Thursday 29 February 2024

LIFE STUDY #2

It seems I have an affinity with the number 9. 29 years ago my first children's book, The Animal Bus, was published. 19 years later I produced The Traveller's Guide to Love, and now - only 9 years on - a new adult novel, Life Study #2, has seen the light of day. According to Prof Gloom, this geometric progression should see my next book published in 2028 or 29. (Or else 29 is the total number of people likely to buy it.)

Of course this doesn't take into account Moon's Travelling Circus, a children's book  privately published in 2016, or the dozen or so hand-made books I've made for my family over the years, or even the odd bit of journalism. Whichever way you look at it, I'm painfully slow. And old. Also, each book is different from the last, so I'm hardly a publisher's dream - which is why this new novel has been self-published.

Works of heart, if not art...

It's been a very strange experience. Even with encouragement from family and  friends, it still felt somehow fraudulent to publish it myself, but it was either that or let years of work sink without trace. And given the chances of getting a book traditionally published these days, I count myself lucky that at least it happened to me twice, with all the fun of launches, readings, interviews, etc.

Self-publication was a bit like giving birth with no-one there to welcome the baby. It wasn't that friends and family didn't offer, I just couldn't face the embarrassment of plugging my own book. And yet, when I look at fellow writers - even those published by major houses - the amount they're expected to do these days amazes me: arrange their own launches (and even provide the wine) and then waste months of good writing time dashing from one appearance to another...and all for a pittance. 

A civilised book launch
Anyway, given a first-rate guide and consultant (mine was the sainted Averill Buchanan - whom I cannot recommend highly enough) self-publishing can be a whole lot less stressful - especially if you're not expecting to make any money. Then, if you open a bottle of Cap Classique (South African champagne - but you can drink French if you absolutely have to) and share it with someone you love, it's not a bad way to launch a book. And this is one of those times when I'm deeply grateful to social media, because a single posting on Facebook has resulted in so many encouraging messages that I might even do it again one day.

But not just yet.



   


Friday 17 February 2023

DECONSTRUCTING DAHL


Having failed to enjoy a run of tormented, gloomy, deeply-meaningful novels - many of them by people barely out of the cradle - I started making a list of the books I've most enjoyed that are by, and about, older people.

It starts with one of my all-time favourites - Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. Claudia, sometime war correspondent and popular historian - a law unto herself even while dying in a hospital bed in Cairo - is reviewing her turbulent life and times. Funnily enough, Penelope Lively's name, and this particular novel, came up in a Slightly Foxed literary group discussion the other day. The group, like Moon Tiger's heroine (and Slightly Foxed itself) are curious, independent-minded, and thoroughly engaging. And Lively is a wonderful writer who richly deserves to be revisited. 

Next is Embers, by Sándor Márai. This is the story of a single night in a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, where, from dusk to dawn, an ageing aristocrat and the friend he hasn't seen for over forty years 'fight a duel of words, of stories, of accusations and evasions' as they rehash their own past. An extraordinary book.

My third, thought by many to be Jane Gardam's masterpiece, is Old Filth. 'Filth' - which stands for Failed In London, Try Hong Kong - is an international lawyer whose story covers the period from the days of Empire, through World War 11, to the present. The first in a trilogy; beguiling, moving - and very funny.

There are so many others, from that Gentleman in Moscow to Patrick Leigh Fermor's two-volume account of his epic walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople/Istanbul, recalled some forty and fifty years later...but at this point I got sidetracked by the latest literary kerfuffle: Puffin's sanitising of Roald Dahl. 

Perhaps I should say how deeply remorseful I myself feel for using terms like fat, or bald as an egg, in my own writing, now that I understand how hurtful this must be for enormous human beings who suffer from hair loss? (Enormous? Really? Yes, really. Apparently enormous is better than fat.) But actually, the whole thing is such arrant nonsense that I can't be bothered. I am sorry, though, for younger writers who find themselves having to negotiate today's obstacle course of sensitivity-readers, lived experience, own voices, etc. It's no wonder so many new books are tormented. 

I have a large library of original children's books to read to my grandchildren, some of which would undoubtedly fall foul of today's sensitivity censors, but I very much doubt that reading any one of my books would harm a child a fraction as much as the violence that they are permitted to see on screen any day of the week, or the vicious intolerance of so many adults towards those with whose views they disagree. How sad that civilised discussion, and agreeing to disagree, seems so difficult these days. For my money, there are worse things than hurt feelings to worry about in this world - the dire state of the planet, poverty, war - so maybe what we should be teaching our children is to think less of their own feelings and more about others, and to learn from the past, rather than waste time trying to erase it. 

I see that Puffin has now promised to re-release the unexpurgated works of Dahl, so obviously I'm not alone in thinking they're idiots. And yes, I know Dahl had some deeply offensive views, but a great many unpleasant people have produced extraordinary art, and I've always thought this cult of the personality rather than the work was a mistake. In fact, the less we know about the writer, the better. The thing about Dahl is that his writing has introduced the joy of reading to countless children, and given pleasure to millions.

Children aren't interested in our adult obsessions - or ordinary, boring adults for that matter. They prefer wizards, witches and nasty, incompetent criminals they can easily outwit. And I make no apology for posting, once again, this picture of one of my own favourite older characters in children's literature (and my personal role model) - Quentin Blake's glorious illustration of 'a wicked old woman' propped up in bed and laughing, with a bottle of champagne beside her. John Masefield's Miss Piney Trigger of Trigger Hall. I don't think she'd have been too worried about hurting your feelings. She'd have told you to get a grip and then booted you down the stairs.








Sunday 11 September 2022

OF CATS AND QUEENS...

 

Ailurophobes look away now: this one is about cats. And queens...

You don't have to be a monarchist to admire a woman who took on a job she didn't ask for and did it with such extraordinary diligence, dignity and warmth for over 70 years - and without, so far as I know, ever once thumping some infuriating politician, minor royal or head of state. I like to think of Queen Elizabeth now, feet up, glass in hand and ghostly corgis by her side, enjoying her well-earned rest while previous wearers of the crown queue up to congratulate her on doing the job a damn sight better and longer than anyone else.

I can't say I ever saw a picture of the Queen with a cat, but then, we all have our failings - not that I dislike dogs and horses, but for me the cat has always been the ideal writer's companion: beautiful, mysterious, comforting and silent (unless hungry) and they don't have to be taken for walks. Nor do I go out of my way to collect cat books, but much like the animals themselves (and with a little help from my friends) they tend to accumulate. 

I can't remember now who gave me this cat diary, but in it I've recorded the lives of all the cats I remember, from long-ago South African childhood pets to the most recently-deceased. Cats quite often use up their nine lives sooner than expected, and the deaths of some of mine still haunt me, but they brought me comfort in the worst of times, and drawing and writing about them has always been therapeutic.

Ptolemy, who came to us 3 months ago, is curious, gentle, a friend to all; and a regular visitor to a nearby house that's home to members of the Camphill Community, who would love a cat of their own. The other day one of the residents knocked at our door. She cannot speak in words that we can understand, but she can paint, and it seems that Tolly had been sitting for his portrait, because she handed me the picture, framed and ready to hang - an unexpected, deeply moving gift, proving that one small cat can spread a lot of joy.

There's some terribly sad writing about cats (Paul Gallico and Colette both traumatised me in my youth) but there's so much more that is gloriously funny - Wodehouse, Thurber, Lear, Twain and Eliot - as well as a wealth of wonderful children's books: Mog, Orlando, The Cat in the Hat. And then there are poems, like Yeats's Cat and the Moon...

    'Minnaloushe creeps through the grass, alone, important and wise,
    And lifts to the changing moon his changing eyes.' 

But my all-time favourite, and ultimate role model, has to be that great survivor, the immortal Mehitabel, creation of Don Marquis, and friend of Archy the typing cockroach...

i was several 
Tolly and portrait
ladies my little
insect says she
being cleopatra was
only an incident
in my career...

but wotthehell
little archy wot
thehell
its cheerio 
my deario
that pulls a
lady through
exclamation point...

...always my luck
yesterday an empress
and today too
emaciated to interest
a vivisectionist but
toujours gai archy
toujours gai and always
a lady in spite of hell
and transmigration
once a queen
always a queen
archy
period

He ends with this: 'her morals may have been mislaid somewhere in the centuries boss but i admire her spirit'.  Me too, Archy, me too.










Monday 15 August 2022

A SNOWMAN IN HARARE

Thirty-something years ago in Harare, Zimbabwe, the pupils in my son Daniel's class put on a performance of The Snowman. Dan was the narrator, and my de facto other son, his best friend Maruza,  mimed the part of the snowman. It is one of the abiding memories of my life- - even in the school hall of a government primary school in the middle of Africa and the heat of summer, the magic of Raymond Briggs enchanted the audience, most of whom had never seen snow and ice. The Snowman, Fungus the Bogeyman, The Bear, the terrifying When the Wind Blows, Ethel and Ernest: wonderful books, and a glorious antidote to all things saccharine and sentimental.

Briggs died on the 9th of August. Two days later, French illustrator Jean Jacques Sempé also died. I always loved his work, so I'm re-reading my old copy of Marcellin Caillou, which is about the right level for my French, and it's giving me great pleasure. Le petit Marcellin has an embarrassing malady: he blushes all the time, for no reason at all. Luckily he makes friends with René Rateau - 'un enfant délicieux' - who suffers from his own unusual problem: he sneezes constantly. The drawings of these two beleaguered but kind and  philosophical little people supporting each other through daily life are hopeful, captivating, funny - and again, in no way sentimental.

So farewell and thank you, Jean Jacques and Raymond, and thank you Bernie McGill for your new collection of short stories, This Train is For. The title story broke my heart. I rarely cry, but this one did for me. I've only read the first three but they were so good that I'm going to sip the rest slowly - like the finest wine. (Note to self: is this the beginning of a whole new career - matching books to wine?)

The other two novels that have stayed in my mind lately are The Tortoise and the Hare, by Elizabeth Jenkins, and Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna. The former I had read some years ago, but someone mentioned Hilary Mantel's admiration for the book, so I read it again, with more attention. I'd forgotten what a beautiful writer she is, and I love this book for her insight and language, rather than the characters. They are the products - and casualties - of their time: Imogen is the decorative, gentle, placatory wife and solid, tweedy Blanche the older, assertive countrywoman. Both are in competition for the affections of Evelyn - although why anyone would want him remains a mystery. 

Lacuna, on the other hand, has a central character for whom I felt such affection that despite an initial disinclination to read a 600-page novel, even by Barbara Kingsolver, that featured Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Trotsky (intriguing characters, unquestionably, but all in one book sounded like cultural overload) once I had started, I couldn't put it down. It's also a reminder that books sometimes deserve a second chance: this book has been on my shelf for years but I gave up on the first attempt because of its length.

I began with Zimbabwe - the country that gave me 18 wonderful years and so many lasting friendships - so let me end there. Blind Ambition, a documentary film about four young black Zimbabwean migrants who endure extraordinary hardships to reach South Africa and turn themselves, against all the odds, into award-winning sommeliers. That's the second time this week that I've found myself in tears: heart-breaking, joyous and utterly inspiring - do yourselves a favour and go and see it.






Thursday 12 May 2022



The answer to Wordle earlier this week was 'gecko' - a small hardy lizard for which I have a particular fondness. They flickered across my childhood walls and occasionally dropped from the rafters onto an unsuspecting head or lap. I got the word quickly, which is always partly due to luck, but cheered me up because it seemed to prove I was finally shaking off the COVID caught while visiting our family in South Africa. 

We weren’t surprised when we tested positive: we’d been travelling for the first time since it all began and we did more socialising in Johannesburg in 3 weeks than we’d done in the previous 2 years. Still, we’d had the vaccines and boosters and although the first few days brought all the expected symptoms - hacking cough, brain-fog, pain, fatigue, plus a few more – I wasn't expecting what happened on day 8, when I suddenly found myself barely able to move or talk. Be warned, friends, this thing can turn extremely nasty.

So, while the vote was being counted in Northern Ireland, I was being cared for in A+E. My youngest child was standing for election, and it seemed a terrible dereliction of  maternal duty to abandon my watch, but then it occurred to me that if I actually died, it might cast even more of a blight on proceedings. Anyway, she got in and I got out, and here I am again, a tad more battered but extremely proud that my little daughter (in reality 34 years old, inches taller than her mother and expecting her second child any minute) has been elected a Member of the Legislative Assembly for the cross-community Alliance Party. 

Alliance, and I quote, ‘was founded in 1970 with the objective of healing the bitter divisions in our community. We believe in a shared society, free from intimidation, discrimination and fear, where everyone is safe, can play their part and is treated fairly and with respect.’ Well, for my money, you can’t say fairer than that. I came here myself for the first time in 1970, a period vividly recalled for me by Louise Kennedy’s new novel, Trespasses. I was so painfully reminded of those days – the fear, the bigotry, the violence, and the shocking attitudes to women – that I wasn’t sure I could go on. But once you start reading Kennedy, you can never stop; she breaks your heart but she gives you hope, and I think she is extraordinary.  And 50 years on, we have proof that even in the most bitterly divided of societies, a few good people banding together can eventually bring about change. Alliance is also a party notable for being both led by a woman and represented by an unusual number of brave, principled, and inspiring women. My daughter is in excellent company.

Enough of that. This blog is supposed to be about books, and I’ve been trying to think of a memorable novel about a woman in politics – there are any number about men - but Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife apart, I’ve drawn a blank. Suggestions, as always, will be welcome. My holiday reading was mainly escapist. A Discovery of Witches (witches, vampires and demons living undercover in Oxford - and where better?) was fun at first but 600+ pages of delayed gratification, in every sense, was far too much. The Word is Murder came next, the first in Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne-Horowitz series. I'd already enjoyed A Line to Kill, where the action takes place at a literary festival in Alderney (and what writer hasn’t been moved from time to time by literary festivals to thoughts of murder?) and now I'm looking forward to The Sentence is Death. Horowitz sets out to entertain you, and he does it with consummate ease. I also read the third of Amor Towles’ novels, The Lincoln Highway. His second, A Gentleman in Moscow, is still my most enjoyable book of the year; Rules of Civility, his first, was also highly readable, if not in the same class. And perhaps it was partly due to COVID but for me The Lincoln Highway, despite some memorable characters, was in the end too sprawling and unfocused. A pity. 

As so often happens, my back-up book proved best of all. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, was hardly escapist, but such a moving, lyrical account of the strange lives and loves of the immigrants, workers and dreamers who were building Toronto in the 1920s, that I couldn’t put it down.

Like so many others, my own family have travelled far from their beginnings. I sometimes think we'd all have been better off if humans had just stayed home and quietly tended whatever corner of the planet they'd been born in, but it's a bit late for that now. All we can really do is remind ourselves that although we are threatened by so much - not least, the older, power-hungry men and women who continue to send the terrified young to fight their battles for them - there is always hope. And cling on for dear life when the walls start closing in. A bit like geckos. 

Wednesday 9 March 2022



Every so often I decide to call time on this blog. There are already so many voices out there competing for attention, and in the face of a pandemic, a worldwide climate emergency and a war so senseless and barbaric that it beggars belief, my thoughts on literature and life seem a bit pointless. Then I come across yet another book so intriguing, moving, or just downright cheering, that I just can't help myself...

When I finished A Gentleman in Moscow I wasn't expecting to find anything as enjoyable for a long time to come. But Nobel prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel, By the Sea, is extraordinary. I knew nothing about Gurnah and very little about the history of Zanzibar, and a story of exile and old wrongs wasn't necessarily what I wanted to read right then, but a friend had lent it to me, so I did. And what an extraordinary book it turned out to be: beautifully written, at times almost unbearably moving, but always measured, fascinating, thoughtful, wise.

After that came the pleasures of Silverview, the late great John le Carre's last book; Alan Garner's quirky Treacle Walker; and Claire Keegan's wonderful Small Things Like These - a small Irish masterpiece dealing with other historic wrongs, in this case the Magdelene laundries. Like the Gurnah novel, it's beautifully written, unsentimental, haunting and humane.

Then there was Damon Galgut's The Promise. It's always a great pleasure when a fellow South African is acclaimed for a novel, and this book deserves every word of praise. A wonderfully readable story about the crumbling Swart family and their broken promise to Salome, the Black woman who has worked for them all her life. Powerful, funny, poignant and truthful - I can't recommend it highly enough.

I started reading The Promise - as I do any novel by a compatriot, or a writer I know and like - thinking that loyalty would probably keep me going to the end, even if it turned out not to be one of their best, but both Damon Galgut and Jan Carson were a pleasure from start to finish. In fact I can honestly say that The Raptures had me so enraptured from the start that I could hardly bear to finish. Utterly original, gloriously funny and heartbreaking to boot. And while I accept that magic realism isn't everyone's cup of tea, I'm beginning to think that it's the obvious way to write about Northern Ireland - a place simultaneously so beautiful, warm-hearted, bigoted and mad that you can be forgiven for sometimes thinking you're living in a peculiar parallel universe.

As if all that wasn't more than enough, Rules of Civility - the elegant first novel from Amor Towles - was nearly as enjoyable as his Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway is waiting. I've also got the Spring edition of my regular fix, Slightly Foxed, to enjoy, and I'm currently on Page 117 of A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee. This is turning out to be an exceptionally entertaining murder mystery set in Calcutta in 1919. I'm starting to run out of adjectives here, but really and truly, my literary cup runneth over...


Which is a good thing, considering the current state of the outside world. I suppose it's no surprise that so many recent novels deal with old hurts and historic wrongs, but at least the above all do so without bitterness or despair. And sometimes exile and displacement bring unexpected benefits. 40 years ago, I met a Ugandan doctor, newly-arrived in Zimbabwe with his teacher wife (who was in hospital, awaiting the birth of their third child) to begin a new life for their family. We were newly-arrived from troubled Belfast, with two small children of our own, and our four little ones took as instant a liking to each other as I had to their father. They came to play a few days later and when I met their mother, I knew at once that we'd be friends for life. And so we have been, despite the geographical distances between us, and our too-rare times together. Then, a week ago, we were stricken by the news of the death in Uganda of our dear friend. His wife and four daughters must now learn to live without this gentle, lovely man, but I can only be grateful for the disruptive currents of fate that once brought us all together, and so enriched our lives.



And one more happy ending - just to lighten the prevailing gloom: a few years ago a young Egyptian engineer walked into the Belfast bookshop I was running, to volunteer his services. He was in exile and alone over the Christmas holidays so I persuaded him to come and join our South African Irish English Indian family party. He duly arrived at our door with a rucksack strapped to his back and his most precious belonging, an Egyptian stringed Oud, strapped to his front. This instrument he played for us one evening that I will never forget. The desperate longing for home that welled up with the music could have broken your heart. But he and his lovely Greek girlfriend later made a new home in Scotland; they celebrated their Muslim wedding in Cairo a while back, and later this year they'll have an Orthodox ceremony in Greece - two people of different faiths and cultures happily brought together by the upheavals of our times.

Sadly, the Four Horsemen of conquest, famine, war and death continue to ride, as they have done for centuries. Like the rest of the world I am currently holding my breath and hoping against hope that somehow Peace will return to Europe, and that all those recently displaced people will regain some sort of life. We also very much hope that later in the year we'll be in Greece to celebrate our young friends' marriage, and to enjoy a reunion with our Greek family. For now though, it's back to Calcutta for me, and the immeasurable comfort of a good book...

Tuesday 30 November 2021

A BLYTED CHILDHOOD

Someone famous admitted the other day that she still had her old Enid Blyton children's books, but hid her shameful secret in the garage, away from the eyes of the world. Well, I have mine too, in plain view - along with many other out-of-favour authors - and I'll be damned if I ever apologise for the pleasure they gave me. The Magic Faraway Tree, The Famous Five, The Island of Adventure  - just listing them, decades later, takes me back to a place of warmth and safety.

I'm reminded of my long-ago days as a conscientious school librarian, when I devoted a great deal of time to finding books that my Zimbabwean students could relate to. One particular morning I directed the attention of two 13 year-old boys to the possible contenders on the counter. No, they said, what we really want is some more of those Barbara Cartland books. (We had a slightly strange collection at the time, mostly donations from local well-wishers.) Why these two children of the new Zimbabwe wanted to read this entirely white, English, upper-class, romantic froth still flummoxes me, but possibly they just rolled around laughing.

My point is that there's no knowing what childhood books will contribute to our happier memories, but every book that gives you pleasure leads to your reading others, and sooner or later, with any luck, the pattern of your reading grows wider, richer, more sustaining. I grew up in a very different and more dangerous society than the English villages of Blyton, and many of my friends come from deprived or marginalised backgrounds, but it is precisely because those books took us away from our worlds that we enjoyed the stories - as I loved the worlds of Narnia, of E. Nesbit, of George MacDonald's Princess Irene. Places full of magic, where fear and evil could be vanquished by a stout heart; and even if the little, twinkling light in a cottage in the woods led to a witch or ogre, luck and pluck would keep you safe. 

We were lucky enough to have parents who read to us every night: our father opted for Just William, Dr Dolittle, The Jungle Book; our mother for Eleanor Farjeon and The Wind in the Willows. She didn't really approve of Blyton but she respected our choices, and tried to raise the standard with reams of poetry. Years later I read to my own children. Tolkien was a particular favourite for long African car journeys, and I prided myself on doing all the voices, not always easy with his sprawling cast: I can still hear a little voice from the back seat, objecting, 'That's not an orc, that's an elf.'

My own children now read to theirs, and long may this tradition continue. But it saddens me that people are made to feel ashamed of what they used to love. So many children's books, now shunned, are guilty of nothing worse than being of their time; while so many of the new - also of their time - reflect our bleak obsessions with political correctness and the world's wrongs. Even grown-ups (I use the term loosely) seem to be suffering: 'Why does every detective have to be in emotional turmoil these days?' Gloom demands. 'Why does everything have to be so grim?' And he goes back with relief to Moomin Valley, where the worst that ever happens is a temporary chill cast by the Groke. 

Fortunately, there are still plenty of wonderful books to be found, even for adults. The ever-blessed Slightly Foxed put me onto A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, the story of a Russian aristocrat sentenced to indefinite house-arrest (in a hotel attic room) by a Bolshevik tribunal. Now there is a book that celebrates the human spirit, as our hero confronts the world's tumultuous turning with courage, humour, charm and wit. Not to mention the beauty of the language and the occasional glorious description of food. I'm only half-way through but that's because I'm reading it very slowly to make it last.

It's been a horrible year in so many ways, and has ended for us with the death of a much-loved cat and the cancellation of all our Christmas plans. But we have a house full of books, plenty of wine, and the example of the philosophical Count Alexander Rostov to sustain us. I wish you all a safe and happy season, and the comfort of good books.




















Sunday 17 October 2021

COMFORT READING


Flashback to mid September: 6.00am and a small insistent voice begins a dawn chorus outside my bedroom door, 'Guggy...Guggy...wake UP, Guggy.!'

I fall out of bed, crawl to the bathroom, then totter out onto the landing where the most beautiful 3 year-old in the world is waiting for me to accompany him downstairs to release Archimedes (imprisoned in the kitchen in case he jumps on anyone's head in the night) and begin the day. As we go, we sing.

'Always hold onto the bannister, when you go down the stairs. Always hold onto the bannister, and don't fall down on your ears!' (An original composition which I am beginning to regret as we have now sung it at least a hundred times...) 

So, what shall we do first? Build a castle? Set up the Fire Station? Play shop? While emptying the dish-washer, peeling fruit, mixing baby-porridge, making life-saving coffee... I'm the early-riser in the house so this part of the day falls to me. The beautiful 3 year-old's equally beautiful 8 month-old brother is also up but he is being changed by Papa, while Mama tries to stretch the dodgy back that put her in hospital for 6 days when they were one week into their first holiday in Ireland in two years. The original 2 week visit is now nearing a month... 

Medical emergencies, round-the-clock childcare, malfunctioning washing machines, a hoover that started leaving a mysterious cat-like odour behind it...the stars have not been perfectly aligned recently, but when daily life turns tough, for me the best medicine is a glass of good wine and a good book. Luckily, I had both. 

The first book was sent to me by my sister. At first glance I wasn't sure I'd like it (the words 'International Bestseller' on a cover tend to put me off) but a few pages into The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, I found myself soothed, amused and blessedly transported from the trials of daily life by this very enjoyable debut novel based on the making of the first Oxford English Dictionary. The Guardian reviewer called it 'a gentle, hopeful book...balm for nerves frazzled by the pandemic' and I can only agree.

And then I had D.E. Stevenson's Miss Buncle's Book. When I worked in Edenbridge and Southborough libraries a million years ago, I dismissed the rows of Stevensons as middle-aged, middle-class, comfort reading of the dullest sort. Certainly of no interest to my young, cutting-edge self. (At the time I was reading Lessing, Lawrence, Garcia Marquez, and anyone Russian.) But now, older and less concerned with the world's opinions, I read and write for my own pleasure. My only requirements are that the writing pleases me and that I care about the characters, although I can also be seduced by a lovely cover, and this is a beautiful Persephone Books edition.

Miss Buncle is an impoverished, dowdy spinster, condescended to or ignored by most of her acquaintance until she writes a best-seller (under the pseudonym of John Smith) that skewers her self-important and often unpleasant neighbours... It is extraordinarily funny and I recommend it to anyone in need of cheering up. And who isn't, these days? 

Slightly Foxed (the Autumn edition) and The Oldie both helped too - and I know I bang on about SF but where else are you going to find Margaret Drabble on Doris Lessing, or Anita Brookner and Mary Wesley rubbing shoulders with Sir John Squire's hymn to British cheese, Cheddar Gorge? Or indeed, an article on the diaries of Charles Ritchie, lover of novelist Elizabeth Bowen and a Canadian diplomat with a singularly memorable turn of phrase? (He described the Duchess of Windsor in later years as looking 'ravaged but unsated...engagingly full of curiosity and with a nose tilted for scandal.') 

Lastly, two works of non-fiction: Selina Hastings' Sybille Bedford, An Appetite for Life - the biography of a wonderful writer and a fascinating, if perhaps not entirely likeable, woman - and The Seabird's Cry, a book I picked up in a local second-hand shop the day after our own visitors had finally flown home to London. This for Adam Nicolson's extraordinary prose, whether or not you are interested in seabirds and their rapidly disappearing world.

He writes, 'Seabirds somehow cross the boundary between the matter-of-fact and the imagined. Theirs is the realm both of enlargement and of uncertainty, in which the nature of things is unreliable and in doubt.'  And he quotes Seamus Heaney: 

    What came first, the seabird's cry or the soul

    Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?

    How habitable is perfected form

    And how inhabited the windy light?

'Heaney's imagined soul-seabird is not only the great boundary-crosser,' says Nicolson, 'but linked to the emergence and genesis of things. The seabird's cry comes from the beginning of the world.' 

A wonderful book.



Wednesday 18 August 2021

JOURNEYS' ENDS



A postcard of those Belfast landmarks, Samson and Goliath, came through my letterbox a couple of weeks ago. It informed me of the successful completion of a short film, and thanked me for being one of the backers. The film in question is a love story set in Belfast against the background of the Good Friday agreement, with the name of our adored Clementina in the credits, because, the day after she died I happened to read that the young filmmakers needed funding, and it seemed a suitable way to honour her. (She was the sort of cat who would have enjoyed seeing her name in lights.) And on the same day that this card arrived (with its charming hand-written message: 'I cannot really describe how happy I am to deliver this card to you! Thank you for believing in our project...') I had news of a very different kind. One of my closest friends had suffered a sudden, catastrophic brain haemorrhage. So here was one journey at its start and another at its end...

When I moved from Belfast to Holywood 14 years ago, I was a single woman with a cat, and upstairs lived another single woman with a cat. It was friendship at first sight: a bond which quickly grew to include my numerous friends and far-flung family. She even gave up her own bed for my visitors and slept on her sofa when space was needed, and no celebration was complete without her: Christmas, birthdays, weddings, Disaster Parties (for women only, and so called because most women of a certain age have disasters to contend with: divorce, widowhood, loneliness, badly-paid jobs, delinquent children... marriage) She was the kindest and most generous of women, with a wide circle of friends and a great zest for life; she was Auntie G&T to all my children, until the day that, for no particular reason, she decided to give up drink, whereupon she became Auntie TT.

Oddly enough, on the day that she hovered between life and death, I was in the tunnel of an MRI machine - an experience I usually hate - but this time it didn't feel so bad because she seemed to be there with me. Each in our separate tunnels, like two tube trains, going in different directions but lighting each other's darkness briefly as they pass. As we lit each other's lives. Afterwards, I went to see her with my daughter, but she was no longer really there, and I'm grateful she never regained consciousness: she would have faced a life of damage or dependency, which she would have hated. 


And if all this sounds very solemn, it's not meant to be. Grief is all-consuming, often selfish, and always intensely personal. With the best of intentions, people say 'I know how you feel'. No, they don't. No-one can ever know exactly how another person feels, and to say that you do can sometimes feel like an intrusion. But the older I get, the easier the acceptance that death comes for us all, and the more I value the saving grace of humour - The Oldie magazine being a favourite, deeply-unsentimental, and bracing source. (The cartoon on the left is one of my favourites.)

As for books on death and dying, there are some wonderfully funny novels (George Saunders' unforgettable Lincoln in the Bardo, Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, Waugh's The Loved One) and others that are deeply moving without being in any way sentimental. Grief is the Thing with Feathers springs to mind. And then there's Goodbye Mog, for children, which being written by the sainted Judith Kerr, is poignant, wise and funny, and the best book I know about the death of a much-loved pet. For many, of course, poetry is the greatest solace. I may have written before that one of my favourites is by Kahlil Gibran and contains the line 'For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind, and to melt into the sun?' But people who are grieving often find it hard to read at all, and must come back to it in stages. 

My friend's attitude to death was very matter-of-fact. She once said to me - after a visit to the dentist - that if she ever found herself face to face with some deity in the Afterlife, she would have several bones to pick, starting with the poor design of teeth. The name of the Belfast film, by the way, is Another Day in '98 and I greatly look forward to seeing it. In the mean time, I will think of my departed friend, now keeping company with the ever-growing collection of those whose lives I remember with gratitude, with love and laughter (including 18 cats) and I will derive great pleasure from the idea of her confronting the Almighty, and giving off about teeth...

                                                                *
RIP Milko

There is a postscript to this: two weeks to the day after her death, her much-loved cat - the one that moved with me to Holywood all those years ago but who moved upstairs (with alacrity) when I moved out - was judged too infirm and elderly, at nearly 20, to withstand any further changes. So our lovely local vet came to the house to put her to sleep, so gently, kindly and peacefully that we could not have asked for a better journey's end. 

If only we could ask her to do the same for us one day.








Wednesday 21 April 2021

ISHIGURO, ISTANBUL AND INSECTS FOR TEA

Sunday morning, up early and down the stairs to feed Archimedes, switch on the kettle and the radio - and there's Mark Tully with Something Understood. There aren't many good reasons for getting out of bed at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning, but Mark Tully is one of them. This week the subject was living with regret: lines of poetry, snatches of song (Edith Piaf, of course - no regrets there) and an extraordinary exchange with a man who went to prison for murder and will live with regret for the rest of his life. 

And then, On Your Farm, which is usually when I switch off and take my tea back upstairs, but this week we were in Zimbabwe, farming insects. Crickets, to be precise. Now, I'll listen to anything coming from Zimbabwe - I spent 18 incredibly happy years in that country, my youngest child was born in Harare, and I still have dearly-loved family and friends there - but this was one of those BBC gems. Off we went with a woman who, with the help of a charity, travelled to Costa Rica to study and then came back to set up a cricket farm in her village. Just the sound of those crickets churring away took me back...  This lot had mountains of empty egg cartons to hide in, they are very low maintenance, and as far as I know, produce no methane. If chirping is anything to judge by, they were perfectly happy. In the end, of course, they find themselves in hot water. Literally. They are despatched (the actual term used was 'harvesting') by dunking them in hot water. Apparently it only takes a few seconds and then they are dead and ready to fry. They are packed full of protein and taste, so we are told, like fried chicken skin. The reporter ate a whole plateful but she said it helped not to look at her plate.

It was also the BBC that recently serialised Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, Klara and the Sun. I'd listened to a couple of episodes while I waited for the copy I'd ordered to arrive, and it was one of those satisfying occasions when you enjoy reading the book even more than you'd hoped to. A lovely, poignant, thought-provoking and beautifully written novel. 

Then, in my never-ending quest for books to lighten the prevailing gloom, I re-read Cluny Brown, and if you want to cheer yourself up, then Margery Sharp's 1940s parlour maid who doesn't know her place is the answer to your prayers. I defy anyone not to laugh out loud. I also enjoyed Jan Carson's new book of linked short stories, The Last Resort, set in a surreal Ballycastle caravan park. I always like her writing, but this format was especially pleasing: maybe it's just age that has fragmented my brain lately (although I suspect Covid is also to blame: people a lot younger than I am are reporting the same lack of concentration) but it's a bit like having a mental ulcer - right now I need small, regular, nourishing dollops of stories, not indigestible 500 page novels.

Staying local, I have Sue Divin's highly-praised Guard Your Heart to look forward to, as well as The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (my title of the year) by Louise Kennedy. Having read her brilliant short story, Hunger, earlier in the year, I've been dying to get my hands on this one.

And one more link with Zimbabwe to end my week: I have a young relative from Harare who now teaches English in Istanbul, and because I love her (and loved Istanbul when I went there some years ago) I agreed to do a reading and question & answer session with a group of 60 Turkish 10-11 year-olds. You know how you agree to something because it's still 2 weeks away and if you're lucky, the end of the world or an alien invasion might come first, or you might lose your voice? Well, none of those things happened and I duly found myself talking about my writing life, and reading from Moon's Travelling Circus, the book that found an agent but never a publisher, but which has still managed to reach quite a few children. And these particular children were enchanting (as were their teachers). Articulate (in a second language), interested, curious, appreciative. I enjoyed the whole thing so much that I think I may have invited all 60 of them, and their teachers, to visit me in Ireland. I can only hope they don't all come at once.

Istanbul's covered market

A post script. I wrote this before news reached me of the terrible fire on Table Mountain that destroyed the restaurant at Rhodes Memorial and badly damaged Cape Town University. Apart from fears for the safety of all those affected, my family connections with UCT are very strong and so many of my memories are linked to the surrounding areas, that it was hard to watch: the pictures of the burnt-out Jagger Library would break your heart. But South Africans are extraordinarily resilient and at least the mountain will recover, in time. A reminder though, that in the end all our zeal for building up and tearing down, all our sound and fury, are no match for natural forces. Even Rhodes will fall in time, with no human help at all.

After the fire



Friday 12 March 2021

WATERLOGGED AND SLIGHTLY FOXED

I was sent a copy of Roger Deakin's Waterlog by my elder daughter recently. She's a swimmer herself, who'd be only too happy to emulate Deakin's wild-swim around the British Isles. I'm not so brave: I prefer warm Mediterranean or Southern African seas - or outdoor swimming pools, at a pinch. What I do not like is swimming in cold dark water where all sorts of not necessarily well-intentioned things might be lurking in the depths (a dislike reinforced by spending much of my life in places with too many crocodiles for comfort) but I love this book for the charm of the author and the beauty of his writing. And the wonderful humour.

Here he is, quoting a drinking companion in the Three Tuns at Welney, who said 'they were all salt of the earth in the Fens and would give you a sack of potatoes as soon as look at you...' Beyond Cambridge, however, 'They wouldn't give you the drippings off the end of their nose.' And a wonderful account of a wildlife training session when small tubs of otter and mink poo were passed around, in the manner of a wine tasting, to be sniffed and described as 'fragrant', with something of the quality of jasmine tea (otter spraint) or a smell like burnt rubber and rotten fish (mink scat). And I bet you didn't know about spraint and scats either.

I've also been reading, for the first time, a Peter Temple thriller, The Broken Shore. Temple, like me, was South African by birth, but ended up living in Australia, and he brings the people and place to almost startlingly vivid life. He doesn't shy away from racism and bigotry, but he fleshes out his characters with great humanity and humour, and his combination of crackling dialogue, plot and pace add up to a master class in crime writing. I can see exactly why he won so many awards - I couldn't put him down. Nor can Professor Gloom - I just looked into his study, where he is meant to be taking part in an online Hot Star workshop (don't get excited: it's the astronomical rather than Hollywood sort) and there, out of sight on his knees, was an open book, Peter Temple's Truth, in which he was a lot more interested.

Another treat arrived last week: the Winter edition of Slightly Foxed. I love Slightly Foxed for so many reasons: it's full of (short) well-written pieces on old, forgotten, quirky, much loved books, as well as ones I've never encountered, and it entirely lives up to its billing as a 'lively, quarterly review for the independent-minded'. They also send you notes on their delightful cards, which then make charming bookmarks - my  favourite bookmarks (see some below) being one of the many things that add to the pleasure of reading actual physical books.

I go through back numbers of SF regularly (my set is almost complete, only a dozen or so missing from the 69 published so far) and there is always something worth reading again. I needed to do some research on Nancy Mitford recently, and in doing so rediscovered a hilarious piece by Michele Hanson on The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, and Mitford's absolute freedom, at the time, from the constraints of political correctness. Not many writers these days would dare to invent Uncle Matthew, but as Hanson says, Mitford 'observes pitilessly, and then she forgives. If only more of us could do that, the world would be a better place.' 

Slightly Foxed (both of us)
There is also, in this winter issue, wise advice from Barbara Hepworth in her Pictorial Autobiography that many writers might consider. Hepworth, an artist with a family of four (three of them triplets) wrote that '...it formed my ideas that a woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) - one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one's mind.' Slightly Foxed have an excellent podcast too: I urge you to do yourself a favour and listen in.

Fashions in novels (and novelists) change almost as fast as Covid  variants, and having recently had to complete my Census details  and admit to being elderly, white, middle-class and straight - a  combination for which, as a writer, I find myself feeling faintly  apologetic - I don't expect to be published again. On the  other hand, I'm deeply grateful to Slightly Foxed for regularly  reminding me of the books that have changed some of us for life, and the many, many more that have simply given pleasure - and will go on doing so, no matter who wrote them.




Friday 12 February 2021

SHORT AND SWEET



So 
here we are, nearing the end of February, and apart from the birth of a new grandson, the handover of power in America and the roll-out of COVID vaccines, I can't say the year started well. There were even some hideous weeks when the Wine Society stopped delivering to Northern Ireland and Call My Agent ended - not that it wasn't a great ending, and maybe they were right not to let it go on too long. Still, it left a gap, so I'm open to suggestions. Fortunately, wine deliveries have been resumed and at least the supply of jigsaw puzzles hasn't dried up - God knows we need whatever distractions we can find to lighten these dreary days. I just wish I could get hold of some cheerful books. Why do publishers seem to think that miserable times call for miserable books? I've never seen so many described as 'searing' 'heart-rending' 'tragic'. After almost a year of isolation, I just want to be cheered up! 
         
What really upsets me, though, is the  current trend in children's books for really bad celebrity authors (hang your head, whoever is publishing David Walliams!) and for grim, politically-correct subjects. I read a picture book review the other day that praised the choice of 'difficult' subjects. In picture books? Come on, people, does no-one remember how important those beautifully-written, imaginative childhood books were that took you away from the miseries of daily life?

Anyway, I bought The Art of the Glimpse, not because I thought it would be cheerful - it's not, particularly, but it contains work by local writers I know and like: Jan Carson, Ian Sansom and Louise Kennedy, whose story Hunger I particularly liked - but because short stories are ideal when concentration is harder than usual, and doom, gloom, isolation and Brexit are all taking their toll. The other great advantage of the genre, of course, is that even if you hit a dud, at least you know it's going to be a short-lived dud. In fact, the only real danger you run with this book is that you might fracture a bone if you dropped it on your foot. It's huge.

When it comes to novels, these days I'm in favour of slimmer books. Let me be honest: I'm nearly always in favour of shorter novels - it's rare for me to wish one had been longer - and Anne Tyler's Redhead by the Side of the Road not only comes in at under 200 pages, so far it's my favourite book this year. The moment you meet Micah Mortimer, you know he's going to be one of those odd, endearing characters that Tyler does so brilliantly. Micah is a free-lance tech advisor - Tech Hermit - and supervisor of his apartment block. His life is as orderly as a calendar: a cleaning routine set in stone, a daily run and excellent driving skills (watched over in his head by Traffic God, who makes approving comments as he executes perfect turns and braking). Plus regular undemanding evenings with Cass, his woman friend. Wouldn't you just know it's all going to fall apart? But you also know that it will do so with such wit and  humanity that whatever happens, you'll enjoy the ride. 
 

Mary Gaitskill's Lost Cat is also very short, but unfortunately, it's the opposite of cheering. She's a fine writer, but I'm a cat lover, and why anyone would uproot an Italian cat (no matter how deprived) cart him all the way back to a home in the USA with three other cats already in residence (and then lose him there) is beyond me. (For an un-deprived cat, see picture on the right. The caption should probably read 'And don't even think of opening a bottle before the cat food...')

Little Red (Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's new volume of short stories, published by Blackstaff) is also waiting for me. I finished reading The Dancers Dancing just before Christmas - a lovely, wry story of a group of teenagers, sent to the Donegal Gaeltacht in the 1970s, whose lives and voices shift and change and captivate, like the light that dances on the river running through the novel. But Ni Dhuibhne isn't just a lovely writer: she has things to say about writing that strike a chord with me:

'A novel is a complex thing. Sometimes I think of it as a building, a house...and the challenge is to design, construct and decorate it as well as one can. But...when it comes to the crunch, the writer knows that even if there is a flaw in the design, even if something goes badly wrong, no one is going to die. Some readers might be bored, or the artist disappointed. But that is it. Writing a novel that fails is not a hanging offence. The world will get over it. This gives the novel writer a wonderful freedom. Although art is demanding and the artist needs to take pains, it is a sense of irresponsibility that is the writer's greatest gift.

There are many rivers in books that have stayed in my mind  down the years, from Wind in the Willows to V.S.Naipaul's A Bend in the River and I'm reading another right now: Diane Setterfield's Once Upon a River which is mysterious, lyrical and engrossing, and exactly what I need right now. 500 pages, but I'm prepared to make an exception for this one...

And I'll leave you with the best advice I've had so far this year, courtesy of Rangan Chatterjee, the Radio Times resident doctor: don't watch the News more than once a day and whatever you do, don't watch it at bedtime. Very wise. Your dreams are probably bad enough already. 

A belated Happy New Year, my friends, and may 2021 and the Year of the Ox be kinder to us all.