dovegreyreader scribbles

Time 2020-10-13 14:04:21

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I ve admired Catherine Hyde s artwork for years, but without realising it via the cards that come from lovely friends on birthdays, high days and holidays with the beautiful pictures. I do usually look for the artist s name but it takes a while for their style to become familiar enough to be recognised.And I have my favourites...Anyone who drives into Cornwall will know the Nearly Home Trees...Cookworthy Knapp on the A30 near Lifton. A small copse of beech trees and a proper landmark that we all know and love.But this could just as easily be us with the woods behind.. I had enough of a back-catalogue of memory for Catherine Hyde to recognise her work when I saw this book on a visit to the Elementum Gallery in Sherborne last autumn.The Hare and the Moon, and as I saw it on the table my first thought was hares, because of that Paul Durcan poem about his father s spirit returning unexpectedly as a hare... I saw that his soul was a hare which was poisedIn the long grass of his body, ears pricked.It sprang toward me and halted and I wondered if itCould hear me breathing...I stood up to walk around his bedOnly to catch sight again of the hare of his soulSpringing out of the wood into the beach cove of sunlightAnd I thought : Yes, that s how it is going to be from now on.The hare of his soul always there, when I least expect it;Popping up out of nowhere, sitting still.The poem is included in the Candlestick Press pamphlet In Memoriam . They sent a copy to me after my dad died and I now try and send a copy to anyone I know who has been bereaved.So with my resolve already weakening at the sight of a hare, as I opened The Hare and the Moon my next thought was If I see a barn owl I m buying this .Well of course I saw a barn owl, they are one of Catherine Hyde s specialities...But then I have the book and will it just sit on the coffee table for the occasional glance or does it have a greater purpose. The clue is in the title because this is a calendar, so I sat it on a bookstand on January 1st and decided to open the pages through the month, and each successive month through the year, because the book works like an almanac.The names of the moons, a flower, tree and bird for every month, and a hare leaping across the page throughout the year... Waking from the winter solstice a hare begins her journey. Through the landscape and its changing seasons, moving in harmony with the moon. Atmospheric and gorgeous paintings show the hare running in January, watching in February, leaping in March until it comes full circle, sleeping in December. Twelve textless double-page paintings of the hare’s journey are accompanied by three full pages of art showing a tree, a flower and a bird for each month. This rich celebration of flora and fauna includes hawthorn and cowslips, swallows, blackbirds, buzzards and owls, harebells, holly, olive, Rowan, poppies and much more. Titbits of text – folklore, fairytale, myth and legend complimenting the art. Who could know that 2020 would be the year it has...When we saw in the new decade last New year s Eve did any of us imagine this...We still step back occasionally and look at 2020 and ourselves with some incredulity...At how we ve adapted and accepted, and what a turning point this is, a first in our lifetime.And then we all just get on with it...masks, being careful, following the rules, not putting anyone at risk, lending a helping hand where needed, being there for each other, and looking with such pleasure on The Hare and the Moon every time I walk in the room, and thinking could there have been a better year for such a book. Few words, but meaningful; enough to give me a thought for the day and ground me in the immutable, the things that won t change.For October, The Hunters Moon, The Wild Moon, The Frosty Moon, The Thunder Moon, the Magpie, the Pomegranate and the myth of Demeter and Persephone. We’ve travelled through snowdrops and primroses, swallows and barn owls, a touchstone for all the things of permanence and year-on-year constancy. I’m looking forward to starting all over again in January. I m thinking there must be more books that would work in this way so all suggestions very welcome, but meanwhile this would be a fine addition to any wish-list for a forthcoming season of gifts (which I couldn t possibly name). But you know what we always say... give them a long enough lead-in time or you only have yourself to blame if you end up with the celebratory biography of the year. ‘Take my camel dear,” said my Aunt Dot as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.’A priceless pearl among that string of wonderful first lines from novels and on a par with the fame of The Go-Between perhaps... The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there... or Anna Karenina for All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,”But my less odorous companion than a camel, as I started reading Rose Macaulay’s final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, has been my trusty little 1923 Bartholomew’s Handy Reference Atlas. Bookhound found it on his shelves when I was reading, cycling and walking the Silk Road and the Hindu Kush from my armchair a while back. and it has been invaluable ever since.Recent plague reading had necessitated locating Caffea, also on the Black Sea. The Mongolian horseman had famously laid siege to Caffea in 1346 but were dropping like flies from a rather unusual illness. It quickly became clear that with rapidly diminishing troops they were going to be defeated until they embarked on the first known use of biological warfare. Catapulting the corpses over the city wall and into the besieged city soon had the Black Death rampaging in Caffea and from there it would make its stately progress into Europe and beyond.It’s where it all began apparently, except many now suggesting that s all the stuff of medieval myth, but you have to agree its a good myth if so, and I ll bet George Martin used it in Game of Thrones somehow.Barthy s thankfully sorted me out.With its beautiful and delicate pastel shades of blush rose pink, gentle lilac, primrose yellow, the lightest hint of green and nice downy peach denoting countries various, and all belying the fact that bloodshed and war and heaven knows what had been involved in this springtime paint chart of constantly shifting boundaries. And so to The Towers of Trebizond, but where on earth was Trebizond.There it was on the Black Sea......and I was immediately transported with Laurie, Aunt Dot (Dorothea Ffoulkes-Corbett) Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg and Dr Halide as they make their way by land and sea to the Black Sea shores (taking the camel with them ) for a bit of missionary work. The Asia shore heaved down to Troy plain, and between them the Hellespont ran green and widened out presently into the Sea of Marmara... We voyaged all day, and before dark Istanbul could be seen ahead, and it is true that it must look more splendid than any other city one comes to by sea... Unfortunately the mission is not without its rivals... I wonder who else is rambling about Turkey this spring. Seventh Day Adventists, Billy Grahamites, Writers, diggers, photographers, spies us, and now the BBC. We shall all be tumbling over each other. Abroad isn t what it was. Aunt Dot proceeds on her missionary work making a beeline for the woman as the easiest targets, no obstacle too great that it can t be surmounted, whether that involved the wrath of the menfolk who object strongly to any upending of the status quo and banished the women behind locked doors.. They had now become to her shackled, gagged and oppressed slaves, who must be liberated at once. ...or the impossibility of the terrain. That s the camel s problem not Auntie Dot s, and it certainly does have some unpredictable mental health issues.The humour is dry; whip smart observations that pin down the funny side of the serious (I m afraid I share this sense of humour too) yet is not acerbic or sarcastic and certainly not cruel, arrogant or demeaning. In other words it s pitch perfect and laugh-out-loud funny.And this is all set against a backdrop of breath-taking scenery. Rose Macaulay had certainly travelled these shores and knew it well doing justice to her sense of place. It s intrepid and laced with a powerful sense of history and change... The ghost would be brooding on the woody cliffs and ravines, haunting the citadel and palace, scornfully taking no notice of the town that Trebizond now was. Is any book s highest accolade that it makes you want to go there. I certainly felt that way about my journey with Rose Macaulay.And another thing... Aleppo, Palmyra, Amman, Jericho, Cana, Nazareth Tyre, Damascus. Place names we now sadly only associate with war and destruction, but still Biblical in my lexicon and as Laurie makes her way alone on board the camel through the Holy Land towards the end of the book I was in tune with her sense of timelessness overlaid by the troubles and changes of the 1920s. Twas ever this and doubtless shall be. So there you have it. The Towers of Trebizond, I ve been there at last. A book I have been meaning to read for years and a wonderful introduction to the writing of Rose Macaulay.And now I m wondering has anyone been to Trebizond...Is it still a destination or a terrible disappointment...If you have read the book please do share your thoughts...did you laugh or was that just me and mild Covid derangement syndrome, where everything needed to be funny or else...PS I reckon it was the camel that did it...comments are sorted and back to normal...and breathe... Firstly a few housekeeping details... an update on the Comments, or lack of, situationThank you to those who let me know there were gremlins and my apologies to Handheld Press that it happened on the very day I had posted about Potterism by Rose Macaulay and their very kind offer of a discount. Fear not the discount code EMILIE can be used with any of their books by Rose until October 25th and if anyone wanted to leave a comment on that post now please do. More Rose Macaulay to come.Sadly it looks as if comments will have to stay unthreaded for a while, and I’m really sorry about that because it makes replying to each other that bit more stilted and convoluted. Apparently there is a glitch with certain browsers and Typepad have no plans for a fix just yet. The other option is to import something new to manage comments, third party and complicated (to me...say the letters HTML and I m away off across the horizon) and it involved adverts and subscriptions and exporting every existing comment (70,000 of them) which then can t be brought back, and giving them access to every last detail about whether I have sugar in my tea etc and oh dear, it s all too terrifying.My best suggestion is perhaps to put the original commenters name clearly at the beginning of your comment if it is a specific reply and let’s hope we can soldier on and keep in touch and keep the conversation flowing here as we have been. Please whatever you do don t stop leaving comments, I know from the emails I had last week that many of you value the contact and interaction as do I.Some of you were also getting a security warning which shouldn t happen as the scribbles is fully compliant. That was due to a few old rogue links on the sidebar that weren t, so I ve been through and deleted or altered the troublemakers and hopefully all should be well now. Please do let me know if you have a problem as I pay a monthly fee for all this to work and be secure and advert free etc. so Typepad are very quick to respond when I ask for help.Meanwhile, we are all doubtless plodding along through the World Situation with patience and forbearance and I had a thought as we hit the winter months here in the Northern Hemisphere...and you are all toasty warm in the Southern Hemisphere.... Own up...who else has a copy of The Mirror the Light by Hilary Mantel which they bought on publication day or soon after and with every intention of reading that instant..And then lockdown came along and we all thought ‘Perfect, I’ll read it now’.But somehow it just didn’t/ couldn’t / wouldn’t happen.Believe me I tried, started and stopped and started again and stopped. Tried once more but my concentration was off on a frolic of its own and the book just defeated me. I think maybe it wasn’t cheerful enough, or I was just in completely the wrong mood.I was desperately disappointed not to see the book on the Booker shortlist but delighted to catch Hilary Mantel in conversation with James Naughtie at the digital Budleigh Literary Festival, and to read this lovely Q A article over the weekend. I had also done a dash into Waterstones last week to pick up a copy of Mantel Pieces, the new collection of Hilary Mantel s essays. Fiction redirects us to mystery and chance, and doesn’t assume that people know their own minds or hearts,’ says Hilary Mantel, and it has all spurred me on to try again.So I was wondering whether anyone fancied a slow, shared meander of a read of The Mirror the Light, maybe through November and into December? That gives us the rest of October to be getting used to the idea, and do some arm strengthening exercises before we start in earnest. No set schedule and nothing strenuous in the way of analysis from me, just an occasional ‘welfare’ post to make sure no one has tendinitis or has cut off the blood supply to their lower half. I’ll just be asking how everyone is doing and we have comments to exchange thoughts, but it’s also that nice warm fuzzy feeling that comes from reading the same book at the same time and knowing that we’re in it together. Apologies, the comments seem to have gone off on a frolic of their own and I know some of you haven t been able to find them or leave one.The Typepad fairies are on the case but for now I have gone to a different setting which means the comments won t be threaded for a while (as in you can t leave a direct answer underneath a particular comment) and hopefully normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. It has given place to the age of melodrama, when nothing is too strange to happen, and no one is ever surprised. My next foray into the writing of Rose Macaulay was Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract, first published in 1920 and recently republished by Handheld Press, and if ever there was a book for now this is it.It s somehow reassuring to discover that human nature changes very little...That reactions to extreme life and world events remain equally unpredictable and perhaps, dare I say, are occasionally bizarre and incomprehensible.As Sarah Lonsdale suggests in her introduction, A slim and superficially light volume, Potterism s trenchant criticism of the popular press in the wake of it widespread failings during the First World War, caught the public mood. You can t believe a word you read, said contemporary commentator Charles Montague, and Rose Macaulay took up the cudgels to tackle the issues head on in Potterism, her tenth novel and her first best-seller.Twins Johnny and Jane, the children of newspaper magnate Percy Potter benefit from the best education money can buy. Johnny an alumnus of Rugby and Balliol. Jane an alumna of Rodean and Somerville, and both emerge from this rarified atmosphere ready to take on and undermine their father s newspaper empire. Meanwhile their mother writes novels under the pen name of Leila York and this will be equally troublesome to her opinionated offspringNothing like biting the hand that feeds you.Mr Potter meanwhile is well aware that his newspaper fails to meet the intellectual or political requirements of his children, or his wife, who for all her pot-boiler romance novels feels she has perhaps pulled the family up the social echelons just a littleThe twins along with a group of like-minded yet disparate friends set about their dismantling with the Anti-Potter League Facts are too difficult, too complicated...Potterism has no use for them. It appeals over their heads to prejudice and sentiment...Potterism is all for short and easy cuts and showy results...plays a game of grab all the time - snatches at success in a hurry ....It s greedy. Life becomes a complete and unintelligible mix of what is acceptable and what is not and, as is so often the case, the boundaries blur and those who throw stones often find themselves in the most fragile of glass houses.Jane will become embroiled in marriage and a tangled love affair that proves almost impossible to resolve, and events take a very dramatic turn which I couldn t possibly divulge but expect drama and intrigue.The First World War interrupts the Anti-Potter League project and Rose Macaulay cleverly writes the same scenarios from differing viewpoints. One hundred years on its easy to imagine who might be the subject of her gimlet eye and wry humour now. No one would be spared.With its themes of women s lives, and the limitations of marriage and childbirth, along with a fascinating element of anti-semitism (Rose Macaulay was most definitely not anti-semitic but portrays it astutely) I must now confess that I read this cover to cover back in July, couldn t put it down and so took very few notes. Six weeks have passed and I am at the limit of my lucid thoughts, but Potterism and The Towers of Trebizond both so good they awakened my interest in Rose Macaulay, and that thrill of finding an author I knew so little about, that I set to and found as many of her books as I could. I have been reading Jane Emery s biography Rose Macaulay, A Writer s Life and what a fascinating and complex woman Rose was.I like her.Born in 1881 and growing up in the boarding school environment that was Rugby, where her father was a teacher and living alongside Rupert Brooks family, Rose Macaulay would eventually move on the edges of the literary circles of the time. Virginia Woolf seems to have been an acquaintance rather than a friend and, not surprisingly, less than complimentary about Rose in that waspish way she somehow made her own. Nancy Mitford likewise in a letter to Evelyn Waugh in 1962 is equally scathing in her opinion, I came across it by chance... Did you ever know an old spinster called Rose Macaulay? It appears she was no spinster but had a lover (hallucination?) and she wrote a lot of disagreeable letters to a protestant clergyman in America. The publishers said did I mind references to myself in them.... I didn t know her so I said, yes, I minded. I met her at Mrs Fleming s once and thought her sharp but ladylike. Not all the kind of person to gush to a parson. Somehow this all made me like Rose Macaulay even more. She was most definitely her own person, knew her own mind, seemed to worry little what others thought of her and functioned at the deepest level spiritually.... and yes I have a volume of her letters to the parson. At the same time Potterism was written and published Rose was in the midst of an ongoing affair with Gerard O Donovan, a married man and once a Catholic priest. Jane Emery suggests that Rose s life and conscience seeps into Potterism in various covert ways. Rose the first to admit she is part- Potterite and therefore not exempt from responsibility or culpability for her thoughts and actions, something I m not so sure Woolf or Mitford would have recognised, let alone acknowledged, in themselves.Of her love affair Rose Macaulay writes to the parson , her confessor and spiritual director Father Johnson... Oh why was there so much evil in what was in so many ways so good? Why did it have to be like that. all snarled up and tangled in wrong, when if we had been free it would have been almost the perfect thing? And Potterism most certainly reflects those tensions with some added nuances and complications, I commend it to the house and don’t forget with the discount code EMILIE you can buy the book for £10 inc.postage from Handheld Press.I ve added in Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann in with Rose Macaulay for a little joined-up reading trail because they seem to have known each other and have so many connections. I know very little about them either. The trail will either flourish or fizzle, but for now it s holding my interest whenever I can manage to put the new Robert Galbraith (aka J.K.Rowling) down. Well, dear blog, it is my birthday today (I don t often let on, they seem to come round too frequently for this Coronation year baby) and this, by the way, is me at my christening days before my first Christmas, and I like to think I still have that gaze in my subconscious memory somewhereBut I have a birthday gift for you thanks to Handheld Press.Handheld Press often run a special offer when it is one of their birthdays. or an author s birthday, or an anniversary, and when they knew I was planning a bit of a Rose Macaulay reading spree on here they very kindly offered a discount code for any of you who might like to buy any of their four books by the wonderful Rose. I decided today would be a good day to share it because I have enjoyed quite a few Handheld books in recent months and would like to keep doing my bit to support them. Business as Usual ~ Jane OliverDesire ~ Una SilberradI was completely new to Rose Macaulay but enjoyed The Towers of Trebizond so much that it led me to Potterism and thence to Crewe Junction and I will be sharing my thoughts on those three in the weeks ahead. I have also been delving into Rose s life via several biographies too and am finding her a unique and very individual writer with a wicked sense of humour as well as an astute and gimlet eye for the foibles of life in the 1920s.Handheld Press publish four books by Rose Macaulay and with the code they are offering a discount of £2.99 which means the books will be £10 each (inc. postage) here in the UK. The code will be available until October 25th so make a note of EMILIE because that is what you will need to enter in the appropriate box if you order. The books are a joy to hold and read and arrive beautifully wrapped in tissue and brown paper, it s a treat for the postman too I think in these days of far too many plastic jiffy bags.These links should take you directly to the Handheld ordering page.PotterismWhat Not - A Prophetic ComedyNon-Combatants and OthersPersonal Pleasures - Essays on Enjoying Life I should point out that Personal Pleasures isn t due for publication until September 2021 but Handheld do send out copies about a month before. I think it is the book of Rose Macaulay s that I am most looking forward to. By this time next year I think we ll all be ready to read about things like...Bed (Getting Into It)Booksellers CataloguesChristmas MorningDriving a CarFlatteryHeresiesNot Going to PartiesShopping AbroadWritingIf you are a Rose Macaulay fan please do declare yourself, and finally I couldn t end without sharing the wonderful Mary Azarian wood cut of that Rose Macaulay quote, and the moment in the day that I suspect we all understand very well... I think we might be in need of some Pleasings so get your thinking caps on (like this cat) ready for comments while I whizz through a few of mine...The weather...could it have been kinder to us here in the South West these last few weeks, and having been absolutely nowhere for lunch for months we suddenly found ourselves ‘out for lunch’ twice in a matter of days. Cowslip Workshops are up and running on an appointment basis for shop and cafe, and we happened to be passing there on our way to get layers mash for the chickens from the farm where we had bought the girls. This is a trivial but important detail because I doubt we’d have gone on the Egloskerry road but for the welfare of the girls. Bookhound had made the mistake of replenishing early stocks that came with them for something which turned out to be very sub-standard. Anyway we had a lovely long chat with the Chicken Farm Man, and as we passed the driveway to Cowslip we turned in and rang on the off chance they could squeeze us in. They could and we scored the gazebo on the warmest of days with the gentlest of southerly breezes and proceeded to fill our boots. It was all very normalising and lovely. I also slipped into the shop and found just the right fabric for the corners of the Knot Garden. I’d run out of the original green but have a near enough match so I can chug along with that this winter. More soon.And then two days later we were invited to meet my oldest (as in known the longest) school friend and her OH for lunch at the Pig at Combe, where they were staying for a couple of days. It’s near Honiton, so the furthest we’d travelled since February, and it was glorious.Beautiful setting, everything safely organised, and having known each other since the age of twelve we always have much to talk about. This included Mrs McClennan Smith’s needlework lessons and the fact we made all our own clothes as a result, writing everything in turquoise ink, cutting around the edge of our velour hats with pinking shears and wearing the brim down, and countless other school moments. The chaps sat and listened patiently and with some incredulity, but more normalising and more loveliness which all feed the soul right now. I wonder if anyone remembers me writing about a book called American Style Spirit - Fashion and Lives of the Roddis Family 1855 -1995 by Jane Bradbury. The clothes had all been preserved by Jane’s aunt, Augusta Roddis and the book was a beautiful blend of fashion, history and family memoir... Whilst couture clothes might be preserved it is rare for ordinary everyday clothes from an ordinary working family to survive both the passage of time, and the one-way journey through thrift, jumble or charity shops to then remain in the possession of a single family for 150 years. It is therefore thanks to Augusta Denton Roddis (1916-2011) who saved the family clothing along with letters, photos and ephemera ... The way I felt about these older clothes is that it is nice to wear them but that it is also nice to save them...they get increasingly interesting with each passing year.The Roddis collection recounts the life and times of an educated, civic-minded, upwardly mobile, middle-class American family. It tracks where they shopped, the influence of fashion trends, the varying fortunes, lives and losses of the family, the love of home-dress-making and alterations to update a style, the sharing of patterns and designs among themselves along with the excitement of new purchases. At a time when many women might have concealed the fact that they made their own clothes, not so the Roddis women...they stitched and embellished and wore the results with justifiable pride. If they bought they bought wisely and well because good quality clothes were an investment. Jane very kindly sent my a very unexpected but welcome bouquet of flowers for writing about the book. The bouquet including hydrangeas which lived on in a vase for so long that they eventually grew roots. I planted up several, lost several but managed to save one. Even though I’d planted it out too soon it survived a winter and threw up a tiny green shoot which I could so easily have missed the following spring. I put it back in a pot, nursed it along all last year and was thrilled to see green shoots again this year. Bigger pot and for the first time flowers. They would eventually emerge as a very delicate shade of almond pink and so Augusta’s Hydrangea lives on.And one final Pleasing.My Preserving Life has been revolutionised with the arrival of the new apple peeler...We had one years ago, long gone so I ordered a new one from eBay. I couldn t quite believe that anything that only cost £7 post free would be any good, but it s metal, sticks to the surface like glue, is sturdy enough and does the job. The freezer is filling up fast and I ve made the Apple Mint chutney too.We have enough to see us into the next millenium.Oh, just one more. I m reading the new book by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling. I bought it in solidarity as much as anything else having written to her recently and received a lovely personal reply from her team, but you may recall that JKR and I have a chequered history over a previous book. However all is forgiven and we are now best friends because I do like Cormoran Strike. I am completely immersed in this doorstop, which is as much as you can ask from a book in these times of frequent distractions.So now over to you and your Pleasings. We eagerly await... Team TolstoyA year-long shared read of War & Peace through the centenary year of Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's death, starting on his birthday, September 9th 2010. Everyone is welcome to board the troika and read along, meeting here on the 9th of every month to chat in comments about the book. Team Tolstoy BookmarkDon't know your Bolkonskys from your Rostovs?An aide memoire that can be niftily printed and laminated into a double-sided bookmark.

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Books, literature, contemporary and literary fiction and non-fiction, reading as an experience, a Devonshire based bookaholic,sock-knitting quilter who happens to be a community nurse in her spare time.

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