Duncan Fallowell got into the usual difficulties trying to negotiate the Mensa Test cum Commando assault course which is registering to comment on this blog but tells me that what he meant was not so much that there are no celebrations for Auden as that there is no NEW BOOK ABOUT Auden to mark the centenary.

And he`s right.

Too late for LBB to publish one, alas, otherwise we would. But my point about his not having a daughter (or son) to see to his interests holds good.

This is the only point at which I part company with my hero, Simon Gray who is so rude about Auden I think he must have eaten something that disagreed with him.

Auden is a master. One of THE masters, and Duncan Fallowell has been pointing out (thanks to the Grump Old Bookman for the heads-up) that whereas last year the world and his wife, not forgetting Long Barn Books, celebrated the John Betjeman centenary, nothing is apparently being done about Auden`s.

I don`t think the answer lies in their respective poetry or even fame and standing on the public love-ometer. I think the answer is simply that John Betjeman had a daughter who not only loved him but was absolutely, passionately determined to keep his flame alive and who worked her socks off for a couple of years plannng a mega-Centenary for him.

Whereas WHA, alas, has no family to root for him.

But I will and if he were not still in copyright I would publish anything of his that came my way.  I will even hire myself out to parties and recite AS I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING, WALKING DOWN BRISTOL STREET by heart. As I can.

Last evening, around five I went across to get a jiffy bag from the book store at one end of the Long Barn. (You don`t have to use your imagination, there is a photo of the LB - look at the side bar.) It was just growing dusk - and haven`t the nights drawn out ?- and as I approached the barn I held my breath. From the far end of it lifting off from a beam high in the roof and coming absolutely silently towards me, was the Barn Owl who lives there, floating like a ghost into the dark spaces among the rafters where his nesting box is sited. I had clearly disturbed him just as he was preparing to go out for his night`s hunting. I went into the book store without switching on the light and I sat there in a conveniently placed rickety old armchair which has been put into that limbo between the House and the Skip and waited barely breathing, for about 20 minutes, feeling quite like Bill Oddy. The owl took no chances and the waiting game was tense on either side but it paid off. I heard the bump as he jumped lightly down from the rafter to the beam, a pause, and then  he flew down, right in front of my open door on his great wide white wings and off towards the cherry orchard. But it was the sight of him coming towards me that was so amazing, his heart shaped face, huge eyes and curved beak so exactly like every picture you ever see of a Barn Owl - which I know is a silly thing to say. And yet it is not. They are so beautiful and strange and somehow you think the photographs must cheat. But they don`t, they don`t.

At about the same time today, I was wondering if I might look out of the window to see if he was setting off, when the two Border Terriers began to go beserk, shrieking and screeching and racing up and down the stairs and then trying to get out of the double doors that lead from kitchen to terrace, hurling themselves at the glass. I raced down from the study in time to see what it was they were having hysterics about. The terrace was a swarming mass of hounds. The hunt was all over the garden and as usual had lost control of their dogs which were eating the bird crusts and trampling among the snowdrops with the big feet and generally having a whale of a time.

The BTs continued to hurl themselves, the hounds ignored them, and a second or two later, the horn for Going Home sounded out across the cherry orchard. I could just make out the last riders streaming down, hear the galloping hooves and they were gone into the gathering dusk.

Whether the barn owl was amongst them I could not say.

Love it. Love it, love it, love it - well, about twice a year anyway and this morning was one of the twice. Seven miles through country lane, past the stud where the new foals are being born but not yet ready to go out, past the church whose snowdrops actually are like snow there are so many, and grab one of the last free parking places, by careful calculation of the time - i.e. after the school run and before the buses start arriving at the market dropping -off points.

It was quiet though, post Christmas and a grey cold morning. But the meat man was shouting out about 2 legsoflambandapoundofsirloinsteakwithfreesausagesthrownin  from his wago. He stands up like  a Bingo Caller with one of those mouth-mikes, being cheeky to old ladies passing by - but acceptably cheeky. They love it. The fruit and veg ladies were in good voice with caulissproutingbrusselssevenjaffasapound but it was actually knickers I was after. The only place to buy those large white cotton interlock mummy`s embarassing knickers is a good market knicker stall. I bought a dozen pairs and in 3  sizes than I need as they do shrink, no matter what it says on the tin. I also bought 8 pairs of boring socks for the SP. He is rather gay about his socks and likes them from Jermyn Street in lavender, scarlet and canary yellow at as much per pair as it costs for two dozen pairs in the market but needs must and I am not about to go to St James`s SW for another couple of weeks. So blue, grey and black has to do for now.

I then bought 6 pots of hyacinth bulbs about a week off flowering which will take over from those the Greek Gardener had ready for Christmas.. and 6 pots were a fiver which is a true bargain, as were the flat brown driving shoes to replace the last pair of flat brown driving shoes from the same Sikh shoe stall man and  a snip at 7.99.

I love the market, I love the man who offers to clean your spectacles for free in order sell you some fluorescent pink spectacle cleaner and the  one who demonstrates the miracle veg peeler and the magic window cloth. The jumper stall was especially good this week as they had a new delivery of lemonsherbert and lime green nylon jobs with sequinned hearts on the front, and the kiddies clothes man had Batman and Spiderman pyjamas for only a fiver. The bookstall has every remaindered cookbook you could wish for - I think they have only ever BEEN remainders actually, as well as huge road maps for 1.99 and the children`s delight - magic painting books. I bought magic painting books for mine just about every week. So uncreative, and soooo much less messy. Dot to Dot books are also uncreative and there were a plenty of those. I love doing  dot to dot. Almost as much as I love doing colouring-in.

The watch stall wasn`t there today but the cheapo make up man was, and the hat stall which has more weird hats than you have ever seen in one place - texan hats, loggers hats, russian army hats and those beige felt jobs that my aunty used to collect.

The fresh fish stall is good except that alongside the proper stuff straight from the sea they sell something called Crab Flavoured Fish sticks which are the same colour as the spectacles-cleaning liquid and I give the freshly home made cakes the swerve because the hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top of the white icing are that colour too. It does make you wonder.

I gathered my things  and went off for coffee and the Daily Mail with a merry heart and as I left the first buses were unloading yards and yards of pensioners, wearing those beige felt hats and waving their sticks at each other. They ignore the zebra crossing and defy huge lorries bearing down on them by waving the same sticks defiantly as they totter to buy their crab flavoured sticks and knickers and grey socks and then to have their spectacles cleaned.

There`s nowhere like it.

Yesterday`s Independent had a long article about the need for the British Library to save7 million pounds a year - as demanded by the Treasury in the latest round of cuts. The full article is linked by Tim Coates in his Good Library Blog and I am glad be pointed it out. And of course all the usual suspects are wringing their hands and shouting 'Disgusting...National Resource Treasure.. International Reputation. what will Robin do then, poor thing.

I have replied in a comment on the GLB and I am reproducing that comment below. People simply have to live in the real world, not cry for a Utopia in which everything would be free. Everything cannot be free. Our taxes do not go far enough. Some things have to be paid for and I do not understand why the British Library readers should be exempt any more than anything else.

Here is my comment.

'It might be better to accept that the British Library, along with other departments, have to make savings and see where savings could be made with least damage to the public. I cannot believe the BL should be open 24 hours a day. The cost in overheads of this would be astronomical far outweigh the benefit to the few people who would use it at 3.a.m. Public exhibitions to close - not the worst idea. There are plenty of exhibition spaces in London.
It has long been a total madness to keep a copy of every single book published in the UK. Many of these are pulp and with POD and digital access it is becoming less and less sensible to pay the sort of storage costs involved.
Researching the family tree is the last resort of the bored retired.
But it would be a grave error to cancel the schools learning programmes and extremely short-sighted.
Charge for use of the Reading Room ?
Why not ?
We simply do not pay for everything through our taxes and if there are no longer free prescriptions, eye examinations and spectacles or dentists, I fail to see why a modest charge should not be made for use of the BL reading rooms.
It is no good saying ( which is what Tim Coates does in his comment on the potential cuts ) that you could find  the 7m a year in half an hour elsewhere. They are not going to ask you. It is better to join in the exercise and do some intelligent advance damage limitation than thunder away like disgusted Tunbridge W.
We would all prefer there to be no cuts in anything anywhere but life is simply not like that.'

Until I can work out how to get it onto the main page and do so in the correct size to boot, please click on the side bar under BORDER TERRIER AMONG THE SNOWDROPS if you wish to go AAAAAWWWWW

Of what books are on the go - which means 'on the bedside table' that bold stand-by.  Apart from books and the usual tissues/notebook/Pilot finepoint, there is a bottle of a new and ultra-delicious smoothie from Innocent containing, I gather, the most powerful anti-oxidants known to man in the form of crushed blueberries, pomegranate and some exotic frruit from Brazil whose name escapes me. It is the best they have yet made and a deep purple colour and I can feel the oxidants slinking away, totally anti-ed as I write.

There is also my whizz new wireless wireless (not a mistake.) I got this having dropped hints just before our non-Christmas because Scott Pack had one for his birthday and swanked about it, so of course I wanted one. And it is the best thing ever. I lie here at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning (I am an owl now, having transmigrated or whatever...) and I fiddle with the little silver buttons and I get politics from Milwaukee and Blue Grass music from Kentucky and sport from Tobago and local people complaining about the rates in outer Queensland. You can choose by genre too - so Oldies -60s/Oldies 70s/Blue Grass/Country and Western/News/News Talk/Classical/round-the-clock Weather Worldwide.. honestly, sometimes I wonder what I ever did before I got it.

Read books I suppose. Which brings me to

1. The teetering pile of Woolf for Dummies related tomes and all those student essays on Jacob`s Room to mark.

2.Nicola Humble. The Feminine MiddleBrow Novel 1920s -1950s which I mentioned here the other day. A most enlightening, perceptive and enjoyable study.

3. Elizabeth Bowen. by Neil Corcoran. Another mildly academic study but all the better for that - very bracing. It provides new insights into an author I thought I knew extremely well. And so I did, from one point of view. Not at all, it seems, from another and it does one good to be shaken up in this way.

4. Kazuo Ishiguro. An Artist of the Floating World. Ishiguro is the best, far and away the very best, of that group of male novelists who I think of as in their 30s but are now in their 50s. It was a rich generation, rather self-absorbed, rather intense and Ish is the finest. His is an entirely original voice. He writes an elegant, cool, calm, thoughtful prose and you must not miss a word. But would you wish to miss any ?

5. Two more JOSEPH ROTH novels. One I had read before and am re-reading - ZIPPER AND HIS FATHER, the other new to me - REBELLION. Both Granta paperbacks. Have I anything left so say about this genius after having said so much. Probably.

6. A crime novel which I have not yet read but the reason it is on the bedside table is that I want to, I want to - only other books have push their way in front. It is THE DEATH OF ACHILLES by Boris Akunin and it says it is 'as if Flashman were frisking through a tale by Dostoevsky.' on the cover. Which is why I have not put it away on a shelf.

and FINALLY,, one of my favourite publishers, Picador, have kindly sent me two proof copies - and I am very excited about reading both. One is WHEN WE WERE BAD by Charlotte Mendelson. I have not read her previous novels but only because even I can`t have read everything but judging by the blurb about this one and having looked up the first two on Amazon I cannot understand what kept me. This is a Jewish Novel and there are few things I love more. I have loved Jewish novels ever since I baby sat for Arnold Wesker`s children in Stoke Newington 47 years ago and went round the corner  to the Jewish deli for Salt Beef sandwiches first. Those, my Eng Lit degree books and 3 sleeping children in a quiet, warm flat with West Indians playing the Bongo drums next door, are golden in the memory.

But I digress, as usual.

Picador`s second proof copy is one I have been eagerly awaiting. It is THE DISSIDENT by the American name-of-the-moment, Nell Freudenberger. Having read her short stories, which are the best, far, far and away the best I have read for many years, I am confident that this novel will not disappoint.

To say the very least.

 

 

 

I am led to a novel called THE FEAST by Margaret Kennedy (1950).. I will tell you by what I am led in a mo. But there is the most wonderful bit in which a publisher talks about novels by the equivalent of angry young men (who had not been invented in 1950). Such AYM, he says, generally write three books.

"The first is on the little victim theme. It has promise. It is well written. It gets astonishingly good reviews.  It is very frank and tells how their childhood has been warped, either in a preparatory school or a public school, or both, or else in Wapping or on Cold Comfort Farm. At secondary and grammar schools they don`t seem to go in for warping children neaely so extensively. I wonder why."

(The second book is a bitter comedy, very mondain, with a continental background.. and no one ever reads the third.)

The paragraph about the first novel struck a chord though most recently novels about warping tend to be misery memoirs more than first novels. So did the last half line. It is all too true that fewer and fewer people are reading the third because it is so rarely published at all. Make of that what you will.

The book by Nicola Humble from which all this comes has the rather thesis-like title of The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s. Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism but don`t let that put you off. It ic academic - it is published by OUP - but it certainly does not read like a thesis. It mentions so many of the novels my mother used to borrow from Boots Lending Library, so many of the lost names of those years, women who wrote good, often very very good, middle-class, middle-brow fiction -words to be spoken so scornfully both by highbrow academics and those Angry Young Men. But one of the book`s great insights and which struck me very forcibly, is about Virginia Woolf. Now she is regarded as the highest of highbrows, inhabiting the realms of the very great - and quite right too. But Humble makes a telling point.

She says that the 'conventional construction of modernism has long celebrated VW as its lone female exemplar but that, 'while it would be foolish to challenge her status as a profoundly original, formal innovator.. the gap between VW and her female contemporaries looked by no means as yawning in her lifetime as it has since appeared. VW herself repeatedly compared her work with that of other female novelists such as Rose Macaulay and Rosamund Lehmann, evaluating their success and status against her own, and admitting jealousy of their talent in at least one case - that of Katherine Mansfield.'

That made me think long and hard and to go back through VW`s diaries and letters and find a good deal of evidence of precisely that. (Woolf for Dummies students nb.)

But lest we become too serious of a Saturday evening, let me end with another quotation the book found for me... from George Orwell.

'For casual reading - in your bath, for instance, or late at night.. or in the odd quarter hour before lunch - there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl`s Own Paper.'

Just substitute for the G.O.P  the magazine 'HELLO.'

 

I nicked the idea of blogging about this from over at Madame Arcati. I know she won`t mind. My head has no original ideas in it after a week of powerful antibiotics.  Any road up, as we say, this carbon trading. I think I understand the principle behind it though I have no idea if it could actually work - the figures, as Madame A says, seem to be a little, shall we say, creative. But I think I have found a way of making money out of it.

Correct me if I am wrong but as I do not fly and indeed, do not visit foreign countries as I have no passport, I am in credit, carbon-wise. Very very much in credit actually. I think I am credit in other carbon areas as well as I have planted about 50 acres of trees here  but let us not be diverted.

I think that, in a sort of reverse air-miles process, I should give people my non-air miles or Carbon Credits as we must call them, and they pay me for them. So that they can then fly with clear consciences, knowing that my not flying anywhere means that they..... Oh you get the drift.

I can see this as a very good wheeze. Maybe I could ebay it ?

How much will you give me for not-Paris, not-New York, not-Mauritius, not-AspenColorado.

What do you mean but you would be paying for the trip twice over ? How is that relevant ?

A clear conscience is priceless, I`d have thought.

According to the Museums and Libraries Authority, who justified their existence by doing some incredibly complex and valuable research into the matter, we all lie about what we have read - and some (men) lie more than others, in order, so it seems, to 'impress a date.'

Hm. What I would ask is how do those smart people with a pen and a clipboard who put the question 'have you ever lied about what you have read / if so was it once/weekly/annually/ every nano second ?' KNOW that the person they have accosted isn`t lying ?

However, they have come up with a top ten books about which, apparently, we all lie. We say we have read them when really we have not.

Here is the list - and here are my entirely truth, see this wet, see this dry, cross my heart and hope to die, answers.

Top ten books we lie about reading

1. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R Tolkien...READ ABOUT QUARTER AND ABANDONED
2. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy.. HAVE READ
3. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte .. HAVE READ MANY TIMES
4. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – John Gray .. HAVE NOT READ AND DO NOT PLAN TO READ
5. 1984 – George Orwell.. HAVE NOT READ
6. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone – J.K Rowling .. HAVE NOT READ
7. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens .. HAVE READ MANY TIMES
8. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte .. HAVE READ.
9. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown.. HAVE READ
10. Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank.. HAVE READ.

I would turn the subject on its head and the top 2 books about which people never lie. They are the books they say they know they ought to have read but simply cannot.

1. Ulysses

2. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu

One of the fairly usual student e-mails came in last week. His name was Michael and he was, of course, desperate because he hadn`t done his homework and pleaded a thousand excuses. He also said he has messed up a lot and really really wanted to do well in English so please would I send him chapter synopses of The Woman in Black which he had to hand in yesterday.

Maybe the bug was hovering in the wings because I sent off a pretty tart reply asking why he thought I would be likely to have a synopsis of every chapter of a book I wrote 25 years ago, just to hand; why I should hand them to him even supposing that I did and going on to say that it was not actually difficult to do a chapter synopsis and explaining how.  I ended up by asking him how his demand made sense given that he had already 'messed up' and wanted to improve. I also said that if he really meant what he said he could and would work until he succeeded.

I did wonder if I had been too abrasive and not encouraging enough but by then I had fired off the e-mail - as you do.

This morning came this reply.

Just found this in the latest journal of the Virginia Woolf Society. Mont Blanc - the very expensive fountain pen maker - has what they call Writer`s Edition pens and the latest, to celebrate VW`s 125th birthday is now available in a limited (sic) edition of 16,000.  OK this is what you get.

'The barrel of the pen is not straight-edged but swells and tapers slightly, gracefully suggestive of the female form. It is made of a black epoxy resin and features a guilloche pattern of finely-engraved waves. The  surging and subsiding of the waves are a truly autobiographical metaphor for the ups and downs of Virginia Woolf`s life. Upon the cone is engraved the limitation number of 16,000 and more importantly the tiniest, absolutely accurate reproduction of Woolf`s signature. , It is so fine an engraving, so understated, that you have to look hard to see it but once you do it is absolutely unmistakeable.

A small faceted ruby has been set on the clip that arches over the cap, commemorating the brilliance of her work and symbolising the individuality of VW`s avant-garden style and the climax of her literary creation. It was a stroke of genius to think of engraving on the 18ct gold nib the elm trees representing the Woolfs Leonard and Virginia  that stood in their garden at Monk`s House and where Leonard buried Virgina`s ashes in 1941.

The pen is presented in a book-shaped box with a spine bearing VW`s signature and it opens like a book too. This truly elegant and unique writing implement is available on its own for £475 or in a set with  a similarly styled ballpoint pen and propelling pencil for £995.'

Start saving.

It must have been difficult for her when she was alive and always being confused with the film star. Elizabeth Taylor was a gentle, nervous, shy woman and a novelist whose worth has gone on being recognised since her death in 1975. She is better than Barbara Pym and Pamela Hansford Johnson, not quite as good as Elizabeth Bowen or Muriel Spark - I would put her on a par with Anita Brookner of the women writing now. She is intelligent, perceptive, a careful, elegant but never self-conscious stylist and her novels are about the sort of people she knew, the English middle classes - though one of her fine short stories, The Devastating Boys, moves sharply away from that comfort-area to tremendous effect.

Above all, she bears re-reading. I am embarking on a journey through her novels again, having kept some of the old Virago editions, and bought a few more in charity shops recently.

Monographs on individual writers, except for the Great Names, are out of fashion -publishers probably feel they would not sell. They could be right. There was an excellent series published by the British Council for years, called Writers and their Work - they were pamphlets rather than books, and they were an excellent introduction to a wide range of writers. I wish they could be re-introduced and brought up to date. One on Elizabeth Taylor would not come amiss. Or on Brookner for that matter.

Maybe Long Barn Books should think of reviving the idea.

There has been an awful lot of weather about and when I went to bed last night - well, in the early hours of this morning to be exact, the last thing I read was a warning of snow, frost and freezing temperatures.

I sit working here with my window open looking out into the Cotswold fields and hills bathed in sunshine under a vivid blue sky. I went out to post a couple of letters and it was chillier than it has been of late - ie I needed a coat. But that was it. Perhaps it is on its way, perhaps it is only oop t'north ... but for now, winter still has not struck.

I have been deep in Gullywith which is reaching a critical point, and also plotting the new Serrailler crime novel, so I have been very aware of the weather because I glance up at it so often and when the wind howls it howls round my workroom like a prowling beast. Peaceful today though.

One of the books I read until the covers came off when I was in my teens and aspiring to be a novelist was a book of The Paris Review Interviews with writers. I wanted to know not so much how they did it in terms of where their ideas came from as in terms of pen or, as it was then, typewriter, morning or midnight. I see there is another collection of these fascinating in-depth interviews just out. I don`t know why it should be of interest to others - pen or typewriter, morning or midnight - but it is, it is. It`s a question I am always asked when being interviewed.

I used to say pen and morning. Now I say pen sometimes, laptop sometimes - and any old time, morning, midnight = though never afternoon. There is something sleepy and dead and brain-fudged about the period between 2 and 5 and I am often having a nap. If you work until three in the morning, you need a kip at three in the afternoon.

I am also always asked if I aim to write so many hundreds or thousands of words before I allow myself a cup of coffee or a break. Perish the thought. I work for as long as I feel like it, sometimes I do a thousand words, sometimes five thousand and when I want a cup of coffee I have one. Heavens, it isn`t penal servitude.  I do have one little habit which I learned years ago and I cannot now remember from who. I finish at a point when I really REALLY want to write the next bit.

 

There has been a discussion about Comfort Blanket Books on various book blogs. Someone assumed that meant what I call Marshmallow books. But it is not what I meant. A Comfort Blanket Book can be War and Peace or Dante`s Inferno - or Black Beauty or Harry Potter. A book cannot be a CBB on first reading.. the essence of it is the familiar, truths, a writer`s viewpoint and experience, style, characters, exchanges, descriptions - which so chime in with one`s own persona and taste and experience and ideas and give such interest and pleasure that there is a cast-iron guarantee of delight and stimulation and renewed affection with every reading. A CBB need not be light reading or have a happy ending -though it may.

I have been trying to think of a term for the exact opposite and came up with Hair Shirt Books - books which make us UNcomfortable, which disturb us and rouse us from our complacency, which challenge and provoke, to tears perhaps, or rage, or righteous indignation. A Hair Shirt Book is not something to which one turns in time of distress or personal misery - but it is a essential nevertheless, essential to our growth and development and spiritual and cultural well-being.

Any book about the Holocaust is by definition a Hair Shirt Book. Schindler`s List, say, or The Diary of Ann Frank.

A book about abuse of some kind. A novel about extreme grinding poverty from which there is no escape, about slavery or carnarge in war.

But a Hair Shirt book can also be one which is very difficult to get under the skin of - perhaps it is linguistically challenging. Ulysses is a Hair Shirt Book. Kafka is a Hair Shirt writer. T.S.Eliot`s Four Quartets are HSBs. The point, though, is that the struggle availeth a lot. That there is not difficulty for the sake of difficulty.

One of the best Hair Shirt Books I know, which disturbs and makes me uncomfortable with every reading, is Trollope`s The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Everyone will have their own suggestions but I do think Hair Shirt Books there must be. I think so to the extent of having written several myself.

 

 

A ROOM OF ONE`S OWN

This is our next book. If anyone has not yet finished reading JR or still has things to say please do. But if we don`t move on a bit it will be Easter and we won`t have finished. Before starting A Room, I`d like people if possible to read the pages about where it originated, in A WRITER`S DIARY, 1929. First entries for that year and on for a few pages. This is a book which definitely relates very much to VW`S life and beliefs, her politics and her 'feminism'.  It is, of course, a key text in feminist studies of her. It is not a long book and it may be self-explanatory but it is very important to a full understanding of her and of her novels too.

Off you go.

I`m getting a lot of enquiries. He`s well, thank you, an now promoted to Detective Chief Superintendent and no, he has not got married in secret. If Simon was about to get married you would be the first to know.

But the last adventure I sent him on came unstuck, all my fault, so he is back at his desk for the nonce and waiting for another quite different challenge. Well we all know how much paperwork the police have these days when they should be out there catching criminals.

Meanwhile, Cat and her family are, as you know, in Australia -Sydney - where Sam has learned to sail in the Harbour and they have a wonderful girl called Ashley as a nanny/best friend, and they extended their stay to a year as they were having such a good time. Chris is all for staying forever but Cat is firmly against - which wins out depends on which of the two is the stronger partner. Yes, you guessed.

What else ? No, sorry, this is not Coronation Street, for which you can cheat and look up the plots for the next 2 weeks in detail on a website. And indeed for all the other soaps I watch too and I really really wish I had resisted the temptation because I looked up The Bill and now I know something I would rather not know.

So I am not going to tell you any more about the next Simon Serrailler. And no, it is not a marketing ploy to create pent-up demand.

Once I have sorted out the Battle for Gullywith the right side has won - and while we await the start of the next Battle or whatever which will probably be The Secret of Withern Mere (or possibly Five go to Withern Mere, haven`t quite decided...)   I will get Simon out from behind that desk, promise.

 

Cheer you all up, I mean.

It started this morning when I opened my usual fix of the Daily Mail with coffee and read an article by the excellent journalist Max Hastings telling us not to worry about global warming because a nuclear bomb would be far far more likely to get  us long before.

Then my Yahoo News popped up telling me that those who are responsible for these things, and God knows how they get the job, have moved the ARMAGEDDON CLOCK forward a few minutes nearer  to midnight, which is when the Nuclear winter will begin. I don`t know if you knew anything about this clock but I certainly did not. Now I discover it has been ticking away since 1945. Is it a digital clock or an analogue clock or possibly even a cuckoo clock ? Who winds it up ? Where do they keep it ?

Whatever, there it is and we are now nearer Armageddon than we were, thanks to Iran and Iraq North Korea and doubtless Osama Bin Laden too.  Apparently when the Cold War ended they actually moved it back a bit. Ha.

Yes I know I said I was going to cheer you up and I am.

I was writing my first novel when they put the Berlin Wall UP (that`s how old I am..) and there were all sorts of Nuclear Threats. I told a friend I wasn`t going to bother to finish the book as we`d all be blown up any day. He said, and how sensible, that if my parents had thought about it at all, they almost certainly would not have conceived a child at the darkest part of World War 2... I was born in 1942, so work it out. I have remembered that whenever people tell me this is no world into which to bring a child.

He also said that when we found ourselves NOT blown up, I would look pretty silly NOT having finished my book.

So I finished it.

The same thing happened at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. I was an undergraduate by then and writing both essays  on Chaucer and another book but I just thought, Oh well, and batted on.

There were quite a few hairy moments thereafter but here I still am, here we still are and here are over 35 books.

I think that probably the erecting of the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs confrontation between Kennedy and Kruschev and that little business over Libya back in the early 80s were probably times when we were closer to Armageddon than we are now.

Of course I could be wrong. But meanwhile, I`m carrying on with writing The Battle for Gullywith and if I could have another baby, I would.

But if you want to know what I plan to do about Global Warming..

er.. pass.

Neglected novelist ? I`m not sure. I think she may be going through te inevitable twilight but I hope it does not last much longer. She is due for a serious revival, to be discovered by the new generations, the book groups and the passionate readers. She has not wanted for critical attention from academia. The very best book is by Maud Ellman and I commend it to you -but the SP has just kindly bought me another, Elizabeth Bowen:The Enforced Return, by Neil Corcoran. It is densely written - and requires to be read with full attention and any sentence may need to be read more than once to yield its meaning. But it takes Bowen seriously and that is right. She came to be seen towards the end of her life and career as a middlebrow women`s novelist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her style is complex and elusive and there is every bit as much going on behind it, as it were, beneath the surface, than there is in Virginia Woolf, though the two are very different writers.

Where to begin with Bowen ? Not, I think, at the beginning. Start with either The House in Paris, a masterpiece, ( no one writes so well about children ) or The Last September, which is one of the best novels ever written about the Anglo-Irish, the Troubles, that whole unhappy history but which is neveretheless a novel - about people in a setting, not a political tract. Later, move on to The Death of the Heart, which was her most popular novel and highly acclaimed in her lifetime. Her essays are good too. She was a rounded and well-read writer. She thought about her craft. There is a good, though not very recent, biography by Victoria Glendinning. I wonder if it is time for another ? 

One always thinks particular writers are too simply good to suffer such a decline in favour that they drop pretty much permanently out of sight but in reality, and with publishers letting back-lists go, it can all too easily happen. Elizabeth Bowen needs to be made safe before she becomes a rescue-case. The way to make her safe is to read her.

 

 

If anyone had wanted to discover what a typical weekend day in the English countryside is like they could have come with me yesterday. The high winds had become medium winds, the rain had stopped but the mud seemed to have become more muddy. Mud is what we live with for the entire winter and often quite a bit of the rest of the year too.

As I drove the seven miles through windy lanes to the market town I passed a lot of 4-wheel drives of various sorts, mainly Land Rovers, all pretty old, all mud-bespattered. This is the sort of place where the Chelsea tractor has a real purpose. They were full of men who all looked the same - ancient flap caps and old, torn waved jackets, weatherbeaten faces. I knew what would be in the back behind grills. Dogs.

I wound on through the mud and did the shopping, stopped for the coffee in one of my newly favoured haunts which I am keeping a secret, then home. Half way back I passed the Stud. Not quite time for foals yet but a lot of the mares were out in the mud, wearing their own version of the muddy waxed jacket and looking quite chunky. Half a mile on, I had to slow to a crawl. Ahead of me was half of the hunt and over the hedge, I could see the rest. More land rovers and men in flat caps all over the place, parking anyhow on the verges and leaping out with binoculars. Plenty of women, too, but their hats are different - they are sort of squashed wolly beige jobs and not especially flattering.  Men in velvet crash hats, men in black jackets, men in velvet jackets, men in pink, women in velvet hats ... the horses get smaller along with the riders, as the field straggles out, and the young ones all wear hacking jackets and sensible chin straps. Catch any Master in a chin strap !

Past the hunt eventually and a mile away, more four-wheelers parked up. By now the first lot I had passed on the way out were in the fields, guns ready, dogs to heel. This is proper shooting, rough shooting, shooting for the ordinary countryman and usually local - not your posh driven-pheasant rich-man`s stuff with visitors ferried in by helicopter.

It was a typical winter weekend scene and almost everyone I saw probably lived within a five mile radius. This is country life. These are country sports. This is what people have done for centuries and will go on doing for centuries more. It hasn`t changed much, nonsensical hunt-laws notwithstanding.

 

 

The SP says I watch too much rubbish on television. And of course he is absolutely correct. Indeed I would go so far as to say that, the News apart ( and that is often rubbish) I watch ONLY rubbish. There is very little else worth watching. No, correction - there is very little else. I don`t think I watch too MUCH, rubbish or not. If you tot up my hours of television they fade into insignificance beside the hours I spend reading books and writing books and playing with the dogs.

How much is too much anyway ? The SP rarely watches at all but that, admittedly, is in part because we only have one set and I hog it and I really really  don`t like anyone else watching with me. I am strange like that. I hate television - or cinema or theatre or visiting a gallery - as a social activity. Eating out in restaurants is a social activity. Watching a footie match or even cricket can be. Having a drink in pub or bar ditto.

No one can read a book with me, thank God, but if they could, would I want them to ? A resounding NO. So why should I want my TV watching to be a friendly, sociable, family, married thing ?

I like my rubbish to myself.

But from time to time there are marvellous reality-TV programmes on about amazing operations, or children`s hospitals, or Owls. And then I am more than happy for the SP to watch and marvel with me and even talk about them while they`re on. Now where is the difference ? This is one of life`s mysteries. OK, a small one, but one, nevertheless.

I like Eastenders,Holby, The Bill and Corrie, not to mention Judge John Deed, in solitude. I also cannot bear anyone coming in and sitting next to me on the sofa for Oceans Eleven or Gosford Park or Some Like it Hot or Casablanca. Ruins it. I have to get up and go and empty the dishwasher.

Odd. All cod-psychiatric explanations welcome.

 

Partly responding to the DGR`s comment but this is something I was going to stress anyway. Jacob`s Room is very much a book that I think you should re-read quite soon ..read it once to 'catch it' but then, when y0u have let it settle, as it were, read it again and more slowly, because you still have questions about it which a second reading will answer and all kinds of details will be seen straight away that were glided over the first time. It - and the same is true of Mrs Dalloway - yields so much more on this second reading very soon after the first. That is not always true of novels. It is not true of Dickens, for example and it does not only have to do with length. Some novels simply cannot do to be read again for 5 or 10 years. I think it is the same with films. I see more detail in Gosford Park every time I watch it - details of acting, minute bits of dress or dialogue, glances, tiny hints.

So read Lyndall Gordon on JR but re-read the book itself.

(House points will be awarded at the end of the module.)

Fresh from replying to two very charming e-mails from people who took the trouble to write and say they had liked this or that book, I was reminded of a conversation I had with the younger daughter recently.

'Do you,' she asked, ' care very very much what people think about your work ?'

I had to think a while and sort out what I did feel before I replied and then I wondered how other writers - and indeed, painters, musicians, actors feel. No, not actors actually, they crave love and admiration, it`s in the nature of the job.

There is no doubt that it is nice, very nice indeed, to get friendly e-mails and letters from contented readers. It gives a warm glow.  But I don`t worry about the other sort, the ones from students telling me a book of mine has made their lives a misery, or from journalists who for some reason known to themselves have decided to dislike me.

No, the serious question goes deeper than that. Do we ultimately do what we do for ourselves - the job/earning-living aspect of it apart ?

And the answer is yes. The job satisfaction is my own and it is really all I want. I never think about the person at the other end, the reader, the recipient. By the time what I am writing reaches them, it is gone from me, finished and I am onto the next thing and the one after that. Do I care about bad reviews ? No, not so long as they don`t get abusive and personal. Do I care what other people think ? No. It may seem strange but I absolutely don`t - I don`t even think about it. I wish I could conduct a poll among writers - and the rest - to find out how common this is. Some writers have cared a lot - indeed, far too much. Virginia Woolf probably did - yet ultimately, she was the one she needed to satisfy  and I am not sure think she ever really did. Perhaps that is the answer. We don`t need the opinion of other people, the approval or disapproval, praise or blame, because we give both to ourselves, and rarely in equal measure.

 

I apologise to Curzon if she felt I was being harsh and dogmatic and generally scholmistressy -(see comments) but it is important to read JR without any  cultural baggage to do with the novel and what we expect of it.  You cannot take VW out of context but have to see this book, as the others, in the light of her development and her ambitions and intentions, whether or not you feel that she succeeded in them.

There are some very good pages in Lyndall Gordon`s VW. A WRITER`S LIFE -pp168-171 but mine is the US edition so they may not exactly correspond. There is also a generous offer. I had an e-mail from the publishers Little Brown who are bringing out a new edition of the Lyndall Gordon and have offered a free copy to any of the Woolf for Dummies  followers who do not already have one. In my view it is one of the very best of the zillions about VW so if you would like a copy please e-mail your address to me, I will pass them on and a copy should  reach you eventually. (mail@susan-hill.com)

Meanwhile, everyone seems to have slowed down in their reading of JR and as a consequence begun to see more and more there.  In response to a comment that the Flanders/death in WW1 of Jacob is flagged up heavily from the start, this was intentional. VW wanted us to sense this all the way - but she was not writing about the young men who died in the trenches, so much as about her brother Thoby Stephen, whose memorial this novel is.

Worth reading about him and their close relationship in her letters and diaries, in order to add even more layers of meaning. I am usually a believer in novels standing alone without reference to the writer or their biography but this is less true about VW than about most novelists. Her life and experiences, especially in youth, and the people she knew, are incredibly important in bringing us to a close understanding of the fiction - and, I hope, a love of it, as well as of her other writing. And indeed, of VW herself. She is someone with whom I have grown in sympathy over many years, as I have come to know her - in so far as one ever can.

 

 

This has always been one of my favourite VW novels. It is so elegiac and so full of the poignancy of loss. It is very noticeable that, like To the Lighthouse, it is set partly by the sea and the sea and seashore, sea places, reverberates through its pages. VW`s St Ives was, someone said her 'land of lost content' and this shows here and later. She loved everything about the sea, beaches, rocks, shells, lighth0uses, views of the sea, the gardens with what will grow there.... children playing.

But I also feel that you do not get the most out of JR until you have read it at least twice - and certainly until you know that Jacob dies in the First World War. Then the meaning of the name strikes home, and then, when you read again, you can go back and find all manner of clues and details which add a dreadful meaning to his short young life.

Indeed, it is, in many ways, a FirstWorld War novel. Think of it as that and it changes perspective totally. You see the horror by having known young Jacob - Jacob as a little boy, playing on the sand and murmuring in his sleep, Jacob as a student learning to smoke a pipe, arguing about Plato in his Cambridge rooms, Jacob, in full young manhood, healthy and strong, having his first sexual experience and then falling in love with the first time.

It is not a novel to be rushed through. It detail counts as much as in a poem. Leonard Woolf thought the characters shadowy, not really there, but that often-quoted judgment was only a first reaction. It seems like that on a first reading but the more you get to know the book, the clearer the characters become - not all of them, of course. But look at Florinda who seems at first just a silly girl, a tart, frivolous and without feeling. Read it again. She emerges as all of these things but yet she becomes more real and substantial, there is a lot more to her than it seems, though not likeable or admirable 'more' it is true.

The sense of place is always strong in VW and here, in her favourite  places, the seaside and Cambridge and London, where she was most at home, it gives a density to the novel. Places are more than just a backdrop. The Scarborough of the opening chapter is a marvellous place -( though I have to say, as one born and brought up there, that the

geography is a little dodgy ! The high ground and the low ground do not quite tally with the real place - it doesn`t matter. It is NOT the real place.

This novel moves VW into a new phase - and yet it is so recognisably about the sort of people and places and details with which she was always concerned. She is trying to convey things in a new way. Sometimes, perhaps, it seems too impressionistic, too hazy. But I find it a far more succesful book than The Waves, where the struggle shows, where everything is so patterned and formal and stylised that nothing human, no emotions or subtleties or sensitivities, can break through.

Jacob`s Room is such a moving novel and Jacob represents the cream of the clever, handsome, healthy, promising young men who were slaughtered.

I don`t know if I have told you that the SP is a very good cook. Before he was lucky enough to marry me, he lived a bachelor life and liked to eat well and to entertain. He realised that it was either eat/entertain in restaurants, eat baked beans, or learn to cook. And having decided the latter and as he is not a man to do things by halves, other than tidying the bathroom, he bought a 2 volume book called Mastering the Art of French Cookery. I ask you.

Now I hate cooking almost as much as I hate tidying the bathroom after the SP ,though I used to enjoy baking and making jam and chutney.  I am probably the only woman of my years, married and with a family, who has never cooked a Christmas dinner in her entire life. I segued  smothly from Mother to friends to the SP. And the only person in this household who can do a proper roast is that same distinguished Prof. All of which brings me to the Last Straw or What I found in the Fridge.

Now I am not squeamish, or not very, and I am happy to shove dead pheasants into the boot of my car and take them to the butcher to be plucked and gutted, don`t mind picking them up dead at all. But...

I went into the fridge for some milk and saw a nice hexagonal gold box labelled Truffles, which certainly wasn`t there last time I looked and which I didn`t recognise from Christmas. I assumed that someone had given it to the SP and that he had just remembered to bring the box home. I am not very keen on truffles but I was feeling rather like chocolate and any port in a storm, so I lifted the lid. Inside were TWO tiny naked birds.. Woodcock .. nestling together. So what ? So WHAT ? They had their heads, beaks and little legs and feet all intact ...it was a very very nasty moment. I felt like someone who has discovered a human hand in the airing cupboard in some grisly crime novel.

Apparently they were given to the SP by the young son of a scholarly friend of his - the young son having been passionate about cooking since he was knee high to a saucepan, proper cooking, the Gordon Ramsay stuff. He and the SP had apparently been discussing the finer points of haute cuisine and the talk had turned to the best way to roast a woodcock. As it does. Next thing, we have these two naked babes with beaks, heads, hands and feet, in a truffle box in our bloody fridge.

I mean, what is wrong with baked beans ?

Woman. Well, I`m not poor. But by rich, I mean J.K.Rowling rich. I was thinking about this as I finished Chapter 23 of The Battle for Gullywith - The Midwinter Revel. (bet you`re excited.)  I bet you a shilling everyone writing a children`s book thinks about it.

And I thought, if I became JKR rich, what would I do with the money ? We can assume that with the interest on the interest I have enough to live on and buy the daughters nice big houses and the SP a new Duchamp tie to go with the 2 he got for Christmas.  This is just the small change.

But it is SO much money that you can think big. I would secure the future of our local cottage hospital. That would mean an endowment of many millions. And I would ensure that it is well-staffed and open again at night to out as well as in-patients. And if the NHS didn` t like it, I`d take it out of the NHS. Well, talk is cheap. If I had as much money as that they would take notice of me.

You can do so much more with money going to smaller ventures than throw it down the bottomless pit that is medical research. I have the honour to be a Trustee of the Kay Mason Foundation a charity started by the novelist Richard Mason to provide scholarships which pay the fees of bright children from desperately poor families in the Townships of Cape Town, to go to the best private schools. They are the future leaders of their country. It does not cost a lot, by comparson with school fees here, to put a child right through  a good secondary school and see them on their way to university and we are already in our second generation of KMF scholars. So five million pounds there would make a mega difference to a great many young people. It is one of the most gratifying things I have ever been involved with.

Which made it all the more sad to see Oprah Winfrey spending 40million dollars to build ONE SCHOOL in Johannesburg - one luxury school. That money would pay for thousands of young people through some of the already-existing and excellent schools there are. These used to be for whites-only, now in theory they are open to all - but all means with money to pay and if your family wage-earner brings home 100 per month....

After that, I think we`ll gather all the commenters to this blog up for a weekend away somewhere, to talk books and make friends. Lynne`s Endsleigh Hotel should do nicely - quiet and understated and very English. None of this Barbados rubbish. I will be pretending my money is Old Money.

 

Snowdrops now popping up all over the place. We plant 500 a year new ones and the old ones also divide and multiply so in a couple of weeks, if it has not snowed, it will look as if it had. But the Greek Gardener did point out the spear of a pale blue crocus this morning and that is too early..so January 10th, 1 small blue crocus.

However, before you nod sagely and say the words G.. and W... listen to this. James Lees Milne`s Diaries have long been one of my comfort blanket books - though a pretty prickly one at times, and last night I came upon this..

"Friday 24th January 1975.  Down the Boxwell drive was amazed to see masses of primroses already out. Last year`s roses are still in flower. There can seldom have beensuch a mild winter, nor one so wet."

So there. That was the year we were married and I remember the mildness - and indeed we had a row of mild winters. The following one, blackcaps over-wintered in the garden of our first Stratford house and I have never known that since,G...W.. or no G...W...

Philippa replied to the blog about my charity shop haul, saying that Greengage Summer was one of her comfort-blanket books and suggesting I ask others for theirs. I have one or two - chiefly

My Family and other Animals - Gerald Durrell

The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford

any Jeeves or Blandings P.G.Wodehouse

Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass.

I am sure there are a number of others which will bubble up but do add yours,.

 

I sometimes have a mosey round the charity shops in the small market towns around me. There are a lot and they all have a book section and I usually come away with treasure, having first fought through the Readers Digest condensed books, old knitting patterns, old Ladybird readers and ancient Mills and Boons.

Yesterday, in the Age Concern shop, which looks after its books and displays them prominently and well, I bought the following.

1. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Attwood. As new paperback. I really must give MA one more go, or the Dove Grey Reader will come after me again.

2. A very nice Folio Society edition of Rumer Godden`s Greengage Summer in its original slip case.

3. Ishiguro`s The Artist of the Floating World, in the original Faber paperback, hardly read, to replace the one somebody nicked.

4. and the best, an as-new hardback in as-new dustwrapper of Quentin Bell`s  2 volume biography of Virginia Woolf - first edition.

the lot for a tenner. Can`t go wrong.

I have  a saying which makes the family yawn. It goes 'there are too many sofas in the world.' (Well, have you see the number of sofa adverts on television and in the colour supps ? )

Now, at the risk of being like a turkey voting for Christmas, I am adopting another saying. There are too many BOOKSHOPS in the world.  In the UK anyway.

Consider. Every city and large town has at least 1 and often, now, 2 Waterstones. It may have one or more independents. It may have a Borders. It may have a Blackwells or a Methvens. In addition it will have at least one W.H.Smith which is not a proper bookseller but it does sell quite a lot of books. There will also be one or two or more supermarkets which also sell books.

At this time of year, every publisher, no matter what they may say, is grappling with Returns.. hundreds and hundreds of returns. The reason the books are being returned is that they did not sell and they did not sell because there were too many of them out there. Some books, like  those by Jamie Oliver and Peter Kay, went on and on and on selling. The rest - well, they didn`t. They are now  being returned.  Returns, as I have said so often here that I bore myself, are a WASTE. Waste of time, money, energy, paper, petrol, carbon footfalls.. everything. If there were fewer bookshops there would be fewer returns. QED. There simply cannot be room on the high street for them all - al those rent, rates, staffing, lighting, heating. There just are not the book buyers to go round.

When I am dictator I am going to do two things. The first and most important will be to make people who carry umbrellas pass a test and have a licence. Then I will cut the number of bookshops. In half.

 

Joe wrote 'Thank you for making my English lessons a bit more interesting.'

and he didn`t want me to do his essay for him either.

I know I said Epiphany. But I am still thinking hard about JACOB`S ROOM as I have been revising my opinions on this latest reading.

I have no idea how many of you have finished it - but you have another few days before we get down to work.

And if you want to Plan Ahead... the next book will be A ROOM OF ONE`S OWN as it`s important to look at VW the non-fiction writer, to get a complete picture.

 

Four copies are now in from the wholesaler. Would anyone who asked for a free Joseph Roth book and didn`t get Hotel Savoy, like to ask again please, and the copies will wing their way. E-mail if you do not want to leave your address here.. mail@susan-hill.com

Meanwhile, I have discovered a Roth which I had not read.. called ZIPPER AND HIS FATHER, quite short, and as absorbing from the first sentence as Roth always is. He is very good indeed on father-son relationships, especially at a time when appearances mattered so much and emotions could not be so clearly and publicly - or even privately - expressed.  There is a wonderful quote from the Independent on the front cover. (A pity it does not credit the actual writer.) "Joseph Roth is a writer with whom new readers often fall hopelessly in love."

Perfectly true and I hope all my match-making efforts will work on some people here.

 

 

Some writers divide the world. It has nothing to do with the quality of their work or their place in the hierarchy. They are writers who never provoke a lukewarm response. You never say 'yes, I quite enjoy X' or 'I can`t say I really like Y`s last book as much as some of her others.'

No, these are the love-or-hate writers, those people are passionate about, join the fan clubs of,  become obsessed by, or simply cannot stand. You know that writer Z is very good - a genius even. You just can`t read his books. Or you suspect that writer P is rubbish but you can`t read anything else. My starter-list is below. I am sure others will add their own.  Some of these I love, others I simply cannot read. I leave you to slot each into the appropriate category.

I have now added whether I love or cannot.

P.D. Wodehouse.. LOVE

Terry Pratchett.. CANNOT

Tolkien.. CANNOT

Mervyn Peake ..CANNOT

Ellis Peters..CANNOT

Haruki Murakami ..LOVE

Anthony Powell...LOVE

Over to you..

 

CRICKET

When I was a child we lived in Scarborough, home of the famous September Cricket Festival and my grandfather came to stay with us every year in order to go to it. When I was 4 he took me with his for the first time, sat me on a bench, gave me a bottle of cherry pop and taught me about the game. We lived opposite the sports ground belonging to Rowntrees, where they also played cricket so that was my summer evenings and weekends sorted. It was the same grandfather who placed my first bets on horses and instilled the love of racing into me too.

Village cricket, county cricket have been greater loves than Test cricket so perhaps I am not qualified to comment on the latest humiliation - but everyone else is having their two penn'orth, even those who think the game is played with an oval ball, so... I am forced out of reticence by this morning`s news that we are going to ask Shane Warne for help. Excuse me ?  This is like George W`s new Chief of Defence, the one who swipes his hair sideways to conceal (sic) his baldness, asking Osma Bin Laden for advice on the Military. Have we no pride left ?

ADVICE FROM NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES AND OTHER BOSSY FOLK

The newspapers are always full of advice and today, sme of it is about how to do a party. Now if they want to tell us where to hire the best-dressed marquee or how to apply for a late-night licence that would be useful but they never do, they tell us things like 'Provide entertainment for the children.' and ' Make sure your shy cousins have someone they can talk to.'

All of which teach-eggs-suck is bad enough but then I read 'Organisation is vital. Six months isn`t too far ahead to...' Oh please...

..AND 'PLEASE' WILL YOU SPEAK ENGLISH ?

'Tell me if  I ever ..' I say to the daughters, meaning one of two things - Firstly, 'if ever I start to sound like my mother', and secondly, or a Grumpy Old Woman. If ever they hear me say 'When I was your age I used to (walk 20 miles to school through the snow)' or 'In my day.. ( we didn`t have all this television and computers we had to make our own entertainment.')'  they have my permission to go for the jugular. Ditto if I ever write letters to newspapers complaining that no one knows where to put the apostrophe any more or speak 'the Queen`s English'.  But someone has written a letter in The Times today which has brought me out in a rash of 'Why can`t they write English ?'  It is about the NHS, a subject which interests me greatly, and about how nursing needs reform and a better system of governance not just more money. So far so good. It is from the head of an organisation called Nurses for Reform.  And after saying a few sensible and timely things about what is wrong, it starts to suggest how they can be put right. Like this, apparently.

'It is only when healthcare is opened up to real consumers and trusted brands in a genuine market that nurses will find themselves working in a sustainable environment withj the incentives, resources and encouragement to deliver a responsive, popular and truly high-quality service.'

Will someone please tell me what the hell any of this means and even more importantly,  what the hell it has to do with nursing people who are ill ?

AND WHILE WE ARE ON THE SUBJECT OF THE NHS

I don`t know about you but I thought you went to see  a doctor when you were ill. Oh -ho no, not any longer. You go to see the doctor when THEY  invite YOU to make an appointment and even though you are perfectly healthy and feel it. You go to be weighed and measured and have your blood pressure taken and your cholesterol levels checked and to be given bossy information about that once-unusual now fashionable illness, diabetes, and to have scans and smears and blood-tests and mammograms.. all of which combine to mean that your doctor now earns upwards of £200,000 a year. But if you are ill you cannot see him or her, because you cannot get an appointment until you`re better and if you happen, stupidly, to be ill in the night, at the weekend or on a Bank Holiday, you can talk to an unqualified call-centre person about it,  or go to A and E  (and even call an ambulance to take you there  ) but you cannot see a doctor, and certainly not your own doctor. Lewis Carroll couldn`t have made it up.  Well, I`ll tell you something. I have set my face against any of their money-making little schemes. I have a blood pressure machine of my own and I take mine and that of the SP every week, I have a flu jab a year and that`s IT. I`ll work out what to do if I`m ill when it happens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have cracked this picture lark, don`t you ?

If so, the barn.

The short list published today is impressive. The selection is intelligent, interesting, unusual and interesting for its omissions too !Anyone buying and reading only these books this spring will have enjoyed a rich variety of new literature.  Here it is, in order of appearance on the programme.

THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER. Jed Rubenfeld

THE GIRLS Lori Lansens

RESTLESS  William Boyd

LOVE IN THE PRESENT TENSE  Catherine Ryan Hide

SEMI-DETACHED.  Griff Rhys Jones

THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE.  A.M. Homes

HALF OF A YELLOW SUN.  C ADICHIE

THE TESTAMENT OF GIDEON MACK.  James Robertson

 

 

I am having to put this up here. I thought it was something that would no longer cause problems but it is. I have just had an e-mail from someone which quotes a publisher`s reader called Susan Hill and a comment she made some while back which seems to make a nonsense of things I have been saying recently. So I need to clarify this again.

For 30 odd years there were two Susan Hills in both writing and publishing and it caused no end of confusion for us both. Sadly, the other Susan Hill died of cancer a couple of years ago but obviously things linger. So please let me clarify here for the last time.

1. I did NOT write a novel about the pop music industry called Breaking Glass.

2 I have never worked in publishing apart from running Long Barn Books.

3. I have never been a publisher`s reader.

4. I did not ghost Bob Geldof`s  autobiography.

5. I did not edit or ghost a great many books for Hutchinson.

All of these were the other Susan Hill.

I once got a very cross letter from Kingsley Amis, who was an old friend, telling me to stop writing asking him to contribute to books in which he had no interest... it was, of course, the other SH and  it was all sorted out without hard feeling on either side. But it was picked up by the Sunday Times who, I thought, had sorted out any confusion... and indeed it did for years. But when the other Susan Hill died a good many people rang up to find out if it was me - or not. Two people even wrote letters of condolence on seeing - but clearly not closely reading - the obituaries.

 

 

 

While the Man is trying to sort things out for me, I`ve added a new picture. I don`t seem to be able to get the name up correctly but click on the 'cropped picture' under Recent Entries and you should get cowslips and fritillaries by our lake.

All these, by the were, were taken last year by Betty, whose photographs form the book Long Barn is publishing in October -Chipping Campden and the surrounding villages. (Orders taken !)

A woman writer in today`s Daily Mail about her 20 -odd year celibacy and the reasons  for it. Too much information, on the whole, but this caught my eye.

'Writing is a very solitary pursuit. You have to live in your own head and get on with it. It takes a tremendous amount of focus and plumbing of your own psychological and intellectual depths.'

Hm. Well.. but she goes on ' Living with somebody would deplete my resources and cramp my creativity.'

I cut it out to show the SP when he gets back from New York tomorrow.

 

I managed to get another one onto the Recent Articles.. but no further. Too late, too tired. Giving in and asking a Man tomorrow.

Meanwhile, click on the Cherry Orchard and enjoy the 2006 blossom - taken from the top of the Cherry Orchard, and the bench where I often go to sit and think. Or work. Or look at the blossom. And the sheep.

I have spent about 2 hours trying to upload a photograh onto this blog. I have got as far as uploading it onto Recent Entries, so if you click on the top entry, for Pict 4075.. you should get a deightful photograph of our wicked Border Terriers.

Or not.

It looks as if it may take me another 2 hours before I discover how to get it actually onto the page before you as you arrive at the blog.

Or not.

If I don`t, I`ll have to Ask a Man and you know how I hate doing that.

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

THE LIST TO DATE

FICTION

 Suite Francaise.  Irene Nemirovsky
Taking Comfort.  Roger Morris
Abide with Me. Elizabeth Strout
Amazing Disgrace. James Hamilton-Paterson
The Road. Cormac McCarthy
One Good Turn. Kate Atkinson
The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets. Eva Rice
Be Near Me. Andrew O`Hagan
The Ruins. Scott Smith
The Other Side of you. Salley Vickers

 NON-FICTION

The Polysyllabic Spree    Nick Hornby (3 nominatuions)
Blood, Sweat and Tea.  Tom Reynolds
The Shadow of the Silk Road.  Colin Thubron
England`s Mistress. The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton.  Kate Williams
The Perfect Summer Juliet Nicolson(2 nominations.)
Thomas Hardy. A Time Torn Man. Claire Tomalin (3 nominations.)

I have just been browsing about some of the aspiring writer`s blogs, creative writing websites. And in among all manner of different comments and counter-comments, confessions and questions and answers and pieces of advice, one thing struck me and this was how painful the whole thing seemed to be. How much angst, anguish, worry, striving, fear of failure, self-flagellation and goodness knows what else which indicated that almost none of these people are ENJOYING WRITING. Now if I had not enjoyed writing, from the age of 5, if I had  not always and everywhere found it huge fun, stimulating, interesting, exciting,  entertaining and surprising, I would have gone off years ago and done something else. I love writing, just as I imagine those who can play football or any other game or paint pictures or sing or  ride horses .. love what they do. There is hard work and a certain amount of anxiety but if you have even the smallest bit of talent, then you should be enj0ying the exercise of it - if you don`t, for heaven`s sake give up. NOW.

There has always, among very literary writers, been a certain badge of honour worn about the Suffering involved, the agony, the blood, the sweat and tears, the soul-searching, the pain of the creative process.  All of which of C...p.  Hard work, yes. Frustration when it doesn`t quite go right, certainly. But otherwise, fun and more fun.  Why do people play games ? For fun - though there are some competitive types who do it to WIN.

No one makes you start writing. No one makes you continue. It is a hard job to make a career from, a bit harder to make it  a well-paid career. And there certainly are the times when you get stuck. I was stuck recently with the 4th Simon Serrailler crime novel and the reason I knew I was stuck was because I was hating writing it, it was dragging, I was trying to avoid getting down to it each day. That is not like me. The moment I realised it, I knew what I had to do which was get the fun back into it. So I began writing the children`s book THE BATTLE FOR GULLYWITH, which is huge, mega-fun.

The writing life can be made too full of Shoulds and Oughts. It`s too easy to beat ourselves up. I SHOULD write 1,000 words a day. I OUGHT to work in the morning when I`m fresh. I MUST write every single day. I WILL MAKE MYSELF finish this chapter before I let myself have a cup of coffee

Oh for heaven`s sake. No should or ought or must. Just enjoy it. Have fun. If this one isn`t working, try another. If all you have is misery, stop doing it.

Even when I have been writing what I would call difficult books - ones which were very close to me, or about very personal emotions, I enjoyed the writing, because it was often therapeutic or cathertic - something positive and creative coming out of a tragedy, something made whole again out of a breaking-up. Perhaps then 'fun' was not the word but enjoyment and satisfaction always were.

They must be. So if you are trying to write your first book - or maybe even your fifty-first, give yourself a break. Let yourself play. Enjoy it. How would it be if you were a concert pianist who hated playing ?

Quite.

I was saddened that it seemed to be making everyone so miserable. We can`t have that.

From Bet LaRue in New York.

Fiction. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

from Anita.  Non-F. BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEA by Tom Reynolds.

From FICTIONBITCH.. Novel. TAKING COMFORT by Roger Morris.

from THE DOVE GREY READER.   Non-fiction. ENGLAND`S MISTRESS. THE INFAMOUS LIFE OF EMMA HAMILTON by KATE WILLIAMS

Fiction. ABIDE WITH ME.  Elizabeth Strout

Nominated by Craig Ranapia

Non-fiction. NICK HORNBY.. THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE

Fiction AMAZING DISGRACE by James Hamilton-Paterson

 

AMY AND ISABELLE by Elizabeth Strout.

This was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 200 but don`t let that put you off. It is the story of Amy, a single parent of teenage daughter Amy, from a small American town called Shirley Falls and the whole action takes place one hot summer when Amy discovers that Isabelle is having an affair with her maths teacher. And don`t let that bald synopsis put you off either.. the book is much more complex and subtle than it sounds and there is a moving intertwining of two strong wills and characters. We side with each of them in turn. They learn a great deal about one another and about themselves and it seems as if they are opposites who can never be reconciled.

A wonderful evocation of small=town America, too - plenty of writers do that very well but Strout can hold her own in some grand company and she has a fine command of both narrative and language.

Well worth a re-discovery as these short listed books too often drop straight out of sight... it is a two-edged sword, being on a shortlist but not winning.

 

There will be other blogs later today about other matters but I wanted to make a start on my record-keeping.

After a windy night but without any more rain, it is sunny, cold and wonderfully bright with the marvellous slanting light we get here sometimes.

SNOWDROPS. The earliest we have ever seen one in flower here, rapidly followed by others almost as you watch, is January 8th. No sign even of a shoot in the spinney but under the hazel trees near the house definite first shoots.

HAZEL.  No catkins. First buds visible.

BIRDS. Bevvy of young partridges in the field opposite the kitchen window.

Flocks of fieldfares in the cherry orchard.

Also blue tits, robin, wren, chaffinch, all sorts of pigeon, starling seen at 9.20 a.m through the windows. There should be more on a walk round the grounds later.

A few birds are starting to sing again. Robin ? Blackbird.

(I need to spend time with the CD of British Bird Song I got for Christmas -not good on song.)

The holly tree has been almost completely stripped of its berries.