to it." (p.19)

I anticipate this book will have some interesting food for thought.

I have also been keeping up with my 100 Words every day so far this month, the ones I have been pleased with are included over on Leave No Sign.

Shadows

2011-10-12T21:20:00.006+01:00

At the Whitworth Art Gallery today Tish, Creature and I went to see the Dark Matters exhibition and we particularly loved this (picture comes from the dark matters website, we wanted to film it but were not sure if it was allowed):

This particular installation was by a group called Brass Art. It was a structure made of tiny transparent figures and cellophane around which a light rotated casting shadows in the surrounding walls. We watched the images move, enlarge, cross over each other and fade; each time the light went round you saw different details and patterns. For several rounds we followed the light (so our own shadows did not get in the way) and then also stood by the entrance. The transparent cellophane made shadows but they had an opaque quality that suggested smoke, and the larger more solid shape in the centre changed, one minute seeming like a protective hand, at others something more threatening to the scene. It was utterly mesmerising and I could quite happily have watched it all afternoon.

Having been a few months ago and been disappointed by the Mary Kelly exhibition, which was merely bewildering, this was most enjoyable and we will definitely go again, it is on til January.

I came home to a new (second hand) copy of 'Bears in the Night'. I have been looking after the Babe on Thursdays for a few weeks and am working on rebuilding my collection of children's books so we have nice things to share with her. She is nearly two and doesn't quite have the attention span for the more sophisticated stories (she was most insistent last week that I could not read The Sneetches, but loves The Elephant and the Bad Baby). In this tale a family of small bears get out of bed and go on an adventure "up Spook Hill", only to encounter something very scary. As Creature and I walked back from the bus stop we were discussing the book (I had ordered it a few days ago) and were pleased that we could remember it in it's entirety: out the window... down the tree ... over the wall... under the bridge... around the lake ... between the rocks... through the woods ...

Coming of age?

2011-10-10T18:55:00.006+01:00

Twenty one years ago tonight I went off to Guides as usual after a busy day shopping in town, pretty much despairing that the huge lump I was carrying around with me was ever going to make their appearance, I was 38-and-a-bit weeks pregnant. Then at 8.45pm I felt this little pop and my waters broke (fortunately not in a gush or anything). Mary (ex-mother-in-law) took me home and we called the ambulance. By the time it arrived I was well in labour and a bit iffy about going anywhere. The ambulance man said he had delivered a baby but never twins. So we went and I swear that the driver hit every pothole down Carrville high street, while I swore at him the entire way.

Tish (Thymian Maria) arrived at 10.40pm and Jacob followed shortly afterwards at 10.55pm, no doctors, no messing around, it was quite a relief after Lewis. The first year went past in a bit of a blur but since then I have always considered it a blessing to have two together as they always had someone to play with, and mostly they played quite nicely:-) Happy Birthday 21 today.

Nice people

2011-10-10T16:11:00.006+01:00

people with letterboxes big enough for a large Amazon packet

people who leave their porch door open

people who leave notes saying 'please put packet in recycle box'

people who sensibly have their parcel delivered to their workplace

people who meet you at the village shop and offer to take their post (particularly if they live at an isolated farmhouse)

people with doorbell chimes (particularly christmas carols)

people with lavender in the front garden

people who leave a gap in the fence (or even a gate) between themselves and next door so you don't have to walk up and down the paths again

people who have a box at the end of their very long drive

people who have an old ship's bell as their door bell (the most brilliant sound ever)

people who are always home for parcels

(slightly crazy) people who chase after you down the road to give you a banana (yes, that really happened:-)

people who offer a glass of water on a hot day

people who remember your name

people with cats

people who put signs on their postbox warning you there is a bird's nest inside

people who bring out baby hedgehogs for you to meet

people who let you hold their baby while they sign for a package

(In response to Friday's post so people don't think I am a miserable bugger)

Novel Writing

2011-10-09T17:22:00.006+01:00

Originally a newspaper column in the Daily Telegraph 'A Novel in a Year' then became a book and I have been using it for the past couple of months as a basis for a bit of writing practice for NaNoWriMo.

The book consists of alternating chapters where Louise Doughty introduces an aspect of writing, from creative prompts, to character development, to metaphors, and so on, then she gives the reader a writing task and then in the following chapter she recaps on the responses to the task given by participants on the website. Sometimes this was interesting but to be honest a lot of the time I would rather have been able to read more of the contributions than the little edited snippets that she gave, with too much of her saying 'this one was interesting' and other people did this or that. More real examples would have been more helpful. I confess I wasn't really giving it that much of my attention and I'm sure if you devoted yourself to the book as a project it would be very helpful. There were lots of interesting and useful bits of advice on the subject of writing from Doughty herself and other authors, and she didn't in any way try to make it seem like a walk in the park. There is no getting around the fact that it is hard work to write stuff and invariably what you end up with will be utter rubbish.

I keep thinking to myself that 1700 words a day is not very much, though of much of the time I will be doing my day job as well. Of course making stuff up is a whole different kettle of fish from writing blog posts, and even they can take several hours to cobble together. I am really feeling like I can use all the advice that's out there when tackling such an adventurous project. So, a useful little book, though you still need your 1% inspiration before the real work starts.

Stupid people

2011-10-07T17:37:00.003+01:00

people with letterboxes smaller than 3"

people with letterboxes that are above head height (yes it does happen)

people whose letterbox is on upside down (so does that)

people with vertical letterboxes

people with ankle height letterboxes

people with a badly fitted draught excluder on their letterbox which actually prevents things being put through the letterbox (if i had a penny I'd be bloody rich by now ...)

people who design draught excluders for letterboxes

people who design those metal boxes to fix to the wall so you don't have to cut a hole in the front door, mostly they are crap too

people who have dogs who eat the post

people who don't have a warning sign that their dog may be behind the letterbox ready to eat the post

people who have a basket behind the letter box even when they don't have a dog who eats the post

people who have a letter box where the hole behind the flap is smaller than the metal covering it

people with letterboxes so stiff I nearly break my fingers trying to open it

people who have both brushes and a flap inside their letterbox ... WTF!

people with no bell or knocker so I bruise my knuckles

people with a sign saying 'bell not working please knock' ... fix it can't you

people who come to the door after five minutes and say 'sorry I didn't hear you knocking'

people who don't hear you knocking but do strangely hear the card being put through the letterbox

(Had a really crap day and my only consolation is walking round muttering 'stupid people' under my breath for every house that irritates me.)

The sad book

2011-10-05T21:17:00.005+01:00

I don't write about children's books very often, mainly because I don't read them much these days, but I was drawn to the cover of Michael Rosen's Sad Book when I saw it in Julie's living room this afternoon. The title strikes you for a start and the front cover picture, which is all grey. I sat and read it to myself. It is a sad book. It is a children's book and it is about his son who died and how sad it made him feel. It is the most beautifully written book, not mawkish or sentimental, just poignant and gently heartbreaking. It describes how upset and angry it made him feel to have his life so changed by the death of his son, how much he misses him and the things it made him think and do. Then it describes the things he tries to do to make himself feel better, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and the sadness never really goes away. It is so perfect because it is so honest. It does not say that it is in any way wrong to feel sad about things, and does not try to have any answers or cures for feeling sad. It just acknowledges that sometimes this is just the way you feel and you can't do anything about it. In the world of children's stories that is so dominated by enforced bright cheerfulness it is wonderful to find someone prepared to write such a book.

NaNo gloves and all that

2011-10-04T21:28:00.009+01:00

NaNoWriMo preparations are warming up. Over on my other blog (they have been proliferating a little recently) I have been joining in with Magpie Tales, a weekly creative writing prompt, and have also started writing 100 Words a day for October (got to start somewhere if we are going to be doing 1700 a day during November), you can read them on the 100 Words website without joining up I think.

I sat for a couple of evenings and knitted myself a pair of fingerless gloves (pattern only available if you are a Ravelry member), in what was left of the lovely lambswool and silk, so that I can type and still keep my hands warm on those chilly autumn mornings when I am too mean to put the heating on. I am still working on the hoodie for Tish that I started back in August, it is slow because of being fine yarn, but also because of getting distracted by other stuff.

Am racing to the end of War and Peace (100 pages of epilogue!!) so expect a mammoth review some time soon.

And Creature has been out joining in with the protests again, they made themselves into a gang of zombies with the assistance of the marvellous Emma and became 'the generation of the living dead', making their voices heard during the Tory Party conference that has been happening in Manchester this week.

So it goes

2011-09-28T07:29:00.005+01:00

This is another book I plucked from my parent's bookshelves, a somewhat battered 1970's copy with very yellow pages: Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut.

I am not so sure that this is really a novel. I think it is really a thinly veiled excuse to write about his war experience, since it recounts in some detail his witnessing of the destruction of Dresden in February 1945. When you experience something so overwhelming it is almost impossible to make sense of it. One little quote kind of summed it up, in discussing the works of Kilgore Trout and why they were helpful to war veterans: "So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help."

A young lad called Billy Pilgrim (an allegorical name if I ever heard one) time travels within his own life, experiencing it all in a strange order, and also travels in space as he is kidnapped by aliens called Tralfamadorians and taken to their planet to be exhibited in the zoo. The Tralfamadorians insist that there is no such thing as time or death, that all moments exist all the time, which is how Billy can travel to other points in his life, and that all events are inevitable. This is a very thin book, because not very much happens in Billy's life, except for the war and the alien kidnap thing:

"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters." (p.110)

As I say, it's not so much a novel as a philosophical treatise about the absurdity of life. He experiences this most terrible of events, in the firebombing of Dresden, and yet after that life must go on. Although we are seeing it all backwards (because the whole book leads up to their imprisonment in Slaughterhouse 5, the firebombing and the execution of Edgar Derby) you do feel that the experience changed him. When he first arrives in the war he is resigned to his fate and wants to be left to die rather than struggle for survival, but afterwards, though he learns of the inevitability from the Tralfamadorians he somehow makes more sense out of life. What it reminded me of most was Voltaire's Candide, which is a satire that mocks certain philosophical beliefs. Slaughterhouse 5 is punctuated by the phrase 'So it goes' (to confirm both mundane events and horrific ones) which seemed to me to mirror Dr Pangloss in Candide, who says repeatedly that they live 'in the best of all possible worlds'. They both seem to say, 'this is the way things are, they just are and you can't do anything about it'. It appears somewhat fatalistic but Billy becomes the antithesis of the naively optimistic Candide, accepting events through his ability to revisit them in the past, but not placing a moral value on the events. He gives toward the end the oft quoted aphorism 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom always to tell the difference', which, though a little trite, kind of sums things up.

This is my favourite passage from the book. Life is absurd when you view it forwards. However it makes much more sense in reverse:

"American planes full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for the wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and the planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialist in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anyone ever again." (p.54)

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

2011-09-27T19:26:00.001+01:00

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley

I have been listening to this on audiobook over the weekend while knitting and thinking that it is one of the pleasures of book blog browsing to occasionally come across such a gem. I don't recall where it was, but thank you so much to whoever reviewed this.

Ptolemy is an old man, living out his years replaying some memories and avoiding others, housebound, not by incapacity but by a creeping dementia that means he does not know where to go or how to get back if he ever got there. He relies on his grandnephew, who's failure to appear one day leads him into new contact with his large extended family and with the wider world. A young girl called Robyn becomes his caretaker and instead of just walking him to the store and back she takes his life in hand and shakes it up in ways he could not have anticipated.

What is so wonderful about the book is the portrait of Ptolemy, so vivid are the descriptions of his thoughts that you feel like you understand the debilitating nature of old age decline. He goes to say things and then forgets, he knows that he does not know, that he has forgotten, but is haunted by memories that he cannot escape. He has this sense that there are important things he needs to do before he dies but he is crippled by his own weaknesses and failings. You get a real sense of his intense vulnerability, how he knows he cannot protect himself, how reliant he is on others, but there are still flashes of a more shrewd person, a proud one, one who is trying so determinedly not to give in to it all.

I really liked too the relationship between Ptolemy and Robyn, a loving and genuinely affectionate one but also a slightly ambiguous one, since he is too aged to feel real desire but still has the ability to admire her as a beautiful woman. Also his friendship with a old lady called Mrs Wring, who he encounters on a trip to the bank when she asks him to loan her some money and offers a precious ring as security. It is this event that sparks for him the memory of the treasure and how he should make amends for past wrongs.

As a young boy Ptolemy lost his best friend in a house fire and then witnessed the lynching of his beloved great uncle, events which marked him and which now have come to dominate his thinking, his need to make amends and to provide protection for his family for the future. The lasting image of his long dead wife is his other ghost, one which he has avoided by closing up their bedroom and sleeping amongst the junk on a mattress under the table. When it emerges that his grandnephew has been killed in a drive-by shooting Ptolemy determines to provide for his wife and two children using a 'treasure' stolen by his great uncle. In a scene that reminded me of the film 'Awakenings' he chooses to take some experimental medicine to restore his brain function. Although still relying on Robyn to care for him he takes steps to secure the treasure and make a will, and then in a very powerful scene confronts the person he knows is responsible for his grandnephew's death.

This book made me think of 'Small Island' by Andrea Levy that I read some years ago, a novel about the life of immigrants into the UK from the Caribbean during the 1950's. It is difficult to write about books that tell about black people's experience and not feel like you are coming across as patronising, but both this and Small Island I felt gave me some small insight into a life experience that is so foreign to my own. For Ptolemy the world is not to be trusted, and no just because he is loosing his marbles, but because he is black. He does not expect the world to work in his favour, he expects to have to fight for things. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey was poignant and heartbreaking and yet never sentimental, and from a writer who's output seems to be mostly detective mysteries it was most unexpected.

Zen and all that

2011-09-19T17:37:00.002+01:00

More than anything else I have come to the conclusion that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a warning to not think too hard about the meaning of life, since it appears to be the cause of the total disintegration of the narrator's personality. I started this book some nine years ago when I first moved in with Dunk and I restarted it at page 130 where the bookmark was, though I have no idea if that was actually where I read to. I remember there being an awful lot of stuff about motorbikes and that was probably why I abandoned it, however as it progressed there was less bike and much more philosophy, and I rather wished it would go back to the bikes. The unnamed narrator is telling us the story of Phaedrus, who is his alter-ego, the name he gives to his former self (that took me a while to figure out), a teacher of creative writing, and of how his search to understand the abstract idea of 'Quality' leads him to madness. I found much sympathy with his original struggle:

"Hundreds of itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies ....

It wasn't until three o'clock in the morning that he wearily confessed to himself that he didn't have a clue as to what 'Quality' was, picked up his briefcase and headed home." (p.177)

and his astute assessment of what was wrong with the education system:

"Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated of course, you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything - from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it." (p.187)

but I found that as it went on he dove into the depths of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Aristotle, Plato and Sophistry and I think it assumed too much prior knowledge of Ancient Greek philosophical ideas so that I was a little out of my depth. The zen stuff is kind of in the background of the ongoing story of his motorbike journey with his son:

"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself." (p.198)

"Weeds and grass and wild flowers grow where the concrete has cracked and broken. Neat, squared, upright lines acquire a random sag. The uniform masses of the unbroken colour of fresh paint modify to a mottled, weathered softness. Nature has a non-Euclidian geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of the buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study." (p.281)

"While we wait for chocolates malteds I notice a high-schooler sitting at the counter exchanging looks with the girl next to him. She's gorgeous, and I'm not the only other one who notices it. The girl behind the counter waiting on them is also watching with an anger she thinks no one else sees. Some kind of triangle. We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives. (p.282)

As the book progresses he talks more and more philosophy and their travels are relegated to mere moments interspersed within the story of Phaedrus, recounting in detail his attendance at a philosophy course. The trouble is that his recounting of these events inside his head as he drives the motorbike is causing him to relive the same reactions to what he learned and what he thought, and is taking him back into the breakdown that he suffered. Sometimes he pauses in his recounting only for a sentence or two, to tell us they stopped to eat something, and then goes right back to the intellectualising. But these moments were the ones that seemed more significant to me and were what I focussed on. The journey seems to have become an end in itself and tension grows between the pair, the father so wrapped up in his thoughts and the son becoming a truculent teenager:

"Farther on at Leggett we see a tourist duck pond and we buy Cracker Jacks and throw them to the ducks and he does this in the most unhappy way I have ever seen." (p.394)

Even brief they are enough to give the reader quite an intimate picture of the relationship between father and son. The son's growing reaction to the aimless and purposeless travelling, and his need to understand what really happened to his father, sees the situation come to a crisis point and ends with them having fogbound confrontation.

The book almost seems to be cautioning against viewing classic philosophy with too much reverence, that even people like Aristotle and Plato need to have their ideas scrutinised and criticised. Read more carefully than I have done I am sure it would be an education in itself. He is very critical of the higher education system and the nature of teaching and schooling in general, about how it discourages real creativity and originality. I don't think this book has changed the way I think about my life but it has a lot of interesting things to say about life in general, philosophy and human nature ... and zen and motorbikes as well. Still worth reading after all this time.

Crivens!

2011-09-15T07:08:00.006+01:00

Or sock knitting with the Nac Mac Feegles. Creature and I sat on Tuesday afternoon and listened to 'Wee Free Men' by Terry Pratchett on audiobook.

We have 'A Hat Full of Sky' on tape which follows on from this one, but this is the first book that introduces us to the Nac Mac Feegle, who are a kind of Glaswegian pictsie, who mainly like fighting and drinking and have blue skin and red hair. What I just love about Terry Pratchett is that he always makes me laugh out loud, because he is so clever and subverts everything that other writers do. He takes commonly used phrases and turns them on their head, undermining the meaning and poking fun at the assumptions. He does have themes to the books, choosing an 'institution' from the real world and parodying it within the setting of the Discworld, like 'Going Postal' which takes on Royal Mail and has a magic sorting machine that spews out every letter that could ever have been written. Even when you become familiar with his style he still manages to surprise, and it becomes this familiarity that makes the books so enjoyable, with characters who you get to know turning up across the books.

Am doing a couple of pairs of bed socks for relatives across the pond. Dad is popping over to visit with his extended family (there are eight of them and five live in the US). This lovely yellow is for Auntie Iris. I think she's the eldest, and went to America after the war (that's World War Two). (The baby of the family, Uncle Doug, recently celebrated his 70th, I love knowing I have such a long lived family, it bodes well for old age.) The yarn is lambswool and silk and came from Kingcraig Fabrics.
The second pair in progress are for Uncle Dennis. He's like this version of my dad with an american accent, they are close in age and grew up together. The internet has been a huge boon for them as they now chat together on Skype all the time. Dad is flying next week so I have to get a move on, but both pairs are thick and chunky and done with double yarn so I should be finished by tomorrow.

Beth's famous honey oaty cookies

2011-09-15T06:41:00.005+01:00

Creature came back from one of her sojourns in Malvern with the most wonderful of cookies recipes from her friend Beth, so here are the instructions just for you. Be warned, they are very addictive.

Honey Oaty Cookies:

2oz margarine (or butter, but they really don't need it)

3oz sugar (white, if you use soft brown it has a whole other flavour and would drown out the honey)

Cream together.

Add

2oz plain flour (these are made with white but wholemeal could work too)

2oz oats (porridge rather than coarse)

1 level teaspoon baking powder (do not use SR flour)

1 tablespoon runny honey (I buy cheap stuff just for cookies, don't waste you Manuka on these)

Mix thoroughly and get a mixture that looks like this:

Beth's recipe said 1-2 spoons of honey but I found if you use too much they are sticky in the middle. If you like sticky by all means use more honey.

Grease a couple of baking trays with oil and make small balls of mixture, the usual term is 'walnut sized', well spread out and flatten slightly.
Bake in a moderate oven, 170/180 degrees or gas mark 4 for 10 minutes. Use you judgement as to the level of goldenness, cooking is an art not a science, but do not overcook, they will still be soft when you taken them out. Leave on the tray to cool for a minute or two before taking off so that they crisp up slightly. When I sent the recipe to my sister I ended it saying "eat while still warm and make another batch", which is sensible advice since they are best still warm. They will keep in a box reasonably well but why would you want to. It's best to double or triple the recipe if you have friends coming round.

This book with change the way you think and feel about your life

2011-09-11T12:27:00.006+01:00

So in preparation for NaNoWriMo I have been doing some exercises from the book 'A Novel in a Year' by Louise Doughty. Now, allowing someone to read something I have written is going to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to writing a book, so in the spirit of not thinking everything I write is utter tosh I will post some of it here. This is exercise number 8 and the remit is to write a paragraph from the point of view of an inanimate object. She uses the example of 'Skepticism Inc.' by Bo Fowler, which is an entire book written from the point of view of a shopping trolley (which I am now going to have to add to the TBR list as it sounds excellent). Anyhow, this is what I wrote:

I am going to change your life. At least that's what it says on my cover. It's a bloody grand claim if you ask me. I mean, I'm only wood pulp and a bit of glue when it comes down to it, oh, yes, and the ink I suppose, that's the slightly more important bit. Right now I could do with something that could change my life. I am in a bit of a sorry state. My spine is very dried out and my cover is peeling at the edges, I was only a cheap mass produced thing (don't forget the grand claim, they were anticipating a high demand for copies and wanted to maximise their profits). My pages are worryingly loose in some places and going decidedly yellow. A while ago I did spend some time on the bedside table but since then it's been many years on the shelf, gathering dust. I suppose I should be grateful, the things you hear about, the terrible places some of us end up. Even a box in the attic seems bearable compared to the recycle bin, or worse still … the incinerator. We would try not to scare the new ones, especially those that say things like 'Jeffery Archer' on the front, so it is only mentioned in a whisper, but we all know the rumours, the fate awaiting those who fail to live up to their promise. Even having 'international bestseller' is no guarantee these days, though you are slightly more secure if you win something. I have sometimes wished to be a Mills and Boon, they just go round and round the charity shops, lots of owners, lots of new sights and plenty of interaction with the readers. The covers are a bit naff, all those swooning women in flimsy blouses, I rather like mine (it has a lotus flower morphing into a wrench), so it's a trade off really; quality content and cover make up for the lack of attention. When it comes down to it I would rather be read just once and have a real impact than have a hundred readers but be instantly forgotten. I am the kind of book that people have heard of, my reputation precedes me. At the time of my publication I was the biggest thing around, my back-cover-reviews say things like, 'original', 'explosive' and 'unforgettable', those where heady days. It's been quiet in recent years though so you can imagine my delight when I found myself picked out and put in a small pile by the bed. I am in good company here, Sylvia Plath for goodness sake, I mean I'd never even heard of the one I was next to on the shelf. I'm trying not to get too excited, I don't know if my message still has the appeal, times change, but you never know. Life is definitely looking up.

Trusty staple gun strikes again

2011-09-04T14:14:00.005+01:00

I so hate living with other people's curtains, one of the downsides of rented housing. They are invariably old and nasty. The ones in our current living room were quite nice really, just cream patterned, and lined, so not that cheap when they were new. However the curtain rail had been the cause of some problems and, having come loose twice already, was wedged in place in a hole in the plasterwork at the corner of the bay window. When Tish was round for a visit the other day she went to close them and the whole thing came down. So today I decided to return to my favoured method of curtain fixing ... the staple gun. This is a great tip for people not keen on the whole palaver of having to buy rails to fit, and drill stuff and most of the time the plaster is all crumbly and you end up having to buy huge quantities of filler and kind of cement the whole thing in place. Just too much bother. So here they are. I then took the hooks that were in the wall on either side of the bay and screwed them into the window frame so I can tuck the curtains up during the day. It has the nice side effect that we are no longer overlooked by the neighbours when they come out to use the bin (which they seem to do on inordinately frequent occasions).

These 'curtains' were bought as sofa throws from Shared Earth many many years ago. One had been cut up and made into a cover for a futon, and then sewed back together into one piece when I used them as curtains in my house in Cecil Street. You can see the original colour on the left hand edge there (that's the bit that was cut off and so is not faded). I have always loved them because they were some of the very few non-functional items I ever bought for my home at a time when we were very hard up.

And I have also been doing cosmetic preparations for NaNoWriMo. This is my desk. It used to be Dunk's desk but the 'study' is too tiny for it so he has a table and lots of stuff in boxes instead. I cleaned it up the other week (it had become a bit of a dumping ground for washing and crafty stuff) and put up this hanging (also with the staple gun:-) that the girls bought for me (you might recognise it from the home made christmas tree post). I am sitting here now writing this, just to see what it feels like to write at a desk, and if the chair is ok, and if the light is good. It looks all very bare at the moment. I am thinking that, as I did with the christmas tree, I can pin things to the hanging like a notice board, maybe pictures or inspirational quotations to encourage me, stuff like that.

Work Whinge of the Week: the Biggie!

2011-09-04T10:25:00.005+01:00

It's been an ordinary kind of week but the last two days tipped the balance and reminded me of the good reason for an indoor job. Friday I had a less than fun encounter with one of these (you know, the kind that tear small children to pieces):

that emerged from an open front door as I approached. Now as a child I was frightened of dogs; we lived across the road from a council estate where they ran around loose in gangs (something that thankfully no longer occurs), and it has taken me a long time to grow out of it. Over the years as a postie you develop certain techniques. At houses where you know there might be a dog you rattle the gate, so if it is around it comes running (rather than catching you unawares) and you put the post in the gate. I have always been very strict about not putting myself at risk and will only enter a garden where I am comfortable with the animal, I am happy to just walk away with post for a house where a dog is running free unattended. I have gradually trained myself not to run away when I see a dog coming but to stand still, and then back myself against a fence or wall so I can defend myself (usually with whatever mail is on my hand!). I had a nasty one just a few weeks ago when a dog escaped from a house and had me pinned against the fence snapping and barking for some minutes before the owner responded to my shouts. So after Friday's experience I was suspicious of all open front doors and Saturday I approched one house very quietly, placed the letter down gently and walked back to the gate, which unfortunately banged, and did not catch shut, causing the nasty little mutt inside to be able to pursue me onto the street and again harangue me for several minutes while the ineffectual owner tried to get it to come back in, or even stand still and be caught.

Fortunately none of these encounters resulted in injury. I have been bitten three times in the nearly nine years as a postie, though very minor compared to Mike, who was left badly scarred on his leg after a run in with a stray, Rick, who was scarred on his arm (and who accepted a bottle of whiskey by way of apology), and Glen, who nearly lost the end of his finger being bitten *through* a letterbox. All three times were bites to the back of my calf, twice being just brief little nips that bruised, the third was a much worse meeting with a Border Collie. I had seen the dog at this farm before and it had gone for me, so that day I got out of the van cautiously but the yard was completely deserted. I set off across the yard from the cottage to the main house and was abruptly brought to my knees by this pain. By the time I had turned around (this was how fast it happened) the dog was already disappearing around the wall at the end of the barn. I found one of the stable girls and asked her who's dog it was. I hobbled round for the rest of the day, and had a scar on my calf that took a year to fade away. The only consequence is that the owner gets a letter from Royal Mail asking them to keep their dog under proper control. In no way do I think that dogs should routinely be put down for such behaviour, but if a human being injured me in the same way they could be charged with assault. I think neglectful dog owners should, at the very least, receive a police warning after any such incident. I remember meeting a woman in the local MIU who had been badly bitten and I asked her if she would report it to the police because it is important to record dog bites, so that if/when it happens again the owner cannot claim that the dog has never done it before.

While I'm on the subject ... shut the bloody thing in the kitchen before you open the door won't you, rather than trying to block the gap with your body as the blood crazed creature tries to push past and get at me ... it makes me nervous.

To kill a mockingbird

2011-09-02T20:50:00.003+01:00

I found this copy of To Kill a Mockingbird on my mum's shelf and picked it up thinking that if I had it right there I would get around to reading it. I have been doing a bit of preparation for NaNoWriMo, some writing exercises, and thinking of doing some more focussed reading of modern classics rather than drifting haphazardly through the pile of waiting books (cue excuse to go off and trawl the internet for lists of modern classics). I have a copy of The Bell Jar that I bought recently and from the bookshelves downstairs I have selected; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (read in my 20's), Howard's End (love the film and have old tatty copy from charity shop), Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut and Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that is almost the only novel Dunk owns and that I started reading in the spirit of 'bonding a new relationship' when we were first living together, the bookmark is still at page 130. It seems like a nice varied collection.

Right, back to the book in hand. I had the vaguest of notions about the story of To Kill a Mockingbird, not having even seen the film, and so anticipating mostly racial tension and dramatic courtroom stuff. The charm of this book (not sure if 'charm' is an appropriate word here) is that it is such a small book that says such big things. It is such an enjoyable straightforward narrative; I feel like I have read so many books with plot lines that jump backwards and forwards, or tell things in a confusing order, or from multiple points of view, it was nice to find one that just gets on and tells the story. The book is narrated by Scout, looking back from adulthood, and follows a period of three years during which she and her brother Jem find their idyllic childhood disrupted by a crime and court case, and it's consequences, that divides their community and bring them into close contact with the adult world. Their twosome becomes a threesome when they are joined for the summer by Dill, the nephew of a neighbour. Their playground extends as far as being within calling distance of their housekeeper Calpernia and not having a mother to fuss over them they pretty much please themselves. Life is marred only by the presence of their mysterious and disagreeable neighbours the Radleys. Over time fear of them turns to curiosity but much bigger things are in store for their family. The character of their father Atticus Finch has become a byword in integrity and morality (both in the book and by readers in general), and he is appointed to defend a black man who has been accused of raping a white woman. Though the book is set in the 1930's it is in reality addressing the issues of segregation and racism that were being confronted by the civil rights movement during the period it was written in the 1950's. The thing that really strikes about the novel is how separate the lives of black and white people are, and even though all the 'genteel' households have black servants there is a real barrier between them. And the fact that on both sides people seem very accepting of the situation, as if it is normal and natural, and while Atticus tries desperately to offer some reassurance to Tom Robinson (the accused man) they both know that in reality there is no possibility of justice. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be funny but I found myself laughing at the nighttime scene where Atticus is sitting alone outside the jail. He is sure an attempt will be made to lynch Tom and so takes it on himself to act as guard, and the men arrive, and there is this terrible atmosphere of fear and menace, and then the children barge in to the situation and Scout chatters away to one of the men she recognises, utterly unaware of what was happening, and inadvertently diffuses the threat.
And in amongst all the politics it is the story of a little girl trying to make sense of the world. Scout is such a lovely character, loyal and affectionate, but also thoughtful and intelligent. The moments that stuck out for me were her first day at school, I really can't believe I hadn't heard this quoted somewhere as it is the most wonderful lambasting of the school system; Miss Caroline is annoyed to find that Scout can already read:

"Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try and undo the damage" (p.23)

and Scout's reflection on school:

"as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I could not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me." (p.38)

Scout is taken in hand by the arrival of her aunt Alexandra who disapproves of her running wild and her closeness to her brother and tries to bring a more feminine influence over her:

"Who was the 'her' they were talking about? My heart sank: me. I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me, and for the second time in my life I thought of running away. Immediately." (p.140)

The book is criticised on many fronts, for having weak, stereotypical black characters or for having an overly romanticised view of southern society, but I am not sure these things detract from what it says. She shows us this ordinary town, populated mostly by 'good' people, the judge, the sherrif, Miss Maudie, Miss Rachel, even Mrs Dubose turns out to be of solid stuff, and then she shows us that this same society hands out justice based on race, that a man will be convicted not because he is guilty but because he is black. She shows this, and she shows us in no uncertain terms that this is wrong. The lesson that Atticus repeatedly teaches his children is not to judge another person without putting yourself in their shoes. I loved the scene at the end where Scout stands on the Radley porch and tries to see the world as Boo Radley saw it. The idea that you need to step outside your own cosy world and into another unfamiliar one in order to understand what needs to be changed is no less true now. I could talk about this book all night, or I could shut up. It is a hard book to write about because you don't want to end up spouting platitudes or even imply that the world, or specifically the justice system, is any better or less prejudiced now than it was then. Just read it.

More than one way to burn a book

2011-08-25T17:57:00.006+01:00

I first read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury many years ago but picked it out on audiobook at the library because of a conversation on an e-mail list. I think I probably had a much stronger memory of the film of the book so it was interesting to hear the full story again.

The book is a dystopian vision of a future in which war is accepted as inevitable, people are kept passive by wall to wall television and books are viewed as subversive and are forbidden. Firemen are now the people who destroy books. I get the impression that Guy Montag, our protagonist, was already asking himself quiet questions about his work and his society, even before he meets the unconventional Clarisse, otherwise he would have dismissed her as crazy and not been intrigued by her. The government really knew where the danger was, considering that just a brief glance at a book is enough to lead the fireman astray. It almost feels like the wrong approach, we all know the best way to make something more attractive is to outlaw it, surely it was within their power simply to engender disinterest, so that reading simply withered away. So Montag starts to steal books, and hide them in his house, eventually revealing his secret to his wife and attempting to read and understand the books. And so he finds himself increasingly at odds with his boss, his wife and society in general. In such a society you cannot just disagree a bit and still live there, so his only option is to run, and run quite literally when the very unpleasant robot dog is set on his trail.

What I found most interesting about the story was the way television had come to dominate people's lives, with huge screens covering all the walls of their living rooms, in many ways the most prophetic aspect of the book. I found myself mainly musing on how difficult life would be without books, their education system seemed to consist of acquiring skills but not knowledge or understanding, and wondering how you reach a point where people stop asking questions about things, stopped wanting to know and understand. The book is also making a statement about how an authoritarian government controls, not so much by fear and violence, but by apathy; feed people what you make them think they want and they will just accept the rest. The setting fire to the books aspect of the story is in some ways merely symbolic of the control and the crushing of ideas. It was first published in 1953 but in 1979 Ray Bradbury wrote a postscript to the book which was included on the audiobook and was most fascinating. In it he rails against what he sees as creeping modern day censorship, from political correctness to the expunging of swear words, and the dumbing down of literature for the consumption of schoolchildren. Considering that Banned Books Week is coming up at the end of September his words are very apposite.

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian/ Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist / Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist / Women's Lib / Republican /Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever."

Duvet Day

2011-08-25T06:00:00.006+01:00

I started my day off with a plan yesterday and even managed to carry most of it through. I confess I would rather have had a Duvet Day (though we tend to define it as a Dressing Gown Day, one where you don't get dressed all day and do pretty much nothing, though you are not obliged to actually stay in bed) having been feeling really exhausted recently, but there are always so many things to do on my day off.

I finished off yesterday's blog post and wrote a short piece for the Open Stories "Real Story 2011 Competition" that I came across via the Manchester Literary Festival (it is closing Saturday so you'd have to be quick). I am going to be volunteering, and hopefully blogging too, for the literature festival that is happening over two weeks in October and am really looking forward to it.

The job I really had planned though was a new duvet cover. My first foray into duvets was a lovely patchwork velvet one for Creature that you can see in this old post, made when we moved to Fosseway Avenue, and the inauguration of this blog was a post about the first one I made for Tish. Dunk and I have had one done in purple satin made at least five years ago, it has irritated me for some time because it did not fit the duvet very well and the fabric had become very worn. I have a very large fabric stash because at some time in the far distant future this may become a home business (I have six or seven made up ready to go in an Etsy shop), and having trawled through it yesterday I plumped for the embroidered duck egg blue with a shot gold/blue edging. I cannibalised the old one, removing the cotton backing fabric to use on the new one so that I could get it finished. I sewed to the accompaniment of 'Fahrenheit 451' on audiobook, that I will review for you later. For once the sewing machine did not put up a fight so it all went pretty smoothly, and we cuddled up quite contented under the new one.

We were the Mulvaneys

2011-08-24T10:25:00.003+01:00

We were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates

I have only read one other book by Oates back in 2009 but her name has stuck in my head as someone worth reading, which is what prompted me to pick up this one at a charity shop a while ago. Interestingly it is another tale about rape and it's aftermath, and, again, about how the ripples of consequences can spread and reverberate.

The Mulvaneys are an all American family; dad runs a roofing business, mum stays at home and cooks, eldest son is the football star, second son the brainbox, daughter is sweet and popular, and the youngest son, Judd, relates this tale of their downfall and redemption. It is a little like something out of The Waltons, only set in the 1970's. I can almost hear them calling 'Goodnight' to each other between the bedrooms of High Point Farm. They are wholesome and happy and bound together by their shared life:

"Always it seems, hard as I tried I could never hope to catch up with all their good times, secrets, jokes - their memories. What is a family, after all, except memories? - haphazard and precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen (called the 'junk drawer' in our household, for good reason). My handicap, I gradually realised, was that by the time I got around to being born, my brother Mike as already ten years old and for children that's equivalent to another generation. Where's Baby? - who's got Baby? the cry would commence, and whoever was nearest would scoop me up and off we'd go. A scramble of dogs barking, their eagerness to be taken along to wherever, a mimicry of my own, exaggerated as animals are often exaggerations of human beings, emotions so rawly exposed. Who's got Baby? Don't forget Baby!" (p.4)

So Judd builds for us, the reader, this picture of such an idyllic family life, full of warmth, and then it all goes horribly wrong. After a fateful Valentine's Day dance Marianne gets drunk and is raped, and the cracks begin to show in what you think is a strong and loving family. Judd is left trailing in the wake, being a young teenager and not really understanding what has happened or why it is so devastating. Interestingly for a woman Oates writes mainly about the male reactions to the event, and it is their behaviour and emotions that dominate the story. Michael senior, the father, reacts predictably and confronts the young man responsible and ends up arrested himself. Marianne refuses to press charges because she has such a hazy recollection of the rape, and blames herself for getting drunk. After her initial physical shock she withdraws into herself, but by this time the family is so concerned with how Mr Mulvaney is behaving that her hurt is completely overshadowed. Michael gradually becomes ostracised by the community as he tries to get justice for his family (Marianne becomes kind of lost in all this, as it becomes something that happened to them all) but at the same time he cannot bear to see Marianne and so she is sent to live with a distant cousin of her mother. Mike and Patrick, the older brothers are both wracked with guilt at being so powerless, forced to come into daily contact with their sister's rapist. Mike gets into confrontation with his father and eventually leaves and joins the army. Michael takes to drinking and the business goes slowly downhill. Patrick goes off to Cornell but continues to be preoccupied with Marianne and the "execution of justice", and eventually ropes Judd into his plan to get retribution for the crime. The rape itself takes on an almost mythical status, not a physical act, one that Marianne appears to recover from, but the symbolic event that has this power over their lives.

Meanwhile the women just get on with life. Corinne, the mother, tries desperately to carry on regardless, pandering faithfully to her reprobate husband as he goes further and further off the rails. I did not like her as she seemed unable to confront him and simply sacrificed the family that she had worked so hard to create in an attempt to placate him. She allowed him to send Marianne away, and to keep her away, causing her to carry all the blame for the destruction of their family. She does nothing to prevent the spiralling out of control of their lives, nor to prevent her husband's descent into alcoholism. It's as if she has to keep up this front of normality, telling everyone, including I think herself, that everything will be fine. She spends the entire book completely in denial about the catastrophe that has befallen them. And Marianne waiting patiently, first at the cousin's home, then going away to college and living in a strange worker's cooperative, for the call to return to her family, one that never comes, living with the feeling that she has shamed her family and deserves this punishment. She becomes this extreme version of self-sacrifice, physically wasting away and neglecting her studies in order to work harder for the co-op. She abandons her life several time in order to avoid making close relationships with others, but seeking out places that mimic her family environment, searching for a new sense of belonging.

There is a lot of suppressed emotion in this book. A lot of men being men and not wanting to show how they feel, or being unable to articulate it. So they hide behind other things, like drinking and the army. Patrick is the one who confronts it in the end, in a scene that is both gripping and cathartic, and hugely satisfying, when he enacts his plan to execute justice against Zachary Lundt. I won't spoil the event, but it felt to me like the turning point of the book. Then we return to Marianne and watch as she finds a new place that feels like home and learns to trust in life again. Corinne works to rebuild her life, having held her husband's hand at the end, and by sheer force of will drags her family back together. While the characters were not necessarily sympathetic they were certainly all interesting, and in spite of them all going their separate ways you get this ongoing sense of a bond between them, the shared history, of both the good times and the trauma, keeps them linked. It is a story about family ties, and even though it was a little bit too 'feel good' I think we all deserved the ending.

" 'Judd, I just can't get over your brother Patrick! He isn't at all what I'd expected.' I asked, curious, what she'd expected, what Mike had led her to expect of Patrick, and she said, 'Well, I guess I expected someone not so - Mulvaney.' I asked, 'But what is Mulvaney?' for the concept was genuinely baffling to me. Vicky said, stroking her belly that was so pert and round beneath her buttercup-yellow maternity smock, and fixing me with a look as if I must be joking, to ask such a question, 'Why, you. all of you.' " (p.445)

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

2011-08-23T19:24:00.005+01:00

So what do you do when you find you have been friends with a family for fifteen years ... why have a barbecue of course. We met the Ridley Birks family in August of 1996 at the Education Otherwise group that used to meet at what was the Parrs Wood Rural Studies Centre, and because we found that we lived just around the corner from each other we took to sharing tea (though I spilt mine on her living room floor on my first visit) and letting the kids run wild together. A year later we moved away but somehow the friendship stuck, through visits and camps and EO gatherings. The rest, as they say, is history. We had a bit of a nostalgia session on Sunday having dug out a collection of old photographs of us doing silly stuff together. It was a pity not to have the big kids there too, for the 25th we'll have to make it a more formal event I think, proper planning and invitations.

Obligatory Silly Faces

And Worn Out By All the Excitement (except the Babe that is:-)

Works in progress

2011-08-21T20:56:00.003+01:00

I think Creature's experiments with her hair will be an ongoing work in progress for some time. After discussion with friends she has had another go at the multicoloured look, this time sleeping with the colour on, which is supposed to help the semi-permanent colour to last a bit longer. We used green, purple and blue this time, as you can see, wrapped in foil to keep the colours separate, and then covered in a plastic bag to protect her pillow.

This morning the effect was pretty awesome:The yarn I showed you the other day is coming along quite well, I'm only making about a mistake every other row, but mainly if I try and knit in bad light. I think that doing a whole jumper in sock weight yarn may be the thing that drives me to getting some reading glasses. But it looks great and I am pleased with how lovely the colours look. You can't see the lacy design that well, it is meant to be snug fitting and will have to be well blocked after it is finished. It looks a funny shape because the clever pattern creates the shaping by changing to smaller size needles rather than reducing the number of stitches, so the part I am working on at the moment is the narrow part at the waist.

to cage or not to cage, this is the question

2011-08-19T19:50:00.006+01:00

In the corner of the office we have an area that is referred to as 'The Cage', it is locked and has partly wire mesh walls, where the Special Delivery items are sorted and other important stuff stored. Today the manager asked me if I was interested in taking on an indoor job, working in the cage. As part of the revision there is a reallocation of all jobs within the office, based on seniority (how long each person has worked for Royal Mail, I have eight years eight months), and whether you are full time or part time. He knows how to get to me because he says the job needs someone well organised and professional, and I am a sucker for a bit of flattery. I would still be doing the same hours and days, though sometimes coming in earlier to open the office! So I am weighing up the pros and cons of a distinct change of role.

pros:

being inside in the warm

not so physically tiring

interesting variety

getting to know how the office runs

more responsibility

having to learn new stuff

can always do some delivery on overtime if I miss it

cons:

being inside

missing the physical activity

not really being a 'postie' any more

feeling a bit like it is a softie job

having to do packet delivery one day a week

I am trying not to make a gut decision based on the fact that I have had a crappy hard work week and cursed the whole process of going out and putting letters through people's doors. I had not really considered the job that seriously before because I did not know what it involved, but now I am in a quandary.

Yarn Porn

2011-08-12T17:45:00.004+01:00

Beautiful yarn for your delectation.

This stuff is Zauberball 'Cranberries' that will become a lacy hoodie for Tish.

This wonderful concoction will become a kind of freeform blanket for cuddling up with on the sofa. When Tish went off to uni she took with her the recycled sari-silk yarn blanket that I had made for the sofa so I have been promising myself we would have something new, vibrant, stunning and unique. We have a selection from Araucania, Mirasol, Noro, Louisa Harding and Debbie Bliss. I realised as soon as I saw the package that there is not nearly enough here, but this will keep me going for a while.

Giant babies and all that

2011-08-10T18:50:00.006+01:00

Most days I like to check out what people have been searching in order to come across my blog, usually it is something that brings up my most viewed posts, like 'Margaret Atwood poetry' or 'Will and Lyra's bench' or, strangely, 'galapagos'. Sometimes people just coincidentally search the precise passage from a book that I have quoted in my review. The Cooking and Sewing post from April is still getting visitors almost every day though I can't fathom out how people are coming across it. The most peculiar search I came across was 'giant baby+ squashing' which brings up our visit to the Manchester Art Gallery back in January, I rather liked that one. But today someone searched 'martine frampton', and now I am just completely freaked out!

In other news I have made a firm decision to participate in National Novel Writing Month (more commonly known as NaNoWriMo) in November. Creature and I signed up last year but since we moved house I failed to write a single word, Creature wrote a few chapters, and she likes to do it the hard way, by hand in a real book with a real pen. I am working on the principle that if I tell people it is more of a real commitment. The only problem is my complete lack of inspiration. I read so many great books and each of them inspires me in a different way, so I am trying to pin down what makes each of them worth reading. I went in search of Margaret Atwood's 'Negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing' on the bookcases downstairs and got 'A Novel in a Year' by Louise Doughty from the library that has some interesting writing exercises to get me started. While rooting around my shelves I picked out 'These are my rivers' by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and, as is invariably the case, I got completely distracted from the job in hand, so I thought I would share this, it being a long time since I posted any poetry:

People getting divorced

riding around with their clothes in the car

and wondering what happened

to everyone and everything

including their other

pair of shoes

And if you spy one

then who knows what happened

to the other

with tongue alack

and years later not even knowing

if the other ever

found a mate

without splitting the seams

or remained intact

unlaced

and the sole

ah the soul

a curious conception

hanging on somehow

to walk again

in the free air

once the heel

has been replaced

the end of the world as we know it

2011-08-07T11:38:00.003+01:00

I came home from work on Thursday determined to moan about the rain, it having been another 'bath wrinkle day', then thought how well it all linked in to writing about my most recent read. The weather was so bad it reminded me of our year of the flood in 2007 when Moreton was engulfed in a tidal wave of rain that saw our house under several inches of water (a lot less than some people, but the houses on the other side of the road were spared completely). Dunk trawled through his vast archive of stuff and came up with the photos that we took that afternoon as the waters rose. It was all rather fun to begin with, Tish put on her bikini and sat in the hammock in the rain, and even as the water began to invade the house we floated rubber ducks and carried precious things up the stairs. It ended on Saturday morning when we stripped out the carpets and lino and then lived with concrete floors of six months until the builders moved in.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Attwood

I knew this book had something to do with Oryx and Crake, it is kind of a sequel, so I kept thinking I had read it before as the names of the characters were so familiar, or maybe I had picked it up at mum's before and read a chapter or two. It is always a mistake to browse my mum's bookshelves as I always add at least half a dozen to the pile. She did have a little book in which you were supposed to write down what you borrowed so she could keep track of her books, but she said not to bother, I think maybe it's part of a futile attempt to downsize.

I really like dystopian fiction, though I always wonder why the future is never imagined as a nice place, with the human race learning from their mistakes and making a better world, rather than one where it has all come crashing down around us. What I think is interesting about a book like Year of the Flood is how it parodies the direction that the world is already moving in, the obsession with science and technology, the corporate takeover of society and the increasing divide between the rich and the poor. Our two heroines Ren and Toby are part of a group called The Gardeners, a religious cult that rejects modern culture and lives in a rooftop garden where they grow real food and await the coming of the 'waterless' flood that Adam 1 has predicted. You get to thinking that he has some kind of insider knowledge, that the Gardeners seem to have contacts in all sorts of high places and I wouldn't put it past them to have been involved in whatever nasty germ infects and destroys the human population. It's just too much of a coincidence that most of the people who survive seem to be members of their cult. What is most enjoyable however is how such a scenario lets the imagination run wild, and Atwood fills the book with outlandish creations, outrageous ideas and wonderfully horrid baddies, animal hybrids, weirdly coloured sheep who's wool is used for hair transplants, 'Secretburgers' (who knows what they contain), Happicuppa (aka Starbucks:-) and Painball, televisual punishment rather like Big Brother only with weapons.

The book really is about asking questions. Look where we might be headed, what sort of a society are we creating, what are the consequences of progress ... and most of all, will we get our comeuppance? It is not a plea to return to some kind of idyllic preindustrial 'naked in the woods' society. In the same way that the floods of 2007 came as a nasty shock to some small affluent enclaves of southern Britain, how easily mere stuff can be swept away, it is just meant to bring a pause for thought.

(If you are a fan of Margaret Atwood you can pop over and read about her poetry here, it is my second most visited post after the lizard cake and maybe we can buck the statistics and get it into first place.)

(p.s. there is no river in Moreton, this is pure unadulterated rainwater!)

Stopgap post

2011-08-06T15:00:00.002+01:00

Have been reading and listening to audiobook and knitting and baking and going to work and drinking tea with Julie, but since Creature got back from Hes Fes I have hardly got a look in with the computer, so several posts are in the pipeline but not making progress. I reached page 1000 in War and Peace, which feels like a great milestone, only 400 and something to go, but I am now wondering how on earth you write a review of such a vast book.

So here are my cabled socks that have taken well over a month. I kind of invented the pattern as I didn't want to do just plain ones, and then regretted it because the cables were so fiddly, and I hadn't really planned it out very well and I forgot how often I was cabling and I worried I had made them too small ... but in the end they turned out ok and they fit really nicely.

Armitage strikes again

2011-07-29T17:29:00.006+01:00

Is it a bit suspect to say you are a 'fan' of a poet? I have come across Simon Armitage a couple of times before (his own poetry here and his fascinating introduction here) and really enjoyed his work and thoughts. I also did manage to get a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that Creature and I were reading aloud together, however it sat under the bed for too long and had to go back to the library before we had got very far. There is something about that type of epic poem that is far better when heard rather than read 'in your head'. I am thinking of finding an audio copy.

After a long week with extra overtime a while ago I treated myself to a selection of things that had been loitering on my amazon wishlist, and amongst them was Seeing Stars, Armitage's most recent publication, he apparently claims them as poetry, but I'm not so sure. What they are is more like stories, but not stories like anything I have read before. Sometimes the briefest of snippets of an existence, sometimes a moment that captures the whole of life, sometimes surreal, almost meaningless, or interrupted by apparently random thoughts. The language is certain poetic and they often get their point across in the same oblique way that poems do, but the sense you get is more like something you might overhear in a pub, where you have only caught half the tale. I have not finished the book, because it is a collection to savour, the humour and the ideas, so this is just to tempt you to buy your own.

From the second, 'An Accommodation', where a couple are divided by a net curtain:

"Over the years the moths moved in, got a taste for the net, so it came to resemble a giant web, like a thing made of actual holes strung together by fine nervous threads. But there it remained, and remains to this day, this tattered shroud, this ravaged lace suspended between our lives, keeping us inseparable and betrothed."

In 'Michael' we contemplate what early experiences might mean, the theory goes that the first item you steal is a symbol for what you will become:

"Clint stole a bottle of cooking sherry, now he owns a tapas bar. Kirsty's an investment banker and she stole money from her mother's purse. Tod took a Curly Wurly and he's morbidly obese. Claude says he never stole anything in his whole life, and he's an actor i.e. unemployed. Derek says, 'But wait a second, I stole a blue Smurf on a polythene parachute.' And Kirsty says, 'So what more proof do we need, Derek?' "

'Hop in, Dennis' tells the tale of a warm hearted driver who gives lifts to strangers (but only if your name is Dennis):

"I once drove Dennis Thatcher from Leicester Forest East service station to Ludlow races and he wasn't a moment's bother, though I did have to ask him to refrain from smoking, and of course not to breathe one word about the woman who introduced rabies to South Yorkshire."

In 'Aviators' an overbooked airline needs to bump a passenger, but the only volunteer is the pilot:

" 'But who'll fly the plane?' she wanted to know. 'Why me, of course.' I opened my mouth so she could see how good my teeth were - like pilot's teeth. 'Do you have a licence?' she asked. I said, 'Details, always details. Dorothy, it's time to let go a little, to trust in the unexplained. Time to open your mind to the infinite.' By now my hand was resting on hers, and a small crowd of passengers had gathered around, nodding and patting me on the back."

They are all witty and clever, leaving you with a wry smile or a pause for thought, mostly both.

Learning Nothing

2011-07-24T10:07:00.005+01:00

A friend on Facebook pointed me in the direction of 'Learn Nothing Day', set up by a lady called Sandra Dodd, one of those americans who seem to have made themselves a career out of home educating their children (I mean one where they earn a living rather than it being something that just occupies their time). Certainly she is a passionate proponent of 'unschooling' and someone who I read when my children were younger. Just a note about the politics of the otherwise movement: 'Unschooling' is a US term, used to distinguish themselves from the homeschoolers, who, over there, tend to follow purchased curricula. Here in the UK we tend to call it 'autonomous education', and it is characterised by following and facilitating the individual child's interests and supporting them in making their choices about what they learn and how they spend their time.

Learn Nothing Day was started to answer the 'don't you have holiday's?' question (one of many that come from random strangers who think they have the right to comment on your lifestyle choice), because, of course, since learning is a natural function of the human brain it could be quite hard to spend an entire day learning nothing. The main trouble with the school system (so many troubles so little time) is that it divides the world into two halves: the time in school when you are 'learning' stuff, and the time outside when you aren't. This is the basis for the government's draconian punishments for parents who take their children on holiday during term time, because if they are not inside the school building they cannot possibly be learning anything. Because something is only really 'learned' if you have written it down in an exercise book and had it ticked off by the teacher.

So here I am desperately trying not to learn anything and already, while blog browsing, I have followed the instructions on how to sew, and put a baby into, a baby wrap, how to do a Colonial knot and how to do a French knot.

Go on, try it for yourself, see if you can 'not learn' today.

Going blind in Moss Side

2011-07-20T08:56:00.006+01:00

Back in January of 2009 I thought I was one tough cookie wandering the streets of Winchcombe unsupervised. Since arriving in South Manchester Delivery Office nearly nine months ago I have had a grand total of *one day* training. All the other duties I have done have been blind (five new ones in one week last month), just a process of Neil pointing me in the vague direction of the frame and leaving me to get on with it. I have developed my own process where I write out the streets in order the day before and then pop over to google maps and plug in a street name and then sit with the pink highlighter and mark out the route. I have found this to be pretty successful.

My method was confounded yesterday when I arrived expecting to do my scheduled duty and was pounced on when I walked through the door and given several options, none of which I had done before. I was given jokey warnings about not forgetting my bulletproof vest and avoiding the dead bodies but the reality of Moss Side is not so bound up with its history. I ended up on Hartington Road, and in looking for the photo I discovered that these refurbished streets are being officially 'opened' today. Admittedly yesterday only bits of the street were this tidy, most of the houses still had scaffolding and several were mere shells, but it's all progress in the right direction. I did struggle a little round the Freetown Close estate, where the developer's need to make it seem less like a council estate meant that the blocks of houses were all jumbled at angles to each other with no particular logic, but I survived the experience unscathed. What you do notice is that there are people on the streets. On School Grove I would sometimes hardly pass a soul all morning. Along Claremont Road it's quite a different matter, cars, people, activity, life; a group of young men were having a heated row on the corner of Rosebery Street, it might have been in english but I couldn't understand a word.

Things do take an awful lot longer than they might when you don't know where you're going and it was past 2 when I got back to the office. Dunk sweetened my day by fixing my puncture and walking out with the bikes to meet me.

when the whatsit hits the fan

2011-07-19T22:20:00.000+01:00

"Sometimes whether it is a family or ... any other institution, one has to wait for people to die, or until one knows that things won't matter any more for some reason or other. Though, it has to be said, some things seem never to cease mattering. Or, one has to wait until one knows one is about to die oneself, and so won't care, frankly, when the balloon goes up. You know; when the whatsit hits the fan."

The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks was written 23 years after The Wasp Factory but the voice was immediately recognisable, the initial approach to the story being narrated by Tango, a down-on-his-luck glaswegian, who is putting up his mate Al, our hero. Al's cousin Fielding has turned up to try and persuade him back into the family firm, there is a corporate buy-out in the offing and together they try to garner the resistance. Mixed in with the buildup to the Extraordinary General Meeting and Grandma Win's birthday (the family matriarch) is the sad tale of Alban's life and loves and how he came to be estranged from his family. A little like The Wasp Factory (but only in the most superficial of ways) it is a story about family secrets, and the shadow of his mother's suicide that exerts unexpected influence over his life. Alban falls in love with his cousin Sophie, and their illicit teenage affair is abruptly torn apart, the cruel and ongoing separation continues to be a torment for Al in the years ahead, influencing his decisions and thwarting his happiness. He is something of a tortured soul, clinging to the past and not really getting to grips with what he wants out of life.

It's very much a book about the characters. I mean, what's not to love about Beryl and Doris, two elderly maiden aunts who like to get tipsy and are plainly very fond of their errant nephews., and the wonderful domineering Grandma Win, who puts on the frail-old-lady act whenever anyone threatens to thwart her plans. Despite being quite a large extended family they all have jobs in the family firm which keeps them in close contact and you really get a sense of what might be kindly interest sometimes turning into annoying interference. He excels too with atmosphere, moving the tale around the world, from Hong Kong to America to the wilds of the Scottish highlands, each equally evocative. The story hops back and forth, keeping your interest by giving you snippets of background information about the major players and details of Al's misspent youth. And just when it is running along smoothly and straightforward Iain Banks drops in this lovely poignant 6 page passage describing Irene's drowning:

"There is no discernible path any more. She stumbles down the side of the stream, nearly falling, then stoops to pick up another couple of rocks, adding them to the collections in the poacher's pockets. She thinks she feels something give as she adds the stones to the right pocket, and worries that the material will rip, letting the stones fall out. She recalls a fable about something like that. Aesop, probably. The fable of the woman who tried to carry too many rocks; that would be her. Not that it would ever be written, not that anybody would ever read it. Not that it mattered in the least. Not that anything did.

...

The tears roll down her cheeks and into the slapping waves, taking their own tiny cargo of saltiness with them.

She feels sorry for the child, for Alban.

The gently sloping shelf of the loch bed ends here; she walks off the hidden underwater cliff with a tiny surprised cry, bitten off, and vanishes immediately under the brown waves, her auburn hair sucked down last like fine tendrils of seaweed, leaving only a few bubbles which float briefly and then burst and vanish." (p.123-128)

He keeps getting hints that there is more to the story than anyone is letting on (like what Beryl tells him in the quote at the beginning of my review) and Alban seems to have dreams that are sometimes about his mother, her loss plainly preoccupies him more than he acknowledges.

It was just totally engaging, I loved the people and the places, even all the politicking behind the scenes about who wanted to sell, and who didn't, and who was just hedging their bets hoping the offer was going to rise. The loud Americans from Spraint Corporation were just a parody of themselves, spouting all the same stuff you read in the newspapers when foreign companies take over beloved British institutions. I was faintly disappointed with the climax of the story, it was not as momentous a revelation as I was expecting, and I was left wanting to know Sophie's story; what had happened to her, why did she not seem to pine for Al the way he had for her, who was the unnamed bloke she supposedly pined for in return. It was a bit of a neat happy ending, but I think that after all he'd been through Al deserved it.

jumperish holiday

2011-07-19T18:07:00.005+01:00

The second half of my week off I ventured alone in the opposite direction to mum and dad's down in Devon. We had a very relaxing few days, mainly pondering the Guardian crossword together. Claire arrived Friday with Matt and Siobhan on their way to a cottage in Cornwall, and Bart and Vieanne came over for a family dinner. It was all very civilized ... until dad offered to let me take photos of the jumpers I knit for them, and then for some reason he got a little silly:

After he had finished with his senior moment they let me take a sensible one as well:
I spent the time in devon working on the jumper that I started for Creature back at the beginning of July, and it is finished. I am so pleased with it, I added random stripes to enhance the already variegated yarn. It is just in time for HES FES starting on Saturday, a little something to keep her cosy on those damp and chilly evenings in the teen tent. I am missing out AGAIN because Andy had to change venue and moved the week ... maybe next year!
I also, at dad's suggestion, took a photo of this lovely family portrait that has been up in their living room forever. That's (left to right) me, Bart, Claire and Giles. Not sure about the boy's outfits but mine and Claire's dresses were definitely home made by my mum (and that sofa had really scratchy material).

Lizard Holiday

2011-07-19T17:21:00.006+01:00

I managed to pack a lot of holidaying into my week off, which turned out to be a good thing as I was phoned at 7.30am yesterday asking where I was because, even though I thought it was still holiday, work did not agree.

Creature and I went up to visit the Geordie contingent and meet some of the new additions to the family. The reptile room now looks like this (you can't even see the bit that goes round the corner and has the specially built unit to house the eagerly anticipated baby snakelings):

(when we visited in July 2009 their collection looked like this, though they have moved from the flat to a terrace since then, mainly to accommodate the expanding collection.)

This is Lewis with the Sailfin, whose name I cannot remember. After the sad demise of Ozzy the water dragon he is the pride and joy, though he has a tendency to want to be the highest thing in the room and his claws are no respecter of human skin. He shares his enclosure with Alan the gay tortoise, who intimidates him and hogs all the nice food.
Here I am with one of the many many snakes (Lewis has given up naming them and has to number the vivariums to ensure everyone gets fed). I didn't get a photo of this one measuring herself up against Creature (they do that to see if you are the right size to eat:-)
This is Midge, the Bosc Monitor, several feet bigger than the first time we met him and now capable of taking your finger off if he felt like it.
Flik is the tegu, last seen on this blog being taken for a walk at the reptile shop. Now very big and fond of snoozing under the sofa.
Since the boys were working rather a lot we hung out with Rachel and ended up at this rather brilliant shoe shop in the Grainger Market and bought Creature some fabulous, and very shiny Doc Marten boots.
I hadn't seen Jacob in about a year so it was wonderful just to see him again and meet his young lady, who's name is Jenny. She seems lovely, and it's nice to have two such excellent Geordie girls to take on my sons and keep them out of trouble.

Should have gone to Didsbury

2011-07-16T13:57:00.000+01:00

Today we in blogland are celebrating International Anita Brookner Day (hosted by Thomas at My Porch), it being her 83rd birthday and to mark 30 years since her first novel was published. So I went to Chorlton library and found Rules of Engagement, it was the only one of her books they had. It turns out I should have popped down to Didsbury, where they seem to have a much better choice of Anita Brookner novels.

I am not sure that they will want me to join in when I say how bored I was by this book. I mean there is introspection and there is introspection ... and this book takes it all to a whole new level (or is that depth?) I mean no wonder this woman spent so much time worrying about her motivation and her 'relationships' and her emotional reactions and what people thought ... because she had *absolutely* nothing else in her life. And the real trouble with all this introspection was that the woman was so devoid of personality that she never thought anything interesting. She never once said anything meaningful to anyone or had a real conversation about anything or really showed any interest in another human being or interest in anything beyond her own thoughts (ok she read a few books, but a very limited selection and only thought of them in terms of how they reflected back her own thinking or opinions.) She is never really happy, sometimes contented, never has a strong sense of attachment to another person, even her supposed affection for her lover is couched in oblique language. I am sorry because, on reflection, I feel like my intense dislike of the woman and her life distracted me from the writing, which was plainly very effective since the book had such a strong impact on me and created such a powerful reaction. The book was the story of a wasted life.

"Now my mood changed to one of weariness and incipient revolt. I played my wifely part adequately, and yet I could see it for what it was: a sham. And it was not only my married life that was a sham; my other life too did not, could not, bear active scrutiny. I saw the point of those grim days in Paris. They had been the means of preparing me for a life lived according to my own rules, rather than rules imposed on me by other people. I had had a glimpse of the freedom available to the purely selfish, though that freedom could be limited by desire. Once again I wanted to roam the streets unobserved, my thoughts confined to myself rather than anticipating another's movements, another's wishes. I wanted everyone to die and leave me alone. I particularly wanted Edmund to die, for I knew that without him I should be myself again and not the person I had becomes once I had chosen him, or been chosen by him." (p.60)

The whole book just goes round in circles as she rethinks herself: her friendship with Betsy, which is frequently broken beyond repair and then reestablished, her marriage, tedious to a fault but with Digby repeatedly referred to as 'honourable', her affair with Edmund, acknowledged as shallow and physical but to which she ascribes deep feeling, she recognises she should 'do' something with her life but utterly fails to act. Years go by, taking her from a newly married twenty-something to being middle aged, in which *nothing happens* apart from a couple of boring people coming round for dinner.

I wanted to scream in frustration, I wanted to give her a good hard slap. It's as if she never moved anywhere from the young woman she was bought up to be, learned nothing from her experiences, had such narrow expectations of life and no imagination. And as I often do I found myself clinging to the hope that it was all leading somewhere, an epiphany, anticipating some kind of denouement that never came, it just kind of dribbled to a halt at the end. I plodded through it, just as I am struggling with this review, because I wanted to contribute to the IABD. I do not feel inspired to read any of her other books.

earning a living in my pyjamas

2011-07-08T19:36:00.003+01:00

I found myself agreeing with Harrison Shepherd frequently, but never more so than on the subject of being a writer. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver won the Orange Prize in 2010, leaving me with four winners remaining to read for my challenge.

I tend to be a bit daunted by books that are well over 600 pages and it has taken me quite some weeks to finish this, but it was worth it. A couple of months ago Dunk and I watched a film about the life of Frida Kahlo and she was such a wonderful character, and she plays an important role in this novel, my interest in her kept me engaged when the story was slow. In the references in the front is a list of newspaper articles which are genuine and then the disclaimer: "Historical persons are portrayed and quoted from the historical record, but their conversations with the character Harrison Shepherd are entirely invented." He reminds me of Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart, when I was briefly convinced he was a real person, because he was so beautifully integrated into the story of real events. For a writer I think it is a clever and challenging thing to do, to take a real story and rewrite it from a different perspective, and make it thoroughly convincing.

I was a little thrown the first time he encounters Frida, attracted to the servant girl trailing along behind carrying her copious purchases, as she is described as old, and I knew she was never old. Through a series of chance encounters Harrison ends up working for Diego Rivera and then becomes part of their household, as a cook and sometime secretary. He lives with them during the period that they play host to Trotsky after his exile by Stalin. Though he is on the edge of political events Harrison is not really interested in them, his strength is entirely in his observations of people and their relationships, both the significant members of the household and the servants who looked after for them. With Frida's encouragement he records the events as a dispassionate observer, continuing his childhood habit of keeping copious notebooks about his life.

In the face of threats by Stalin and fear of attack from any quarter there develops quite a claustrophobic atmosphere, but when it comes Trotsky's assassination is shocking, even though the event is a matter of history, because I had become quite fond of him. And afterwards Frida sends Harrison back to the US to accompany her paintings for an exhibition. He takes himself off in his deceased father's car and ends up in a small town boarding house, spending the war employed by the government, moving valuable works of art to safe locations. Inspired by his time living in Mexico he subsequently starts writing historical novels about the country's ancient past, which are a surprise hit making him a minor celebrity. This however, in the post-war era, brings him to the attentions of the MacCarthyists and the UnAmerican Activities Committee, and you kind of see it coming that his political naivety is going to get him into trouble. So the book takes us through the background of both sides of the political spectrum, the communists and then the anti-communists.

This book is partly about people on the sidelines. Harrison himself is involved in these big political events, but not really part of them. It is Kingsolver's descriptions of the other 'minor players' that are also so touchingly poignant. This is the description of what became of Harrison's mother:

"How could a life of such large hopes be so small in the end? Her last apartment: one room above a lace-and-girdle shop. One trunk of frocks and phonograph records, donated to a coworker. Were beaux less generous over time? Her assets less marketable? If she had lived to be old, would she have resided in a teacup, to be sipped at intervals beneath some grey moustache?" (p.246)

And Natalya (Trotsky's wife):

"In the years with Lev her world has been so constrained, with so few objects of beauty in it. She is not a bulldog, only a woman pressed into the shape of a small jar, possibly attempting to dance in there. It shows in the way she places a seashell on the window sill, a red painted chair in the corner: she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it." (p.276)

And Trotsky himself it transformed from an icon into a real human being:

"He took off his glasses and turned his face to the sun for a moment, boots planted wide, the peasant brow facing heaven. He looked the very image of the People's Revolutions in one of Diego's murals. Then the former president of the Petrograd Soviet put away the manure shovel and went to his breakfast." (p.292)

The whole book is a treasure of closely observed moments, though you are left not sure if the political events are the background to ordinary life or the exquisitely drawn ordinary life is the background to the savage political events, both are narrated with equal care and detail.

As a portrayal of a political era it is equally interesting, the newspaper articles really bringing to life the hysterical pursuit of a frightening dogma. Harrison in a letter to Frida:

"The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can't imagine the effect of this. The talkers rise above the thinkers." (p.429)

Then some very astute observations, put into the mouths of characters. From Violet Brown (Harrison's secretary), after the surprise re-election of Truman:

"Oh, Mr. Shepherd, it's a day to remember. Those news men could not make a thing true just by saying so. It's only living makes a life." (p.589)

And from Artie Gold, his lawyer:

"You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified." (p.562-3)

And then I loved this little piece about the nature of the Mayan culture:

"Today we drove south through villages of Mayan farmers, most beginning with X - pronounced 'ish.' X-puil, X-mal, Jésus revealed the secret of the Mayan tongue: shhh. X does not mark the spot, it marks a hush. The Mayans speak their language everywhere in the countryside, and it sounds like whispered secrets. Women stand together in doorways, muttering: shhh, shhh. Fathers and sons walk along the roadside carrying ancient-looking hoes, quietly making a plan: shhh." (p.523)

A clever and fascinating book, about making your own life, which Harrison does (from a very unpromising beginning) recording it, which he also does, making it again and having it destroyed. Harrison's life is reflected in the experience of Trotsky, who's life slowly vanishes as Stalin has everyone he has ever known or loved executed, and also I felt to some extent in Frida, who's works of art document her own life (many, many of them are self-portraits). It is a book about Harrison, and interestingly his relationships with the women in his life, firstly his mother, then Frida and then Violet, all of which have both an intimacy and a reserve to them. And I have not even touched on the myriad of other characters who contribute to the rich tapestry of the novel. A worthy prize winner and I will definitely be reading her again. I'll end with this final quote that seems to sum up the ethos of the book (note: 'Lev' refers to Trotsky, it is his original given name):

"The notebooks are gone. It must have been like this for Lev at the end, with his past entirely stolen. A lifetime of people, unconfirmed by their living presences, or photographs or descriptions in a notebook, can only skulk in the corners like ghosts. They shift like chimeras. Careful words of warning reverse themselves like truth and newspaper stories, becoming their own opposites. An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of colour, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave." (p340-1)

Many jumpers

2011-07-07T14:53:00.006+01:00

Busy busy knitting ... I finished these two lovely cuddly jumpers for the Twins, who were 2 the other day. Unfortunately I think that the jumpers are more like a 3 or even 4 year old size. I am pleased with them. Creature very helpfully held them up so I could photograph them, but hopefully Carly (their mum) will send a picture of the twins wearing them which would look much cuter.

When I bought the yarn I also bought some lovely red/pink stuff, and then decided, when I saw it in the natural light, that it was too pink to make a jumper for a toddling boy. When Creature saw the first jumper finished she wanted one for herself and since I had this left just begging to be used I am doing one for her to take to Hes Fes, for when it gets cold at night.

Cutthroat times

2011-07-01T20:07:00.003+01:00

Creature made the press today after having taken part in yesterday's protest with some friends. Emma made some headless life-size puppets which some of them wore and then the others had a dramatic symbolic 'cut throat'. She even got up and spoke to the demonstration just to tell the crowd who they were and why they were there. Photo from the Manchester Evening News.

Small Stones

2011-06-30T07:33:00.003+01:00

For the month of July I am taking part in an online writing challenge to write a 'small stone' every day. The purpose of the exercise is to encourage people to pay close attention to the small details of life and capture a moment in time that has caught your attention during the day. You can visit the River of Stones blog and read all contributions by clicking the badge in the sidebar, or visit my other blog that I have titled Random Affiliations.

Life, death and knitting

2011-06-29T07:44:00.004+01:00

I downloaded 'The Friday Night Knitting Club' by Kate Jacobs from the Audiobook Library, mainly because of the knitting, but have quite enjoyed it. It was definitely in the realm of 'chick lit', a story about a group of women, their friendships and their lives, nothing too demanding or challenging.

Georgia owns the knitting shop where they meet, and is a single mom to Dakota, struggling with the reappearance of James, Dakota's father. Anita is the long term widow, devoted friend, but also looking to her own future and getting annoyed at the interference of her grown-up children. Darwin is this weird student, researching 'women's issues' who comes to observe but not to knit. Lucie is a TV producer with a yen for a baby. Peri is the shop assistant who really wants to design handbags. KC is Georgia's former boss, mainly just turning up to be sociable. And Cat is a former schoolmate of Georgia's, now living the high life but wanting to escape an unhappy marriage. So they all have their little quirks and concerns, and their own separate story lines, that come together when they have their meetings, time to knit and eat cookies. The main story though follows Georgia and Dakota and their changing relationship as Dakota gets older and the arrival of her father disrupts their nice cosy twosome. It was all very neat and predictable ... that is until she killed off Georgia and then it got trite and sentimental.

I was not totally convinced that the author knew anything about knitting. She had this cute little knitting metaphor thing going on at the start of each chapter, but it sounded a bit like she had read some knitting books and cobbled it together; lots of tired clichés about the troubles that beginners get into and the *really* tired cliché about a jumper with one sleeve too long and one too short, I mean if you can actually knit a jumper who the hell can't measure the sleeves and make them the same size, what a pile of nonsense. So all in all a pleasant little tale of female friendship and how it makes your life better to share your problems and how friends all pitch in to help each other when the times get rough. It will make a nice heartwarming film.

Work Whinge of the Week 23: victorian letter boxes

2011-06-27T17:31:00.003+01:00

Ok, probably not number 23 but I have had a lot of unaired work whinges recently.

We have finally got the revision underway at work (in the pipeline since March), the up side being that I have moved to a 31 hour 4 day week. I have been moved from the old terraces and 1950s semis of Fallowfield down to the posh end, the Victorian/Edwardian red brick of Didsbury. And down there of course everybody is keen to preserve the authentic whatnots of their lovely houses, including the stupid tiny letter boxes that were designed for when letters consisted of a single sheet of paper folded up and sealed with sealing wax ... and I have been struggling with them all morning (letterboxes in general could be the subject of an extended Work Whinge diatribe but I'll save that for another time). The only perk of the morning was the lovely leafy canopy down all the streets that offered a little protection from today's sweltering heat. My bottle of water was tepid and my mid morning snack melted and it was a 25 minute walk back to the office when I finished. Not a good day, tomorrow must be better.

In need of a bedside bookcase

2011-06-26T09:29:00.009+01:00

I really need a better system for my TRB (to be read) pile. I should make a list, prioritise ... or at least finish one book before I start the next.

Books that I am in the process of reading:

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (just a few chapters in)

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (this has been the 'breakfast table' book since I joined a readalong back in September last year, though I am past page 900)

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark (it is small and thin and got lost under something else)

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (short stories that I lent to mum part way through, enjoying dipping in)

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, just a fascinating book, but also very long, nearly down to the last 100 pages, this is my bedtime read.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks is my bus book at the moment, picked up after enjoying The Wasp Factory so much.

The trouble is that the bigger the pile gets the more older things get relegated. I borrowed A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book from mum and really want to read that, but I keep thinking it should be somewhere down the queue, after stuff that I bought two years ago?

The pile has to be nice and tall to make sure the jelly babies are easily accessible though the lamp is still too low down to be helpful when I turn off the main light.

And I realised this morning that Creature (the daughter formerly known as M) has officially left 'school'. As of the last Friday in June she is no longer required to justify her time to anyone from the LEA. Over the years we have had a variety of ignorant intrusive visitors wanting to know what the children were getting up to, and mostly failing to get to grips with alternative ideas about learning outside the formal schooling system.

That reminds me that I have plans to move stuff from my now closed STB website onto some pages attached here. Also just for nostalgia sake to add a link to my first ever website, called unsurprisingly Silencing The Bell, that is still accessible via a web archive.

Colourful work in progress

2011-06-22T15:49:00.004+01:00

Disgruntled teenager (who does not like being photographed) is bored of having dull hair ... so we have transformed it into this:
though the blue has faded out very quickly, the pink is still gorgeous and vibrant.

I have started a couple of new knitting projects. I promised Carly that I would do jumpers for her twins, in fact I promised when they were little, they will be two in a month so I am finally getting around to it. I have bought some lovely multicoloured chunky yarn and am doing raglan sweaters.

I also had another ball of sock yarn hanging around and started doing myself another pair since all my hand knit have holes in the heels (though I will probably unravel them and reuse the yarn). Wanting to do something more interesting I started doing little cables, but they are very fiddly and I am regretting it. All the other pairs I knitted myself I find a bit lose so I cut down to 56 stitches and I am now worried they are a bit small ... will wait and see.

King Lear revisited

2011-06-21T20:28:00.004+01:00

The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff by Margaret Forster that I listened to last week was the most annoying of books with not a single likeable character, only the nice scottish accent of the reader kept me listening, and the hope that Maudie would get a bit of a comeuppance at some point.

Maudie, a very smug, self-satisfied and self-sacrificing elderly woman, decides to take herself off to go and spend four months with each of her three estranged children, in the style of King Lear, to decide which of them will provide a home for her in her dotage. The first daughter lives a neat unassuming life with her husband and only son. You would think that they would be well suited with the same neurotic cleaning routines but having been separated for 15 years they have nothing to talk about and no bond of affection. The second daughter has six children and lives in a squalid farm cottage and tends to spend her time drinking tea and admiring nature. Maudie is horrified to have produced a daughter who is so lacking on domestic talents and sets about sorting out her life, an influence that the daughter resists by being utterly oblivious to her mother's disapproval. She departs in despair and hope to stay with the son, who writes devoted letters but has been living a nomadic lifestyle, alone and self-contained. His minimalist existence in a reclaimed shed is so alien to her and she similarly find she has no point of contact with him.

What was interesting was the portrait of a person who's life was so narrow that they could not even imagine anyone living in any other way, with any other set of priorities than those she felt were important; she sets about scrubbing and whitening her daughter's doorstep and while with the son cannot conceive that people might need to wear different clothes in a Mediterranean climate than in her native Glasgow. And she was so completely unchanged by her experiences. Instead of setting out in a sense of adventure to get to know her children she sets out with a preconceived idea of who her children are, and when they don't live up to it she just withdraws from any real communication with them. She makes no concessions to them, though to be fair none of the children make any concessions to her either, carrying on with their own lives and just taking her presence for granted or ignoring her. It was kind of sad really. Poor Maudie does not have a dutiful daughter who loved her in spite of her behaviour. There was no dramatic transformation, and thankfully no violent eye gouging scenes, and Maudie goes home, deciding that she likes her independence and having her own routine and the comforting atmosphere of her own home. Much as the children were not likeable either I kept wanting her to see that there was more to life than a shiny kitchen sink, but I was disappointed.