Thrilling Moments

I’ve just been reading about wonderful performances experienced by Elaine at Random Jottings and I was immediately reminded of one of the best birthday treats of my life. Back in the very late 1970s I was still living at home, in Bath, but was just about grownup and earning my own living. We were lucky enough to have the wonderful Bath Festival held in the city every year and I had usually been involved in fringe events with my drama group. This particular year, I decided that I would buy a ticket to every single lunchtime performance. As they were short concerts, and in the day, they were much more affordable. I worked as a Civil Servant so I saved up plenty of flexi-time so that I could get myself to and from the concerts as well as allowing time for the performances themselves.

I can hardly remember what I saw and heard except for the concert on my birthday. The performer was a pianist, a dark foreigner with a beard. He played Bartok which I believe is probably not the sort of thing for neophyte concert-goers……. but ….

……….. his hands posed above the piano he played as if his very being depended on the music .. the music was alive and I could feel it. I have never before and never since felt that way about any music. I knew it was something special. As a single entity, the audience was bowled over by his performance and we clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped until our hands ached. He was so unassuming. He humbly stood and bowed at the end of the piece, almost as if he was thanking us. When the applause would not die down he seemed stunned as though he had not known how well he could play and what an experience it was to hear the music that eminated from him.

I was so pleased that I had gone to that performance not knowing anything about the music or the pianist. No one needed to tell me, I just knew he was an amazing pianist, I could feel it. His name was Andre Tchaikowksy and it wasn’t until he died a few years later that I found out that I “should” have thought he was something special. That is probably the mark of true genius. It is obvious even to those who have no idea about such matters.

When my birthday comes round later this year, don’t bother racking your brains for the perfect present because nothing will ever come anywhere near what he gave to me that day. I tremble now when I remember it and I doubt if I will ever feel like that about anything ever, for the rest of my life.

The James Lipton Questionnaire

Goodness me, I’ve never been tagged to do a meme before. Harriet tagged me and as a consequence I now have to answer questions which look easy when you see someone else’s answers but not quite so easy when you are the one in the inquisitor’s chair. I

What is your favorite word?
Lugubrious, but I have yet to use it in normal conversation.

What is your least favorite word?
diffident

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Fresh air, clear skies, birdsong

What turns you off?
Rush hour travel to central London (Thankfully I only do that once or twice a year)

What is your favorite curse word?
Poodles!

What sound or noise do you love?
Breaking waves

What sound or noise do you hate?
The same annoying woman who talks inane chatter on her mobile EVERY morning on MY train. I wouldn’t mind if it was a quick, “shall I pick up some milk on the way in” or “I’m running a bit late……” This woman just witters on and on and on and on and on and says absolutely nothing while her grating voice drills into my brain and spoils any chance of reading a book.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Something to do with textiles.

What profession would you not like to do?
Anthing to do with sport, especially competitive sport.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
“Come on in, this is a TOTALLY smoke free area “.

Now I’m tagging Elaine over at Random Jottings to do this! Can’t wait to see your answers RJ

No other book?

As I suspected, I felt disinclined to have Gilead as my travelling companion for the week. As is often the case I just had to go for whatever was to hand, which happened to be

NO OTHER LIFE by BRIAN MOORE

Another book written by a man. There have been quite a run of those in my recent reading but this is not just any man, this is an old friend. Such an old friend that I know that his name is not pronounced Bry-ann but something like Bree-an. His novels are usually slim, simply written, usually centred around one person in a way that is almost female. He was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic in Northern Ireland and in many of his novels there is no way to get away from the church. In fact the novels go even further and have the main protagonist as a Catholic priest often questioning his own belief.  I have just dipped into the first few pages, far enough to discover that this priest has lived in Ganae, a fictitious Caribbean country, teaching in a school for the elite of the country for thirty years. He has reached retirement and we begin to look back at his life in this poor country.

Over on Anne’s blog, she also has spread her wings for sunnier climes and has been reading a book set on the island of Crete, a place where she lived for several years, and which is the setting of her novel in progress. She confesses that she picked up the book she is reading because of where it is set. I picked up mine because of the author but other recent reads were chosen by the name of the character in the title and the delightful cover design. Is there right or wrong reason to choose a book?

Sunday Salon: Mr Pip has gone

I can’t keep up with all these erudite book reviews and I’m always terrified that anything I do write will act as a spoiler so instead I will just lay a few words on the screen / page:

simple life
fish out of water
trouble and strife

in the water
fish out of water
can life be simple?

That’s all folks – see you next Sunday in the Salon. I’ve picked up Gilead by Marilynne Robinson but I’m not sure if I will stay the course yet. It’s beautifully written and I appreciate the idea of it but I’m not sure it’s the right book for me at the moment.

SUNDAY SALON: Nearly finished – what’s next?

During the past week I have been reading

I was so engrossed with it that just as I stepped off the train at my station, and the automatic doors shut, I realised that I had left my other bag with a file from work and a poster for my son on the seat INSIDE the train. The ticket office was just closing and the chap there tried to call the station at the end of the line, but just as he had expected they had left for the evening. So I had an unexpected 30 mins of reading time, whilst I slowly froze, waiting for my train to come back in the other direction.

I could have kissed the guard when I discovered he had my bag in his guardsvan. He looked extremely uncomfortable when I expressed my feeling of gratitude to him! I still have a few pages left so I will save any comments till later. For now I will just say that it has turned out to be a surprising book.

So what will I turn to next? I’ve just popped over to Harriet’s blog. In fact I still have it open in another tab as I am lapping up the Sonific music she has playing there at the moment. Harriet has tempted me to consider reading Sarah Stovell’s ….

I don’t have the book yet so I may have to read one or two from the tottering TBR heap first. Have a good Sunday Salon everyone.

 

I’ve not read “The Needle in the Blood”

Maybe this will get me in the mood.

Slattern or Seraph?

After my steaming cup of tea, brought to me by MDB (My Dearly Beloved), I made my usual visit to DoveGreyReader. No mention of books this Saturday morning. just domestic stuff about removing cat’s stitches and vacuum cleaner bags. DGR confesses that removed from her appliance she has no idea which bags to buy. Surprisingly that is the sort of info that I do have up my sleeve when out shopping. So that set me thinking. Normally I veer to the slattern end of the domestic manager scale but in a few areas I am fully winged and haloed.

So I thought I might share a few of my virtuous practices with you all, and invite you to pat yourself on the back about your domestic management skills. So without further ado ….

1. I know which vac bags to buy for my dust-guzzler and I write the date that the bag is changed on the new bag.
2. I hang a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook near the kettle and have trained the WHOLE family to write down items BEFORE they run out. Unlike a friend of mine who tried to implement the same scheme, my family do not abuse this notebook by writing items such as Porsche, Viagra for Dad etc.
3. All members of the family have been trained and adhere to my laundry system. Dirty clothes are placed in the correct place. (Training to retrieve correct “person pile” of clean clothes is still in progress).
4. Recycling is well-organised and family adhere to implemented system.
5. Rubbish putting out is organised and involves a 2-member team. To avoid fox scavenging I place bag(s) ready to go out last thing at night before rubbish day & MDB puts bag(s) out as he leaves the house early in the morning. Usually the foxes have gone off to bed before he does this so no mess.
6. A Large HOUSE file/ring binder keeps all appliance purchases & repairs & building works bills & receipts in one place. I can easily look back to see when things were purchased / repaired / installed. This has proved invaluable when dealing with recurring drain problems with our water authority as I have a full log of all my calls to them.
7. A large CAR file / ring binder does the same for road tax, MOT, insurance, services, repairs.
8. Household Address Book. This little book is a treasure trove of trademan’s phone numbers.
9. Composting container on draining board > bucket on patio where mixed with pet rabbit poo > compost bin at bottom of garden.
10. Bulldog clip on back of front door holds letters ready to be posted.

So those are my seraphic ways. I am not going to share my slattern ways with you as they are too numerous.

Now it’s time for you to pat yourself on he back and pass on your ways of good household management.

Hit or Miss?

What is that causes us to warm to a book or not? Why do we like one and not another? Why do we like parts of a book but not all of it? I am having trouble answering all these questions. When someone recommends a book to me I long to love it as they have done but life isn’t like that. I’d heard people waxing lyrical about “Drowning Ruth” but it all sounded a bit weird so I stuck my fingers in my ears and sang “la la la I’m not listening”

Friends and relations noticing I was back in a reading phase tossed titles at me hoping they could get me back in the reading chair permanently. My “baby” sister had just finished “Notes from an Exhibition” and was sure I would love it too. It’s set mainly in Cornwall, has a female artist as one of the main characters with huge dollops of family life, one member of the family at a time looking back. I remember seeing the author’s name on the cover “Patrick Gale” and thinking, “oh, it’s by a man”. Did that influence me? Would it have been better if I didn’t know? I thought that I had immediately sensed a different way of writing. It felt like reportage. Like “best-seller speak”, like those airport books that MDB (My Dearly Beloved) picks up when he is away from home. They are efficiently written and make you have your kit bag all packed and ready for the route march to the end of the book.

 

“But she was awake and her brain was fizzing in a way that would have had Jack Trescothick testing her blood and reviewing her prescription had he known.”

 

 

 

So let me think carefully. I pick up the Gale book and turn to the beginning and read the first page. As I do that, in my head I am writing about me doing just that. Bingo! I’ve got it, possibly. I would have written my actions in the first person and the book is actually written in the third person, so it is reportage. Someone else is doing the telling even though that telling is concentrated on one person. Quickly I cast my mind back to “Drowning Ruth”. Yes, of course, that was in the first person. I remember being mildly annoyed that when the person telling events changed it had a heading of “Amanda” or “Ruth”. I compare it to the book that my baby sister is writing and  which also swaps from one protagonist to another but manages quite well without signposting the fact. I’ll have to have a look at books I have read and enjoyed and books that I didn’t enjoy quite so much to see if a pattern emerges. On the train home tonight I read more of “Notes from ..” This time a description of an insignificant character,

 

 

“She was slight and almost oriental-looking, with very straight dark hair that swung forward across her face whenever she looked down. She had shrugged off her suede coat to reveal a neat subfusc outfit like a woman barrister’s on television. Her silk blouse was undone one button further than she probably realized so that one cup of her bra kept moving in and out of view.”

 

 

Now that’s definitely NOT my sort of book but as if to emphasise the point it became even worse:

 

“When he woke thirsty a few hours later and stumbled to the bathroom for a drink, he found his cock and balls were aching from use in a way he had last experienced in the first solitary frenzies of adolescence.”

 

 

Would a woman have written that? Would she have bothered? After that I need something more innocent to decontaminate my reading area. When I started blogging today I intended to write about “The Battle for Gullywith”. Bloomsbury kindly sent me a proof copy of this and so I feel duty bound to attempt to review it. The problem is that although I had devoured the opening chapters that were posted on Susan Hill’s website I find that I am not running out telling all and sundry to read it. First of all it is a children’s book so perhaps it has to be read in a different way. Personally I don’t think that is the case because I am perfectly eager to be caught up events and taken off to impossible places. At least, that’s what I tell myself but when I think of everything I enjoyed as a child maybe I really do like my feet firmly on this earth. It doesn’t have to be my usual place on this earth. I can happily move in with the Railway Children, Pollyana or the March sisters and pitch camp with the Swallows & Amazons. I also have no objection to time-travelling but I suspect that I have a preference for ordinary life when I live in the past or flit from one time to another. I don’t mind there being one or two people visiting from another place or time but I had trouble with accepting those very tortoises in the Battle with Gullywith that DoveGreyReader enthused over. I suspect that I may become jittery when too many things don’t line up.

 

I have nothing against tortoises. When I was young we had Tommy who appeared to enjoy being carried around the garden by our dog and my next-door neighbours still have two elderly specimens who race up and down parallel to our fence and disturb the silence of our garden when spring comes and the sap rises and their shells crash one against the other. However, I couldn’t cope with the multitude of these creatures in Gullywith. I kept hearing a little voice saying “they are not an indigenous species”. Have I grown up so much that details like that ruin my enjoyment of a jolly good story? I wouldn’t have minded if they were mythical creatures like dragons or griffins or phoenixes or even psammeads but every time they blinked their beady eyes at me that little voice niggled away.

 

The Battle for Gullywith began with Olly, a ten year old boy moving from a perfectly good home in London to a falling down, out of the way ruin of a house. When he encounters a dog and tomboyish girl of course I knew they would become great friends but I was not prepared for the amazing locations that would be visited and events that would ensue. I had difficulty with this split between the real world and the “other” that happened, usually at night. Perhaps I can’t cope with fantasy. I never even attempted Lord of the Rings and dismissed The Hobbit with hardly even a cursory glance. I enjoyed books where amazing things happened but those amazing things were timeshifts or the ability to move into a parallel but just as ordinary world. In Toms’s Midnight Garden, when an old clock strikes thirteen Tom is able to slip from his time into the past but the place is the same, a real place, the garden as it was rather than as it is now. Moondial by Helen Cresswell uses a similar device to transport children back to a prior age. 

 

Maybe I just haven’t got a big enough imagination to deal with these leaps into other worlds  within our world. That’s probably why Lord of the Rings et al never grabbed me. I only ever managed the first Harry Potter. I’m sure that there will be many eager imaginative children out there who  will  totally immerse themselves in the  two worlds of  Olly  & unusual  friend KK but  I’ll stick to simple time shifts in my children’s  books and please don’t  make my adult books too adult.

Sunday Salon: As Sunday draws to a close.. a Gale blows in

Less than an hour to go before Sunday is over and I’ve just read the first six pages of my next book. This one was recommended by my baby sister.

See you all in the salon next Sunday. Happy reading if you manage to get any done in the week. Be strong those of you who are on a book-buying diet.

Sunday Salon: Ruth didn’t drown

So I have done hardly anything today except read. You could say that Ruth has been drowning in “Drowning Ruth”. I’ve already seen a comment from someone who said that the they were annoyed by the book but that it redeemed itself by the twist at the end. Someone else, Ann, I think said that it split her reading group. I seem to remember that a lot of people raved about this book a month or two or a year ago. So where will I place myself or will I just sit on the fence? I can’t explain what it was that kept me reading so avidly. Maybe I just needed a reading day. Maybe I’m just back in a reading phase of my life, after all I did find it difficult to put “The Brief History of the Dead” down or have the really good books just worked their way to the top of the TBR pile? I have a penchant for books that are set in a Noman’s time. You know what I mean. It’s Little House on the Prairie time, Little Women time. Heidi time. We know the characters wear petticoats and don’t drive around in cars and a woman’s place is usually in the home apart from our heroine who is a bit tomboyish or feisty and knows deep in her heart that women are equal to men. So although the book clearly starts just after the end of the Second World War because Amanda tells us that “if I had not gone home that March in 1919, Mathilda my only sister , would not be dead” it is also in my favourite Noman’s time. The way that the protagonists deal with what arises is of course all due to social expectations and mores of the time but it isn’t really what people do but rather the feelings and relationships that feed into the situations that arise.

Initially the “cast list” is small, almost claustrophobic and for the majority of the novel it feels that it will stay that way but as we learn more the doors open up, it feels as though a breeze from the lake will blow some of the stuffiness away but disconcertingly this breath of new air just complicates the truth that we have come to believe or suspect.

Once again it is demonstrated that secrets hardly ever remain so. Once again we learn that a small adjustment of the truth leads to compound untruths and that every action we take is likely to have repercussions that can be good or bad.

This is just the sort of book that I would be pleased to find if I was  on holiday in a remote cottage somewhere and the weather turned nasty. Pile the logs on the fire, heat the milk for the cocoa and be pleased that Aunty Mandy isn’t sending you out to move the sheep.

Sunday Salon: Stickers are bad enough!

Aaaah!

 

I’ve already confessed in a comment on my sister’s blog www.anneholloway.wordpress.com that I bought two books while doing the weekly shop at Sainsbury’s. I never look at the books in supermarkets because there is no ambience in those places. The lights do my head in and in some of them (certain branches of Tescos, Safeways + M&S I actually feel sick if I subject myself to more than a few minutes instore. But she tempted me by saying she’d picked up a certain book and couldn’t put it down. So I looked and found .. and was also lured in by the cover of another book. Subliminal recognition and I didn’t even know it! When I got home I realised the cover was by Petra Borner about who I waxed lyrical a post or two ago.

I didn’t need the book, I have a TBR mountain range but I bought the book. But I have been punished. Now that I take the book in my hands I see that the “Richard & Judy’s book 4 club, Galaxy British BOOK awards 2008” sticker is NOT a sticker but is printed ON the book all over my beautiful Petra Borner cover. WHY?????? The words “Mister Pip” and “Lloyd Jones” need no explanation or apology they are after all the title and author of the book. I have no complaints about the discreet “Shortlisted for THE 2007 man BOOKER PRIZE” but I feel that Richard & Judy, Galaxy et al owe me that circle of cover that they have denied me. Please don’t deface my books it’s bad enough that there are so many tacky covers out there.

OK – rant over …… for now.

Sunday Salon: Ruth is Drowning in Books

I’ve made a supreme effort in the last week and a bit to do more reading. It’s not that I don’t love books and reading it’s just that there are never enough hours in the day. Please don’t lecture me about how if I spent less time at the computer reading everyone’s blogs then I would have ample time for books. I don’t want to live in isolation. I enjoy being part of a community. When was at school it was a community that passed around absolutely anything by John Wyndham. Now I can see why I enjoyed his science fiction so much. Of course the central theme of each work was something strange and amazing but the setting and the people were so normal. Take out plants that can walk, children that can control your mind or a beauty product that can make you live for ever and the books are just about people living together and getting on with life.

I don’t enjoy adventure stories or films or rather I don’t unless how the protagonists go about getting through the adventure is an integral part of the novel/film.

So back to today’s reading, Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz. I heard this mentioned on at least one blog months or maybe even a year or so ago. With my name in the two-word title it was inevitable that I should take a look at it sometime.It sounds as though it will be a murder mystery but the simple storyline of one sister returning home, and moving in with her younger sister who never left, promises plenty of the quotidian domesticity that I love.

I am not quite at the halfway mark (page 105 of 276 pages) and the yarn is beginning to untangle but never at a pace too racey for my homely self. I have to get myself back into the book as I received my first ever uncorrected proof and I felt obliged to read that immediately. Luckily I had halted at a natural break in the narrative. So I could waffle on here for a few sentences / paragraphs /pages … or I could go away and READ!