Left and middle are how I used to look and now I look like the pic on the right. I couldn’t believe how much hair was on the floor after the cut. I decided that as I always scrag my hair right up off my neck all the time that I might as well have it chopped off. I’m not convinced about the visual results yet but it certainly feels good.
Here and on other blogs there has been talk of favourite books from childhood so it seems appropriate to mention news about a children’s book published last year that should surely be well-remembered years from now.
The Newbery Medal is awarded annually by the American Library Association for the most distinguished American children’s book published the previous year. According to my calculations this is the 87th year it has been awarded and I am delighted to say that I have read this year’s winning book, “The Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. You can see it here at the bottom of a pile of new children’s books. I read both TGB and Chris Priestley’s two Tales of Terror books while on holiday in Cornwall in September. Whilst the Terror books were enjoyable enough I was well aware that I was reading a children’s book. Neil Gaiman’s book was diferent. I think I was a child again or at least suspended any adult thought that I should be reading a “good” well-written book and was totally immersed. I couldn’t put the book down and I lived the experiences with the characters.
My edition of “The Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaimanis published by Bloomsbury and is a joy to behold and hold even before starting to read.
The exciting news is that a film is to be made of the book directed by Neil Jordan. Jordan directed “The Company of Wolves” which was based on short stories by Angela Carter in her collection “The Bloody Chamber”. She also wrote the screenplay for the film. When my daughter was about 7 or 8 her favourite animals were wolves and I somehow allowed her to see the film “The Company of Wolves” before I had viewed it myself. It’s amazing that someone didn’t inform social services and have her taken away from me! Neil Jordan has directed other films including “The End of the Affair”, “The Crying Game” and “Interview with the Vampire” but I don’t think that I have seen any of those.
Here’s the trailer from The COMPANY of WOLVES
and The END of the AFFAIR
I seem to have digressed from my original subject, Neil Gaiman and “The Graveyard Book” which tells o the life of a young child who has been brought up in the parallel world that exists in the graveyard, Once you accept the central premise of the book you are swept along with events. I can’t wait to see what Neil Jordan does with the book and it will interesting to see how the casting dice are thrown.
I thought I’d share a glimpse of some of my old puffins with you. Here they are – enjoy!
The extremely well-loved one 4th from the right on the top shelve is “The Grove of Green Holly” by Barbara Willard. The most-battered on the lower shelf is “The Wardens Niece” by Gillian Avery.
I found a piece about Barbara Willard that you may like to read: “The Pleasure of Her Company – Remembering Barbara Willard” by Lance Salway.
A few days ago I finished reading “Two Caravans” by Marina Lewycka. For some reason I keep calling it “two tractors” even though when I say the words I see a caravan. All the quotes about this book use words like funny, hilarious, humour yet that’s not what remains with me. This is a sad book that lets us see into the world of those who work for below the minimum wage often with anything that they are have been told they will earn being taken for “expenses”. Now I am swinging things in the opposite direction from the hilarious and that again is mis;eading because this is a very enjoyable read and yet it causes me to spare a thought for things that if I am honest I would rather not hear about. I would prefer to be safely tucked up in my comfortable home, rather like one of the minor characters, worrying abut what sort of vegetarian I should be or what colour my kitchen should be, than what two or three items I can purchase with the very little money I have. If I buy an own brand “basic” loaf, and margarine will I still have enough to buy a tin of pilchards which I have been advised is one of the cheapest forms of protein. Is it ethical to steal carrots from a field to ensue that I take in some fresh food? We have all seen clips of battery chickens on TV but somehow seeing those places through the eyes of a migrant worker and learning what he has to do to earn his meagre wage and “see” his ghastly living conditions in my imagination had a much greater effect on me.
Then sticking to my resolution to read books I already have, I picked up “Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo” by Ntozake Shange. This is the story of three sisters from Charleston, South Carolina. So far I can see that Ntozake Shange shares at least some experiences with one of the girls.
What do you do when you go on holiday? Go to the library of course, especially if you are tempted in by a notice saying, “BOOKS FOR SALE”. Two hours later you scrape yourself off the floor of that municipal building and pay up for a stretched armful of books that you can’t possibly leave to be unloved.
And so it was that I acquired my first Brian Moore. It was a very slim volume, its purple, plastic-protected jacket faded to mauve: “Catholics”.
The book begins:
The fog lifted. The island was there. The visitor walked to the end of the disused pier and saw it across three miles of ocean, riding the sea like an overturned fishing-boat. morning sunlight moved along a keel of mountain, above valleys black as tarred boatsides. He thought of Rome. Surprisingly the Order itself had little descriptive information. In the Lungoterre Vaticano he had been handed an out-of-print book: Weir’s Guide to Religious Monuments.
Though I picked the book up in the library in Padstow, Cornwall, the beginning of this short novel reminded me of the first time I had travelled to Caldey Island, off Tenby, South Wales to stay at the guesthouse of the Cistercian (Trappist) Caldey Abbey.
So if you have never read any Brian Moore, or indeed visited a monastery, then Catholics would seem a good place to begin.
Now I know that I have promised not to buy any books but after I have shepherded my Brian Moore’s together, I will make a list of those I need to look out for, and I will carry it with me, because if you see a book that you know you need then you have to buy it. don’t you.
Meanwhile, in preparation for my Moore hunt, I will share my list of books with you. Brian Moore also wrote as Michael Bryan and Bernard Mara but I’m not sure if I will start on those just yet.
| BRIAN MOORE 1921-1999
“his books often have a religious motif, without religious intent” “‘every tale should tell itself’. Story is everything… the writers we remember were dedicated story-tellers.” |
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| Wreath for a Redhead ( in US “Sailor’s Leave”) | 1951 | writing as Michael Bryan | |
| The Executioners | 1951 | writing as Michael Bryan | |
| French for Murder | 1954 | writing as Bernard Mara | |
| A Bullet for My Lady | 1955 | writing as Bernard Mara | |
| Judith Hearne | 1955 | read & seen film | |
| This Gun for Gloria | 1956 | writing as Bernard Mara | |
| Intent to Kill | 1956 | writing as Michael Bryan | |
| The Feast of Lupercal | 1957 | ||
| Murder in Majorca | 1957 | writing as as Michael Bryan | |
| The Luck of Ginger Coffey | 1960 | ||
| An Answer from Limbo | 1962 | ||
| Canada | 1965 | ||
| The Emperor of Ice Cream | 1965 | ||
| I Am Mary Dunne | 1968 | ||
| Fergus | 1970 | ||
| The Revolution Script | 1971 | ||
| Catholics | 1972 | read | |
| The Great Victorian Collection | 1975 | read | |
| The Doctor’s Wife | 1976 | have ? but not read yet | |
| Two Stories | 1978 | ||
| The Mangan Inheritance | 1979 | ||
| The Temptation of Eileen Hughes | 1981 | ||
| Cold Heaven | 1983 | ||
| Black Robe | 1985 | read | |
| The Color of Blood | 1987 | read | |
| Lies of Silence | 1990 | read | |
| No Other Life | 1993 | read | |
| The Statement | 1995 | think I’ve read | |
| The Magician’s Wife | 1997 | have but not read |
So here’s the last instalment of pics from my day out in “Big Grownup London,” as the childen used to say.
We emerged from watching the light installations in the subways around the IMAX cinema and started to walk across Waterloo Bridge
from Waterloo Bridge, looking left
from Waterloo Bridge, looking right towards Blackfriar’s Bridge & St Paul’s Cathedral
almost at the far (North) side of Waterloo Bridge, we look down to see our destination, Somerset House
after our visit to the Terrace Rooms, Somerest House to see Richard Bryant’s “Greater London” exhibition
we stood on the terrace and looked across at the House of Parliament, rising out of the cold January sky
Northwards and slightly east and we found ourselves in Covent Garden where I looked down & spotted these colourful tables & chairs
Don’t forget to look up when you walk around town – you never know what you might see
I do hope the floor inside this inter-building covered walkway/ pedestrian bridge is more level than it looks
There’s “Richard Bryant’s London” in the window of Hatchards, elbowing Diana (Mitford) Mosley’s “Pursuit of Laughter” out of view
some more colourful changing lights as people began to head for home
darkness began to fall and I made my way to Green Park, Vauxhall and eventually home.
The subways round the IMAX cinema have been treated as a lighting installation. The lights change gradually from one colour to the next. if you look at the green image below you can see that it has just started the red sequence. Very slowly, bulb by bulb, the lights will switch from green to red until the whole subway is glowing red. It was fascinating to watch but still had that creepy feeling that seems to emanate from subways and underpasses.
I don’t know about you but I’m still a bit of a child when it comes to stunning window displays. Yesterday I popped up to London and walked across Waterloo Bridge to see an exhibition by my boss at Somerset House and then afterwards just wandered slowly around a little of London. Maybe I’ll share some photos with you over the next few days.
Everyone was back at work after the break and it wasn’t a weekend, Christmas and Sale shopping seemed to be all done and we’re supposed to be suffering from the credit crunch, so the pavements were relatively uncluttered. Eventually I found myself in Piccadilly and stories told to me by my grandmother came to mind. She told of “the poor children” pressing their noses against the windows of the rich and being amazed at the sights within. They saw houses decorated like palaces, piles of delicacies and sweetmeats, the like of which they could never have imagined, all lit up by candles that cast a magical glow. It felt a bit like that when I caught glimpses inside The Ritz and marvelled at the windows of Fortnum & Masons and the Waterford & Wedgwood shop in the Piccadilly Arcade. So now I propose to present to you a magic lantern show of what I saw.
Sometime last year, or was it the year before, I picked up 
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and started to read. It didn’t draw me in and I thought that life was too short to struggle when there were plenty of other books to hand. Fast forward a year or so and isn’t it amazing what a challenge can do? The revered DoveGreyReader has a column at the left-hand side of her blog showing the heap of books that she is “currently reading”. I spied Gilead nestling near the top of that heap and that was enough. The hat was thrown in the ring and I picked it up.
An elderly preacher who has been blessed with a late marriage at 67 and the birth of a son when he was almost 70 fears his imminent death at 76 and sets out to write a letter to his son setting out, as he puts it, the family’s begats and all the things he has never said because he has spent his whole life studying and writing sermons. The book is a shock to the system. It is like nothing I have read before and I’m sure that is why I had to set it aside when I first encountered it. Life in the small town of Gilead is quiet and slow-moving and I think that is another reason why I struggled with my first attempt. The slowing down of my own life over the Christmas holidays went a long way to preparing me for this attempt. I stumbled a little before page 50 but the knowledge that DoveGrey Reader was with me somewhere on the same road was a comfort and I girded my loins, took a long slow breath and found my pace.
This book most reminds me of the fragmented accounts and stories passed to my sisters and me by our maternal grandmother. Gentle soft conversation washing over you as you hardly concentrate. Each small piece of information doesn’t mean much but put it altogether and you begin to build a picture of a person, a family, a time. You can only touch the edge of all that has gone before as your life is ahead of you but you can be sure that all that has occurred is part of what you are and will be. As I read it caused me to reflect upon my own family. My grandfather was 76 when my father was born. It the one photo that I have seen of him, he, like Ames, sports a long beard. It must have been strange for hime to have a young family years after his “first children” were fully grown. How I would have liked him to have written a letter to my father, his 3 year old child, in his last few days before he died aged 79.
Ames, often alludes to some shame in the life of his godson John Ames Broughton. Were this a more action-packed book I would have been impatient to discover the full story but if anything this book teaches you patience. John Ames will not be hurried, he is getting old and by the end of the book we come to realise that not even he knows the full story.
Ames talks of Fuerbach and Calvin and other religious and philosophical writers. I have heard of the latter but not the former and I’m sure that anyone who is familiar with the works of these and others will garner far more from “Gilead” than I ever could as could those who are familiar with American history. When I had finished I had to run off and google “Free Soilers”. Maybe I need to make myself a time line and hang a few events on it and read around the subject. Now where does March by Geraldine Brooks slot in?
map with thanks to OpenStreetMap and contributors
I’ve been lazy over the Christmas holidays and not ventured out much. I was lying in bed this morning at 1030 reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson when My Little Darling threw herself on top of me, hugged me and said, “are you coming for a walk?”
I’m always complaining that I need exercise and deriding the family for not dragging me out so, of course, the book had to be set aside, clothes thrown on, hat, gloves and coat donned and best foot put forward. Unlike some bloggers I don’t live in the wilds of Scotland, near the sea in Cornwall, the edge of a moor in Devon or a prairie in wherever you get prairies, but within a stone’s throw of my house I do have Bushy Park, the second largest of the Royal Parks with an area of 445 hectares (1,099 acres) and a deer population of 300+.
If you look at the purple dots on the map above(courtesy of OpenStreetMap.org), you will be able to see the route that we took. We took something over two hours on our circuit so any cobwebs were well and truly blown away. Poor MLD who is about half my mass was feeling cold by the end of the walk but of course I have plenty of insulation to keep me well-protected from the elements. I have been toying with the idea of walking to work at least one day a week in 2009 and the route would be exactly that which we took until we turned northwards to begin our walk home. I would only have to continue eastwards, towards the River Thames and Kingston, for another 10-15 minuutes and I would be at work. Altogether the walk would take me about one hour and ten minutes. At this time of year I would not be able to walk home through the park as the gates are locked at dusk so I would use my Oyster Card to hop on a red double-decker bus and be dropped off a few strides from my home.
I thought I’d share a few images from our walk. 
Just after we turned eastwards, to begin our return home, we walked past “Leg of Mutton Pond”. A watery sun shone overhead causing most of the trees to be silhouetted into what I like to refer to as “Winter Lace”. This is the season that makes me most aware of trees, even more so than spring or autumn. Everything is laid bare and you can really appreciate the negative space between the branches and twigs.
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The noisiest inhabitants of the trees in Bushy Park, and indeed all around this area, are bright green parrot-like birds which according to the RSPB are ring-necked parakeets, the UK’s only naturalised parrot. 
We walked under one tree where a few of them were congregating. One of them had ensconced himself in a hole in a tree and was fluffing up his chest feathers in an attempt to keep himself warm. His compatriots flew around the tree in circles, shrieking loudly with sounds more appropriate to an amazonian jungle than a royal park.
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It’s difficult to believe that there is all this wildlife to observe when we are within the M25, London’s orbital motorway, a bus-ride from Heathrow Airport and not from the city of London itself. On our walk today we soon came to realise that we were being observed as much as we were doing the observing. What do the 300+ deer in this royal park think of the large, often noisy, two-legged creatures who invade their privacy during daylight hours?
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It was past 1300 by the time we crossed the iron bridge that leads to Duke’s Head passage, passing Hampton’s open air swimming pool before finally leaving the park. Leaning over the bridge where the children often played poohsticks at the end of a walk, the ice was still thick and it seemed likely that a freezing night would swallow up the park before the existing ice had a chance to melt. All the more surprising to see swimmers in the open pool proving the claim that the pool is open 365 days of the year for those brave enough to remove their warm garments.
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So it’s back to work in the morning and any walking will be done to get me from A to B, rather than for the sheer pleasure of being outside. Will I pop down to the station and buy a ticket to ride or will I tramp through the park? Place your bets ladies and gentlemen.
I picked up my current book because it is a collection of short stories. The review quote from The Times on the back cover alerts me to the fact that “Eddie Virago’s back. The hero of Joseph O ‘ Connor’s widely acclaimed novel Cowboys and Indians features in the first of thirteen stories that make up True Believers.
In some ways this collection takes me out of my comfort zone and also remains there. The stories deal with ordinary people and the everyday pain of ordinary life. Admittedly several are set in Northern Ireland and chronicle a way of life with which I am unfamiliar but underneath and within every story is a pervading sadness which is not far from all our lives. The stories deal with people leaving, being left or thinking of leaving. People looking back to where they came from and to where they are going and trying to make sense of it all.
True Believers was Joseph O’Connor’s second published work. I am tempted to look out for other writings by him, there are quite a few. Here is what I can choose from:
Novels
Cowboys and Indians. 1991
Finbar’s Hotel (serial novel, with others)1997
The Salesman.1998
Short Stories
True Believers.1992
Plays
Red Roses and Petrol1995
The Weeping of Angels1997
Other
Even the Olives Are Bleeding: The Life and Times of Charles Donnelly. 1992
The Secret World of the Irish Male (humorous essays)1994
Sweet Liberty: Travels in Irish America.1996
The Irish Male at Home and Abroad (humorous essays)1996
As a reward for reading through that list, I throw in a “did you know”.
Did you know one of his siblings is the musician Sinead O’Connor?
Last year finished well. I received the slim and beautiful PITMEN PAINTERS play by Lee Hall thanks to the bounty of DoveGreyReader and delivery skills of Rocky, the ReinCat with his DoveSleigh. If you have no idea what i’m talking about then pop over to the wonderful blog that is DoveGreyReader and, sooner or later, all will be revealed.
I still have TWO CARAVANS secreted in my bag and will be continuing to tow the book along behind me, to and from work until I finish it or one one of my ancient axles rusts away.
Yesterday, New Years Day, I bent down towards the bottom of the shelves just inside what is euphemistically called “the dining room” and ANGELS FLYING SLOWLY by Jill Roe, caught my eye. 
It must be the influence of the Christmas season with its surfeit of angels and no doubt if these heavenly beings indulged as much as humans then they would indeed fly slowly.
I wasn’t sure quite what to make of this book as I read the first chapter. It was extremely easy to read and could sit comfortably alongside Noel Streatfeild’s “A Vicarage Family”. Was this a children’s book? It chronicled the lives of two sisters whose lives are changed when their father leaves the family home and their mother remarries. The Vicarage family do not come from a broken home, the girls are not sent away to a convent and most of the time are not unhappy but the way in which we learn about the daily routine of the children in each book has striking similarities. Jill Roe’s book is set in the late 1940s and the early 1950s whereas Noel Streatfeild’s account leads us up to the start of the First World War in 1914 but to all intents and purposes there is not much difference in the way the children are expected to behave. One set of children have a father who is a vicar and have the torment, as Victoria, a thinly disguised fictionalisation of Noel, sees it of learning her collect every Sunday. Isobel in “Angels..” has to learn pages of her catechism.
There is an innocence in “Angels ..” that could leave this book firmly with a children’s book As we progress to what cannot be called a climax there are sexual overtones, perhaps better referred to as undertones, Even though they have been there all along, we together with most of the girls in the convent, have not picked up on them.
The last few pages provide what I can only call an appendage, rather than a twist. I was not convinced and I do wonder if these few words were added at the behest of an editor, publisher or author’s advisor of some sort.
I’m interested in hearing from anyone who has read this or any other of Jill Roe’s novels.
Angels Flying Slowly (1995) A New Leaf (1995) The Topiary Garden (1996) A Well Kept Secret (1998) Eating Grapes Downwards (1999)
C r a f t y P e o p l e ---- confessions of a lapsed reader 