Cornflower

Hidden yet half revealed

     "Long-stemmed roses, their buds closed like eggs, then open all of a sudden .... awakened by the rainbow trapped in a spray of water..." Colette

"We cannot fathom the mystery of a single flower, nor is it intended that we should" John Ruskin

"There is probably no inanimate object in the world more beautiful than a delicately tinted rose....The charm seems to me to lie, in great part, in the fine silky texture of the petals and in their translucency....It is the charm which it shares with every beautiful thing which is 'hidden yet half revealed' " George C. Lambdin

"A flower unplucked is but left to the falling, And nothing is gained by not gathering roses" Robert Frost

"They that have roses never need bread" Dorothy Parker

(All quotations from Perennial Pleasures: Reflections on Flowers and Gardens)

At the pump

   

     In an article to introduce his new serial novel "Corduroy Mansions" (the first instalments of which you can read here) Alexander McCall Smith said this: "A rambling, rather gossipy story of day-to-day life fits very well with serial publication. I found that readers particularly liked the natural shape of such fiction. They liked short episodes in which something significant was said or done; they liked the glimpses that were afforded of lives or problems. They liked the intimacy of the set on which the characters lived. We yearn for the parish pump, I suspect; in a large, anonymous world we want the society of familiar fictional characters leading out their lives under our gaze".
     I read blogs for various reasons, and one of those is the small glimpses they give into other people's worlds. Turning that inwards, it makes me wonder how I and my life are seen 'from the outside' - do readers of this site get an impression of someone who is far from the real me, or do I come across just as I am. I can't answer that, of course, but I was amused when I discovered on another site that I was the subject of the following sentence: "I want her life"!
    It took me a long time to put anything at all in the 'About' page here. Even now there's very little there, though a careful reading of the 800 posts I've written so far would tell you much more. As to a photograph, I hid behind a succession of blue flowers until I had to make a fleeting appearance a few weeks ago. So in essence I am shyly hesitant to bare all, preferring just to talk about what interests me - which, naturally, says a lot. By extrapolation from what is on these pages you could put together a picture of Cornflower/Karen rather as restorers can recreate an entire room's decorating scheme from a fragment of wallpaper or a few flakes of paint, and my guess is you'd pretty much get it right; I hope so, anyway, as no dissembling is intended.
    While writing this post I've been thinking about how I see a close friend who is also a blogger and whether that view has changed as I've read what they have written over the past year and more. I haven't discovered any unexpected sides to them but I have seen deeper into what I already knew and that has proved to be delightful and fascinating because the point about the blog as a means of communication is that you can focus briefly but meaningfully on a subject in a way which is not always possible in a real life conversation, and I relish those 'close ups' which show me something which otherwise might have remained hidden. That said, of course blogs are edited versions of lives - not everything appears here, nor should it, and this one is less personal than some. But it is possible to write one and retain a balance between what's for public consumption and what remains private and if it serves the purpose of a gathering place like the parish pump that's all to the good and you're very welcome here (whether you want my life or not!).

A very decent bloke

     Remember what I said the other day - the last sentence of this post?

Well, the long-suffering, but surprisingly handy Mr. C. has spent the weekend assembling a couple of bookcases and putting up these shelves (that's sixteen brackets he's fixed so far and there are a few more to do). Any slight "inconsistencies" in the finished items would scarcely be noticed by the proverbial blind man running for his life, and we can now get piles of books off the floor - hurrah! (The task even involved a visit to a place we call "The Shop of Doom", so extra brownie points awarded for that).


Now that the hard work has been done I have the pleasure of filling the shelves, and I've started with Slightly Foxed and my Persephones at the top and am slowly finding good things to go on the lower ones.
Three cheers for the very decent and capable Mr. C. (who nevertheless won't be giving up his day job quite yet!)

No artificial colouring

   

This is not rhubarb but chard, and in half a rainbow's worth of colours.



Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook (whose cover and ribbon bookmarks must have been designed with this vegetable in mind!)



includes a recipe for a pasta sauce based on chard with creme fraiche and plenty of nutmeg.



We had it last night, adding some prosciutto crudo for the non-vegetarians amongst us (carnivore William opted for bolognese instead), and it was excellent - a good combination of flavours, richness balanced with astringency, and a mixture of colourful crunch and more muted green wilt.

Sea fever

     Not Masefield's famous work (which I love as a song, set by John Ireland), but this poem, discovered by reading Coast magazine!



It goes with my Selkie bowl from the island of Coll.



In answer to the poem's question, I do. Do you?

 

Homes and gardens

    

Thankyou to everyone for the kind birthday greetings yesterday. I had a relaxed day, reading and pottering and enjoying this lovely book: Peter Davey's Arts and Crafts Architecture is a marvellously comprehensive and beautifully illustrated guide to its subject - the "bright dewy mornings" and "golden afternoons" of the period when the style flourished. It makes a good companion volume to Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland by Elizabeth Cumming, and I've been doing some cross-referencing to discover more about particular houses.

One of these is Melsetter House in Orkney, extended and adapted by William Lethaby in 1900 and described by May Morris as


 "a sort of fairy palace on the edge of the great northern seas, a wonderful place, this building which was remotely and romantically situated....but for all its fineness and dignity, it was a place full of homeliness and the spirit of welcome, a very lovable place...."
 I want to go there!

The chapter on gardens includes a lovely line from Clough Williams-Ellis: pointing out a long alley he had planted as a young man and which was focused on a mountain, he said "I think you can use a mountain as a garden ornament, provided that you own it yourself" - as Peter Davey says, "A late but succinct summary of Arts and Crafts garden sensibilities, and of the economic and class system that produced the movement".
 

It's...

... Sarah's birthday today,

 

(and it's mine, too).
Happy Birthday, 'twin'!

Books do furnish a room

    

I've moved Inspector Morse to accommodate Jack Nicklaus (it's the clubs that take up the space, you know). Bertie Wooster is sprawling all over the floor, and Edith Wharton is lying on top of Emile Zola ..... Hardy is listing, dangerously, and a curious gap has opened up next to Anthony Powell (was it something he said (at length), or just a coincidence ?!). Lord Denning was in unseemly close proximity to breast-feeding guru Sheila Kitzinger but is now more properly next to Lord Devlin on The Enforcement of Morals.
    Batty as I may sound, I'm just trying to reorganise the books, and what a job it is. We tackled some of it a few months ago but there is still masses more to do so I'm dusty and vexed and stuck for space. As I sort I notice odd things such as the boxed set of Colin Dexter squeezed in between the ordnance survey maps and the golf and fishing books. Law and childcare occupy the same shelf, separated by an African witchdoctor's mask  - bizarre, non? Jeremy Paxman and Matthew Parris make curious bedfellows, while Jeeves would be far from gruntled at the chaotic state of the Wodehouses. And what on earth was in the gap next to Powell?         
      As the need for extra bookcases becomes ever more acute I'm reminded of a line from the good old days of "Coronation Street". Bemoaning her single state having been let down yet again by some cad, Bet Lynch said "All I want is a half-decent bloke who can put me a shelf up".
   

Out of the hat - 2

 

  Whether you are a regular member of our Book Group, you just join in on an occasional basis, or you think you might like to start reading along with us over the autumn and winter, you are very welcome. A look at the marvellous comments on our latest book shows what a perceptive, thoughtful and articulate bunch we have contributing to the discussion - and for all your comments, many thanks - but whether you are setting down your thoughts on a book here or keeping them quietly to yourself, I hope you're finding some good reads through the monthly Book Group posts. 

     Our next book, as trailed some time ago, is the Kipling Selected Stories (or whichever edition you can get hold of) but I'd like to postpone that to a week after the previously advertised date, so we'll now cover it on Saturday 11th. October, instead of the 4th. I hope that doesn't inconvenience anyone.

     Mindful of the need for balance and variety in our reading, the book after Kipling is by a contemporary, female writer, but is set in the past. Sue Gee's novel The Mysteries of Glass has garnered great praise: "exquisitely written", "...rippling, sinuous prose, alive with the cadences of the natural world", "The reader is held from start to finish by the mood....[it] casts its own spell, which is the essential requirement of a novel", "...evocative, atmospheric..a joy to read". Set in Hereford in 1860 it tells the story of Richard Allen who "takes up his first position as curate in a remote country parish. Vulnerable and lonely, he has ideals of serving his priest and his parishioners, but there are those who do not welcome the newcomer, or his views. Then he falls hopelessly in love, and ignites a scandal that will rock a quiet Victorian community to its foundations".
    I read Sue Gee's excellent Reading in Bed last year and can recommend it so I am looking forward to this book very much. We shall aim to discuss it on Saturday, 8th. November, and that ought to give everyone time to get a copy (libraries have it, Amazon US stock it through third party sellers and The Book Depository offer it with free worldwide delivery). I hope this will appeal to lots of us - are you tempted?

Out of the hat - 1

 

  

    

The winner of our draw for a signed copy of Linda Gillard's novel Star Gazing is Becca, and congratulations to her.

 

    Also coming out of the hat today will be the name of the next but one book for the Book Group to read. What will it be? All will be revealed here later!

Whippling it up - again

     The marvellous Dorothy Whipple novel Someone at a Distance is to be Radio 4's Book at Bedtime for the next fortnight, starting tonight at 8.00*. (If you miss it you should be able to listen later by following that link). For more on Whipple, have a look here.

*Mea culpa! It's on at 10.45pm.

Any more for any more?

    

Are any more names going into the hat for tomorrow's draw for a signed copy of Star Gazing? - just leave a comment on this post, and read what Quirky Celt says about the length of the waiting list for the book at her library!!

Champagne bubbles

    I've picked up the needles again after an unintended break of two months. This is another Airy Scarf (from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts) made as the pattern says with Kidsilk Haze.



It is slightly peachier than it looks here, more a lovely champagne colour, with the openness of the stitches and the lightness of the yarn giving the effect of a wisp of fizzy froth.

It's quick work, too: I cast on on Saturday evening and having fairly whizzed along yesterday I'm almost finished now.

Cheers!

Old School

 

 
     This is the story of a school and the power of the literature read, taught and lived within it. It's about "book-drunk" boys; boys for whom writers were the rock stars of their day. It features distinctions of class and race, showing the uneasy divisions between those on the inside and those left, somehow, without, and in its privileged world it looks at image and what that implies and conveys, and imitation, from being an innocent form of flattery at one end of the scale to plagiarism and the theft of intellectual property at the other. 

     That's the gist of Tobias Wolff's Old School, and I must say how much I enjoyed it and how concise and well-written I thought it was. It follows the final year at school of the unnamed narrator, one of a cadre of literary aspirants, and his attempts to win the ultimate prize: a private audience with a major writer of the day. Robert Frost is the judge of the writing competition in the first term and his craggy-browed figure looms large. Then comes the dreadful-sounding Ayn Rand, almost a caricatural figure in an 'emperor's new clothes'-type scenario. In the third term the guest author is to be Hemingway, and our boy feels the prize is within his grasp.    

   I found the book's themes very interesting, particularly the "kind of dozing off in his attention to the truth" caused by "...some hidden yearning to be part of the great world. To be important, even by association." That was powerful and also sad, and coupled with the depiction of "the almost physical attraction to privilege" and the desire for success, it worked well as the basis for the story. I would have liked more of an emotional connection to the characters on the writer's part - there was an arm's length feeling about that, despite its clear semi-autobiographical nature. And I felt the ending was fudged. We skipped forward in time without a great deal of explanation or a clear enough link and then there was an awkward shift of focus to another character altogether which left me wondering if I had missed something (though I liked the Goodbye Mr Chips touch). But all in all it was crisp, elegant, fine work and I'd recommend it. My thanks to Georgia for suggesting it.

What did you think of it?

  

Life lines

  
    I've just read a book from outwith my usual reading sphere but which has impressed me so much I must write about it here. Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order is a remarkable piece of work. In 1991 Joan's father took his own life. It was unexpected, no note was left and no-one close to him knew why he had done it. In the intervening years Joan has sought to examine her feelings, thoughts and actions, and those of her family, both at the time and since to try to make sense of them, explain the inexplicable and, as the title says, put the death 'in order'.

     Every year in the US there are twice as many suicides as murders, and uniquely with suicide "Your death becomes your definition". "Suicide isn't just a death, it's an accusation. It's a violent, public declaration of loneliness. It's a repudiation of connection. It says, 'You weren't enough to keep me here'".
With those stark words, Joan Wickersham underpins her attempt to piece together what happened - what led her father to that point of no return - and as such it is a family memoir, painful, tender, achingly honest, seen through the prism of her father's death. It is not sensationalist or self-indulgent, it is finely balanced and crafted with immense care, charting all the surmising and conjecture and the intense and shifting feelings of the bereaved and utterly bewildered.

     The book's structure is unusual, adopting an alphabetical analysis of the subject rather than being a strictly chronological account, and that approach works well and complements the pared down style of writing. There is humour in it, too, and a clear-sightedness which informs the prose. It tackles a tough but important subject, and it does so with courage and great skill, hence my high praise for it.