Random Jottings

Over - Margaret Forster

Margaret Forster has written over twenty novels and several works of non-fiction and I am a huge fan of hers and have read nearly all of her output.  A new Margaret Forster on the bookshelf is always a case of  rejoicing as far as I am concerned.  There have been the odd one or two that I have not thought were up to her usual high standards, I found Memory Box and Diary of an Ordinary Woman, slightly disappointing but then last year I posted about Keeping the World Away which was one of my top reads of 2007.  Now just over twelve months later I have just closed up the last page of Over which is also another superb book destined, I am sure, to make my top reads of 2008.

Odd that the last two books I have read, this and Mothernight, should have the loss of a child and the effect on the family, as its theme.  Pure accident that I should read these one after the other, as I have had Over for a few months now before finally picking it up.  In Mothernight it is a very new baby who dies, in Forster's novel it is a teenager, Miranda, who drowns in a boating accident.    The story is narrated by her mother, Louise, who is slowly coming to terms with her grief and is trying to refashion her life.  Her husband, Don, cannot.  He refuses to accept the the death of his daughter and is determined to find blame and bring someone to account for his loss.  He throws himself into endless investigations and research seeking a reason for what happened, not believing that Miranda took a boat out and, being an inexperienced sailor, could not cope when a sudden change in the weather placed her in danger.His obsession gradually drives his wife and children away from him and slowly the family cracks apart.

This is a very moving and remarkable book.  Margaret Forster has an uncanny knack of making the reader empathise with the thoughts and feelings of the narrator.  Difficult to realise that this is not autobiographical, at least I hope not, as she gets under the skin of her main character, Louise, and her feelings of grief, exhaustion and slow return to normality are depicted so realistically.  Forster's writing is flowing, fluid and draws you in so that you read easily and become totally absorbed.  I was late back from my lunch break at my office today as I could not go back to my desk until I had read the last few pages and then found it very difficult to return to my work and concentrate properly.

'What is left when the tide recedes and it's over'

After the event, after the understanding that you are never going to see your child again, how do you pick up the pieces and get back to a semblance of normal life.  How do you cope?  I found this book very moving and am sure that this post is very inadequate indeed as I really find it hard to put into words what a remarkable piece of writing this is.  Margaret Forster has been around a long time now, 70 this year, and because of her longevity and regular output, perhaps is not as valued as she should be.  I think she is one of our finest living novelists.

One comment on the back of this edition 'Like so many of Forster's novels it leaves behind a sense of something both absent and profound'

Spot on.  Do buy and read and tell me what you think.

Coronation Street

I was a fan of Coronation Street and watched it religiously since its first episode back in 1960.  However, I finally gave up on it a few years ago as the antics of the younger members of The Street, became ever more boring and tedious and the story lines began to get more far fetched.  I can understand that fresh blood was needed to keep the ratings up and not let the ghastly Eastenders beat them, but Coronation Street has always excelled in strong, mature characters, some witty, some wise, some downright hilarious, and the preening and posing of dim young things made me decide to forgo my allegiance.

I have dropped in every now and then however, when there has been a strong story or big event involving characters who I know and love, though these are gradually dwindling.  Last night was such an occasion, Vera Duckworth had died and it was her funeral.  The Jack and Vera show had lasted for over 30 years, a pair who fought, shouted, were vulgar, loud and obnoxious, could also be loving, kind hearted and sensitive.  Jack rather fancied himself as a man about town and had a roving eye and in one glorious week back in the 70s he posed as Vincent St Clair after sneakily joining a video dating agency and arranging to meet with Caroline, a glamorous rich widow.  Sensing that he was onto a good thing, he arranged to meet her in the Rovers (always felt that was a bit daft, in front of the entire neighbourhood) and then when the 'widow' turned round to face him, it was Vera who had found out what was going on.

Outraged Jack yelled 'You're no widow' to which she replied 'I will be ten minutes after getting you home'

Wonderful stuff.

And now after 50 years together of fighting and feuding, yesterdayy was Vera's funeral and, as I know from experience, when a member of a soap such as this is given the opportunity and a great script, they can turn in a performance worthy of an Oscar.  One such happened also many years ago, when Hilda Ogden, with her hair permanently in curlers and a fag in her mouth (pre-non smoking ban) brought home the belongings of her feckless husband Stan, who had just died, and sat at her table looking at them.  Her husband was bone idle, had never done a day's work in his life and drove her mad, and yet when she sat there and talked and reminisced about him, quietly in a monologue to the camera, it was superb and heartbreaking and acting of the highest. That year, Jean Alexander, who played Hilda won an award for this scene and it has always remained in the pantheon of great moments from The Street.

Lat night we had another one.  Jack, played by the wonderful, William Tarmey, wearing his awful Del boy type camel coat that he has had for years, broke down but managed to recover himself to say a few words about Vera at her funeral.  I swear that the tears shed by the actors playing their parts in the congregation were real, I know mine were.  As he sat and watched her coffin disappearing through the curtains at the end of the funeral, to the strains of Ray Charles and I can't stop loving you, his face was riven with misery.

A truly wonderful wonderful performance.

Mothernight - Sarah Stovell

Saw this on the Snowbooks website, read a bit about it, thought that sounds good, sent a pretty please begging letter (well, email) to delightful Em and lo and behold a copy arrived on my desk at work last week and I carted it home and sat down on Saturday and read straight through.

"Seventeen year old Leila Hartley is a boarder at an exclusive girl's school.  She hasn't been home to see her family in years.....she keeps everyone, teachers and pupils alike at a distance.  A new girl, Olivia Rudham arrives and the two become room mates and then best friends.....When Leila is invited by her father to spend the summer with him for the first time in almost a decade, Olivia goes with her and meets Katherina, Leilas's stepmother who blames her for something that happened to her first child.  Somewhere  in the farmhouse is the truth about what took place....on the winter solstice know in Norse mythology as Mothernight"

Now if that blurb, plus the Edmund du Lac style cover doesn't make you lick your lips with anticipation then I don't know what will. Grabbed my attention I can tell you.    Olivia and Leila form an intense relationship and the story is told from their separate perspectives with them both taking turns in the narrative so that we are privy to both their feelings and fears.  I always like this device in a book, find it adds depth and fleshes out the characters.

Leila's stepmother blames her for the death of her son, Archie who was found one morning lifeless in his cot and sends her away to school and out of the house.  We are given tantalising glimpses of the time this occurred and hints and clues as to the actual events.  It is real page turning stuff.  The reader knows there is something lurking on the edge of the darkness, something nasty and unpleasant, you want to know what it is and then you don't and you want to read on and find out, but are you really sure you want to? 

Set in the country in a long, hot sweltering summer with languid drawn out days in the heat and temperatures and antagonisms rising to a crescendo and the denouement, Mothernight will keep you riveted until you reach the final page.  And whether Leila is innocent or guilty, she arouses our pity because of her longing for a normal life, to be loved and to be rid of the loneliness and burden she carries with her in everything she says or does.

Snowbooks has done it again, found another new author with a great first novel.  I thought it was pretty damn good and I urge you to get hold of a copy and read.  I really want to hear what others think of this book.

Thanks Em....

Weekend Ramblings

Have just finished watching my weekly glitz with Dancing on Ice which gets more and more raucous so once more I had my remote to hand and could block out all the screaming and yelling that goes on.  One 'celebrity' fell over this week and broke his ankle and had to withdraw from the show. Well, never seen anything like it, he was in tears, his partners was in tears, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean were in tears, not a dry eye in the house.  I began to think I had wandered into a lunatic asylum.  Peace and quiet in a few mins with Lark Rise and wallow.

Finished reading two Lake District mysteries which I have posted about and enjoyed and then slap bang into another book, sent to me by Snow Books, which I simply loved and found I could not put down, more of that tomorrow and then started the latest Margaret Forster which has just come out in paperback, and once more am gripped by this author's writing which I admire hugely.

So a pretty laid back weekend.  On Saturday morning my car went into the garage for repair after somebody, I know not who, scraped the side of my lovely Nissan and not only took quite a bit of paintwork off, but also left a dent.  This was done in the car park of my block of flats when we had quite a lot of visitors before Christmas.  No sign of Christmas cheer, no note, no nothing.  I am extremely cross.

I have been given a courtesy car for the week, a Vauxhall Corsa, which seems to drive very heavy after my nippy Niss and I took it out for a drive to get the hang of it.  I shall only be using it to get me to and from the station so no worries but thought I had better try it out and just as well I did because I could not find out how to turn the lights on.  Now this is a worry as I leave home in the dark and come back in the dark so would be at a slight disadvantageous if I couldn't light my way. Tried every button, pushed every knob. Nada.  Got online to see if there was a handbook, nothing in the car at all, still could find nothing so in the end rang up the Vauxhall help centre.  I am pretty sure that they must get far dafter calls than mine, but I did feel a bit of a twit saying Please can you tell me how to turn the lights on?  Fortunately, I got a lovely young girl on the phone, with the most wonderful Liverpool accent, who said 'Don't worry luv, I've got a Vauxhall Corsa and you will find the light knob ...' and then went on to explain how to sort it out. She spoke to me in a very comforting sort of way and I could almost hear her saying after the call  'Ah bless, I had this lady on the phone who didn't know how to turn her lights on'. 

Never mind, she was a sweetie and I nipped outside, followed her instructions and we have lift off.  That is a bit of relief I can tell you.

Another big decision reached this weekend as well.  I have finally decided that as I hate housework so much, I am not going to do it any more.  I don't live in squalor, far from it, but I never get the hoover out, rarely dust and polish and I am ashamed to look at the dust balls under my bed and the cobwebs lurking in the corners of my flat.  Therefore, from Wednesday this week, I have a lovely lady coming in to do my cleaning for me and I am thrilled to bits with this and must remember NOT to run around cleaning and tidying up before she arrives ...

Hope you are all having a good weekend.

Lake District Mysteries - Martin Edwards

Always good to find another detective series that I like and so I am very grateful to Martin Edwards for sending me a couple of these for me to try out. 

First of all, being set in the Lake District, an area I have visited several times, but not recently and of course now want to do again, really helps in that I have a good idea of where the stories are set.  Mentions of Kendal and Hill Top, Beatrix Potter's house at Sawrey, mean I know exactly where this particular character is at that moment.  Not saying of course that I hve to know every location of every book I read, that would be silly, but it just adds somehow.

Two good strong characters in this series:  DCI Hannah Scarlett, recent appointed head of a cold crimes unit dedicated to further research of old unsolved murders to see if any new light can be shed on them.  She views this as a demotion and being sidelined after a case she was involved in collapsed in court, but despite her reluctance Hannah is soon drawn in and deeply involved in solving the murder of young woman found dead on the Sacrifice Stone, an ancient pagan site up on one of the fells (The Coffin Trail).

In the second (The Cipher Garden), an anonymous letter is sent to the unit accusing a wife of murdering her husband years before, the culprit for which had never been found. A landscape gardener, digging trenches and hacked to death with his own scythe.  Nasty.

Hannah meets up with Daniel Kind, an Oxford lecturer and historian who, tired of his academic life moves up to live in in the Lakes with his partner Miranda, also wishing to escape from her past.  His long estranged father was a policeman and Hannah Scarlatt's senior officer and they had become close friends.  Hannah and Daniel's lives, both working and personal, begin to impinge on each other as Daniel seeks to find out more about his father, and also becomes involved in the investigations.

I enjoyed both these books very much.  I did my usual trick of casting the two main protagonists as if I was planning a film, a habit I can never break, so now don't even bother any more and, for some reason, I felt Daniel Craig would be perfect casting for Daniel Kind.  Not because of James Bond, but simply because I have seen shots of this actor in the recent Phillip Pullman film and feel in that persona, he suits this part beautifully.  Hannah has to be a bit feisty and determined, the name Scarlatt really is a give away as far as her character is concerned, somebody like Kelly Hawes would be good.

So, recommended reading if you enjoy a good mystery, both of which have a twist at the end.  In both cases, I thought they had ended up a bit neat and tidy but lo, last few pages and there was the correct answer which I had not guessed.  I shall now hunt out more of Martin's work. Please do nip over and look at his blog Do you write under your own name? and read more about his thoughts on crime writers and the genre.

And, finally, just a note that Hannah's partner is a bookshop owner and seller and lovely description of a bookshop in the Lakes complete with cafe, coffee and sumptuous cakes.  If this is based on a real life shop then I demand to know exactly where it is so I can visit next time I am up in the Lake District....

Jeeves and Wooster

Now that I have a new digital TV with inclusive box so that I don't have one of those little digithingys on the top of my set, the reception is so much better and I am watching assorted channels and surfing through what is available.  Of course, the answer is not much, with the exception of the repeats of all those wonderful series of moons ago.  I am talking about the perennial showing of the Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett as the man himself (for me he is the quintessential Holmes though others may disagree), David Suchet as Hercule Poirot which I could watch over and over again and do (still some I find to my delight I have not seen), Peter Wimsey series with lovely lovely Edward Petherdige (DVD's still shockingly expensive on Amazon otherwise I would buy the lot), Miss Marple (NOT the Geraldine McEwan series I hasten to add) and, finally, my discovery the other night of Jeeves and Wooster with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.

How did I miss watching this before?  WHY did I miss watching it before?  I think, on looking back, that this was a time when this pair were fairly ubiquitous with their series Fry and Laurie, and non stop appearances on quiz shows, talk shows etc etc and I probably thought enough was enough already. Always the same with TV, find something/somebody you like and then do them to death until public is fed up with them (as with recent costume drama, see post Too Much of a Good Thing?)

Mem;  really must stop all these parentheses I am bunging in, trouble is my mind operates at a tanget and I wander along little byways which have been brought to my notice by what I have just said and I am burbling so will stop now.

Back to Jeeves and Wooster. Found an episode on one of the digital channels and sat and watched it with ever increasing delight. I know absolutely nothing about the works of PG Wodehouse except they are many and various, though I had heard of the dreaded Aunt Agatha, but I now feel that I must seek them out.  This episode was peopled by young men about town rejoicing in the names of Steggles, Bingo and Piggy who exclaimed What Ho! at regular intervals and when spotting a glamorous young lady said What a Corker.  I was in heaven and I now intend to catch up with this series.  Better late than never say I.

While googling I came across this article by Stephen Fry written some time ago and attach it for your amusement.  I very much enjoyed reading it.

http://www.hatsharpening.com/j&w/savedlife.php

Now I need help from all those Woosterians or Jeevesonians out there.  What is the title of the first book in this series?  Do I need to read them in order or can I just dip in and out?  Also, I gather there are others, not Jeeves, in PG output and I need to know what they are as well.

So help please..

Toodle pip!

Marple or Miss Marple?

That Geraldine McEwan is to make no more Marple (whatever happened to the Miss?) episodes is the big news story of the day it would appear (OK Peter Hain has just resigned tee hee so perhaps not), but great debate has arisen about the next actress to play her with rumours of the Christie estate going for a 'younger' version.  The mind boggles. 

The only thing that would reconcile me to a future Miss Marple series, where I hope the storylines will not be mucked about, identity of the murderer will not be changed and characters from other Christie novels do not appear (Tommy and Tuppence anyone?), is the fact that the names of two wonderful Dames, ie Atkins and Dench are being mentioned.

Judi Dench as Miss Marple - now how stunning would that be?

Here is a link below to an article today which you might find interesting:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article3241131.ece?Submitted=true

I still think Joan Hickson is the only one though.

Tigger and Tigger

You will know that I had a bad time last year and was ill for a while and resigned from my last job.  I now have a new place to work and am liking it very much.  Different atmosphere all round. When I tell you that this simply gorgeous Tigger has pride of place in the office of my boss, you will understand why I am enjoying working for him...

Thomas Hardy

A lovely pile of books arrived again yesterday from OUP, including lots of World Classics and I have decided that it is time I turned my attention again to Thomas Hardy.  I do have mixed feelings about him and his output.  Loved Tess, loathed Jude. Mayor of Casterbridge great stuff, Trumpet Major boring. Poetry simply wonderful which I had to study for my O levels many moons ago and I was totally taken over

Woman much missed how you call to me, call to me,

saying that you are now not as you were

When you changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair

Can it be you I hear?? Let me view you then

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Thus I; faltering forward

Leaves around me falling

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward

And the woman calling

These poems were written about his recently deceased wife, Emma.  Tomalin says that 'this is the moment Thomas Hardy became a great poet'.  He was filled with remorse at their estrangement and 'became a lover in mourning'.  One can't help but sniff and say typical male behaviour (well I do anyway...) and pity he was not inspired by her when she was alive.  Ah well, I shall now read on to find out from the wondrous Claire Tomalin what went on in the mind of this  Victorian mustachioed gentleman. Should be good.  .

With his novels however, it is obvious that I have mixed feelings and have not yet come to grips with them and so I have selected a nice slim classic from the pile, to whit: Under the Greenwood Tree.

This was shown on tv the Christmas before last and, while I am pretty sure, from comments that I have read, that the story strays from the original, I found the story of Fancy Day (what a wonderful name) charming and delightful and am giving it a whirl.  I have ordered the DVD from Amazon and am also pulling out the Claire Tomalin biography which I was given for my birthday last year and have yet to read.  So I will be having a Hardyfest for a few weeks and will report back in due course.

Gallimaufry - Michael Quinion

"Gillimaufry - a dish made up of leftover; a miscellaneous jumble or medley"

This book is described as A Hodgepodge of our Vanishing Vocabulary and is not a book to read straight through, rather keep it by one's side to dip into every now and then, preferably with feet up and nothing to do, should that glorious state be obtainable.

Did you know that the word valet was from the Latin vassalus, a retainer which was also the origin of varlet an older title for the same function which went badly downhill in the 16th century when it came to mean a rogue or rascal (I am sure there are plenty of dastardly varlets in Shakespeare, will have to go and look them up).

Holmes and Watson were always dashing off in cabs, horse driven of course. Cab is  a contraction of cabriolet.  Later on they dashed off in a hansom instead.  Apparently this was invented by the man who designed Birmingham Town Hall, Joseph Hansom.  Now how many of you knew that?  I didn't.  He patented his safety cab but didn't make much money out of his invention and the building of the town hall bankrupted him.  So there you go.

We also learn all about sailor's clothing. Canvas was used but the classic clothing fabric was duck (Dutch doek, which is related to German Tuch, cloth).  When the weather got bad sailors wore jackets called fearnought, so called as the material was also used to protect the doors to the powder magazine and, finally, nankeen, a yellowish cotton cloth used for trousers with its name coming from the Chinese city of Nanking.

Now, I could go on and on with an endless list of the quirky, amusing, witty and sometimes quite amazing nuggets of information in this lovely little book, but I won't otherwise I would be here all day.  Suffice it to say, reading this will be a strong test of the patience and love of your mother/father/lover/husband etc as you will be saying 'Gosh, did you know that....' at wearisome intervals as you come across another piece of information that you simply have to impart, but my advice is not to push your luck.

Worth remembering the origins of a few choice items though to bring out at dinner parties and stun people with your knowledge of trivia.  I would recommend remembering the origins of floggets, closh, caterbrawl and saggar-maker's bottom knockers......