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Do you know that feeling – when your head is so full of concerns, worries, events, demands and things to do, that you just freeze, come to a standstill, not knowing which way to go, what to tackle first – and so end up going in all directions and none?
That’s what happened to this blog over the last few months – and it lived on only as half-started posts in my notebook, good intentions and a ghostly on screen presence… the spirit of Bookish Nature Past…
Miss Havisham-like, I still feel a bit frozen and stuck, my blog all cobwebby and neglected. The clocks all stopped. But, on Sunday, some bookish progress was afoot, when I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood – in the nick of time, ahead of the BBC’s adaptation to be screened… tonight!
To be precise, it was back in August when I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood as it was left to us by Charles Dickens – forever suspended at the end of Chapter 23 which, so poignantly, he penned just the day before he died. Since then, I’ve been trying to unfreeze my literary critical faculties enough to write something here about Dickens’s unfinished novel, before embarking on reading Leon Garfield’s interpretation of a possible ending. The plan was to write my impressions of Dickens’s last novel and my take on where it may have been going – then to read Leon Garfield’s completion of the tale, write a separate post on that – and then conclude with a post about the BBC adaptation and how each compares… However, still being stuck in my Bookish Nature version of Satis House, that plan has remained as cobwebbed over as Miss H’s wedding cake!
But, at least now… at the eleventh hour… I’m blowing away the dust and trying to resurrect the poor neglected thing (though I doubt I’ll get my Edwin Drood posts finished in time to coincide with the screening of the television mini-series; will this blog ever be topical??? I always seem to be dozens of steps behind the signs of the times!) With an attempt to stay vaguely on track, I leapt in ahead of the BBC adaptation’s imminent arrival, and read Leon Garfield’s ending of the novel over the weekend – so this resurrected creature of a plan won’t be quite the same thing as was originally intended. But, hey, it just may well morph into something more meaningful…or meandering…or both… and go down all sorts of unexpected ways, maybe following all those probing and mysterious beams of light which, through Dickens’s (and Garfield’s) imagery, follow the novel’s brittle, edgy darkness and prise it open, pestering a reminder of truths to keep the shadows in perpetual tension; a play of light and dark upon the wall – with struggling gleams of possible resurrection and redemption being, I think, what Dickens may have most wanted the reader to keep their eye on…
So, I suppose that’s a very good note on which to also resurrect this blog. I tried in vain to write a detailed post about Edwin Drood yesterday morning and ended up still going down a thousand ways and getting nowhere (I keep hitting this problem of too much in my head, and not enough idea how to deal with it all!) I was feeling a little despondent that I’ll never get back the blogging habit. But, over the next few days (or most probably weeks…) I will attempt to bludgeon into shape all my notes and we shall try to begin again… At least I’ve managed to cobble together this post today, which is a start and makes things seem a little less daunting! And there are some nature oriented posts lurking half prepared in my notebook to knock into shape too…
Add to that the fact that the BBC’s very interesting adaptation of Great Expectations has left me longing to return to the real thing… plus the very tempting group read of Our Mutual Friend (one of my absolute favourite novels of all time) coming soon over at The Argumentative Old Git – I’d better get started on dusting off those cobwebs! See you back here soon for, hopefully, some resulting shiny new posts over the coming weeks…
I hope you had a happy, bookish World Book Day 2011!
I started writing the following post yesterday, with every intention of posting it on the actual ‘Big Day’ - but… time and events had other ideas… So, here’s the finished article; a day late – but hopefully still topical (may whichever day you happen across this post, be a bookish celebration wherever you are in the world!)
Here’s what I wrote on 3rd March 2011:
My son has gone into school today dressed as Harry Potter, his wheelchair wheels sprinkled with wizardly magic (how he would love to be able to fly that NHS wheelchair, broomstick fashion, at Nimbus 2000 speeds! There would be no stopping him; he’d be airborne faster than you could say ‘snitch!’)
As I write this, my daughter will be paying homage beside Shakespeare’s grave. I hope she is passing on to Will a special moment of remembrance from her mum…
Later, she will spend a couple of hours at a workshop with the RSC – followed by a trip to the recently re-opened Royal Shakespeare Theatre, to see Rupert Goold’s production of Romeo and Juliet; a school trip beyond the wildest dreams of my own teenage years!
She’s beaten me to it as first member of the family to experience the new theatre at Stratford upon Avon. For the past few years, I’ve periodically watched its gradual rebirth, gazing across the River Avon at the original red brick façade, imagining the ghosts in its walls stirring, gathering up the memories and poetry of the soul of the theatre as it settles around the new stage and waits for new magic to happen.
My September 2008 trip to see the RSC’s truly riveting, unforgettable Hamlet (David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie – directed by Gregory Doran) saw the RST redevelopment looking like this:
My birthday treat in February 2009 (to see Antony Sher and John Kani in a deeply moving production of The Tempest – its African heartbeat throbbing with the strange magic of the play) - took place in a mysterious, mythological world parallel to these scenes:
And, in June 2009 – another trip to Stratford upon Avon revealed these changes in the theatre:
…all bound up with memories of the truly visceral drama of the assassination scene in Julius Caesar, which I watched through tears of shock and pity, my emotions wrung by the electric, skilful interplay of confusion, betrayal and human frailty moving like a lonely, cornered animal amongst the characters on the stage.
In August 2009, my daughter and I were gifted a very different mood of fun, frolics and superbly handled mayhem in the Young People’s Shakespeare production of A Comedy of Errors – and in June 2010, my friend and I were back in ancient Rome, following Darrell de Silva to Egypt, as he and Kathryn Hunter sparked and sparred in a crackling production of Antony and Cleopatra.
In beautiful August evening sunshine, 2010 – after my daughter and I had been treated to a wonderful Young People’s Shakespeare production of Hamlet - in which Debbie Korley delivered one of the best, most heartbreaking Ophelias I’ve ever seen - I took these pictures of a near complete new RST:
…And also took these commemorative pictures of the Courtyard Theatre, the RSC’s temporary performance space (and template for the auditorium of the RST rebuild) with sad, fond nostalgia in my heart. How I love that ‘big rusty shed.’ So full of memories…
But now, anticipation of my first visit to the transformed RST in June awaits new memories in the making. My tickets – little paper portals to actually be there when Jonathan Slinger, directed by Michael Boyd, inhabits the skin of Macbeth – are tucked away safely and at the ready. My excitement about this production is simmering at heart leaping levels already – it will be the first live performance I’ve seen of ‘The Scottish Play’ since Peter O’Toole was beguiled by siren witches in the infamous Old Vic production of 1980!
Macbeth is special to me – the first Shakespeare play I ever read. I first opened its pages when I was about the age my daughter is now, and it awakened in me a passion for the Bard that has continued to deepen, grow and embed itself ever more firmly in the fabric of who I am. Now, I see the same process at work in my daughter…
For these reasons, and more, I can hardly wait to see Macbeth come alive on stage in what promises to be an electrifying production - and I can’t wait to get inside the new RST. Tonight though, the magic of the place will be brought home here in the sparkle of my daughter’s eyes, and in her tales of her experiences there. This World Book day, she is caught in those heady, early stages of falling in love – as I was when I first read Macbeth – with the book that truly belongs to all the world:
Just a few World Book Days ago, she too went into primary school dressed in the Gryffindor cloak my son wore today (she was Hermione – big hair included!)
Not long before I first read Macbeth, I was tucked up in bed riveted by Jill’s Gymkhana or avidly following Bilbo Baggins ‘there and back again’ (well, I still am sometimes…some things don’t change… 
)
From Ron Weasley to Romeo, from The Hobbit to Hamlet – there’s no telling where a journey through books will lead…
Time. There’s never enough of it. But, for too long now, I’ve very much needed it to slow down – so, once the end-of-term mayhem had drawn to a close, I made myself draw up my paddle, stopped travelling in ever maddening circles, and during the summer holidays, allowed myself to go with the slower flow that ebbs, often unseen, around the worries and stresses. There, in that place, is to be found the small, the essential, the detailed; all those mind-space openers that let in the larger picture and allow you to actually get somewhere.
Somehow, that more relaxed frame of mind opens up more time; unfolds it from previously hidden corners, and makes room for the savouring of small, important moments with the people we love. It pushes out and ignores those warring inner demands that so often distract and break in and shrink time to an awful paralysis. We can’t do everything – so we might as well just clear a space and let ourselves breathe.
Now, of course, with the arrival of autumn, with all its get-back-to-normal routines, the paddle is once more twitching with the turbulent pull of conflicting currents. But alongside that, back in the slow flow, I’m making a further investment in Time by embarking on a literary journey. It’s a momentous one, and a voyage that I can already feel tugging my mental sails out to a wide and satisfying ocean…
On the day the children went back to school, I lingered by my bookshelves, devoting some quiet moments to that delicious task of choosing my next read. When my mind is distracted, my thoughts scattered, the choice on my shelves can be perplexing; there are so many unread volumes and re-reads demanding attention. But, that day, the pull towards War and Peace was so strong, so insistent I knew that, for me, this was “Its Time.”
I took down that hefty tome; a treasure saved up for that “Perfect Moment” when life would not be too busy, my mind and attention not too fractured by inner tugs of war. But War and Peace is not a novel for that “Perfect Moment” (which, in truth, I know will never come). It’s a novel for Life; in all its variety and strife and happening and complexity. That insistent pull towards (at last!) beginning the novel was a liberating invitation to follow – come what may. So, ignoring the twitching paddle, I stepped into the flow, and started to read…
I’m now three hundred or so pages into Anthony Briggs’s (Penguin Classics) translation of Tolstoy’s masterpiece; deep in its heart beats, detail, scope and moment - and in the wide breathing space for the essential that this novel – and all great literature - gives us. A real getting somewhere.
Hopefully though, during that voyage, I’ll be able to pull a few rafts alongside the main ship and fill them up with blog posts about my slow-flow summer – a summer of shooting stars, curious seals, leaping dolphins, bookshops and Shakespeare…
It’s going to be a bit of a dodge around the months and across Britain – from June to the present, from Northumberland to Wales, from red squirrels to red kites…and, in truth, I’m beginning to panic at the thought of all that catching up…
But…no, I won’t succumb…out damn’d paddle! Let’s go with the flow!
A trip to our dentist often involves long waiting times, so taking along something sustaining to read is essential. As I left the house on my way to my check-up this week, I grabbed an issue of the wonderful Slightly Foxed magazine – and in the waiting room, settled my jittery attention on an enjoyable, stirring article about Jane Austen (Plain Jane? Plain Wrong by Daisy Hay – Winter 2009 Issue, No. 24). Just a few minutes later, I was stifling an urge to laugh out loud (seemed too incongruous in the silence of collective dread all around me…) when I read:
[Jane Austen’s] notebooks demonstrate that she enjoyed collecting the views of her more censorious friends and neighbours, including one Mrs Augusta Bramstone who ‘owned that she thought S[ense] and S[ensibility] and P. & P. downright nonsense, but expected to like M[ansfield] P[ark] better, & having finished the 1st vol – flattered herself she had got through the worst.’
That’s just so Jane! Sending brimstones…erm…sorry Bramstones of criticism sparking back at herself, with such a lightness of heart, even glee. And doesn’t the brimful Mrs Augusta B just come alive in those few short lines?
I’ve read this before, but finding it again in the Slightly Foxed article, came just at the right moment… The power of Jane; inspiring perspective and laughter – even in a dentist’s waiting room! Brilliant!
…As is Slightly Foxed; a place to find many a reading gem…
A malaise seemed to have settled over us all on May bank holiday Monday (3rd May). It was one of those potter-about-the-house, can’t-be-bothered-to-get-our-backsides-in-gear days.
“Shall we go for a walk?” my husband asked.
“If you like, I don’t mind.”
“But do you want to go for a walk?”
“I don’t mind.”
Daughter – “Well…I was going to read my book…”
Son, as always, is happy to go along with whatever’s decided…
Cue exasperated husband, gripped by sudden decisiveness. “Come on,” he says, grabbing his shoes. “Let’s go!”
I knew he was right. The house had that stale feel to it. We’d been crowding it out for too long. It – and we – needed to breathe.
The weather was a bit doubtful – a cake slice of changing flavours: cloud topping, warm sun in the corners, cool breeze in the centre. But, when we caught a full hit of sun, the warmth was like a melt-in-the-mouth moment – and the sense of release into somewhere spacious and full of colour, was like an intense burst of flavour, after the porridge blandness of the day indoors.
Our local woods that day were like a gift. We breathed them in – each of us glad we’d made the effort to head their way. Treading the familiar paths, every inch brought new discoveries – colours, light, texture, sound.
Since our last visit, the bluebell transformation of the woodland floor had swept in like a magic spell, and they were in flower everywhere:
Clumps of greater stitchwort dazzled the sunlight from their pure white petals:
..and yellow archangel spread in profuse, golden trails along the woodland floor:
The occasional red campion was in flower beside the paths:
…and we also discovered green alkanet and violets in flower along our route:
That morning, the dawn chorus had floated in through the window with added volume - insistently prising under the edges of sleep, to wake me with a startled awareness of its change in tone. (I heard on the radio recently that Thomas Hardy described the birds singing at dawn as ‘persistent intimates.’ I love that phrase – it captures perfectly that pleasantly inescapable mingling with the consciousness of spring birdsong.) More spring migrants must have arrived, adding to the hugeness of sound that filled the growing light. And now, in the woods, the trees were bursting with birdsong, each bird flinging its voice into the air, so that the notes seemed to shiver and scatter through the fresh, bright leaves.
I’ve never heard a cuckoo around here. This is a semi rural area – a mix of suburb and patches of wild space so, no doubt, not prime cuckoo habitat - but perhaps they were here in the past, I don’t know. Due to the cuckoo’s decline, the present time is increasingly a place where hearing a cuckoo call seems a lucky chance, rather than an expected herald of spring. I’ve not heard a cuckoo for far too long…
However, there were plenty of botanical cuckoos in flower on May bank holiday. Cuckoo Pint, or Lords and Ladies, flaunted primeval flowers everywhere:
And we found two cuckoo flower, or lady’s smock plants along the damper areas of the main bridleway:
As we admired the delicately pink flowers of this food plant for the larvae of the orange tip butterfly – almost on cue, a male orange tip passed us by, brushing the air with the bright tangerine edges of its wings. But, generally, It wasn’t a butterfly day – there was too much of a chill in the air. The orange tip was confining itself to a sheltered, bluebell-intense dip, where patches of sunshine locked themselves to the ground, holding off the shadows.
But, as we began to wander home, those shadows suddenly crept across the paths - and the scent of bluebells intensified on the air - as a great, damp pall of cloud came out of nowhere and drew itself across the blue sky. Hurrying through the rain, we returned to the house, refreshed by this deep breath of the spring…
A Shakespearean take on cuckoos and cuckoo flowers:
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight.
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
- From Spring song – Love’s Labour’s Lost – Act V, Scene II.
…And a beautiful description of a violet, with another link back to Shakespeare, from Ted Hughes; a perfect nugget of words to savour:
Only a purple flower – this amulet
(Once Prospero’s) – holds it all, a moment,
In a rinsed globe of light.
- From A Violet at Lough Aughrisburg by Ted Hughes (Flowers and Insects collection, Faber and Faber)
Maundy Thursday in the beautiful city of Bath was a day of shifting spring sunshine and a pouncing April Fool wind. Swathes of daffodils shivered in Victoria Park, lesser celandines were opening their petals beneath stately trees…
Lesser Celandine, Ranunculus ficaria
…and we, via Royal Crescent, The Circus (and no doubt the route of many a Jane Austen stroll) were on our way to The Paragon – and our first ever visit to Topping & Co. booksellers
As we approached the pale blue shop front, we caught tantalising first glimpses through its windows – warm light, lingering readers, towering walls of books, beautiful wood floors – and then the door was closing behind us, and it was like entering a gentle fold of time, back to the bookshops of my childhood…
All around us, floor to ceiling, there was a vast selection of titles; row upon row of backlist volumes as well as current bestsellers, a discerning variety and breadth of choice wherever you looked. The natural history section was a rare treat in itself – packed full of carefully chosen titles spanning years of the best nature writing, not just the latest releases or TV tie-ins. Here was an ideal roll call of writers – a lovely selection of titles by Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane, and all the others you would wish to see represented there. It was wonderful to see the New Nature Writing issue of Granta tucked between them, completing the picture.
For a long while, I browsed in the children’s section and marvelled at the beautiful display of hardback gift books. It was a feast of magic for the eyes. Spines of sumptuous red, green, blue or inky black – gold blocked and cloth-bound volumes, all primed to begin their journeys through the lives of generations of readers to come. Heirlooms waiting for a home…
My eye was particularly drawn to a gorgeous cloth-bound volume, containing Susan Cooper’s complete The Dark is Rising sequence; a gem of an edition which I’ve not seen anywhere else – and, until now, never knew existed. It was so heart warming to see this fitting tribute to how special these books are – a gem for a gem, made to be treasured.
There’s something about storybooks like these, especially when gathered together in such numbers – that speaks of magic libraries in mysterious, Green Knowe houses; volumes waiting to be read in rocking horse attics, or in secret gardens – or on Gyptian ships bound for Svalbard…
My daughter’s eyes were shining as she drank it all in. Everywhere we looked our gaze fell on abundant treasures. Bookshops like Topping’s feel such an organic part of the journey of reading. They intensify the whole sensory and tactile experience, so that even before ‘Once Upon a Time,’ the discovery and anticipation begin.
The only way we’re going to keep these special places, and the experience they offer, is to spend money in them – so, as my daughter had some saved up Christmas money, she was able to make her selection from the ‘magic library.’
She chose this beautiful Everyman’s Library Children’s Classic edition of a well loved favourite, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty:
Her old second hand paperback copy has all but fallen apart after many a bumpy rucksack journey to school – so this will be her treasure-copy, living long on her shelves for repeated readings (I can almost see those imaginary great-grandkids turning these pages in years to come!)
On its first journey home as heirloom-in-waiting, Black Beauty was joined by Cornelia Funke’s Inkspell (my daughter’s other choice from Topping’s shelves) – plus quite a hoard of other books which, earlier in the day, we’d bought with our stash of chain-store gift tokens left over from Christmas:
I’m looking forward to reading the Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson (I loved the gripping storytelling and Woman in White, gothic feel of Fingersmith. And Kate Atkinson is a firm favourite, always providing a sparkling festival of fiction delights) but I’m sure I’ll be borrowing some of my daughter’s choices too!
We’ll definitely be back to Topping’s whenever we get the chance. In fact, I can feel the pull to return there already. Our Rocking Horse Attic is just an imaginary one – but that gorgeous edition of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series definitely belongs there, I think…
…My twin passions!
If you too have a passion for either, or both, of these things, you will know how they feel nothing short of hardwired into your very self. Through life, they play a big part in shaping your own nature – or your nature responds to their influence and rightness of fit…whichever comes first. Though in reality, I think, it’s a cyclical process, forever ongoing, with no possible unravelling of beginnings or ends.
These two passions will certainly be the chief shaping factors of this blog. Sometimes they will intertwine, sometimes separate; though, hopefully, often inform and illuminate each other! Under those subheadings of Books and Nature, I think it’s going to be an eclectic mix. Some posts will contrast, many connect. From the Hobbit to Hamlet; from Ruby Ferguson to William Faulkner, from my back garden to the wild wood – from wagtails to whales; from the nightingale in poetry – to the poetry in the peregrine…
…With a big splash of my favourite writers along the way! My top ‘Big Three’- Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare will put in many an appearance – and my special interest in children’s literature means that a cornucopia of children’s writers, past and present, will inspire many a post. Beyond any doubt, there will be lots of wallows in the nature writing to be found within its very own genre (from the likes of (again favourite) writers such as Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Chris Ferris, Robert Macfarlane et al…) along with celebrations of all that wonderful nature writing to be found in a whole range of novels, poetry, plays, journals and essays as an intrinsic part of the very fabric of Literature and Life.
Each post, I think, will be a response to moments (bookish or nature-related, or both!) which clamour to be kept and tucked in the memory…
Recently, I read a quote from Kathleen Jamie, the writer and poet, which in itself, struck me as something perfect I wanted to pick up and keep. She said ‘Your creative mind is like a coat-pocket…’ So, here I am, keeping the idea of the coat-pocket in my ‘coat-pocket’ so to speak!
And that’s exactly what this blog feels like – like a coat-pocket, just waiting to be filled with what I pick up along the way…
I hope you’ll join me here on my wanderings, share in my findings – and add some of your own along the way!
If you know what species a tree is, you have a good idea what its closed leaf bud will eventually look like when it’s fully unfurled. Between the closed bud and the time-worn leaf, there’s a known or expected rhythm, a theme – but so many possible shaping factors…
How exactly will the unfurling leaf turn to the light? Precisely how will it curl in response to dryness and heat – or bend under the weight of rain? What patterns and marks will be left by time’s events?
I have an idea what this blog is waiting to be whilst it simmers in my mind; a tentative mental picture of how it might grow – but only time will tell how exactly it will emerge as I turn these ideas to the light and see what happens!
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