Wool gathering

Little to report. I owe too many e-mails, stocks are running low, there are still piles of leaves to rake in the garden, and in general I have left undone those things I ought to have done etc and there is no health in me. But we have lit the second fire of the winter, a warm dog and warm sofa is beckoning, the world is filled with woe but home is good, though it seems less important where it is.

I was asked what I thought about when knitting. It's rather hard to say; sometimes about the other things I ought to be up and doing instead of knitting, sometimes what I'm watching or listening to at the time. Just lately it's been this serialisation of this book, about girls and women acquiring the power to electrocute people at will. It's a bit good but I get the impression reading the review that the serialisation misses out quite a bit.

In fact I rather like this passage from Rose Tremain's Music and Silence (probably more my scene that speculative post-feminist dystopias really) set in 17th century Denmark, about the act of knitting, which I have posted here before but I don't suppose anyone remembers:

Queen Sophie, when she was young ... loved to be rowed in a little boat to this island and there sit in the sunshine and indulge in her secret passion for knitting.  This activity had been proscribed throughout the land as tending to induce in women an idle trance of mind, in which their proper thoughts would fly away and be replaced by fancy.  Men called this state 'wool gathering'.  That the wool itself could be fashioned into useful articles of haberdashery such as stockings or night bonnets made them no less superstitiously afraid of the knitting craze.  They believed that any knitted night bonnet might contain among its millions of stitches the longings of their wives that they could never satisfy and which in consequence would give them nightmares of the darkest kind.  The knitted stockings they feared yet more completely as the probable instruments of their own enfeeblement.  They imagined their feet becoming swollen and all the muscles of their legs beginning to grow weak.

'Wool gathering' seems like a good description of not only what is going on in my head when knitting but in my life much of the time. Could be worse.

(Old photo, again, posted before.)

'I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day...'

Walking back through the November twilight, waved at my 95 year old friend at his window, it's a little cold these days for him to lean on the gate to chat. I pulled a sprig of bay leaves from his tree to add one to tonight's dinner; we have them in our garden but I wanted them there and then. I feel reluctant to take our late walk these dwindling afternoons, and yet when I do I'm always glad of it, the evening gentle, redolent, somewhat melancholy, full of low light and good smells for a dog, and we always walk further than I think we will.

I remembered a bit in 'Diana of the Crossways', a book I read a couple of chapters of for Librivox, and which I found a trial. I must get back to recording for Librivox, and walking dogs for the SPA, and other socially useful activities. Diana and Redworth return from the Crossways, she unwillingly having had her flight from disgrace forestalled, through a November evening, and she says that now she understands now why he always takes his holidays in November, which pleases him because she has not only remembered but also understood a detail of his life. A nice detail of a tedious book remembered vividly. That sometimes happens.

This has been going through my head lately.

(Worth hanging around on Youtube afterwards to hear other selected Paul Simon stuff: 'Slip sliding away', 'Loves me like a rock', 'Me and Julio' etc, I remembered Az singing that one to me, and other things.)

Bonfire of the Vanities - books

Avus's recent post about discarding books, and his daughter hhb's helping with some of the difficulties of this by re-homing them on beautiful new bookshelves, and how e-book reading has come to fill a different role in his reading life, and encouraged him to explore different writers, struck some chords. We've got rid of a great number of books this summer; it hasn't always been easy, but it has been thought-provoking and generally fairly liberating. Detachment again.

I've come to the conclusion there's rather a lot of precious nonsense talked about Books. I've probably talked quite a bit of it myself at one time or another, and may well be about to again.

Dale said lately one of the things he's had to let go of is his own idea of himself as a well-read person. I too used to consider myself so, and enjoyed the epithet as a compliment sometimes, but lately I've come to mistrust it. I'm aware also that, what with blogging at one time, and browsing around on the internet generally, or knitting, or walking the dog, or watching fairly lightweight telly for the sake of companionship with Tom (and more knitting time) or whatever other interest I might currently be following, and also with my own loss, with age, of patience and staying power for reading matter, I'm no longer a great reader. I have a reasonable catalogue of stuff read and remembered, and I'm glad of it, but it's not such an essential part of who I am now.

I've also come to see that owning and having read a large number of books does not, in itself, make you a serious and cultured person anyway, any more than travel necessarily broadens the mind. I have one older acquaintance, who hauls her battered old library around with her from one move to the next, sometimes adding haphazardly to it, priding herself on never throwing one out and cramming them into smaller and smaller accommodation so her living space is so cluttered you want to scream (she has a hoarding problem anyway). She is, frankly, shallow, casually prejudiced and not very clever (with friends like me...), in spite of how well-read she appears to be, and in spite of the pretentious way in which she says 'Oh but I couldn't be without my books!' or expresses disdain for e-readers because 'There is simply nothing like turning the pages of a real book!' On the other hand, our young sculptor friend, for example, who has too much energy and need to be doing to bother much with reading, is no less deep-minded and cultured for all that, far from it.

E-readers can be cover for those who don't want to give away the less than edifying nature of their reading tastes (50 shades etc) but they are also a good antidote to books as vanity. It's gratifying to be seen to have a lot of books, showing off your taste in reading, books do furnish a room, look at me, I'm a reading person! etc etc. But who knows what you've got on your Kindle, could be Proust, could be Mills and Boon, a slim grey electronic device can't brag or pose - despite the ridiculously overambitious stuff most of us collect on them, because hey, it's out of copyright and free! (Or nearly) Edmund Burke anyone? The Complete Henry James for just two quid? Michelet, in French? What's your bit of pretentious Kindle vanity? But at least your only mostly pretending to yourself.

There are many things, though, I'm really pleased to have on Kindle, and which, like Avus, it's encouraged me to read when I might not otherwise have done, since I don't have to find shelf room for them; the Patrick O'Brian canon, which I'm working my way through in fits and starts - I know it's time to get the next one when I find myself struggling with something else and thinking 'why am I reading this when I could be reading about Aubrey and Maturin? - are so much nicer to have stored electronically, always to hand, than taking up a whole great shelf of physical space in a bookcase. I weakened with one, baulking at paying the e-book price when I could get a second hand copy for a penny plus postage - and now I regret it, the lone scruffy paperback - even with the beautiful Geoff Hunt cover painting - floating about when it should be in the set with the others on the device.

It is true that some types of book don't really work on the e-reader: poetry isn't great (line lengths etc), though I do read some there, or a lot of non-fiction or reference, anything with pictures, obviously, anything in fact you need to dip into, move back and forth in, get your fingers in amongst the pages of, browse randomly. Indeed, it's best for more traditional fiction with a fairly linear narrative, I find, even some modern novels with unconventional structures which you need to shuffle about in can be better in good old codex form, though the search function on the e-reader can be handy too, and the built in dictionaries are great, even help me to read a bit of French there.

Yet to make too much on the whole cult of the 'real' book as object is only a short step from the vulgarity (far be it from me to be judgemental...) of Reader's Digest, and their upmarket doppelganger the Folio Society*, 'luxury' 'collectable' 'sumptuously bound and presented' editions, all tooled and hefty, supposedly there to look good and decorate one's shelves, to satisfy, again, some kind of vanity,. It should be the text itself that counts, not the vehicle for it.

Mistake me not, I do recognise the beauty of a truly well-made book, and many old books are lovely objects, I'm as much of an admirer as the next person of sturdy cloth bindings, good creamy paper that doesn't yellow, nice old fonts and printer's flowers and all that. Even a good quality paperback can be a very pleasant thing, but books aren't treasures any more, they are cheap, disposable and don't last. Nothing wrong with that, but dragging them round as a badge of our superiority, or like a trail of scruffy, lame old wrinkled retainers who've seen better days but there's some perceived sense of mutual obligation between them and us is, I think, a mistake. I looked at my old paperback novels I've kept from as far back as the seventies and eighties, and saw that they are simply no longer of any real practical use; the spines threaten to crack and lose pages, the paper is yellowed and brittle, the print looks cramped and uninviting. In the generally unlikely event of my wanting to revisit and reread them, I'd be far better off getting them as e-books, which mostly should be possible.

For that's another thing. Books that were deeply, life-changingly important to me in my twenties, say, simply no longer are. Sorry, but Doris Lessing seems more and more to me a profoundly humourless, self-important writer, whose take on feminism was downbeat and discouraging to say the least, her attitudes to sex depressingly heteronormative (I got that from our grand-daughter, good eh?) to the point of Lawrentian, and to mental illness surely often unhelpful, and whose later vision of the destiny and purpose of humankind was almost laughably wrong and a little too close for comfort to Erich von Daniken. To the dechetterie with her!

Even the shelf of chunky out-of-copyright Wordsworth Classics, which Tom got me the Christmas before we came to France, and which I worked through in the first hard, hard early days here - Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, Villette, The Riddle of the Sands, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc fond though I am of the memory, can go. They are easier to read as e-books, available for free, and the memories are not dependent on their physical presence, which goes, of course, for so much of the stuff to which we shackle ourselves for sentimental reasons.

That said, there are many books I've not been able to part with. I was barely able to get rid of any of the poetry, even the ones I don't much care for I find I have a mawkish attachment to, almost a sense of responsibility - who will take them in, no one will want them, where will they shelter oh where will they sleep? It doesn't help that there's nowhere really to send second hand books with any certainty they could be found and appreciated by anyone; Emmaus does have an English language section, and a lot went there, but they're overwhelmed with books anyway, I gather. The dechetterie has started a book drop, from which they are distributed to schools and libraries, and they said they accepted English language too. But this concern for their afterlife, as Tom pointed out, is a distraction, we need to simply leave them at on the doorstep and forget them. Still, there are those whose connections with people,times and places are simply too important to let them go; detachment's one thing, ripping your heart out is not required.

A Paris food blogger I follow, living in very restricted space so frequent decluttering is essential, photographs her books for the memory or the record when she turns them out. We considered this but didn't do it, it threatened to hamper the action, and we didn't really see the point. One of my knitting buddies told of how her son-in-law has used old books as insulation in his roof, visible, I think, but not really accessible. Tom says that's one way to have very erudite mice.


* here I must plead guilty to having fallen for the Folio Society con once,a long time ago, long before the internet, when we were actually quite starved of reading matter in English, a state which seems incredible now. They were offering some good reference books as bait, a Brewer's Phrase and Fable I still have and like to keep in book form, and some other things. But the overpriced and overweight 'Stones of Venice'  in its stupid box has gone and good riddance.

Scapes, Balbec, octopods

Three things which have brought much pleasure.

Leek scapes. Our retired farmer usually brings me a bunch of leek plants late in the summer, which he has grown from seed and has spare of. I've usually got a bed free for them by that time, the broad bean patch is good having been well tilled and nitrogen-fixed, so they're a useful and appreciated resource through the winter. This last lot I must have planted at the right phase of the moon or something, as they grew well, stayed rust-free and went on well into spring without bolting. However, they did start throwing out these rather elegant flower buds eventually. At the back of my mind was the idea that perhaps these were usable, so I looked them up, found various suggestions, and that they are known as scapes, so I threw one into the soup one evening as a test, and found that it was good, so gathered a whole bunch and steamed them on their own.

I'd long heard about leeks being known as poor man's asparagus, but not fully understood why. I've had good results steaming the small ones and dressing them with vinaigrette (one made with hazelnut oil with a few toasted chopped hazels on top is pretty sublime), but these flower heads really do have a texture and flavour which easily rivals asparagus. It would be well worthwhile to let the plants bolt every year; in fact it would almost be worthwhile just to be able to use the word 'scapes'.

~

Just finished the second of Patrick O-Brian's Aubrey Maturin series, Post-Captain, now fully hooked, and glad to know that, if I'm spared (as my granny used to say) I have the rest of my life for the remaining eighteen and a half. I enjoyed the first very much but found I couldn't always quite see the ships for the rigging. The third is on order, which posed a small dilemma as I actually find I especially enjoy reading them on Kindle, where somehow I obtained the first two for some kind of promo-price, because the on-board dictionary, though frequently confounded by some of the more technical sea-going vocabulary, is useful - I rarely, I can say without bragging, need a dictionary when reading novels, but P O'B is an exception, - as is the facility to search for previous references. However, the Kindle prices from now on are more than I'm prepared to pay for an e-books when I can buy second hand more cheaply, so print on paper it is.

Anyway, one small thing that made me almost squeal with self-satisfied joy was when, late in the novel, seeking a target on the French coast on which to exercise the Lively's guns, Aubrey decides to lay waste to the small battery just off 'the little port of Balbec'. Unlike most of the French locations mentioned, Balbec does not in fact exist, save in the pages of Proust, where it is the chic seaside town where Marcel goes with his grandmother, and falls in love with Albertine, among other things. Not only is it gratifying to one's vanity to spot such an arch kind of literary joke, but I also rather enjoy the conundrum of Balbec's existing in Napoleonic times as a little fishing port, then a hundred years later in Proust's time having grown into a famous resort, while O'Brian re-conjures it eighty years on from that as it was a hundred years before... etc etc. You don't really need science fiction to play about with the space-time continuum, any fiction can do it.

(This observation has also enabled me to help rekindle momentarily, and gain some small kudos among, a small Ravelry discussion group of formidable women amongst whom I am a mere tyro, who have put down their knitting mostly to read the entire canon of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, sometimes more than once. The group calls itself 'The Lesser of Two Needles')    

~

Knitting: Sumer is icumen in, and this tends to mean either cotton knitting, which I have some of on the go but which you can quickly tire of, as can the tendons, or socks, which are light and portable. A belated present for my old friend Glenn, who when he visited with partner and dogs earlier this year, was bearing a very delicate and interesting small tattoo of an octopus, which he had copied from an ancient Greek vase painting, on his upper arm. This put me in mind of the time, some twenty-five years ago, when he and I were traipsing round the Peloponnese in the tracks of Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and we lodged for some days (the next bus out was the other side of the weekend) in a small coastal hotel, and every evening we asked the middle-aged spinster daughter of the house what was for dinner, and she showed us the pots in the kitchen, and every night she showed us the same pot of stewed 'octopoooos', so that by the third night octopus tentacles and the suckers on them had parted company and the latter were floating about on the top.

So, octopods being something of a theme, I made him these socks, for a biggish birthday, a bit late.

They are based on this pattern, but only really the chart and the general style, the helix knitting being somewhat beyond me. In spite of being quite fine wool, and the fairly tight stranded knitting, they came out rather large (they're on my feet in the second photo), but he says he has been wearing them as slipper socks, and will try them inside wellingtons too.

Foot update, book in the post, February collage

Uncertain whether I shouldn't be doing more about The Foot, but disinclined to drag The Patient off to doctors or x-ray clinics, since clearly it was better when rested and kept on the horizontal or slightly above, I decided on the Monday to consult our lovely pharmacy, a thriving and lively place. The Patient himself hit on the rather intelligent idea of taking a photo of the extremity in question and showing it to them. I shall spare sharing the actual images here. The pretty dark haired assistant pharmacist, who was wearing a beautiful dark blue handknit cowl, listened carefully, winced and grimaced at appropriate moments of the narrative, responded enthusiastically to the photographic evidence, and told me we had done all the right things, that there was indeed little to be done about a broken toe, that an x-ray would only confirm what we already knew, and that it should be better in ten days to three weeks. The only additional recommendation was an ice pack three times a day regardless of The Patient's objections ('Pas de glaçons sur mon pied!' I mimicked, with the invisible translation switched on retrospectively), and free-and-for-nuffink they supplied us with a set of cannes anglaises for as long as needed.

After a few days of The Patient lugubriously insisting that it was never going to get well, he is now moving much better and getting about in the house without the aid of the cannes, so now we're back on track, though I had to bring in the wood and take out the rubbish myself for a while.

~

Another nice and flattering surprise in the post.

As I mentioned before, Charles Davis asked for the photo a few weeks ago, but he said it would only be for an e-book, so I was very pleased be given a proof copy of it in print, not only to gratify my vanity about the photo but because I was struggling to read it in the PDF format on my old-fashioned grey-faced Kindle.

Charles is dissatisfied with and rather cast down about the book, which I know he's been working on for quite a while, he says it's irretrievably flawed. Initially he didn't expect to have it in print at all, but it is now available, very reasonably, from an independent publishing source via Amazon. So far, his deprecation of it notwithstanding, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. It's set on the Mont St Michel in the early seventeenth century and described as ' a ludibrium or capricious game, a classic adventure story informed by riddles, myths and conspiracies', and though it is certainly something of a colourful and mischievous romp, and will, according to the rather spoilerish blurb on Amazon, get even more lurid, it's also typically full of fascinating, unexplored corners of history, with alchemy and threads of gnosticism and such like, undercurrents of ideas and counter-history flowing in and out like the partially hidden and deceptive currents and streams in the sands around the Mont (which was why he wanted the photo, though that wasn't taken there but some way further west into Brittany). I do like exploring these obscure backwaters of history and ideas and belief very much, but so often fiction that uses them is just unreadable, badly written, portentous rubbish. Charles' writing though is so classy, sharp and witty and ironic, his dialogue crisp and satisfying, his characters likeable and solid, his research and learning, though worn quite lightly, so meticulous and informed with an awful lot of legwork (literally, he's a world class walker and his bread-and-butter writing is walking guides), it seems a great shame he's not better appreciated. 

'You do not take literature seriously, Dom Robert.'

'On the contrary, I take it so seriously that I am persuaded that the highest literature is also the most lighthearted, floating in the ether while the weighty tomes of moralists slough aobut at their authors' feet before sinking without trace. Read Rabelais, read Cervantes. Wisdom weighs lighter than folly.'

[Pilgrim of Love, Charles Davis.]

~

Time for a belated collage for the month of February.

1. Early daffodils up the road, always among the first I see.
2. Mending.
3. Some 'flowers' for the guest room, hebes and hellebores, whiteish and purple the only actual blooms, otherwise rosehips, bay and acanthus leaves, dogwood seed heads.
4. Doggies on the beach.
5. Beautiful Milly.
6. Seashells collected and left on the windowsill, they're still there.
7. Jantien's exhibition. Our friend Jantien Kahn is doing another residency at la Résidence in Moncontour, this time with her partner Jessie Ehlhart (website in Dutch), who is using the opportunity to develop her work as a musician and sound artist. They too, like our other visitors, have been brave birds of passage, appearing on out doorstep against the season and cheerfully bringing late winter/early spring cheer and doing our hearts good. I'll try to get a post done about their opening night, though it was a few weeks ago now...
8. La Polyclinique where Tom had his eyes done. It really is a very pleasant building, full of light and giving out onto sweeping views, about a central well,
9. which has this cheerful mural, featuring the rather unlikely scenario of seagoing fishing boats on the nearby lac de Guerledan.
10. Still bare trees outside the windows, shining with rain, which I didn't quite capture, but the little yellow orb of flare charmed me somewhat.
11. Grey hat.
12. Wet muddy field.

Now March marches on, and we sat outside in the garden for an hour or two today, though it's good to come in to the fire too.

Books again

One or two posts elsewhere,  Zhoen pondering the matter of writing in books, library or otherwise, comments left on the last post when I featured the books I had at Christmas, and conversations, started me looking back over certain earlier reading experiences, and thinking about the meaning and value we give books as both concrete and abstract things. Stella too, has been writing about culling things, possessions generally, then books in particular. She dwells on the connections reading creates for us, with other people and with our own history. She mentions H is for Hawk, and how it will connect her with me since she came across it here, which is nice. My finding that book was already part of a long series of occurrences of synchronicity, prompted and giving rise to other memories in turn.

I suppose I tend to be on the lookout for things about falconry. Like Helen Macdonald, the book's author, from my teenage years I wanted to be a falconer. The wish faded, there was little opportunity to explore it hands-on at the time, and the extensive reading and research I made showed me that it would probably demand more time, money, grit, heartbreak and a stronger stomach than I would likely ever be able to manage, but I still love the subject, and very much enjoyed our day at Fauconnerie Bretagne a couple of years ago. One of the first books I found on the subject, and one of the first adult books I remember buying for myself, at the age of about thirteen at a school book fair, I think, was TH White's The Goshawk. This has been on my bookshelves ever since, becoming so familiar that, slender and plain-spined as it is, I had largely ceased to notice it, and even wondered if it were still there. But there it was, between Le Grand Meaulnes and the Mary Renaults, and I was happy about that, not only that I still had it but because of the company it was keeping. My ordering of books on shelves is idiosyncratic and fairly fluid and has developed organically, and I don't necessarily remember exactly where things are, but it is important to me, so when lack of space, appropriate height of shelves, additions which expand certain groups that need to be kept together, and my own acts of culling necessitate changes that force certain volumes into places alongside others where I don't really think they belong, it bothers me a bit.

At about the same time as, or just before, I must have read a review of H is for Hawk, the Sunday afternoon radio dramatisation was of TH White's The Once and Future King. It was quite a good one, using bits of White's own Book of Merlin coda as a device to make the narrative retrospective and non-linear, which meant that the darkening heaviness of story's progress could be lightened and enlightened from time to time by some of the episodes from the first volume. I'm sorry for people who haven't read the book, that the label of 'fantasy novel' might put them off. Not that I want to run down fantasy novels anyway, but I just can't think of it as one. I suppose if I had to I'd describe it as a kind of psychological novel, but on an epic, historical, mythic scale, but also the inward broodings of a brilliant, sad, bitter, hurt, rather twisted man. Not sure if I'm selling it to you yet. It's about love as weakness, evil as power, about betrayal and cruelty, good people doing bad things and bad people doing worse ones, about national and personal mythmaking, and most of all for me it's about terrible, painful loss of innocence.

There's a lot of falconry throughout The Once and Future King, but especially in the first volume The Sword in the Stone, along with many other birds and animals and animistic nature and colour and magic and jokes galore, including lots of ironic anachronism generated from the conceit that Merlin was born and lived backwards through time, an idea entirely White's invention, but which took off so well that many people think it is an original part of the Arthurian myth. There is fun and education and wisdom - I still love the Badger's Dissertation as one of the most satisfying of creation stories - a few sad and worrying moments and a few early intimations of later themes, but overall a completely delightful, joyous, appropriate children's book.  I read it one summer when I was about twelve, I think. I had a comfortable and sheltered childhood and was undergoing an old-fashioned though serious education; I was not a precocious reader, and mostly was still cheerfully consuming Monica Edwards and Arthur Ransome, stories of birds and animals and tomboyish adventure and old legends were my meat and drink. At the end of The Sword in the Stone I was thrilled, I knew this was more substantial fare and wanted more, so I announced I would read the rest of the work. My brother, three years my senior and always more of an intellectual heavyweight, looked somewhat doubtful and warned me that I wouldn't find it as pleasant, which of course made me think he was patronising me and I had to rise to the challenge.

The second volume, The Queen of Air and Darkness, is fairly short, and I did get through it. But the blow to the solar plexus which the two episodes of Morgause's evil which open and close the volume delivered remain with me still. I can remember sitting up in bed with the sick knowledge that I couldn't un-read it. In the first, she boils a cat - 'both woman and cat had black hair and blue eyes' - alive, in some detail, on a whim to make an invisibility charm. The charm fails and she loses interest, throwing out the cauldron of water, skin fur and bones out of the window. This shocked and disgusted me, yet I persevered, and somehow her seduction of Arthur at the end - by means, perhaps, of another charm, a ribbon of skin carefully cut from around the outline of the corpse of a dead soldier - had a deeper and more poignant impact. Arthur, though somewhat blooded and battle hardened by this time, is still the open, energetic, kind-hearted, well-intentioned boy of the first volume, an innocent. Merlin, who has the powers of magic and foresight to protect from and avert evil, for a number of reasons - whether a kind of time-travel directive, the requirement that Arthur and others, should work things out for themselves, simple absent-mindedness or the enchantment (not altogether unwelcome) of his own sorceress Nimuë - cannot or does not intervene. Arthur doesn't know who she is or what he's doing, or what the ultimate cascade of consequences will be, but as TH White concludes, innocence is not enough.

Well he certainly helped me offload quite a bit of mine. But it wasn't the first time this had happened. At a similar kind of cognitive point, when I was beginning to choose and read independently at about seven or eight, there were some little softback collections at pocket money prices that I liked very much as objects, they were small and chunky and had bright, slightly folk-art kind of covers, those for the younger readers had red spines and those for rather older ones dark blue. I'd worked through the red ones and reckoned I was ready for the blue. This turned out to be a collection of stories including Bluebeard, a story my evidently sanitised education in fairy tales so far had omitted to incorporate. As I recall it, the details of the contents of the bloody chamber were not spared. Again, I remember where I was, in the back seat of our estate car on a shopping trip, maybe left there with my brother with our books while our parents finished the shopping, as happened quite frequently in those days. I remember closing the book in horror and not picking it up again. Neither then though, or with the TH White, did I tell anyone about what I'd read and how it had affected me, though I may have muttered something to my brother about 'I see what you meant.' I don't quite know why not; a sense of not wanting to share the distress, protecting my elders from something nasty or a kind of fear that I might get into trouble for messing with nasty things myself, pride, that I ought really to be able to cope with difficult stuff for myself, but also perhaps a sense that what happened between me and my books was my private affair, and a knowledge, underneath, that there was in fact nothing that could be said that would make me feel better; 'it's only a story' wouldn't wash with me, then or now - as if that makes it any less real!

And I don't quite know, in these times when children are both exposed to all kinds of horrors, real and fictive, which make these mild trauma seem very small beer, and yet are also overprotected and overseen and fretted about, so that a child psychology book I've read deplores the Saint Nicholas tradition as trying frighten children into good behaviour and damaging them terribly, and that reading AA Milne's 'James James Morrison Morrison' could create serious anxiety in them, or when a mother I knew, still reading (the early volumes of) Harry Potter aloud to her thirteen year old, used to make off the cuff deletions of things she thought would distress or frighten her, quite how things should be.

Anyway. I don't have a copy of the blue-backed Bluebeard book, in fact I have very few books left from childhood, presumably it was either passed on to jumble or left in the attic of my childhood home when my parents moved, along with all kinds of other put-away childish things to be someone else's problem, or conceivably, in the case of some of the objects, rare collector's items. That's one way to deal with your unwanted clutter. Neither to I have The Once and Future King, though I did until recently. I think the first one I had was a library book, as many of the books we read were. We owned a lot of books, but it wasn't considered needful to do so, and many of those I remember most vividly, in terms of their content and what they looked and felt like, were from the library (and no, we certainly never wrote in them!). It took me many years to read it all, in fact, the long anguish, sordid betrayal, compromise, cruelty and conspiracy of the four-cornered adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere and the revenge of the Orkney clan were also difficult to work through in a different way, but for all that it has been my constant and much loved companion for most of my life. I often wondered about its author, and the consciousness and personality which created it, so humane and imaginative and so sad and bitter, so when I heard about H is for Hawk I was doubly interested.

The copy of it I owned, for at least thirty years, was a paperback which I bought for my first serious boyfriend when I was seventeen, it had a not-too-embarrassing dedication inside the cover, with a date, so I know how old I was, in my very neat small, pointy, just post-childish handwriting. Not quite sure why; he had courted me with a gift of The Mabinogion so perhaps I thought Arthurian might interest him, perhaps it did, perhaps there was something subliminal going on!  I ended up keeping it anyway when we went our separate ways. It began to fall apart, worse than most paperbacks, quite early; another brother borrowed it and said he had a very active relationship with it, in terms of becoming quite obsessive about the content, making notes etc, while wrestling to try to keep the pages in any kind of workable order. Finally, not very long ago, I threw it away completely, and though it was odd to put a book in the bin, especially such a familiar one, I did so without regret; it was unreadable and I can always download it to the Kindle if I do want to read it again, though I feel I probably won't need to.

I still have The Goshawk though, with its ring marked cover and scuffed edgesand would be sorry to part with that. I might read it again too, before or after H is for Hawk, or alongside.

The other book in the picture, Bird of Jove, is also falconry related, but part of another story, a shorter and lighter one, which I'll get onto later.

'The general balm the'hydroptique earth hath drank...'

- St Lucy's day. The yellowed copy of the Penguin Metaphysical Poets, passed down from my sister Alison, via my brother Phil, I think. I can't always tell whose writing it is in the margins with the rather lame, A-level notes, mine or theirs.

As often, a remarkably light-filled day, the house filled with sun till it went down behind Victor's barn some time between four and five. 

As always, it was my birthday yesterday. It rained most of the day, so though we went out we didn't walk, but I did today, just from home,

and a number of wonderful and delicious, small but perfectly formed, things have happened, many of them happenstantial and unlooked for, so I will post about them over the next few days.

Cheerful things on winter days

Over the coffee cups:

There are worse ways to linger over the breakfast table. I'm currently rather taken with toning stripes; those two blues are somewhat more different than they appear. They're more fingerless mittens for Jantien's partner Jessie (here are Jantien's finished carmine pink mitts).

And then it's that time of year again, bickering our way through the Christmas card list. It's all right really, we got Lifeboat ones when we were in Jersey, and we keep it sensible, are seldom able to reduce the number much but it's perfectly manageable, we aren't such excessively friended people as to have hundreds to remind that we're still alive every year. 

I broke the back of it today and got the overseas ones off all save the few that go in parcels. I intended to go out and do a bit of shopping for these and other things, but then decided against, since insomnia struck at 4 am, and the sofa downstairs, my big blue blanket, a glass of warm milk with a dash of orgeat and Aubrey and Maturin were beckoning. Life and hours are so leisured these workless winter days, I can easily afford this kind of broken sleep, and in truth rather enjoy it, as it's more or less the only time I allow myself to read and only to read, but it does leave me a bit bleary and disordered and out of sync. Also I thought the O'Brian would lull me into somnolence, lapped by the waves and lost in the impenetrably rich texture of detail and terminology and nothing much happening but exercises, with the men's characters drawn bit by bit in bold yet elliptical strokes, as it has gone on for nearly a third of the book. But then all of a sudden it got exciting with an Algerine galley attacking a Norwegian cat, and quite a bit of blood and thunder and the promise and disappointment of prize money, so it kept me awake longer than I meant it to. 

~

Talking of cats, I got out of the car in the drive the other day and perceived I was being watched.

A little face looking from the thuja hedge.

Possibly birding but more likely just exploring. I called Tom round and he enquired if she were stuck,

but she said she was OK, and gave his hand a quick pat and a rub with her head before climbing down. Don't know whose she is, she's friendly and seems happy and cared for, but we agreed we shouldn't invite her in.

~

Lastly, they showed this again in full on telly today, I do like it so much, be it ever so kitsch and camp and tacky and I'll probably be raided by the Taste Squad:

As well as to mark the launch of BBC Music, it's a Children in Need fundraiser thing, it seems, though I didn't know and don't actually follow that. And I'm so far from au courant I don't have a clue who many of the musicians are in any of the genres, but it's nice to see some familiar faces and there's a list of all of them as they appear here.

~

Tom's ophthalmology appointment tomorrow, so must needs find out where we're actually going.

Meditations on moorland

Wendy recently posted a fine meditation on the psychology of landscape and people's response to a moorland, which more often than not an uncomfortable one: 'its very openness mistrusted for a lack of delineation and directive patterns'.

I was expecting myself to struggle more with a sense of fear and hostility to the landscape of the Monts d'Arrée, but I was curious to find out.  Wendy points out that the kind of person to whom the emptiness of moorland does appeal is 'not necessarily the clichéd solitary spirit of romantic literature'. In fact the one of the people who encouraged me to go there was my knitting buddy Soize, with her busy small town life and all its networks, her lively family, funny dog and hobby 2CV, but whose eyes kindled when she told me how she loved the desert landscape of the Monts, as did those of her cherubic twins when they showed me the photo album they'd put together of the trip and told me with glee that it was 'the Gates of Hell!'

And when I came to walk in that landscape, it was like a return, and I remembered that in fact I had loved moorland as a child, from chasing ponies on Dartmoor and Exmoor, to marvelling at the slopes of the Yorkshire moors (hoping vainly to see a merlin), to falling in love with the uplands of the Long Mynde in Shropshire on what turned out to be a sad family holiday (which I wrote about here, a long time ago).

Childhood literature fostered this rather, many of the adventure and pony books I remember reading (I was not a precocious reader, when I was a child I read as a child, so the menace and melancholy of Wuthering Heights, Hardy's Heath, and even Jamaica Inn I didn't come to till I was older) featured moorland as exciting and full of adventurous possibility, and somewhere often to which the characters ascended at epiphanic or transitional points of the narrative. I remember a description in (I think) an Arthur Ransome story where the moor is described as like a ragged counterpane thrown over the skeleton of the earth, with the rocks as bones showing through in the threadbare places, and a passage in a pre-war pony book, Jerry the Story of an Exmoor Pony (a hand-me-down from who knows when which I held in such nostalgia that I recently sought out and bought an old copy on-line) where the eponymous equine and his young rider follow a stag hunt, to a high and desolate part of upland where 'the moor looked wild and, even at this time of year, rather stern.  Colourless too, for there was very little heather, only crisp wiry grass. The very sheep looked different...' Everyone the boy knows has been left behind, including his father who has tired earlier with an injury,  he is among strangers.  A sudden storm washes the landscape, the hunt is abandoned, then the stag appears, to the boy's eyes only, from a thicket, but he says nothing, allowing its escape.  Yes, yes, I don't like bloodsports either but that's kind of mythic, isn't it?

No stags where we were in the Monts, that I know of, or even many sheep, though the last wolf survived there until 1906, but it is good horse country; we saw more evidence of horse riding and pony trekking her than elsewhere we've been in France.

For me though, much of the appeal of moorland, I think, is the juxtaposition of vast to small, macro to micro, the wide horizons and long views,

set against the fine detail of the flora and fauna and stone, detail which would be lost in a mass in a lusher landscape,

the counterpane may be threadbare, but it is nevertheless finely bejewelled and embroidered.  Much of my delight in the heathlands I discovered as a child was in the rich texture of the heather and in finding the succulent tiny jewels of bilberries, though it was too early for those now, in fact moorland comes into its full beauty perhaps in late summer, when more fertile country is often overblown and past its best.

On such an open and austere canvas, marks and lines, whether natural or man-made

acquire drama and power, indeed, human constructions and objects become quickly weathered into abstracts and emblems:  

It's worth rediscovering the moor.

~

(I should have got this post done a while ago, I've some excuse to plead that I've just been knocked over by some unpleasant flu type thing and have only just been able to face screen and keyboard.  I have more photos of the trip to post, and will try to do so before they are completely out-of-date!)

Wendy's Monts d'Arrée

A rather wonderful thing happened when we got to the Troglogîte.

Wendy Mewes is my go-to writer when I want to know anything about Brittany, especially Finistère, and something of an all-round hero.  She lives very close to where we stayed, but she does guided walks and researches and writes about the whole region,and keeps a blog about her activities here. She is a power-house of information and knowledge, of imaginative, accessible but rigorous writing and scholarship, plus she's an indefatigable walker and loves dogs. Her first book I discovered was her History of Brittany, and it made me appreciate what it is to be a proper, trained, disciplined historian, who can assimilate and retain huge amounts of knowledge, evaluate it and present it in a form that's concise, readable and appealing. In addition, of course she's working with sources in a second language, which clearly doesn't bother her much but must make things a bit harder going, though in fact her books on Brittany are often translated from English into French.

I already had Finistère, Things to see and do at the End of the World, which covers the whole department and was giving me plenty of ideas - it's set out in fourteen scenic driving tours each rounded off with a comment with particular recommendations, pieces of advice and remarks about anything that has personal resonance or affection for Wendy herself, which is a nice touch.  When I noted on her blog that she was also bringing out a short guide especially about the Monts d'Arrée, the area where we were staying, I asked whether and how I made be able to get it for the trip, and she instantly said, though it wasn't officially out yet (it is now), that she'd drop one round at the gîte when we got there, she passed the place every day.

So within an hour or so of our arrival she came looming out of the fog, for which she apologized, with a copy, wouldn't stop since she had an awful cold and a lecture to deliver miles away in Morbihan the next day, though she did look over our shoulders and ask where Molly was, since she reads here sometimes and is a dog person (Molly was reclining comfortably on the sofa, which was suitably covered in a clean blanket and towel, I hasten to add).  She wouldn't take anything for the book and was nice about my blogging, which I took as a great compliment.  The Troglogîte people, who she introduced herself to and showed the book to before coming to find us, asked later how we knew each other, and had we met before, with that rather puzzled air that people who don't do this blogging/on-line thing tend to have about the friendly, familiar, generous relationships and contacts which it engenders.

So here a a few more long shots of the places she has helped us to explore. Thanks Wendy!

Up to Menez Mikel, the Montagne St Michel again, from near the gîte,

and from climbing it: looking west, 

south,

and east over the Lac St Michel.

And from a drive rather further west, across the Rade de Brest.

Hamburg parsley, epistemological exoticism, and a thousand colours

1: Hamburg parsley: a very poor germination of the seeds means I only have four plants to show for it, but I pulled one today and roasted it with some carrots and leek and an undersized and barely ripe butternut squash.  I've never eaten it before; it does indeed resemble, as Jane Grigson described it, 'an underprivileged parsnip', but the flavour and texture are not much like, and certainly more delicate.

2: My big brother Phil gave me a book he'd written when we met earlier in the month.  It's a GURPS role-playing game supplement on the subject of Atlantis. GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System, and in fact what big bro is best known for in this line is his collaboration with Terry Pratchett in creating the GURPS series for the Discworld books.  I am only a little the wiser as the the arcane nature of these activities, but I am already absorbed in the book, which is full of fascinating information on every possible aspect of the Lost City, from Plato through Madam Blavatsky and Jules Verne to modern submariners.  It's meticulously researched and delightfully, accessibly written, and it serves to remind me of  how we spent so much of our childhood, with Look and Learn comics and Jackdaw folders and wall charts and maps and bickering over knowing most about obscure things, and generally being pretty horrid little bookish know-it-alls, and how marvellously enriched our lives have been by it, even though neither of us, he by choice and I by aptitude or the lack of it, has ended up as conventional academics.

3: More knitting! The Lang Mille Colori I mentioned before, which Iso bought for me as a present when we had our knitting day out , I started making into a fairly narrow single rib scarf, along the lines of the famous Noro striped scarf as written down by the mighty Brooklyn Tweed.  However, and this wasn't my original idea but I can't remember whose it was so I can't credit it, instead of using two different self-striping yarns, I used two different ends of one colourway, so that instead of one end of the wool being at the start of the knitting and the other still embedded in the ball, both are left at the beginning and one runs out in a loop instead of an end, a topologically interesting proposition. Thus the broad fuzzy bands of colour are broken up into narrower stripes but only by other colours of the same wool.  I've no idea if this makes any sense at all, but this is the result:

(In fact at this point I'm using opposite ends of two different balls, but anyway, the principle is the same.) I've lately picked it up again since putting it aside in favour of other projects for other people with deadlines. I must say that knitting seems to be one of the only things I've ever taken up where I'm finishing things some time before the deadlines, which must be a good sign, though how long this situation will continue before I overreach myself I don't know.

Yarns and knitting are extraordinary for provoking memories and associations, particularly the colours involved.  The chalky hues in this wool put me in mind of a couple of ceramic items I came upon at a particular time in my life: a fragment of mediaeval floor tile preserved at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset, and a small pottery pendant in the shape of a leaping salmon, small and simply shaped but with a glaze of remarkable complexity, which I bought from a young woman on the street in Killarney.  I may one day revisit Muchelney, and even perhaps Killarney, I hope so, but the little fish pendant I left behind somewhere and won't see again.

Stripes, 3/3, Tom's scarf

Although I mostly avail myself of all the excellent free stuff on the internet, one of the unexpected joys I'm discovering about knitting  (yes, it's true, I do rather like knitting, did I not say?) is the literature of it.  I never knew!  Some of this comes across as rather smug lifestyle porn: produced from knitting cafés full of preposterously slim, glamorous people who seem to have nothing to do but sup on dainty cakes, practise yoga and pilates, hang about the edges of the film industry and create teeny-tiny bijou sweaters and jackets from sock wool (you have to be skinny and/or leisured ever to finish a sock-wool sweater that you can get into).  But the best of it, from the chatty, quirky, witty style of Elizabeth Zimmerman, who's like a really good, funny, enthusiastic blogger, giving a vivid impression of her unusual character and way of life, addressing the reader with irony and affect, quite unlike any other writing on this subject or probably any other of the period, to Nancy Bush's remarkable, scholarly, ethnographic travelogues, knitting books can be so much more than just collections of patterns.

One that I've enjoyed lately is called 'Knits Men Want' by Bruce Weinstein. As well as achieving what I regard as the almost technomagus-like feat of creating universal patterns so that you can knit the given garment for any size person in any yarn, by a kind of matrix whereby you cross-reference the number of stitches per inch with the measurements of the person concerned, he intersperses each of these with an essays and advice about what one needs to consider when knitting things for men.  He observed from his own knitting groups that women were frequently disappointed when presenting the men in their lives with lovingly made and, as they considered them, suitable gifts, only to have them unappreciated. So as a man himself and a knitter, he decided to address the situation.  The chapters have headings such as 'Rule 1:Men Can't Fake It', 'Rule 3: Men Sweat', 'Rule 5: Not All Men Are Worthy of Cashmere', 'Rule 10: When In Doubt, Make Him Something Basic', are very funny, and while somewhat hyperbolic at times, contain some useful and interesting observations.  

It has certainly made me appreciate what a good sport and loyal husband my Aussie brother was to wear the forget-me-not blue fluffy mohair sweater my sister-in-law made for him when he went on his long pilgrimage walk last year*, since other pieces of advice the writer gives, are to avoid itchy fibres ('men are babies') and stay with subdued colours ('think under the rainbow - most men want to live in Kansas, not Oz').  Bearing this in mind, when we went into the lovely wool shop in Morlaix, I picked out a nice flecky grey wool, possibly something from the soft underbelly of a yak or similar, and offered to make Tom a scarf.

'Bit dull,' he said 'what about this?'

and selected a ball of sock wool in glowing red, russet, grey and anthracite.  It was Lang Jawoll Magic degradé,  - shade no.85.0028, if you do follow the link.  In fact his initial choice was 85.0017, and it was I who demurred and suggested there was perhaps a little too much pink and purple in it for comfort, though to judge from our friends' account of spying two notable French icons of film and fashion in Paris lately, the men's department in Marks & Spencers on my England trip, and our lovely doctor's new pullover the other day, pink and purple are cool for men just now.

The photo doesn't really do the colours justice, indeed neither does the colour chart in the link, it really is very rich and does glow like embers.  Another of Bruce's counsels is not to make scarves for men too long, but Tom says that one skein's worth isn't enough, he envied his granddaughter her long scarf, and would like this one well wide enough easily to loop round double, and as the 4 x 4 rib makes it a bit narrow, that's just as well.  And as it's sock wool, this makes it something of a work of patience, so I doubt he'll get it before Christmas, as I still need to have more than one thing on the go at once to avoid boredom. But since it's still very mild, and as he's not going for walks much since he stepped in a rabbit hole and twisted his knee (poetic justice perhaps after all the cursing of bunnies he did when they were coming into the garden earlier in the year?), that doesn't matter much either.

I promise, no more knitting for at least one more post...

* though in fact it was reported that this made him something of a 'cuddle magnet', in our other brother's words; women who were complete strangers came up to him at bars and hostelries and snuggled up to him, or at least to his jumper.