It’s been such a treat to have so much time to read this summer; taking a solo trip and doing lots of travelling on planes and trains has given me ample opportunity to make a proper dent in my enormous pile of books waiting to be read, as well as catch up on the latest bestsellers and explore some new areas of interest.

My book of the summer has been Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which has been slowly gathering a thin film of dust on my bedside table for about two years (the shame). I felt that it would be the perfect book to take on my trip to the Pacific Northwest, seeing as I would be spending a lot of time in nature, and in some locations that are specifically mentioned as part of Wall Kimmerer’s explorations of what we can learn from Native American communities’ connections with the landscape. I am no botanist and my knowledge of science is limited to what I can vaguely remember from doing my GCSEs over twenty years ago, so I was initially concerned I might not be able to follow the book, but I needn’t have worried. Wall Kimmerer writes with such poetic beauty about what nature can teach us about itself, and about us, and makes a compelling case for hope in the possibilities we have to help heal the Earth from the damage we have done to it since industrialisation. Her connection to nature goes beyond scientific knowledge, to an experiential knowing based on mind, body, emotion and spirit. This multiplicity of knowing is an essential part of Native American culture, and she talks very powerfully in the book about how in the early years of her career, she was ridiculed for viewing plants as sentient beings, with inherent knowledge and understanding of their own, and forced down a route of thinking that engaged only the mind in her research (interestingly, this is something the prominent British nature writer Robert Macfarlane explores in his new book Is a River Alive?). Over years, Wall Kimmerer has regained that connection and shown how meaningful it can be in understanding why plants behave in the way they do in different environments, and her case studies in the book - particularly relating to sweetgrass - are a compelling example of how intuition and emotion can be just as important a part of scientific enquiry as what can be measured objectively.

Bringing the mind-body-spirit connection back to the relationship between man and nature is what Wall Kimmerer argues is essential to create healing on the Earth, but this is a two way street - as much as we need to nurture and protect our Earth, it needs to be enabled to nurture and protect us, and we as humans benefit so much from what the Earth can offer us. It is a symbiotic, equal relationship - if we allow it to be. If we all viewed nature as being as sentient and worthy of respect as our fellow humans, we certainly wouldn’t be treating it with the callous abandon we currently do, in polluting, concreting, burning, cutting and so on. I found myself utterly absorbed in this wonderful book that has so much to say about the interconnectedness of everything on this Earth, and our role as individuals in preserving those precious chains of connection between all living things. I also loved what she had to say about her role as a professor, and what she has learned over the years about experiential learning and the impact of her students discovering for themselves what nature can offer, by taking them out into the woods and the mountains and giving them the opportunity to do and find and uncover and make connections for themselves. As a fellow educator, I was inspired and encouraged by the role we can have as teachers in enabling children and young people to discover their own relationship with the world around them, and I have underlined so many passages to discuss with my colleagues when I get back to school. I haven’t been so affected by a book in a very long time, and really encourage everyone to read it.

Fiction-wise, I’ve powered my way through a wide variety of books I’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks - Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans was a charming and absorbing bit of escapism, set in a country house during WWII - she writes so well and creates such fantastic characters - the legacy of her days as a screenwriter - and I loved every minute of it. Penelope Lively’s Consequences accompanied my plane journey to Seattle - my mum gave it to me and said she had loved it, but she hadn’t warned me how sad it was - I had to choke back my tears! The story of three generations of women in the same family, starting just before WWII, it was marvellous and unputdownable - the perfect accompaniment to a long journey. I found Deborah Levy’s August Blue a really interesting and intriguing novel, but had less success with Hot Milk, whose protagonist lacks any real personality and so I couldn’t engage with the story at all - I had the same experience watching the film at the cinema, and I have to say I thought it was a mistake on the part of the screenwriter to not add layers to the character that are sorely missing in the novel. Persephone’s newest book, Crooked Cross by Sally Carson, is a devastating exploration of how the rise of Nazism rips a family apart in 1930s Germany - a rediscovered, almost entirely forgotten classic, Carson’s prescience in seeing what Hitler was going to become and her clear-sightedness in showing how the conditions in Germany at the time enabled ordinary people to become monstrous in their behaviour towards their neighbours and friends is astonishing - it’s amazing to think this was published in 1934. It’s not an easy read, and I found it emotionally very hard - especially in our current political climate - but it is absolutely a necessary one and I encourage everyone to get hold of a copy.

I really enjoyed Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, The Safekeep, winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, which also explores the impact of Nazism, but in quite a unique way. Set in the Netherlands in the 1960s, it seems to be the story of two very different women unexpectedly falling in love - before a fascinating twist shows that this is not really what the book is about at all. It’s beautifully written, and opened my eyes to a part of Dutch history I knew very little about. It’s a very worthy winner of the prize and I’m glad I wasn’t my usual sniffy self about prize winning books, and actually read it straight away rather than waiting ten years to deign to give it a go! Finally, I spent a day utterly immersed in Rumer Godden’s heady and sensuous Black Narcissus - it explores what happens when a group of nuns set up a convent in a former palace in the Himalayas, which has been recently abandoned by an order of monks under mysterious circumstances. Legends abound about the place having ‘bad energy’, but the nuns, led by the proud Sister Clodagh, are determined to make a go of things and pay no heed to the warnings they are given. However, soon they find that they too are falling under a strange spell…and no prizes for guessing that things are not going to end well for them! I loved it - and it’s reminded me that I must read more of Godden’s backlist. She is such a fabulous writer.

There is nothing better than a long lazy summer of reading, is there? My imagination has been full to bursting, and I’ve so enjoyed being able to flit in and out of so many worlds. I’m now very much on a roll with nature writing, and have a pile of books I’ve bought to further my knowledge of the ideas to which Wall Kimmerer has introduced me. Hopefully, with the start of the new school term approaching, I won’t end up letting them gather dust for quite as long as I let Braiding Sweetgrass!

One of the (many) joys of being a teacher are the long, luxurious summer holidays. Weeks of freedom billow out before you as you walk out of school on the last day, full of promise of endless possibilities. I have many colleagues who plan their summers with the skill and precision of a military commander, arriving on the last day of school with their bags packed, ready to head to the airport as soon as the final bell rings. They disappear off to far-flung destinations, planning to backpack their way across entire continents for two months, often landing back in London in the early hours of the morning of our first day back. They turn up at school, backpack still in tow, tanned and exhausted, full of tales of hikes through rainforest jungles, hair-raising bus journeys up mountain peaks, riding camels across deserts and plunges in lagoons beneath cascading waterfalls. I always listen with awe, but know it would never be my kind of summer. For me, summer is all about taking it slow, keeping things spontaneous, and going where the spirit moves me.

This year, the spirit has moved me to the Pacific Northwest. I’ve wanted to visit this part of the US for years; the history and the landscape have long been a source of fascination. Many moons ago, when I lived in New York, I remember spending hours in the New York Public Library, reading about the Pioneers and the Oregon Trail, in awe of the journey so many immigrants made in the nineteenth century to their new futures. I also read with horror the treatment of the Native Americans as part of this process, and wondered how in our contemporary times, these histories and communities coexisted. On a more superficial note, on my ‘places I want to visit’ bucket list is Powell’s Books, the world’s largest independent bookstore, and it just so happens to be in Portland, Oregon. A couple of months before the holidays, I came across an article online about travel in Oregon and it reignited my old desire to see those landscapes for myself. I idly researched some ideas for a road trip, and tried to recruit my best friend to join me. But she couldn’t come, and I didn’t want to do all the driving by myself, and so I shelved the idea. I’ve never travelled alone before, and was daunted at the prospect, so I thought I’d just spend the summer doing something closer to home instead. But then I heard all my colleagues talking about their adventurous summer plans, with many of them going solo, and I thought - well if they can do it, why can’t I? So, before I gave myself too much time to think about it, I booked my flights and decided to figure the rest out later. And so here I am, writing this, from my Airbnb in Portland.

I flew into Seattle a week ago, my eyes like saucers as I took in the incredible views across the Puget Sound as we came into land. I sailed through the almost empty airport, and hopped onto the Light Rail, which is built high above the streets, like something from a midcentury space odyssey movie, and offers fabulous views as it makes it way through the outskirts of the city and into the centre. I dumped my enormous backpack at my Airbnb, and then headed straight down to the waterfront, marvelling in the beauty and the scale of all the water and the trees so close to the city. I was mesmerised by it.

I have noticed, over the past few years, my connection to urban spaces starting to shift. Whenever I am in a city, I find myself gravitating towards the water or the trees, the spaces where nature has been allowed to flourish, and where the crowds and the concrete are absent. In London, at the weekend, you’ll usually find me reading a book beneath a willow tree in my local overgrown cemetery, swimming in Hampstead Heath’s Ladies’ Pond, or enjoying a coffee on a bench in one of Bloomsbury’s garden squares. I don’t want to shop, or sit in a restaurant, or be packed into a room looking at art with hundreds of other people. I just want to be outside. Here in the Pacific Northwest, things have been no different. Seattle’s downtown - the Pike Place Market, the Space Needle, etc - held no interest for me. I took the cursory photos, and then on my first full day in the city, I got straight on a ferry to Bainbridge Island. On arrival, I wandered up the hill from the ferry terminal to the charming little town of Winslow, where I had a look around the marvellous art gallery, which features local artists, browsed in the fantastic independent book shop, which had such wonderful, imaginative displays and very helpful staff (I bought a beautiful book set in Portland, called Glaciers by Alexis Smith), and got a delicious sandwich from Cafe Hitchcock (again, such lovely staff!) to go and eat by the water. As I sat on a bench and ate my sandwich, looking out across the Puget Sound, I marvelled at how fortunate I was to get to travel - to have the time, the funds, the freedom.

After lunch, I followed a marked walking trail, and found myself on the site of an old Japanese-owned berry farm, now a park - reading the information board, I learned much about the troubled history of more recent immigration in the Puget Sound - and then wended my way back down to the water, where I found the most magical inlet, surrounded by trees, with no one else in sight. I sat myself down on a rock, got out my book - the brilliant Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose insights as a member of the Potawatomi tribe into the connection between people and land, the importance of restoring this and the benefits to all of us in this process, have been so apt for my trip in this part of the world - and read uninterrupted for about an hour or so. Used to the crowds and busyness of the East Coast of the US, I couldn’t believe that no-one else was there. It was my own slice of heaven.

The next day, I headed off to Ballard, which had been recommended to me by friends at work due to its quirky shops and neighbourhood feel. I found the house that inspired the Disney movie Up! - a compelling indictment of gentrification in what is still a very industrial neighbourhood - and then came across the National Nordic Museum, which tells the story of Scandinavian immigration to the Puget Sound. I expected to just pop in, but I ended up spending the whole morning in there (with only about ten other people!), fascinated by the exhibitions and learning so much. I didn’t realise that a tenth of the Scandinavian population emigrated to the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries - and their presence has really shaped this region. I hadn’t made the connection between the Scandinavian landscape and climate and the Pacific Northwest, but of course it has much in common - and the skills and trades built around the natural environment that many Scandinavians had from their home countries were transferred to their new home when they came over. If you’re in the area, I strongly recommend a visit.

From the museum, I made my way over to Ballard locks, which are the busiest in the whole of the US! - and are a key site for salmon as they move through on their way to spawn. There’s a whole salmon education centre, which I found unexpectedly really interesting, and you can go under the locks and see the salmon through a window. I then crossed over to the Magnolia neighbourhood and walked up into Discovery Park, where I headed straight to the water, and West Point Lighthouse. This is such a beautiful place, situated on a gorgeous beach from which you can see the city centre rising up in the distance, and I loved paddling in the clear, cold water and letting my mind wander.

My time in Seattle was a wonderful introduction to solo travel. I had been dreading it, worried about being lonely and bored, but actually, I have loved being able to go completely at my own pace, do whatever I want, whenever I want, and not feel under any pressure to see all the sights. I am enjoying taking it slow, gravitating towards nature and beauty, and relishing finding the perfect spot to just sit and read for a while, with nowhere I need to be and no one else I need to worry about. Here in Portland, I have already been to Powell’s Books several times - I don’t need to worry about boring my companion with yet another browse of the shelves! - and spent long lazy mornings reading and pottering before heading out for the day, as I am battling with jet lag and finding I need a slower pace. There have been moments, of course, when I have wished I could be sharing the experience, or wanted to have a chat with someone, but they pass. Being alone does not need to mean being lonely - with such glorious surroundings, it’s actually a joy to have the time and quiet to just be able to sit and enjoy it all. Going solo might be how I always choose to travel in future!

Here in the south of England, we’re in the midst of a heatwave. For weeks now, the sun has favoured us with its constant presence. The air trembles and the pavements steam with the heat of it. That curious, thick summer dust of spent pollen is sprinkled across every surface. The strong sunlight both brightens and bleaches. Life has spilled inside out - pavements are thick with throngs of people drinking, talking, laughing late into the evening - as if we are in a proper European capital, rather than our now even more isolated island outpost. And I am on my summer holidays. Perfect timing.

I have felt in somewhat of a heatwave of my own these past few months. The summer term is long, intense and often stressful. The atmospheric pressure remains high day after day, week after week, as the students grow more and more anxious in the run up to exams. Tempers fray. Tears are shed. Tiredness makes us all terse with one another.

Endless cups of coffee are drunk to fuel late-night marking sessions. The days and weeks pass in a Groundhog day blur. I stagger through to every weekend, a rock to rest on briefly amidst the waves. There are holidays, there are adventures, there is plenty of fun and laughter both in and outside the classroom to enjoy - but even when I am not at school my mind is never far from my classroom, my students, all the things I need to do, all the things I should have done. It is only when we break up for the summer that I can separate myself for long enough to return to a sense of self that is not wrapped up in my identity as a teacher. That is, until I bump into a student - there is no word more horrifying to hear in the midst of the summer holiday, when loafing around your local highstreet in hot pants, than - ‘Miss!’

All this to say - being a teacher is not always compatible with being a writer, or indeed, a person who creates anything that requires thought and imagination and headspace. I often read or see or think about something and then think ‘oh, I must write about that-’ and then the next tranche of essays lands on my desk and my mind shifts in another direction.

However, over the past couple of months, after some soul-searching, some reconnecting with people, some very good advice from numerous encouraging friends and some saying ‘yes’ to opportunities I would normally say ‘no’ to in term time, I have begun to resurrect my writing identity, and have been dipping my toe back into the theatre world. I had a play on a few weeks ago - it was well received, and there has been discussion of taking it further. I did a wonderful workshop with the theatre company Wise Children, that reminded me of the joy of creative collaboration and gave me plenty of fresh ideas. A friend and I have decided to start our own theatre company and make our own work - our first play will be on in London in September, as part of a fringe festival. I have booked myself onto a writing retreat with the Arvon Foundation in a few weeks’ time, gifting myself time and space to write a new play. I feel energised again, creatively, and I am determined that the ‘teacher’ part of my identity is not going to subsume everything else from henceforward.

Once I shifted back into creative mode, I have been alive and attentive to so much more going on around me, seeing inspiration and interest everywhere. I feel that I am oscillating like the air around me in the heat of the July sun, every molecule of my being waking itself up to new opportunities and new connections.

There is much I want to write about, and I will be making up for lost time as my long summer unfurls and I can share some of the things I have been reading, doing and thinking about during these months I have written nothing. In the meantime, I will leave you with two recommendations - read Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick - it’s a first novel, and it’s not perfect - it gets off to a very slow start - but the writing is beautiful and the ending worth the wait. And if you are frazzled and hot and just want to read something cosy, heartwarming and utterly lovely - then read Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans, which I devoured in one sun-soaked sitting on my balcony. Bliss!

Every time I’ve been to Paddington station over the years to catch a train, I’ve looked longingly up at the departures board at the trains heading to the country’s southernmost terminus, Penzance, on the Cornish coast, and wished that was my destination. I could imagine the delight of the final stretch of the journey - the train skirting the coastline, the fairytale turrets of the castle of St Michael’s Mount rising from the sea as we rounded into Mount’s Bay, and then the excitement of pulling into the Victorian terminus to the sound of the waves and the seagulls. What fun it would be! - I have always thought to myself, while boarding a train to somewhere far less exciting - but somehow I’ve just never got around to it. That is, until last November, when an exhausting first term at school meant I couldn’t face a plane journey or a frenetic European city break over half term, and instead decided that a Cornish cottage and a lovely relaxing train journey were just what I needed to restore my energy. My best friend was happy to join me, and so we packed our bags, stocked up on snacks, and became those people of whom I had always been jealous as we boarded the train to Penzance.

The journey was wonderful, and such a treat to be able to sit and not move for five or so hours, watching the beautiful, ever changing landscapes flash by outside, listening to the murmur of conversation of your fellow passengers, dipping in and out of a book, and getting tea and biscuits from the trolley. By the time we pulled into Penzance, it was already dusk, but we could see the shadow of St Michael’s Mount emerging from the water and the lights of Penzance and Newlyn glittering up the hillside gave us a warm welcome. We strolled out of the station into the town, and then walked through the beautiful Victorian back streets to our rented cottage, a journey that offered plenty of intriguing glimpses of gardens full of luxurious exotic planting made possible by the famously mild climate, and alleyways and ornate buildings we couldn’t wait to explore by daylight. Both of us knew instantly that Penzance was going to be a town we would absolutely love.

We spent a week exploring this absolutely delightful town and its environs, and we barely scratched the surface. There is so much to see and do, and the public transport is excellent, so you can roam quite widely around West Cornwall if you decide to go car free. Penzance itself is beautiful, formed mainly of Georgian and Victorian architecture, and full of history at every corner. The main town has a plethora of independent shops and cafes, with a wonderful book shop called The Edge of the World, and some fabulous vintage clothing shops, as well as the amazing Egyptian House, which is the most unique building I’ve ever seen, and is available to stay in as a Landmark Trust property. We loved wandering the streets and finding plenty of hidden gems, and it’s also a foodie as well as a shopping mecca - The Honeypot Café does some of the best cake I’ve ever had, Barbican Bistro’s unassuming exterior - an old harbour building - hides a cosy restaurant serving the most exquisite fresh seafood, and Pizza Plz is a fab little pizza joint offering a ring-side seat to some of the best people watching in Penzance from its huge windows looking out over the town.

Besides shopping and eating, there is so much to do in Penzance that we struggled to fit it all in! There are the glorious Morrab Gardens to explore - free public botanical gardens - in which is nestled a private subscription library, the Morrab Library. We were warmly welcomed when we popped our heads around the huge front door, and told we could wander round at our leisure - which we did, delighting in the warren of rooms lined with Victorian floor to ceiling bookcases, many with their original copperplate paper labels still just about clinging to them, and with cosy armchairs and teacups and biscuits laid out for library users wanting a snack while they read. It is a little slice of heaven, and a place I thought must no longer exist outside of midcentury novels - but it does, and I encourage you all to go! Penlee House Gallery, which exhibits Cornish art and items relating to Cornish history and culture, is just a short stroll away from the Morrab Gardens, and is nestled in its own ample parkland. It’s a magical place, full of objects and art telling the story of Penzance and West Cornwall, and it also happens to have a brilliant café that should not be missed. We saw a fascinating exhibition there in which paintings of Cornish landscapes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were displayed alongside paintings of the same landscapes completed in the last couple of years, as a commentary on how climate change and the impact of mass tourism has altered and in some cases destroyed the natural environment - a truly sobering sight in many cases. We were also entertained on two of our evenings at the wonderful community run Acorn Theatre, housed in an old chapel - we saw a brilliant folk band and listened to a talk on Cornish ghosts, and if we had been there a couple of days longer, would have been able to catch a local theatre company doing a version of Dracula, which I’m sure would have been an absolute treat. I was amazed at how much culture is on offer in a relatively small town - the residents of Penzance are very fortunate on that front.

Penzance also has an incredible Art Deco saltwater lido, Jubilee Pool, which was restored a few years ago after a heroic effort by locals to save it. It does have a heated section that makes a swim in winter just about bearable, so we did brave it, but we didn’t last long! The cafe warms you up very nicely after a swim, though, and offers fabulous views across the bay. Just a short walk from the Lido is the former fishing village and artist colony of Newlyn, which now feels more like a suburb of Penzance, but it does retain its own identity. They have an excellent contemporary art gallery (with another great café), but the best thing about Newlyn for us was its wonderful independent cinema, housed in an old mill. It’s a real hub of the community, housing a great bar and restaurant too, and we loved the experience of having a little cocktail before going in to watch a movie. It’s not often you can stroll home from the cinema along the seafront, either!

Somehow, despite all of this magnificence on our doorstep in Penzance, we also managed to squeeze in a day in St Ives, which is a lovely 90 minute bus ride away, where we visited the Tate’s outpost there, as well as the marvellous Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. It had been years since I last visited, and I remembered little, so it was wonderful to wander its higgledy piggledy streets that wind up the cliffside, offering tantalising glimpses of the sea beyond, and popping into its array of independent shops and art galleries. I was delighted to unexpectedly discover Talland House - the childhood holiday home of Virginia Woolf, immortalised in To the Lighthouse - and though it is now divided into flats and surrounded by more modern development, the view across the sea to the lighthouse remains, and it was incredible to be able to see the place and the view I have read about so many times.

Our few days in Penzance were magical - and made even more so by the fact that it being November, there were hardly any tourists around. The weather was quite kind to us, and we enjoyed some fabulous walks along the coast to the villages of Marazion and Mousehole, being buffeted by the wind and enjoying the treat of coffee and cake in cosy cafés to warm ourselves after our exertions. I have only ever been to Cornwall in the summer, and was worried that a winter break would be disappointing, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I’m already planning my return!

Why has it been so long since I last wrote? Well, it’s partly due to the usual teacher excuse of the first term back at school after the summer (a lifetime ago) being an absolute vortex in which my time and energy disappeared for the best part of three months, and partly due to the fact I rather foolishly decided to write and direct a promenade version of Macbeth as the school production, and gave myself eight weeks in which to get it performance-ready. That feat accomplished back in December, and my classes now fully established and under control, life outside of school is now possible!

I loved the experience of writing and directing my first show in my new(ish) school, especially as I haven’t picked up a pen to write a play since I finished my Playwriting MA two years ago now. Writing work to be assessed, constantly having to listen to and address feedback on my writing, and being surrounded by people hustling to become commercially successful as writers ended up destroying any joy I took in the process of writing, and I allowed myself to develop the belief that I wasn’t really any good anyway. My life is busy and I’m always being pulled in several directions between my job, volunteering commitments, hobbies, family and friends, and carving out time to just write for pleasure has always seemed like an utter indulgence I can’t afford. How anyone makes art while also holding down a day job and maintaining a family and social life, I really cannot comprehend. As such, I’ve been really interested over the past couple of months, as I’ve juggled my own creative project with Life, in exploring the creative process of women working in environments where it would seem that they shouldn’t have time to fully devote themselves to their art. It’s taken me to some wonderful places, and given me plenty of inspiration.

In early October, I made a pilgrimage to my favourite place of female and communal creativity; Charleston. The weather was gloriously sunny, the air was crisp and scented ever so gently with woodsmoke, and the garden was full of late summer flowers still holding on to a last blaze of life. My friend and I wandered through the rooms that manage to feel like everyone who lived here has just popped to the shops for half and hour and will be right back, and felt the creative energy of the space vibrate through us. I love how every surface is decorated in pattern and colour, and every nook and cranny has a delightful, carefully (or perhaps casually - who knows?) objet d’art placed just so to catch the light or speak to the painting above it. I loved the make-do-and-mend nature of the curtains - strips of random fabric sewn together, and the rods held together with paper clips! - and how you can see where the paint was rubbed away on the dining room table by years of people’s elbows. The house is a true work of art, created to delight and bring pleasure to the people who lived in it, with no expectation of anyone ever wanting to come and see it or monetise it. It’s art for pure pleasure’s sake, and in a world where we are increasingly only placing value on art for how much money it can generate, it was a joy to be reminded of how we can get fulfilment and value in expressing ourselves in our domestic spaces - when we don’t have time, energy or inclination to be creative in other ways, doing something as simple as rearranging ornaments on a shelf or finding just the right vase for a bunch of flowers can be as meaningful as writing a story or painting a picture.

More artist inspiration came in Cornwall during my November half term, when I finally got around to visiting the Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden in St Ives. Climbing up the narrow, winding back streets of this once sleepy fishing village, you find yourself going through a door into what seems like a poky little cottage - but head upstairs, and you’re in Hepworth’s totally unexpected lofty, light filled studio. Outside is the magnificent hidden garden where many of her beautiful sculptures have been carefully placed to enhance and reflect their surroundings, from which there are uninterrupted views of the sea stretching out to the horizon. The first work of art you see at the top of the stairs when entering the studio is a beautiful hardwood sculpture of a baby, modelled on Hepworth’s eldest son. It is so immensely tactile that I wanted to immediately pick it up and give it a cuddle - and the curator in the room told me that many women have the same response. She then gave us a talk on Hepworth and motherhood, and how her love for her four children - three of them triplets - influenced and inspired her work, but also at times made it very difficult for her to have the time and energy to create. It didn’t help that when her triplets were born, her partner Ben Nicholson - who was still married to Winifred Nicholson at the time - buggered off to Rome for several weeks on an art scholarship, leaving her quite literally holding three babies with no money and no support. She had to temporarily put the children in a nursing home in order to manage - she was so tired and weak, she couldn’t feed them - but amidst all of the chaos of childrearing, she still managed to do at least half an hour of creative work per day, saying that she saw the life of being a mother one that ‘nourished’ her creativity rather than depriving her of it. She certainly did not subscribe to Cyril Connolly’s theory that the pram in the hall is the enemy of great art.

Neither did Tirzah Garwood, whose solo exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London is the first of her work in over 70 years, and is an absolute delight (if you can’t make it to the exhibition, the catalogue is an excellent substitute). I went with my sister at the end of November, and we were moved, inspired and transported by the work on display. From the witty woodcuts she made in the early stages of her career while at art college - where she was tutored by Eric Ravilious, who would become her husband - to the dark yet whimsical oil paintings of oversized children’s toys in lush gardens, collaged models of houses and shops, and the beautiful decoupage scrapbooks she made to entertain her children, the exhibition reveals a woman alive to every detail of the largely suburban and domestic life around her, and able to turn whatever materials she had to hand into a work of art. She was devoted to her three children, and being widowed when her youngest was still a baby, she did much of the raising of them alone - but like Hepworth, she found them and their view of the world an inspiration. I loved looking inside one of her 3D models of a bakery, in which her daughter’s face can be seen peering in through the window, and outside one of her beautiful collages of a house, her daughter Anne can be seen sitting on a little paper swing. Much of her work might fall into the category of folk art, but it is important to remember that Garwood was very much a working artist, supporting the family with the money she received from her art, as well as her highly sought after marbled paper business. Garwood has long been overshadowed by the fame of her husband, so having this exhibition highlight what a creative genius she was too is long overdue. As much as I loved every piece of the work on display, what I loved most was knowing that Garwood had made all of it at home, her children around her, in between doing the cooking and the shopping and the washing up. Tirzah has taught me that Life doesn’t have to get in the way of art - unless you let it.

The hot ticket of the summer in London, which I missed while on holiday in New York, was The Years at The Almeida, the story of an ordinary French woman’s life in the 21st century, adapted from the genre-bending autobiographical-historical book of the same name by Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux. Fortunately it’s now transferred to the West End, and I’m off to see it in a couple of weeks, so I spent last week reading the book in preparation. I didn’t realise that Annie Ernaux had always written alongside working full time as a secondary school French Literature teacher, and parenting two sons, and her dedication to her art and insistence on making time for herself and her writing amidst the busyness of ordinary life was both awe-inspiring and a little intimidating. If she could teach kids all day and then come home and do the dinner and the housework and still find time to crack out a few Nobel prize winning novels, then what on earth am I doing collapsed on the sofa scrolling on my phone of an evening?! The Years is marvellous, and highly recommended - an utterly unique telling of an individual life alongside the collective one of a generation, and having been a small child when Ernaux was in her forties, it’s given me a much better understanding of the world I was growing up in and can now barely remember. I love how she places herself and her life within the context of that of thousands of her fellow citizens, demonstrating how so much of our experience on this planet is collective and connective, rather than individual and isolated. No artist makes work in a vacuum, after all - it is this living alongside others, in the rich chaos of everyday life - where our inspiration is found.

So, here I am, another new year, and a firm resolution to get my pen and paper back out and a play written, inspired by all of these incredible women. I also promise to be more present here: I certainly won’t let so much time pass again before writing!

Unbelievably, I am already back at school. The air in London has turned crisp and cool in the mornings, and the pavements are littered with fallen leaves. The trees are starting to look burnished around the edges, and the flowers in my local park are almost spent. The blackberries poking through the fence at the bottom of my communal garden have become ripe for the picking. August is about to bleed into September, taking Summer with it for another year. As always, it wasn't long enough. But I made the most of it.

After getting back from New York at the beginning of August, I needed a week to recover from whatever hideous plane lurgy I had picked up, as well as from the utter exhaustion of walking 30,000 steps every day for seven days in 35 degree heat. I’m not often ill, so when I am, I make the most of it - I go full on Victorian invalid and take to my sofa with plenty of blankets, trays full of nourishing things and piles of books. I absolutely loved having a week where I had a legitimate reason not to do anything other than relax and read, and where my biggest exertion was going up the road to the ice cream parlour (if you’re ever in Islington, you must try Udderlicious - they do the best ice cream). While on the sofa, I read the marvellous The Ladies’ Paradise by Émile Zola, which I’ve been wanting to read for years, and finally got around to as Simon and I had decided to do a podcast episode on it, which you can listen to here. I love books that feature workplaces - I find it fascinating to go behind the scenes and catch a glimpse into the day-to-day minutiae of a professional world different to my own. Zola carried out so much research into the workings of a department store, and it shows on every page. His hero - Octave Moret - is a visionary businessman who has taken his late wife’s small silk store and transformed it into ‘The Ladies’ Paradise’ - a one-stop shop for everything a woman might need for her body and her home. He dreams of expanding further and taking over an entire city block, creating a palace dedicated to women and their needs, and making his fortune in the process. He understands that volume of sales will lead to profit, so he slashes his prices to lure in customers, ruining the trade of the small, old fashioned shops in the vicinity, all of whom hate him and are resisting the modernity The Ladies’ Paradise represents. His heroine, Denise, is a pure hearted innocent from the country, devoted to the care of her younger brothers after the death of their parents. She starts working at The Ladies’ Paradise, and we see the shop floor through her eyes - the competitiveness of the sales assistants who get commissions on their sales, and so undermine and sabotage one another to get the best customers, the demands of rude customers, the exhaustion of being on your feet all day, the struggle to make ends meet on a tiny salary. I loved the lavish, loving descriptions of the shop displays, and the discussions of various innovations Mouret wanted to make to lure in more customers. I loved the bitchy silk salesmen, trying to get their manager sacked so they could get a promotion. I loved the description of the clothing and the fabric and the little details that revealed the material culture of this period of time. There is a sumptuousness about this novel that makes you want to sink into it - it’s long and bloated and saccharine and very Victorian, but glorious nonetheless. The perfect novel for a summer sickbed.

Once recovered, I was back out and about again. I had booked in two UK mini breaks to soften the blow of my summer holiday coming to an end, and I had a lovely time exploring two areas of the country I’ve not really spent as much time in as I should have. The first was a night in Petworth, in West Sussex, where my friend had discovered this amazing B&B in an old railway station. We drove down and spent a pleasant hour or two at Petworth house, which is an enormous barn of a place now looked after by the National Trust, and houses a huge art collection. The house itself I didn’t like - it was built merely to show off and not as a home, and it feels cold and unloved and barren - but the art collection is amazing, and the grounds are beautiful. Exiting through a door in the servants’ quarters takes you directly into the pretty town, where there are plenty of lovely little shops to potter around. After exploring Petworth and then checking into our B&B, we decided that the glorious sunny evening shouldn’t be wasted, so I drove us down to West Wittering, which has a glorious long sandy beach. We sat on the beach and chatted until the sun went down, watching the light playing over the water. The next day, we went to Chichester in the morning, which has such a lovely cathedral - home of Philip Larkin’s famous Arundel Tomb and a beautiful Marc Chagall stained glass window - and the fabulous Pallant House Gallery, which alongside being a brilliant gallery of modern art, also has the most fantastic art bookshop, including vintage and antique books. I couldn’t resist picking up Carolyn Trant’s fantastic sounding Voyaging Out: British Women Artists from Suffrage to the Sixties, which I can’t wait to read. After we’d taken our fill of Chichester, we drove back towards home, stopping off at Standen on the way, another National Trust property. It’s a beautiful Arts and Crafts house designed by Philip Webb, who worked with William Morris, and entirely decorated and furnished by Morris & Co. Lived in by the same family until it was given to the National Trust in the 1970s, it’s a fabulous time capsule and a must-see for Morris fans. We loved it, and it was the perfect way to finish our mini break.

The following day I was off again, this time with my sister, to the Chilterns. We were staying in an airbnb in Oxfordshire, and en route, we stopped in the beautiful Thameside town of Marlow, which has a glorious bridge across the river, fantastic riverside walks, and streets full of beautiful Georgian and Victorian houses, quirky independent shops and lovely cafés. We really enjoyed pottering around and soaking up the sun by the river, watching the boats go by. That night, we had a delicious meal in the magical garden of a local pub, and then the following day, my sister very obligingly drove the hour or so into the Cotswolds so we could visit somewhere I have dreamed of going for years - Kelmscott Manor, home of William Morris and later his daughter, May. It was just as magical as I had hoped, and the surrounding village and countryside were so breathtakingly pretty that I could understand why Morris had decided to set up home here. The house itself is humble and simple inside, sparsely but beautifully furnished, and with plenty of fascinating information about the family and their circle. There is a fabulous café and shop, too, and you can go off for a walk through the village to see some of the buildings built after Morris’ death to commemorate his life, as well as the local church, where the family are buried. I loved every minute - if you find yourself in the area, I strongly recommend a visit.

The following day, we spent the morning pottering around Henley-on-Thames, which is a larger version of Marlow, and famous for being the base of many of Team GB’s Olympic rowers - it has a lovely stretch of waterfront along the Thames and a lively and pretty town centre with plenty of shops and cafés to enjoy. Walking around in the sunshine in such lovely tranquil places made the world and its troubles feel a million miles away. It was a perfect way to end my summer holiday, and made even more perfect by getting to spend some quality time with my sister.

Now, it’s back to the grindstone, but I’m looking forward to getting started on a new school year with new classes to teach, as well as the variety of theatre and art exhibitions that are opening over the next couple of months. I always feel a sadness as the long, lazy days of summer draw to a close, but Autumn has so many delights of its own that it’s hard to feel sad for too long. Even so, it’s not over yet - the sun is still shining and I’m still wearing shorts. We’ll see how long that lasts!

I picked up this lovely book a few weeks ago when I went to the ‘Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors’ exhibition at the glorious Garden Museum, which is a genuine hidden gem in London that I actually don’t want more people to know about because I love how peaceful it is. It’s in a church just off Lambeth Bridge, at the back of Lambeth Palace, and aside from being beautiful and fascinating, with a tower from which you can see fabulous river views of London, it also has the most wonderful café that is in a secluded garden courtyard filled with green-tinged dappled light from the trees overhead. I love going there with a book and getting a coffee and one of their delicious chocolate chip cookies and whiling away an afternoon as if I were in the middle of the countryside, while the beating heart of London obliviously pulses just on the other side of the wall.

Having just come back from a sweltering New York, I was in the mood to read about how some of my favourite city-dwelling novelists of the mid twentieth century experienced life in the countryside when they escaped for various reasons from city life, and so I finally got around to reading Rural Hours. It argues that for Woolf, Townsend Warner and Lehmann, moving to the country at pivotal times in their lives enabled them to access new rhythms and perspectives that permanently altered their work and their relationship with it. The first section explores how Virginia Woolf’s first move to the country, to a now demolished house, Asheham, in 1912, revitalised her and gave her fresh inspiration and perspective after her first major breakdown and the writing of her largely unsuccessful first two novels. She then goes on to look at Sylvia Townsend Warner’s purchase of the cottage Miss Green in Dorset, and how this gave her the freedom to pursue a different life, though she had already written her only real hit, Lolly Willowes, when she moved there. Finally, Rosamund Lehmann came to the country to escape the war and a failing marriage. Facing a crisis in her life, the countryside offered her a fresh start at a time when everything else seemed to be falling apart around her.

The flaw of the book, as Rachel Cooke points out in her slightly acerbic review in The Guardian, is that Baker rather over-eggs her thesis that moving to the country was a profound influence on these women as writers, and that it fundamentally changed them and their work. I agree with Cooke’s view that the book is unsuccessful in proving this, and at times I felt that Baker was flogging a dead horse in keep circling back to this argument. All of the women moved to the countryside for very different reasons, at very different times in their lives, and none of their writing can be linked with any real meaning to the time they spent in these locations at all. In my view, what the book really shows is what the experience of living in the country compared to the city can do to someone’s state of mind, habits, relationship with themselves and with others. It was fascinating to read about the day-to-day routines of countryside living, with its pleasures and its pitfalls - fruit picking, mushroom hunting, long lazy summer days in the garden and cosy winter evenings by the fire, alongside collapsing ceilings, rising damp, freezing bedrooms and cultural isolation. As a social history of middle class people living in the countryside in the middle years of the twentieth century, as well as a biographical sketch of some unexplored periods of time in three wonderful writers’ lives, it’s a magical book. As a study of how living in the country affected these women as writers, it’s much less successful. This is largely because living in the country was only ever a part-time occupation for these women - all of them had their countryside cottages as their second homes, and were back and forth to London quite regularly on the train. In fact, the locations of their homes were chosen precisely because they could quickly get back to London - and I do wish that Baker had looked at this more in the book, as I think the relationship someone has with the countryside when they still have one foot in the city is profoundly different to a full time resident.

As someone who lives in the city but often fantasises about living in the country, I did find myself enchanted by Baker’s descriptions of country life, romanticised somewhat by the fact that all of these women had servants or women who ‘did’ for them, which undoubtedly makes life far easier wherever you are. However, in the back of my mind I had my grandmother’s voice, who grew up in Dorset, not far from where Sylvia Townsend Warner lived, and whose poverty-stricken upbringing in a cottage that her parents could not afford to fit out with the ‘mod cons’ Woolf, Townsend Warner and Lehmann were quick to do before they moved in was very far from the rural idyll presented here. The lack of engagement with the reality of the middle class second home experience of the country in this book was a missed opportunity, I think, and represents the ongoing commodification of the countryside by city dwellers, keen to have their cake and eat it while those who live there year round are left with only the crumbs. It’s all very well to have a rural retreat as a creative escape, but at what cost to the rural communities who service this luxury for those of us who live elsewhere? I think there’s also something interesting to be explored in the experience of living between two places, what we get from both the energy of the city and the repose of the countryside. I would perhaps argue that these women’s creative energy was bolstered by the variety they had access to, rather than just their experiences in the country. Nonetheless, despite my misgivings, it was still a very lovely read, and one I learned much from. A lovely read in these dying days of summer, when the open spaces of the countryside call to us all.

When people ask me why on earth I went back to teaching after leaving it behind to work in the theatre for a couple of years, I always laugh and say - for July and August. Of course, of course, I went back for the children - but the summer holidays are most certainly the cherries on top of the cake, the delicious taste of which I missed unbearably when sweating away in an office above the Globe theatre last July.

I’ve been on my holidays for three blissful weeks already, and I feel like I have returned to myself after what was an incredibly busy and quite emotionally fraught final term. As soon as school finished, I was in the car and driving straight down to my happy place - Devon - where I stayed in a magical cabin on the North coast, right on the border of Cornwall, and had a wonderful time watching the roiling waves hitting the rocky shores, wandering amidst fern-filled lanes, pottering around pretty coastal villages and eating multiple cream teas. I slept, I read, I relaxed. The weather was not quite what I had been hoping for - far too cold and damp for any sea swimming - but in many ways, the less than ideal temperatures made me feel less pressured to be out and about, and allowed me to just enjoy being still in surroundings where I didn’t have to worry about doing the washing/hoovering/cleaning. Such a joy.

This part of Devon and Cornwall has much to satisfy the literary traveller. Just outside of the pretty harbour village of Boscastle is the sleepy village of St Juliot’s, where Thomas Hardy met Emma Gifford, his first wife, after being commissioned to prepare a report on repairs required to the church. In the church is a striking memorial window to Thomas Hardy, and outside is a beautiful wildflower-filled graveyard with gorgeous views across the rolling fields down to the sea. It certainly is a spot you can imagine being the setting for a Victorian romance. In nearby Morwenstow, the poet reverend Robert Hawker, a well-known nineteenth century figure who has now been largely forgotten, built his vicarage with its four chimneys built to represent the four towers of the churches he had worked in during his career. The church tells the story of his life in some beautifully made felt panels created by the local community, and there is a wonderful cliff-top walk to the National Trust’s smallest property, Hawker’s Hut, where he wrote much of his literary output. Right next to the church is also the Rectory Farm Tearooms, which do a tremendous cream tea - not to be missed. Not far from Boscastle, on the road through Bodmin Moor, is Jamaica Inn, of Daphne du Maurier fame, where there is a small museum about her and her work, and a tremendously tacky restaurant, full of ye olde fixtures and fittings. It’s not easy to imagine how this place can have inspired Du Maurier these days, but for die hard fans, it’s worth a brief stop while en route elsewhere. For more Du Maurier, a drive to the breathtaking Hartland Quay takes you to the set of the most recent film version of Rebecca, where you can see photos of how the hotel on the cliff was transformed into Manderley’s local village and where the wreck of Rebecca’s boat was pulled from the waves. On the outskirts of Hartland is Hartland Abbey, a beautiful stately home that has been the location for many a period drama - most famously Sense and Sensibility - and a walk down to its private beach to see the Morlands’ cottage is a must (and the cafe is very good!). Even in wet weather, therefore, there is still plenty to see and do. If you’ve not been to this part of the UK, I highly recommend it.

After a couple of days back home in London to play in a piano concert (very amateur - I am no great shakes!) and do my washing! - I was back on my travels, this time to Europe. I spent a magical few days in Switzerland, a country I had never visited before, where I stayed with a friend and colleague who has lived between there and here for many years. Her local knowledge enabled me to see the area we stayed in through the eyes of those who live there, and it was a glimpse of a life that looked very attractive indeed. We stayed in a lakeside hotel in Lutry, a beautiful small town on the shores of Lake Léman, just outside of Lausanne. We swam in the lake and at the amazing outdoor community pool at nearby Pully, we watched the Euros final in a big screen by the lake (a very different experience to watching it in a pub in London, that’s for sure!), we drove up into the vineyards and across the mountains to Gstaad and Gruyères, we went to the jazz festival at Montreux and we had lovely lazy lakeside dinners in Lausanne. I loved every minute. Switzerland felt clean in a way I have never experienced before - the air felt utterly pure and fresh, everywhere we went was neat and well cared for, and I felt cleansed just being there. I woke up every morning to a view of the blue of the lake meeting the shadowy blue of the French mountains meeting the blue of the sky. Up in the mountains, the countryside rolled away into the distance, all green and gold and luscious, with snow-capped peaks glittering in the sun. Everyone looked tanned and lean and healthy. Every house had cascades of flowers tumbling from balconies. It was like being in a film set.

It was very hard to tear myself away, but I had my dear friend to go and meet in Denmark, so I reluctantly boarded a train to Geneva, which whisked me past more beautiful lakeside towns and villages, and flew North. I landed in sunny Copenhagen and boarded a train to Gilleleje, a pretty seaside town on the North Zealand coast, two hours north of the capital. This area is known as the Danish Riviera, and is a very popular holiday spot for Danes and Swedes. I had a joyful reunion with my friend, who moved to Copenhagen last year, and we had a wonderful few days enjoying this beautiful part of the world. We stayed in the Gilbjerg Strandhotel, which was a perfect base - right on the beach, and a half an hour walk along the coastal path into the town. We loved walking up and down this coastal path, looking at all of the traditional summer houses (it’s a very common Danish custom to have a summer house) and marvelling at the views across the sea to Sweden. Using the excellent local public transport, we were able to get out and about to see various places of interest - we particularly loved visiting the Rudolph Tegners Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Munkeruphus art museum, which is the former home of the artist Gunnar Aagaard Andersen. Both of these are set in stunning locations, enabling the art to become part of the landscape, and the landscape to become part of the art, and we could happily have stayed at both places all day.

We loved pottering around the little towns - Denmark does retail so well - and sitting on the beach, watching the world go by and chatting. The weather was kind to us, and so we were able to do a couple of early morning swims in the sea - bliss - and after so many weeks of depressing weather in England, it was lovely to be able to unfurl and feel the warmth of the sun and the freshness of seawater on my skin. It was very hard for both of us to leave Gilleleje behind, and getting off the train in the busyness of Copenhagen’s central station was a bit of a shock after our days of quiet amidst the space of the coast and countryside. However, it was lovely to see a bit of Copenhagen in the sun - the last time I visited in February, it was absolutely freezing - and my friend whizzed me round a few sites before I had to get to the airport for my flight back to London.

It’s been glorious to get away, see new places, spend time with good friends, and get glimpses of different possible lives. I feel refreshed for it. Next week I’m off on an entirely opposite type of holiday - a week in my beloved New York (for those new to my blog, I lived there in my twenties), which I haven’t visited since the summer of 2019 - far too long. So I can’t wait to see old friends and revisit old haunts, as well as see what’s changed since I last walked its streets. But for now - a brief hiatus of reading, pottering, and having the time to enjoy London. Such a joy.

Over the Easter break - which already feels years away! - I fled the relentless grey skies, dampness and drizzle of London to the islands of Malta and Gozo. I’d never been before, but had long been intrigued by tales of these historic and culturally unique islands that sit between Europe and Africa, and have been fought over by numerous Empires, desperate to secure their strategic position between two continents. Family and friends who have visited came back full of enthusiasm, telling stories of blue skies and endless sea, the dazzle of ancient buildings of cream stone lit by ever-present sunshine, enormous and ornate churches, and a fascinating blend of East-meets-West in its architecture. I added it to my list of places to go, but it was only after waking up to what felt like the sixth week of relentless rain that I was propelled to book tickets - googling ‘where is hot in Europe in April?’ and finding Malta almost at the top of the list meant I was finally sold!

I could spend pages waxing lyrical about how glorious Malta is. The capital, Valletta, is built around its fortified harbour, which now houses a fascinating museum that is well worth a visit, as it explains the history of the island and the role of the different conquering powers, as well as the original rulers of the islands, the Knights, all of whom have shaped the Malta you see today (and for those of you who watch The Crown, it’s where Prince Philip and the then Princess Elizabeth lived and worked during the brief window of married life before Elizabeth became Queen). Its streets are steep and crowded with beautiful historic town houses featuring Malta’s distinctive wooden balconies, and everywhere you look, there are enormous and richly decorated churches that demonstrate the importance of religion to the islanders. Valletta has a stunning cathedral, a lovely palace, and plenty of piazzas with cafes where you can sit and while away the day people watching in the sun. From pretty much every street you can see the sea, and there are beautiful gardens up on the old ramparts outside the fort you can also sit in and have a drink while watching the boats sail past on the water below. The main old city of Valletta is very small, and you can walk around it in 20 minutes or so - but it is packed with places to visit and things to see, and we didn’t get time to go across the water to the Three Cities area which contains just as much history - we had to save that for next time.

While on Malta, we also took a day trip to the fortified ‘city’ of Mdina, half an hour inland from Valletta, and easily accessible by the public bus service (the public transport on Malta is all electric, extremely reliable, regular, and cheap - you don’t need a car at all). We were expecting it to be a quick visit, but found ourselves so charmed and transported by this magical slice of history that we ended up staying all day. You walk in under an enormous ancient gate, that leads you into a warren of warm yellow stone walls housing beautiful homes, restaurants and churches, and opening up every now again into unexpected piazzas where you can sit and take in the beauty of your surroundings. For a tiny place, you can wander around for ages and not find your way back to where you started, so maze-like does it feel inside. You can also walk around the perimeter walls and take in the stunning views across the Maltese countryside and out to sea. It’s a popular tourist destination due to having been a filming location for Game of Thrones, but it certainly didn’t feel overcrowded. Not having watched Game of Thrones ourselves, we were initially perplexed when a large crowd of tourists came to photograph the outside of the very pretty but not especially remarkable looking cafe we were eating in, until our waiter informed us ‘this is the brothel.’ We clearly chose well when selecting our breakfast spot!

After three days on Malta, we hopped on the public ferry to Gozo, the smaller sister island a 30 minute sail away. Quieter and more rural, Gozo certainly feels very different to what locals consider the ‘mainland’ of Malta, and it has a wide array of beaches and watersports, which Malta lacks. We stayed in a beautiful farmhouse for four days, and adored every minute. A twenty minute walk down the road, through the pretty and historic village streets and wending through the shrubby countryside beyond, took us to a beautiful beach with turquoise water lapping the shore. Twenty minutes in the other direction took us down to the harbour, where we caught the open top tour bus around the island. We took in the island capital, Victoria, which is a smaller and quieter, but no less beautiful and historic, version of Valletta, Gozo’s enormous cathedral, and several beaches, before settling on Ramla Bay for the afternoon. This is a gorgeous red sand beach where any building - including hotels - is banned, and so it’s just a beach, a beach cafe, and nothing else for miles around - pure bliss. Calypso’s cave of Greek legend perches on the cliffs above the beach, and the place feels almost untouched by the passing of time since those mythical days. We were sharing the beach with hardly any people, considering it’s considered Malta and Gozo’s best beach, and the cafe served delicious food - something we found everywhere we went on the islands. The Maltese certainly know how to use their local ingredients to make delicious, largely Sardinian inspired food, and we were very happy to try the cuisine at every opportunity!

We adored our time on these beautiful islands, and despite their small size, we both felt by the end of our week’s stay that we had barely scratched the surface. If you love history, then this is the destination for you - the combination of Arabic and Turkish inspired architecture rubbing alongside Italian and Greek influenced buildings is like nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere else in the world, and then there’s the red telephone boxes and post boxes that spring up surprisingly, reminding you of the fact that Malta only stopped being a British colony in the 1970s. The EU has funded a huge amount of restoration work on the island, and the development of numerous museums, all of which are innovative and genuinely fascinating to explore. While there are a lot of problems - locals will talk to you about the governmental corruption, the lack of women’s rights, and lack of work opportunities for young people - things are changing and the islands are modernising rapidly. I can’t recommend a visit enough!

It’s the Easter holidays - at last! - and I’ve just spent a week in sunny Malta (of which more will come later) where I’ve been able to enjoy getting properly stuck in a book. The Spring term at school is always short but intense - mock exams and frantic last drafts of coursework require endless marking as well as plenty of counselling and coaching of stressed-out students - and this also coincided with the school production I’ve been working on since October. Time for personal reading and blogging over the past few weeks has therefore been virtually non-existent, so a reasonably long plane journey (3 hours), chilling in sunny spots and early nights has been a real balm for my reading-deprived soul. Luckily, I thoroughly enjoyed every book I took with me, and I’ve been inspired by each of them to explore their subject matters and authors further. So, quite the win!

Before I went on holiday, I’d been reading The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis with glacial slowness, managing 15 or 20 minutes before bed before drifting off to sleep. I’d never read anything by Martin Amis before, and was inspired to read this by the recent film of the same name (which is only very loosely based on the film, from what I can gather - I’ve not watched it yet). I finally finished it over Easter weekend, and while I can’t deny that it’s clever, and shocking, and thought-provoking, I’m not sure it worked for me. Amis sets the novel in ‘Kat Zet’ - the soldiers’ slang for the concentration camp - in the later days of the war. It is split between three male perspectives: the cynical Thomsen, an official who does clerical work for the company providing the concentration camps with slave labour, and who is untouchable due to being the nephew of Hitler’s Private Secretary; Paul Doll, the deluded, narcissistic and cruel commander of the camp, and Szmul, one of the prisoners, who is in charge of the disposal of his fellow inmates’ bodies. The novel is not really about the war, or the concentration camp at all; this is all just incidental in the battle between Thomsen and Doll for the affections of Hannah, Doll’s wife. The camp provides a series of administrative and practical problems that need to be continuously argued over by the comically useless Doll and his lackeys, undermined by the increasingly jaded Thomsen, and silently endured by the defeated Szmul. The detail of what happens in the camps is merely hinted at, and often couched in euphemism. The fact that the novel is focused on one man’s love for another man’s wife against the background of them all living on the doorstep of a concentration camp is what makes this an interesting and daring piece of fiction, and worth reading. I wouldn’t say the writing or the structure does. You can feel him trying to be clever with every sentence he writes, and the prose felt painfully artificial to me as a result. I also found the constant use of conversation in German and complex German terminology for the names of soldiers and organisations and so on alienating and unnecessary - adopting this approach without providing a glossary to enable people to understand what they’re reading I found to be deliberately exclusive and arrogant. In short, this was my first and will be my last Martin Amis. There is a good story in here - but it needed to be teased out by someone more interested in communicating that story rather than their own perception of their brilliance.

In contrast, what a joy it was to start reading George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter on the plane. His second novel, it tells the story of downtrodden Dorothy, the spinster daughter of an elderly, selfish, parsimonious snob, who has absolutely no interest in helping anyone other than himself. She is worked to the bone running his house and doing all of the work of their rural parish that he should be doing, yet her simple, fervent faith gives her a sense of purpose amidst the drudgery of her day-to-day life. One day, however, after a night spent at the local roué’s house, where she has been lured under false pretences, Dorothy wakes up on the streets of London, wearing someone else’s clothes and with no idea who she is or how she got there. She is swiftly picked up by a band of tramps heading off to Kent to pick hops, and Dorothy enters a world in which back breaking work all day is rewarded by laughter and song around the campfire at night, and any thought of self or situation is obliterated by sheer exhaustion. It is only after seeing her face in a newspaper, where she is said to be missing, assumed to have run off with the man she was last seen with, that she remembers who she is. Overcome with shame at what the village must believe of her, Dorothy writes to her father for help - she knows she can’t go home, but she also has no money to support herself. Receiving no response, she goes back to London and faces a nightmare life on the streets before her father’s class-conscious cousin is able to give her a helping hand into a job at a very second-rate private school, where her meagre board and lodgings and harridan of a boss merely echo the life she had left behind at her father’s.

Orwell’s prose is always a pleasure to read, and it was fascinating to read such an early piece of his work, and see his socialist preoccupations and interest in the lives of the poor and working class coming together in this story of a genteel woman down on her luck who eventually comes to choose duty and routine over independence and struggle, because the former is easier. There is plenty he finds to critique about the petty bourgeois sensibilities of 1930s England, and the lack of support available to those who fall through the cracks, but Orwell’s skill as a novelist means that this never tips into didacticism - certainly not for me, anyway, though I can see that some readers may disagree - and I found his exploration of Dorothy’s psyche - particularly her loss of faith and how this fractures her sense of worth and purpose - sensitive and utterly convincing. He permits himself some artistic experimentation here, too, suggestive of being interested in modernism, and the fantastic - there is a strange verbatim theatre style chapter that didn’t quite work for me, and the mystery of Dorothy’s appearance in London is never explained - we just have to accept it as a piece of narrative sleight of hand - all of which makes this not your run-of-the-mill Orwell novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it is not a book you could call uplifting, by any means, and am very glad that Simon chose it for our next Tea or Books? episode - so do tune in when it’s live to hear more on our thoughts.

Carrying on the Orwell theme, I then picked up Wifedom by Anna Funder, which is a genre-bending biography enhanced with fiction of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife, who, as Funder argues, was written very successfully out of Orwell’s life and writing by both him and his biographers, and she is determined to right that wrong. I’ve not quite finished yet, but I am absolutely loving it. Funder is not saying anything new in terms of her exploration of the patriarchy and the hidden, unpaid ‘wifework’ of women that has gone on since time immemorial to enable the public, paid work of men. However, her determination to demonstrate how Eileen was fundamental to Orwell being able to write the work he did has uncovered the obfuscations, omissions and downright lies of those keen to perpetuate a certain image of Orwell - and deny the contribution of Eileen to his work - over the decades since he died, is nothing short of revelatory. She goes back to the sources of Orwell’s biographers and finds examples where words have been changed, information withheld, damning evidence wilfully reinterpreted, all to ensure that Orwell’s problematic behaviours and often shameful treatment of his wife was kept hidden from view. In the process, Eileen’s life and phenomenal achievements were erased. Orwell barely mentions her in Homage to Catalonia - but she was the one risking her life running the operations of the POUM militia in Barcelona, keeping the communication lines open between the front and the various agents throughout Spain and beyond, hiding incriminating documentation in her hotel room, dodging sniper bullets and risking arrest to procure passports - I could go on. It was Eileen who was really wanted for arrest by the regime - not her husband. He was just an accessory - that was how important she was. But in Orwell’s version of events - she was just there to make the tea. I could go on - but you simply must read the book. Eileen’s story is a perfect example of what patriarchy has done and continues to do to women’s lives, and I am delighted that Funder had the determination and tenacity to dig through the archives to bring Eileen’s achievements back into the light.

Finally, one of my reading goals for this year is to read more classics I’ve never got around to, and I did just that while lazing around the pool. I finally read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which requires no introduction from me, I’m sure, suffice to say that I found it utterly absorbing, totally mad, and nothing like anything I would usually read, and I absolutely loved it. I am now a convert to magical realism, after believing for a long time it wasn’t for me, and look forward to reading more of his work. It was the number one book I wanted to get to on my list, and after this success, I very much hope I will find the others just as worth the wait.

January and February have gone by in what seems to be the blink of an eye. I am currently producing the school musical, which is taking place in a professional theatre, and the amount of work involved has been far beyond my initial expectations. Rehearsals every night after school and on Saturday mornings, meetings at the theatre with the technical crew, hundreds of emails to parents, hundreds of emails to colleagues, lots of running around school looking for children and costumes and lost scripts and the finance administrator to please please pay my invoices…it’s been a full time job on top of a full time job, and I am almost ready to collapse. But it will soon be show time - by this time next week, the final curtain will have come down, the fabulous cast of students who have worked their absolute socks off would have had the time of their lives, and me and my amazing director will be able to get a proper night’s sleep for the first time in months. It’s amazing how your dreams get infiltrated with this sort of thing - I’ve had a lot of panicked 3am wake ups, after dreaming that a light has fallen down and hit a child on the head, or the lead is sick and I have to go on and sing her part, or the theatre can’t actually have us after all and we have to do the musical in the street…

But. It’s not all been stress and drama, of course. I had a wonderful few days in Copenhagen over half term, where one of my oldest and dearest friends now lives. We stayed together in a very fancy hotel in the centre of town with a spa - because I really needed one - and had a marvellous time wandering the beautiful streets, eating a lot of pastry, and seeing plenty of art. The last time I went to Copenhagen was ten years ago, so while some of it was familiar, most of it felt very new, and it was a very different experience to visit with a local. My friend took me to the incredible Louisiana modern art gallery in the suburbs of the city, which is a stunning 19th century mansion with attached 1960s gallery extension nestled in beautiful gardens overlooking the sea. The art work is magnificent, but so is the setting - the two in communication with one another makes for a truly unique experience. There is one double height room with an incredible view across a lake outside, in front of which is perched one of Louise Bourgeois’ huge spiders - it felt like this creature had just wandered in from the rugged landscape outside to get warm before wandering off again. We also had a lovely time at the National Art Museum, which is another fine piece of architecture with a beautiful glass atrium that makes the most of the lovely views outside and makes the city itself a work of art alongside the paintings on its walls. Aside from all the art, we enjoyed wandering in and out of lots of beautifully decorated, peaceful churches, shopping in numerous stylish boutiques and department stores filled with gorgeous stuff, eating lots of lovely cakes and the best pizza I’ve had in my life, and generally admiring the colourful and varied architecture of this charming city. Unfortunately it was very grey and damp and cold for my entire visit, which made it hard to take decent photos. But I was warmed and cheered by being with my friend, and seeing her happy in her new home. I shall be going back frequently, and look forward to sunshine and getting on (and perhaps in!) the water next time I go.

Reading-wise, over the past month I have very much enjoyed Elizabeth Fair’s The Native Heath - if you are a fan of Barbara Pym, you will love her novels and I strongly recommend you giving her a go. This witty tale of what happens when a woman inherits her old family home and inserts herself into the life of the village was just what I needed to switch off after my busy days at school. It’s not her best - that crown still belongs to Landscape in Sunlight, in my view - but still very worth a read. On an entirely different emotional plane, I took Chernobyl Prayer with me to Copenhagen, and it is a powerful, devastating read. An oral account from a multitude of people involved in some way with the disaster - local residents, government officials, children, clean up workers, wives of those men who died - it reveals the true human cost on the Belorussian people and is a fascinating insight into the role the Soviet mindset played in the response to the disaster. Despite the often distressing content, I couldn’t put it down. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

For a wider cultural hit, I loved watching All of Us Strangers at the cinema - a remarkable, beautiful, heartbreaking film, and seeing the Diva exhibition at the V&A - I really enjoyed the focus on female artistry and achievement. The Chanel exhibition at the V&A is also glorious, though very crowded - I could have stayed in there looking at the gorgeous clothes forever!

I hope your beginnings to the year have been less frenetic than mine. There is something to be said, however, to have an absorbing creative project to throw yourself into at this time of the year. I feel that I’ve missed those long, dark and depressing days I normally struggle with amidst all the hustle and bustle of school, and now as things slow down, I am emerging into blue skies and blossom and the delicate scent of life stirring in the air. I do love this transition from February into March, when warmth and colour and light begin to return. Soon - Spring.

One of the many joys of teaching in international schools, as I have for many years now, is the freedom I have to teach whatever literature texts I like. At the moment I’m having a wonderful time teaching my Diploma Literature students Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, which is just the most magnificent novel to teach due to both the beauty and rich texture of its prose, but also the cleverness of its narrative structure. Janina, the very unreliable narrator, is a woman living on the margins of society, both literally and metaphorically - she chooses to live in a hamlet on the Plateau, an isolated, windswept slice of countryside on the border of Poland and the Czech Republic - and lives her life according to what the stars tell her. A passionate believer in astrology, the sacredness of the natural world, and the equality of animals to humans, she rejects the values of the community in which she lives, where hunting and Catholicism are central to people’s lives. Marked as an eccentric oddball by her neighbours, and dismissed as being just a crazy old woman by those she tries to alert to the damage the local male coterie of huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ types are doing to the natural environment around them, Janina decides to take matters into her own hands, and in quite spectacular style! She is a magnificent character, who Tokarczuk uses to question the accepted norms of Western society, and my students have adored being thrown into her world - and I have loved watching as the penny has slowly dropped that she is not all she claims to be! However, what I have enjoyed the most this time round (I’m on my third reading) is thinking about the connections between Janina and William Blake, whose poetry suffuses the text and gives the novel its name.

Blake was a man outside of his time, whose claims of visions and connection with the spiritual realm always marked him as an eccentric. A man of the Enlightenment, he was clear-eyed about the corruption and exploitation that were the pillars of industrialisation, and while rejecting organised religion, still believed in a spiritual realm and a loving God, evidence of which he saw in visions from very early childhood. As my students would say, he spoke truth to power and was unafraid of ruffling feathers, and as he aged, his increasingly idiosyncratic views saw him labelled as a madman by many. His poetry and art never sold well during his lifetime, and he died a pauper - he is buried in the Dissenters burial ground at Bunhill Fields, which was, at the time, on the edges of London - it’s now in the very busy neighbourhood of Old Street, on the edge of the City, and a beautiful new memorial headstone was laid a few years ago. His most famous works, his Songs of Innocence and Experience, had only sold 30 copies at his death - hard to imagine now, when they form the backbone of English literature. He seemed destined to be forgotten until he was revived later in the nineteenth century, largely by the Pre-Raphaelites, and then in the 20th century he was taken up the Modernists and Beat poets who saw him as a counter cultural hero. He is now revered by many as something of a prophet, a man outside of his time, whose radical, strange and often challenging poetry and accompanying illustrations express all that cannot be fully understood and articulated beneath the everyday of our human experience.

I never studied Blake at school or university, and so I’ve been going on quite the journey of discovery over the past few weeks as I’ve been endeavouring to learn as much about him and his world as I can. I have been very much enjoying John Higgs’ fascinating biography, William Blake vs The World, and the catalogue for the William Blake exhibition at the Tate a few years ago is providing me with an excellent insight into his process as an artist. I’ve been exploring the amazing Blake archive online, looking at the commonalities between his illustrations and starting to gain a better overview of how he saw the spiritual world, and I’ve been immersing myself in the strange and wonderful world of his poetry. I don’t read much poetry, as a general rule - it’s never appealed to me all that much - but reading Blake is a very transcendental experience, and the more I read, the more I can let go of the idea that I am reading poetry, and instead just let myself be immersed in his imaginative landscape. The unusual experience of having images to go with the poems, to help you connect the words with the world Blake was trying to recreate for his readers, makes it an even richer process, and I am just in awe of what a visionary genius Blake was.

I love how easy it is these days to become very knowledgeable about something quite quickly, with so much expertise available at your fingertips. I’ve been able to listen to podcasts, recordings from literary festivals and radio shows where experts have discussed Blake, read his poetry, and offered numerous fascinating tidbits it would have taken me ages of scouring multiple sources to find. All of Blake’s work is published on the Blake Archive, making it easy to compare and contrast multiple images at the click of a button. While I imagine the old days of having to dig about in archives was far more exciting (one of the reasons I love A.S.Byatt’s Possession so much is that the plot hinges on a chance discovery in a literary archive), the democratisation of open-access information means all of us can educate ourselves now in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even 20 years ago.

Janina and Blake are peas in a pod, and living in both of their worlds has been a thrilling and intellectually exciting experience. Being able to take my students on this journey with me, allowing them to see how writers gain inspiration from one another and how a wide and deep knowledge of literature allows you as a reader to make more meaningful interpretations of texts, has made it even richer. This week we’re going to make a pilgrimage to Blake’s grave, and pop in to the British Library to see some of the illustrated manuscripts of his poems in the Treasures Gallery, to help bring it even more to life. We have discussed going to visit the Plateau in Poland, too, to really cement the experience, but I’m not quite sure I can convince my Headteacher that’s strictly necessary! We’ll settle for watching the recording of Complicité’s magnificent theatre production of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead instead, which should be going live in the next couple of weeks. If you’re interested in seeing it, do keep an eye on their website.

I hope I’ve inspired you to go on a literary journey in this dark and cold month where staying in and reading feels like the only sensible way to spend one’s time. This year my reading resolution is to read more intentionally, and namely to mop up a few of the major classics I have never got around to reading. I’m tossing up Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea and Dickens’ Bleak House as my next reads…any thoughts welcome!

Today I emerged from my post-Christmas hibernation and decided a good long walk was in order. Ordinarily when I want a proper stomp, I head up to Hampstead Heath and get both literally and metaphorically lost in the only real wilderness London has to offer, but after flicking through my copy of the wonderful 1960s classic, The London Nobody Knows, by Geoffrey Fletcher, I decided to stick a bit closer to home and see what treasure I could find on the backstreets as I wended my way from my flat in Clerkenwell down to Chancery Lane.

The aim of the walk was to find London’s oldest (and I believe only) surviving cast iron urinal, which is located on Star Yard, round the back of Chancery Lane, near Lincoln’s Inn. This may seem a strange focal point for a walk, but some of you who have been reading my blog for a long time may recall my interest (my friends would call it an obsession, but I prefer interest!) in public toilets. I love the history of public toilets - or conveniences, as the Victorians called them - largely because public toilet provision is closely aligned with the opening up of cities to women as places of leisure. Sadly many of the original Victorian public toilets have now disappeared, so when I come across one I’ve not heard of before, my excitement goes through the roof. The description of this urinal as being a sort of makeshift lean-to affair intrigued me - as did the fact it was still standing, despite being far from a solid structure - and so camera in hand, I set out to find it, and also see what else I could spot on my way.

I am fortunate to live amidst a beautiful cluster of Georgian squares, which are sandwiched between Rosebery Avenue, Amwell Street and Pentonville Road, and which offer much architectural interest. Amwell Street is full of original nineteenth century shop fronts and also has the old industrial buildings of the New River Company, which used to manage the water supply of this part of London. They are currently under construction to become the new Quentin Blake Museum of Illustration, which my neighbours and I are much looking forward to opening in 2025. You can read more about the site here. I am particularly thrilled, as Quentin Blake grew up on the same street as me in South East London, and went to my secondary school, so I feel like my life has come full circle in some small way. Interestingly, Charles Dickens’ illustrator, George Cruikshank, lived on Amwell Street, and his great-grandson was in my class at secondary school. Isn’t life just full of strange coincidences?

Walking through my neighbourhood offers much to delight, but I know it all by heart after spending far too many afternoons during the 2020 lockdown wandering its streets, so we shall bypass this neighbourhood and instead I will transport you past Exmouth Market, which is a delightful street of restaurants and independent shops, and down Rosebery Avenue, which links Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell and Islington as it wends its way from Theobalds Road up to St John’s Street. It is largely made up of old warehouses, which have now been converted into offices and apartments, and also has several interesting nineteenth century mansion blocks and tenement houses. This was always a slum district, and maintains a vaguely institutional air through the height and scale of these large Victorian colossuses that straddle the wide road. It is elevated - you can see the viaduct when you get to the middle of the road - which is due to the fact that this used to be the path of the River Fleet. If you pop down onto the road below, you’ll get a nice view of the Victorian ironwork that props Rosebery Avenue up and gives it this distinctive almost New York-esque character, which you can also see at Holborn Viaduct, but on a larger scale.

When I hit Theobalds Road, I took a left and went down Leather Lane, which is famous for its traditional weekday market. There was no market today, so I could enjoy looking at the mixture of different shop fronts, some of which haven’t changed since the nineteenth century - I particularly enjoyed seeing some of the original signage that has somehow managed to stay intact. As I walked, I happened to spot an intriguing looking Gothic church poking out of a side street, so I ducked off the main road and found a remarkable enclave of buildings that made me feel like I’d gone back in time. Attached to this Gothic church, which is apparently a rare William Butterfield design (he was a prominent neo-Gothic architect), are a Gothic clergy house, and another clergy house/hostel, which looks like it belongs in Amsterdam. In the middle of the road opposite to these, sits a little Dutch-style arts and crafts block of council flats, and opposite that, a small art deco factory painted a startlingly bright white. All around this cluster of architectural wonder are ugly 1960s council blocks, and I was left marvelling at how these pockets of beauty survive amidst the immense amounts of redevelopment that have taken place in the 20th century. I particularly loved seeing this little cat next to a flower pot in the window as I walked past the clergy house; it was like something from a Barbara Pym novel. I could almost smell the cabbage boiling in a pan somewhere behind the panes.

Onwards to High Holborn, where I had a wander through the courtyard of the gargantuan Victorian terracotta office building originally built for the Prudential Life Assurance Agency - all pinnacles and arches and pointed roofs - before cutting down Fetter Lane - which has all been destroyed by modern office construction - and Bream’s Buildings - which has some lovely old Victorian office blocks - before finding myself in Star Yard, home to the aforementioned Victorian urinal, or pissoir, as it would have been known when first built, as it is a copy of a French design. What a joy! It is like a little cast iron shed affixed to a brick wall, and has been there since the 1850s. It was padlocked, but being tall and armed with an iPhone, I managed to look inside with my camera - it is no longer a toilet, but a storage shed, which belongs to the house opposite (I did some googling). It would seem this is why it survives, as it is in private rather than council ownership. It’s a shame it doesn’t still fulfil its original purpose, as truly public toilets are now a rare sight - but I am just glad it is still there to be admired as a piece of nineteenth century craftsmanship. I also love the fact that when it was built, it was situated next to a still-surviving gas lamp - how thoughtful!

My goal achieved, I decided to have a wander through Lincoln’s Inn, which has some of the most beautiful architecture in London, in my view - I absolutely adore the little shops and pubs on Carey Street, which haven’t altered in well over a hundred years, and look so tiny compared with the buildings they are connected to behind. I’d love to find out more about how they came about in the first place. There is so much Victorian gothic in these streets to enjoy - the Maughan Library, now belonging to the King’s College London, is a particular delight - as well as the Georgian stateliness of the beautiful buildings around Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where you can find the marvellous Sir John Soane Museum. I love the wide array of Victorian street furniture on the streets here, too - so many impressive old street lamps, and even an old drinking fountain. You could spend a good hour or so just exploring this little corner behind Chancery Lane, especially if you go into Lincoln’s Inn itself, which is one of London’s famous Inns of Courts, but the sky was beginning to darken, so I thought I best hurry on.

After feeling like I had been transported to the nineteenth century while wandering these quiet back streets, it felt quite jarring when I came out of a side street onto the busy bustle of Kingsway, which joins Aldwych to Holborn. This was once the terminus for London’s trams, and is an enormously wide street as a result. I ducked across into another side street, and then walked down Long Acre into Seven Dials, noticing for the first time many beautiful old shop signs and fronts that I had never really stopped to enjoy before, as well as stumbling across a Swiss Church I had never noticed, despite walking past it dozens of times. En route home, I popped into the gorgeous stationery shop Choosing Keeping, which is well worth a visit, as it’s filled with the most beautiful handmade and vintage stationery that I could have happily have spent a lot of money on (but resisted, because I’m sure I’m not alone in having a drawerful of beautiful unused notebooks already!), and realised that, without the usual crowds (London is always blessedly quiet in these days between Christmas and New Year), Seven Dials is a real joy to wander through and has got some lovely independent shops I’ve always been too frustrated with the crowds to bother exploring. I have made a note to revisit soon.

What I love about London is how suddenly you find yourself moving from one neighbourhood to another - standing amidst the gaudy Christmas lights of Seven Dials and the traffic of High Holborn as I waited to cross the road, I could already glimpse the flat-fronted soot-blackened Georgian terraces of Gower Street ahead, signalling the transition into Bloomsbury. With relief I left the busyness of the shopping streets of Covent Garden behind and walked up Gower Street until I hit Bedford Square, my favourite of the Bloomsbury garden squares. I then took a right, walked past the back of the British Museum, cut through the rather barren looking Russell Square gardens, and then took my familiar route home through the back streets of Bloomsbury, once the stomping ground of Dickens and Woolf. I have been feeling a little out of love with London lately, longing for fresh air and greenery and nature. But on days like this, when a walk down a road I’ve never had reason to go down before can offer so much to delight and surprise, I remember how enormously lucky I am to live in such an endlessly diverting, fascinating and historic place, that manages to be continually in flux while remaining reassuringly the same.

These lazy last few days before Christmas are such a treat after the manic activity of the first school term of the year. Having a week to wind down and gear up for the festivities is just what the doctor ordered. I’ve been busy, but pleasantly so - there’s been a carol concert, a night at the Barbican listening to ‘Christmas at the Movies’, cosy coffee and cake à l’Autriche at my favourite local café, Kipferl, a trip to the cinema to see ‘Wonka’ (which I very much enjoyed as a piece of undemanding whimsy), a family ‘fake’ Christmas, and a glorious wander around Hever Castle’s Christmas lights show and fair, including a ride on the merry-go-round (my sister and I loved it so much we went on twice!). There’s also been plenty of time to put my feet up and read, and I have been having a Middlebrow Midwinter, in that I’ve allowed my brain to rest and indulge itself in reading what it likes best during these short, dark days when the sun rises late and sets early, and the body and mind long for hibernation and stillness. In preparation for this, I treated myself to a few books by middlebrow writers I’ve long liked but not read widely, and what a fabulous time I’ve had devouring them this week, while lingering over tea in bed in the mornings, and enjoying a little Mrs Miniver-esque tea tray on the sofa during the lamplit afternoons.

I first read a novel by Elizabeth Fair several years ago, when Dean Street Press started republishing middlebrow authors who had otherwise been lost to the midsts of time. I remember liking A Winter Away very much, experiencing plenty of laugh out loud moments, and finding her style very similar to Barbara Pym, though slightly less caustic and with a little more whimsy. I can’t imagine why it’s taken me so long to get to another book of hers, but when I saw a gorgeous 1950s copy of Landscape in Sunlight going very cheaply on eBay a couple of weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge. Set in the village of Little Mallin, the book tells the story of one summer in the lives of its residents, though it largely revolves around Mrs Custance, the vicar’s wife, and her preparations for the church summer fête (known as the Day to everyone in the village), as well as her concern over her twenty-something daughter Cassandra’s lack of direction in life. Cassandra is quite happy whiling away her days as a governess, but when her childhood friend George, the wayward son of the local aristocrat, comes back on the scene, she finds herself unsettled. Alongside the Custance’s domestic woes are those of the Templars. Cassandra is the governess to the nephew of Eustace Templar, a once famous portrait painter who retired to the country in a huff many years before and now hates any mention of artists. He lives in a rambling old pile with his marvellous hippy of a spinster sister, Isobel, and their fastidious brother in law Colonel Ashford, who finds the ramshackle nature of life in the Templar household unbearable. Colonel Ashford’s main goal in life is to find a house of his own, and quickly (he is staying with the Templars while his wife recovers from an operation), but houses in the village are hard to come by. Eustace Templar owns a very pretty cottage at the end of the lane that would be perfect, but it is currently occupied by the village martyr, Mrs Midge, and her insipid, over-indulged son Lukin, who fancies himself the next young thing in the art world. The two are ‘utterly devoted’ to one another, but much to Mrs Midge’s dismay, Lukin, with the encouragement of Lily, the newly home from school niece of the Templars, is starting to develop a desire for independence. Eustace and Isobel would dearly love Mrs Midge - who Mrs Custance considers in the category of ‘people we could do without’ - to move on so that Colonel Ashford can move in. Can Lily and Cassandra’s cunning plan to encourage Lukin to set himself up as a Real Artist be a solution to the problem? Throw in a good amount of village gossip, misunderstandings, fears of poor weather and the petty disagreements that so often cause battle lines to be drawn in rural communities, and you have an absolutely brilliant comedy of manners that would give Jane Austen a run for her money. I would actually say that this is better than Barbara Pym, and that really is saying something. I couldn’t stop laughing while reading it - there are so many brilliantly observed moments and fantastic lines of dialogue that made me stop in my tracks and think - my goodness, this is such fabulous writing. So fabulous in fact, that the moment I finished, I went straight online and bought a copy of her first novel, Bramton Wick, which is just as entertaining and funny, though the characters are not quite as memorable as in Landscape in Sunlight. I now consider myself an Elizabeth Fair addict, and look forward to exploring the rest of her oeuvre in the New Year.

Alongside these two marvellous novels, I have been absorbed in Ruby Ferguson’s (of Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary fame, one of my favourite Persephone reprints) For Every Favour, which had such a beautiful dust jacket that I bought it on a total whim, without knowing anything about the actual story (and when it arrived, I found it was also signed by Ruby Ferguson - what a bonus!). It wasn’t at all what I had expected, but it is brilliant nonetheless. It is the story, from childhood to old age, of Eddie Boan, a poor gardener’s boy born in the 1880s, who aspires to become a butler. We see him work as a pantry boy and valet in his first couple of jobs, in which there are many ups and downs while he is earning his stripes, before he goes to Merryns, a beautifully run Edwardian country house occupied by Lord and Lady Cedely and their young family. Merryns is an idyll that for Eddie will always be remembered as the happiest time of his life. This is largely due to his unrequited love for Miss Isobel, the Cedely’s eldest daughter, who is just a couple of years older than Eddie. Beautiful and selfish, she blazes her way through life doing exactly what she wants and to hell with everyone else, and the morally upstanding Eddie can’t help himself, despite her representing everything he abhors. When Isobel commits a fatal error, Eddie finds himself coming to her rescue, and this ultimately leads to his ruin. After WWI, he is down on his luck, almost out of options, but then a chance encounter from his past gives him a second chance - but with another war around the corner, can it ever last? And will Eddie ever be able to put the ghost of Isobel Cedely to rest?

Eddie is such a fantastic, endearing character who I loved seeing grow and change over the course of the novel. My heart broke for him, and I longed to shake him at several points - he feels so real and comes so alive off the pages that it really does feel like you’ve sat down with a relic from the Edwardian era and heard them tell you their life story by the end. Imagine a middlebrow version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day without the Nazi sympathiser as an employer, and you won’t be far off the reading experience of For Every Favour. I can see why Persephone haven’t reprinted it, as it centres the life experience of a man, and it is a little earnest in places, but it definitely deserves to be brought back into publication and enjoyed by many more people than those who have managed to find a rare original edition. I’d actually love to see this recreated as a TV series - a mixture of David Copperfield and Downton Abbey. If you can get hold of a copy, I encourage you to give it a go. I’d also be very keen for any more Ruby Ferguson recommendations - For Every Favour has reminded me just how good a writer she is.

I hope you will all have time to have a little bit of a Middlebrow Midwinter yourself over the coming few days of the advent season. Have a wonderful, restful time, whatever you are doing and whatever (and however) you celebrate.

I’ve been under the weather for a solid month. Going back to teaching after a couple of years out of the classroom has been a real assault on my immune system. I’ve gone from being teflon when it comes to illness - nary a sniffle, nary a day off - to a hollow-eyed hag with a hacking cough and perpetual sore throat, crawling into bed at 8pm every night exhausted and waking up in the morning feeling no better for it. However, my two-week bout of laryngitis has finally abated somewhat, leaving me with just a tickly cough rather than a throat like sandpaper, and my voice has finally returned to its usual pitch. Here’s hoping it’s going to be uphill from now on. Just keeping it real, everyone! Life in the land of Book Snob is not always full of fun. But we soldier on regardless. And the one benefit of illness as far as I am concerned is that it justifies otherwise unnecessary purchases of books in order to lift the spirits. A particularly serendipitous purchase over the past couple of weeks was Family Album by Antonia Ridge, which I plucked from the shelf of a charity shop on Marylebone High Street, largely because I liked the look of the dust jacket. All it took was a glance at the blurb - a spinster English teacher in middle age decides to go on an adventure to find her long lost family in rural France! - and I was trotting off to the counter to hand over my two pounds. The man serving me was very jealous - ‘I wish I’d spotted that!’ - and I went off to get my bus home feeling very smug indeed.

As I lay on the sofa coughing up a lung and feeling sorry for myself that evening, I picked up Family Album and fell into that midcentury world of wonderfully restful and undemanding charm and whimsy that readers of Miss Read and D E Stevenson will know and love. Dorothy Durand is a no-nonsense woman who has reached middle age having travelled no further than her industrial midland town. Brought up by her beloved Aunt Kate after the tragic early death of her parents, she had a simple but loving childhood, and after a not particularly illustrious schooling, unthinkingly followed her aunt into the teaching profession. Then follows two decades of dedicated hard work teaching the ‘remedial’ class at the local high school, alongside caring for her ageing Aunt Kate, with little excitement or promise of any to come. The only magic in Dorothy’s life is the legend of her parents, kept alive through the family album of photographs her father brought with him on his marriage. Aunt Kate has told her of her handsome French father, who swept her mother off her feet and married her despite his family’s objections. The Durand family cut off their son after his marriage, and there has been no contact with them since, but Dorothy has never stopped wondering about the other side of her family living across the Channel. From a young age, she has diligently studied French and keeps up an impressive fluency to maintain a connection with the father she never even knew. Dorothy has a fancy that she will go one day to find her family when she is retired, but when her Aunt Kate dies suddenly, she realises that life is short, and the time for adventure is now. Much to everyone’s shock, Dorothy hands in her notice, lets out her house, and sets sail for France, with no plan other than to go where her heart leads her.

Needless to say, that through a series of wonderful coincidences, Dorothy finds her way to her family, and finds a whole new world of love and possibility as she travels in the footsteps of her father. Ridge’s portrait of France and the French is informed by her own experiences, and it shows; her lovingly detailed descriptions of the beautiful, historic streets of Arles and Nîmes, of the conviviality of a French restaurant at lunchtime, of Provençal markets and rackety train journeys across the lavender-scented countryside, all transported me back to places where I have spent many a happy summer. However, Ridge really excels in her characterisation; she brings every one of the locals Dorothy meets to vivid life, and I fell in love with all of them. Their excitement at meeting Dorothy and the warmth with which they welcome her into their lives is a testament to the goodness at the heart of humanity, and a message I’m sure Ridge was keen to send so soon after WWII ripped Europe apart.

The dust jacket blurb tells me that this was the first ever radio-serial to have been written for the BBC Radio show Woman’s Hour, which is still going strong today, and was enormously popular when broadcast in 1952. Much of the novel takes place in the French town of St-Etienne, and the book was given out as a school prize to the best students of English in all the Lycées in town when it was published! I can see why it brought much joy to the post-war housewives of England and France, and can’t understand why it has fallen by the wayside; it is a charming indulgence of a book that demands nothing of the reader other than to sit back, relax and enjoy. I highly recommend you getting hold of it and giving it a go. It’s the perfect book for this time of year; amidst all the rush, bustle and sniffles, it will provide the precious moments of stillness we all need to get through the festive season.

I don’t know about you, but I find that every now and again there’s a travel destination that suddenly everyone is talking about. Your colleague will be going there, and then your brother, and then people at a party you’re at will be talking about this amazing time they had there, and then you’ll pick up a magazine and find a four page spread on what a marvellous and magical place it is. Then you’ll get off the tube and find yourself faced with a huge poster of said place from the relevant tourism agency, and it starts to feel like a coordinated attack from someone, somewhere, to get you on a plane, post haste. It’s been like this for me with Budapest for the past year, so after what felt like the fiftieth recommendation, I finally booked a flight and an airbnb and made plans to go over half term. A friend wanted to join me, and we thought it would be fun if we could add a train journey into the mix - after realising that Vienna was a mere two hours’ away, we thought - why not? And soon found ourselves on a journey along the Danube to take in the two beautiful former capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

We flew into a sunny Budapest on a Sunday morning, and were whisked into the centre of the city by the impressively organised public bus service. After a delicious brunch and dumping our bags in our lovely 19th century apartment in the old Jewish quarter, we set off for an explore. We were immediately charmed by the gorgeous architecture; the streets are lined with beautiful nineteenth century apartment blocks, many of them with lovely art nouveau detailing. Narrower streets filled with quirky shops and hidden passageways criss-cross behind larger, stately avenues down which jolly yellow trams sail alongside the traffic, connecting the distant neighbourhoods of the Buda and Pest sides of the city, which are separated by the Danube. The main shopping streets by the river are an art nouveau masterpiece, and then as you walk through them, the Danube itself appears: a vast, glittering, shimmering mass of water that makes its stately way through the city and out to the countryside beyond. Along the water lies the magical fairy palace of the parliament building, as well as Buda Castle and a myriad of other beautiful buildings that were a delight to look at as we walked across the famous Chain bridge and took in the views. It is a remarkably old fashioned city scape, and one we found utterly charming. I had heard of Budapest’s beauty, but I couldn’t have been prepared for how truly gorgeous it is.

We had great fun over our three days in the city, exploring as much as we could on foot. We loved climbing up to Buda Castle and taking in the incredible views across the city, and visiting the Hungarian National Gallery, which is one of the best art galleries I’ve ever visited, with a comprehensive collection of nineteenth and twentieth century art that tells the story of this fascinating country. We spent a blissfully relaxing afternoon lolling about in the Szechenyi Baths complex, the largest of its kind in Europe, where we felt like we had truly stepped back in time (and the metro there from the centre is also like stepping back in time - tiny carriages and nineteenth century stations). We took the tram out to a suburban neighbourhood to visit the famous Esceri flea market, picking up some vintage treasure, and then hopped on to a bus even further out into the countryside, to go to the fascinating Momento Park, a repository of statues from the Soviet era. We also managed to fit in a night at the ballet - top price seats in Budapest’s opera house are about the third of the price of London, and we felt like royalty for the evening - as well as a gig on a boat, listening to an amazing Hungarian folk band, as well as plenty of delicious restaurants, buzzing ruined bars, and browsing around a multitude of fantastic vintage shops. We loved every minute and had our fill of delicious coffee, pastries and cakes, not to mention one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had at our neighbourhood restaurant. Budapest is a truly magical city, and one I know I’ll be back to visit again soon.

It was with slightly heavy hearts, therefore, that we boarded our train to Vienna. On arrival, as we wended through the streets to our apartment, we already felt ourselves missing the slower pace of Budapest, its fresh air, open views to the countryside, and the beautiful Danube. However, we were determined to take Vienna on its own merits, and soon set about exploring. Downtown Vienna - around the Ringstrasse - is all stately Haussmanian apartment blocks, enormous pillared official buildings and wide, tree-lined avenues, interspersed with parks and pockets of greenery. We were dazzled by the fancy shops with their beautiful nineteenth century fronts, the enormous Stephenskirche and the Hofburg Palace, sitting perched at the end of the main shopping streets. As dusk fell, we joined the queue for the Café Central, and enjoyed out first taste of Viennese life; nothing beats Austrian cake and coffee!

Over the next couple of days, we took in more beautiful architecture, visited the Klimts at the gorgeous Belvedere Palace, went to the Sissi exhibition at the Hofburg Palace (I must watch the new film, Corsage, about her), and then went to find out more about the Royals at Austria’s answer to Versailles, the stunning Schönbrunn Palace. We explored the canal and saw the art made by the locals along its walls, and stumbled across an 18th century porcelain factory and park next to our apartment, where we had some delicious cake in their fancy restaurant. We wandered around Leopoldstadt and took a stroll through the Prater, which was a place we both thought would be a fantastic setting for a horror movie. We visited the Austrian Parliament (largely because I needed to use their toilet), which was unexpectedly fascinating, and open to anyone (what a breath of fresh air!) and went to a concert at the Musikverein where the performers were dressed up in 18th century clothing. We ate so much cake that by the end of the week, I felt sick at the sight of it. We headed back to the airport surprised at how much we had enjoyed ourselves, loaded down with a suitcase of Manner waffles (how had we never come across these delights before?), and in agreement that these two glorious cities had won our hearts.

I picked up Jane Gardam’s remarkable book of connected short stories, Black Faces, White Faces, while in Oxford a couple of weeks ago. I dashed into Oxfam Books on a dreary, wet Friday afternoon, looking for something - anything - to read, as I had somehow forgotten to pack my book when frantically chucking my things into my overnight bag that morning. I didn’t have long - my colleague and I were accompanying our students on a three day conference, and during a lecture, my colleague had said she’d hold the fort while I went out for a quick breath of fresh air. For such a bookish town, the Oxfam Books in Oxford never has that great a selection - perhaps it’s because no one in Oxford gives away their books?! - and as my eyes scanned over the shelves, I failed to see anything that really sparked my interest. Then, suddenly, I saw the magical name of Jane Gardam leaping out at me, and I plucked this slim little volume off the shelf. I read the blurb - ‘Jamaica in the off-peak season: brilliant sun, clear blue skies, neatly raked beaches, cool cocktails and swimming pools…But beneath the idyllic surface cross-currents of tension and terror threaten to sweep the complacent holidaymakers out of their depth’ - and was immediately sold. Jane Gardam’s Old Filth series of books were probably my favourite contemporary reads of this year, and so I was delighted to have another world of hers in which to absorb myself.

I didn’t have any time to flick through, so when I started reading on my return to the conference, I realised I’d inadvertently bought a book of short stories rather than a novel. I’m not normally a fan of the short story form, but these are all so perfectly, exquisitely crafted portraits in miniature that I found myself entirely satisfied by them regardless. Set in the time they were written - the early 1970s - amongst the largely English, wealthy guests of a high end Jamaican hotel, the short stories explore their adventures and misadventures as they attempt to navigate an environment that both fascinates and repels them. One of my favourites was the tale of two ancient school mistresses, who leave their Harrogate school for the first time in their lives to take a holiday in Jamaica, and whose terrifying journey up into the hills in a rainstorm, with one of them driving a car for the first time since driving an ambulance in the war (the first one!) could so easily have been a horrific tragedy, but instead descends into the most glorious farce. I also loved the story of the honeymoon of an impossibly young and impossibly well-heeled couple, who are hopelessly in love until they get caught in a rainstorm and their car breaks down. Their differing responses to crisis give them both their first proper glimpse of the person they have married - and to their horror, neither of them like what they see.

All of the stories are pictures of personal drama and disappointment, interspersed with a wicked sense of humour, as well as an undercurrent of unease and uncertainty, as befitting the setting of a paradise island that functions as a playground for rich white people, while being a place of poverty and limited opportunity for the local population. Everyone in these stories isn’t quite who they present themselves as being - everyone is hiding some secret desire, or unspoken truth. The most striking story is probably that told from the perspective of a man who has had a stroke and lost his ability to communicate - his commentary on what he sees and how he feels about his life is presented alongside what his loud, relentlessly cheerful wife tells everyone he is feeling, revealing the gulf of understanding that has always existed between them. His silent desperation is truly haunting.

These stories are in some ways very much a period piece, exploring the lives of a narrow pool of wealthy upper-middle class people whose troubles are largely self-inflicted. Gardam’s choice to explore the lives of these characters while they are on holiday in a place known for its connections to slavery allows her to begin to explore the impacts of colonialism in their often selfish and self centred behaviour, and the absence of any Black voices within the text despite these characters’ constant presence on the margins of the action, is a stark reminder of how the protagonists give so little thought to anyone outside of the confines of their own privileged worlds. I was reminded of Jamaica Kincaid’s remarkable essay about Antigua, A Small Place, and the corruption and damage caused by it being used and abused as a playground by white tourists, and I wondered whether, if Gardam were to write these stories again now, she would have something more explicit to say along these lines. I would hope so.

I don’t think I would have come across this brilliant little set of gems if I hadn’t have ducked into Oxfam Books in a moment of desperation, and I’m so glad I did. I’d love to hear from anyone else who has read them - and I hope I have encouraged some of you to give them a try.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t wish I could play the piano. It was an instrument of glamour and mystery to me from when I was very young. How on earth did people play it with their two hands doing entirely different things at the same time? How did they read the music, and play with two hands doing entirely different things at the same time, and also move their feet on the pedals? It seemed a feat of the most extraordinary skill that someone with no spatial awareness and very little grasp of left and right (as I have) would never be able to achieve. I decided to accept that the piano was just something that was not for me, like ballet, and gymnastics, and anything else that involved being able to coordinate myself while looking elegant.

Until one day a few years ago, when I was sitting in assembly as a teacher, listening to one of my students performing a solo on the piano. She was wonderful, and I felt both pride and envy as I watched her fingers moving so rapidly and gracefully over the keys. How I longed to be able to do the same! I told her so when I saw her later that morning, and she asked me why I didn’t learn to play myself if I loved the piano so much. I laughed and said of course I couldn’t - I was far too old to learn now, and I was sure I would be useless anyway. She put her hands on her hips and asked me what I would say if she had said the same thing to me - we both knew the answer. The following week, my lovely student had me sitting in the music block with her at lunchtime, and she gave me my first ever piano lesson. It was a revelation. I had no idea what the music said, and no idea which notes were which, but with her help, I was able to play a little tune. From that moment, I was hooked. The teacher had become the student!

I’ve been taking piano lessons and playing ‘properly’ now for eight years, and I absolutely adore it. My piano lesson is the highlight of my week, and while practising isn’t always a joyful occasion - there are plenty of frustrations to deal with when your brain is tired, and your hands won’t do what you keep trying to tell them to - it’s the most wonderful feeling when a bar you couldn’t play a few days ago comes floating out from underneath your fingers, and a piece that was once just an intimidating series of notes on the page slowly begins to take shape as a coherent piece of music. Playing music is a psychological process as much as it is a physical one, and I’ve learnt as much about myself and how my mind works as I have about the workings of a piano over the past few years. In order to create music, you have to break down the mental barriers that are trying to prevent you from picking up your instrument in the first place, let alone the voices that start to intrude once you begin to play. Music is about communing with yourself, and with others, and it involves vulnerability and risk and passion and love to do it properly. You have to put your whole self into it, and you have to school yourself in resilience, in patience, and perseverance if you’re going to get anywhere. It’s not for the faint hearted, but the rewards are certainly worth it.

I’m so glad I started playing, and in the midst of learning pieces I am finding hard, and feeling like I am getting nowhere, I often stop and remind myself of where I have come from. Life as an adult can sometimes feel like treading water, with little tangible evidence that the experience and knowledge you gain on a daily basis is taking you somewhere new. Learning something makes that growth visible again.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because I meet so many people who say they’re so jealous I can play the piano, that they wish they could learn, and yet they’ve left it too late now. And I always tell them my story as proof that such an attitude is nonsense. It’s never too late. My piano teacher’s oldest student is in her seventies, fulfilling a childhood dream to play. If you’ve ever wanted to take up a musical instrument, but are worried it’s too late, I urge you to do something about getting started. I promise you won’t regret it!

Daunt Books republished one of mid-to-late 20th century writer Celia Dale’s noir (I’m wondering if there’s a genre for female noir writers - feminoir?!) novels, A Helping Hand, last year, which I enjoyed very much but found lacking a little bit of ‘punch’. When I saw Sheep’s Clothing being advertised in Daunt the other week, after reading the blurb, I thought this might provide me with the punch I had been looking for previously. Two female ex-cons, one scam, several elderly victims - not a premise I have ever come across before, and one I was very keen to try. And I'm glad I did!

Grace is in her fifties and has spent her life ducking and diving, after enduring a chaotic, poverty-stricken and loveless childhood. An early wartime marriage quickly over, she has spent her life ‘looking after Number One’ ever since, interspersing periods of legitimate employment with ‘schemes’, the latest of which has ended her up in Holloway Prison for six months under a larceny charge. In Holloway she meets Janice, a vague, uneducated twenty-something survivor of childhood sexual abuse, whose lack of sense means holding down a job has never been easy, hence her forays into shoplifting. On landing in Holloway, she cleaved herself to Grace as a form of protection. Soon Grace saw that Janice could be a very useful sidekick in her next scheme, once they both get out of jail - not the type to ask questions, easily biddable and someone to enjoy bossing around, she’d certainly be more of a help than a hindrance, and a bit of company in the evenings, too. Once released and ensconced in a grimy North London flat share, they begin Grace’s latest money making scam - posing as social security workers, they will visit elderly women who live alone, and tell them that they are due backdated benefits. While Grace gets out her official looking forms, Janice makes the tea, slipping in a sleeping pill as she does so. Once the old lady is asleep, the pair whip round and take everything worth any cash, and make a quick exit, later flogging anything they’ve got hold of on various markets around the city.

Grace loves the thrill of scoping out her potential victims, spending hours on her designated research days in local libraries, post offices or high street shops, looking for women out on their own, and preferably having just drawn their pensions. She follows them home, makes a note of their addresses, then when she has enough in one area, she and Janice strike. Grace loves the order and method of it all, and has strict rules for Janice to follow to ensure they don’t get caught. Whenever Janice questions anything, Grace soon reminds her who keeps a roof over their head, and Janice, beaten into submission, largely does as she’s told. That is, until she begins to long for something more.

One night, Janice goes out to a pub by herself, and meets ‘Dave’, a mysterious, handsome man her own age who won’t tell her who he works for, and seems just as happy to not know very much about Janice. They begin a loose relationship, mutually agreeing to meet up every few days, but never swapping numbers, or addresses. Once Grace finds out, she forbids Janice from seeing him again, as forming any permanent connections could blow their cover. But Janice believes herself to have fallen in love, and can’t give Dave up. She starts to dream of a different life, one where she might have a home of her own with Dave. However, is Dave all he seems?

Meanwhile, Grace has started to get fed up with Janice, and has her eyes on a bigger prize. Her regular Sunday night outing, ‘up west’, to a pub at Tottenham Court Road, where she goes alone to see ‘a bit of life’, has resulted in a casual acquaintance with Conroy, a man of her own age who seems to be quite well-to-do. Over several weeks, Grace plays a game of cat-and-mouse with him, until eventually he invites her to his home for tea with his mother. Grace thinks she has the measure of the situation, but his mother turns out to be a redoubtable woman, and not quite what she had expected. However, a nasty accident befalling the old woman presents an opportunity Grace can’t pass up. But will Conroy be the man she thinks he is, and the way to the easier life she secretly craves?

Both Grace and Janice are deeply damaged and lonely women, and this portrait of the uneasy relationship between them is troubling and unnerving to read. Grace has no morality, no sense of wrongdoing, guilt, or shame. Everything she does is for her own good, and as much as she tells Janice that she’s lucky to have her looking out for her, she only looks out for Janice in the sense of ensuring that her actions don’t put Grace’s scheme in danger. Dale gives us only the sketchiest portrait of Grace’s past, and there is little to go on to understand how she has become so devoid of humanity. However, the picture she paints of the dingy, uninspiring worlds Grace has always moved in, and the lack of any affection she has ever received from anyone, does give a glimmer of insight into how a woman like Grace could become as cold-hearted yet craving of comfort as she is. Janice is the more tragic of the two; she is not mean spirited or unkind, just easily led and lacking in any confidence. She is desperate to love and be loved, but her childhood abuse makes it difficult for her to understand what either of those things look like. If she hadn’t have fallen into Grace’s clutches, she may well have had a very different fate.

Dale’s interest in women who transgress the expectations of femininity and domesticity are so unusual, and while I was troubled by the world she creates on the page, I also found myself utterly transfixed by it. Like Mary Elizabeth Braddon in her sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret, she’s not afraid to give women the same potential for villainy as men, and neither does she feel the need to psychologically justify their behaviour in any great depth. Grace robs people because she likes it, and that’s all there is to it. It’s important, I think, to have novels like this that show women in this light - manipulative, scheming, lacking in morality - to challenge the social stereotypes that depict women as somehow being innately kinder than men. There is a delicious irony, too, in Grace’s scheme working precisely because she and Janice are women - for who would suspect two smartly dressed women knocking on their door as being anyone other than who they said they were?

I’ve also not read a lot of fiction written in the 80s, the decade of my birth, and I was fascinated by the descriptions of London, interior design, food and high street shops that I’ve heard about from my parents and seen in their faded Polaroid photo albums, but never really seen come to life on the page. It was strange to think of this setting as having existed during my own life time - when Janice has no way of contacting Dave outside of a communal telephone number, when people withdrew a week’s worth of cash from banks in one go because debit cards didn’t exist yet, when bomb damage was still visible on London streets and you could drive around an empty London on a weeknight and park outside a pub on Tottenham Court Road - madness!

I really can’t recommend this highly enough - Dale is such a talented writer, and the way she slowly tightens the screws to build the tension in this novel is such a work of art. She also has a fantastic ear for dialogue - Grace’s voice is so brilliantly done - and I relished every single page. I so hope Daunt will republish more of Dale’s back catalogue - her other novels are so hard to get hold of, and I’d love to read more.

This weekend I read an article in a magazine I enjoy, The Simple Things, all about looking up. Apparently we don’t do it very often, and yet much of what is wondrous to behold - the stars, the light suffusing through tree canopies, Victorian chimney pots - is situated above our natural eyeline. Looking up offers a different perspective, and a new way of relating to your surroundings. I was inspired by this, and decided to look up and around more fully today as I went for an afternoon stroll in the autumnal sunshine. The end goal was the supermarket, but I took a circuitous route to take in the Oxfam bookshop (I was very good and didn’t buy anything) and the bakery (to get a hot chocolate, because it’s officially cold enough for one now). Fortunately for me, the supermarket, bookshop and bakery are all in Bloomsbury, and only 15 minutes from my flat, so I appreciate that my walk to the supermarket is probably more scenic than most. However, I was surprised by how much I noticed on this walk by looking up and actually paying attention to my surroundings - I’m so familiar with my neighbourhood, that I barely look at anything anymore, not even the British Museum - I’m normally listening to something on my headphones, dodging tourists and in a rush, so today’s leisurely pace and intentional focus on actually being rather than doing was a wonderful opportunity to see everything afresh.

It was a crisp, blue sky day in London today, and as I didn’t go out until after lunch, the sun was hitting the tops of the buildings - perfect for my looking up activities. My first port of call was the Brunswick Centre, whose modernist lines look their best in sunlight, and never cease to look slightly surreal, surrounded as it is by down-at-heel, smut-stained Georgian and Victorian terraces, and 1930s mansion blocks. I am a huge fan of 1960s architecture, and enjoy the contrast - and the idealism - of this development, which mixes residential, social and commercial space, and is largely local authority housing, meaning that the flats are rented at a reduced rate. It is a continuation of Bloomsbury’s history, which has always been a neighbourhood where people from a variety of social backgrounds have lived alongside one another - and one that has never been afraid to change and adapt with the times.

I got my hot chocolate from the bakery, and then made my way across Russell Square while sipping it, enjoying the view of the bronze-tinged trees as I did so. I used to work on Russell Square, and spent plenty of time idly staring out of my classroom window over the years, but even this familiarity didn’t prevent me from noticing new things today. Russell Square started out as a uniform Georgian square, the grandest of all the Bloomsbury squares conceived by the Duke of Bedford, but today it is probably the most varied of them all in its mixture of architecture. Some of this is as a result of bombing, but it was already much transformed from its original layout by the end of the 19th century, thanks to the arrival of Kings Cross Station just down the road, making Bloomsbury a prime spot for hotels. I love the terracotta-fronted hotel on the north side of the square (built on the site of Emmeline Pankhurst’s house), whose elaborate wedding-cake detailing is so emblematic of the more-is-more aesthetic of the late nineteenth century. In the late afternoon sunshine, the terracotta glows beautifully, and the impressive work of those who carved this tricky, easily damaged clay is made clear to see.

Many of the Georgian terraces that survive were pimped up in the nineteenth century with terracotta facings, and these are interesting to notice as you walk along the West side of the square. On the south side, abutting the side of the British Museum, are the only original houses left - much simpler, dark bricked terraces that now house many University of London academic departments. As I crossed the road, coming out of the gardens in the middle of the square, I stopped, looked up, and took a photo of the chimney pots. I’d never noticed just how many there are before, for each building. All those fireplaces in one house! It made me think of how much work it must have been for the servants to keep these houses going when they were first built. Fires in every room, constant smoke and smuts both from inside and out - not to mention the coal to be hauled up several flights of stairs. What a life!

I walked past the British Museum - such a beautiful Palladian frontage - and down to the Oxfam bookshop, and then back up Gower Street, once home to so many luminaries - Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, etc - past Bedford Square, where I also used to work, and which is the only complete (non bomb damaged) Georgian square left in Bloomsbury, and worth a blog post on its own . I stopped to take a photograph of a few of the houses, noticing the subtle differences in each one. At first glance, they seem very uniform, but a closer look reveals slightly different balconies, chimney pots, little bits of moulding or other decoration, various fan light patterns above the door, etc. This is because when they were first built, the building company offered them for sale, ‘off plan’, before they were finished - much like modern housing estates today - and so the first occupants of Bedford Square were able to choose some elements of the exteriors of the houses for themselves. Building catalogues from the time show the range of door mouldings, balconies, etc. people could choose from, all at different price points. I like to think of the original owners picking their fixtures and fittings, trying to one-up the neighbours as they did so - there’s nothing that shows upwardly mobile middle class ‘keeping up with the Jones’’ like a slightly fancier balcony than next door!

I wended my way back towards the Brunswick Centre (location of the supermarket) via the rear entrance of the British Museum, which is quite the contrast to the famous front. I had never really properly looked at it before today, and I noticed for the first time the design features that tie it to the earlier parts of the building. Built in the Edwardian period, this extension and new frontage is flat and less grandiose than the original, but the use of moulded pillars and a portico is a nod to its Grecian style origins, while having the rather solid no-nonsense air of early 20th century architecture. I rather like the contrast. It’s always interesting to see, within the same building, how architectural fashions change over time. Speaking of which, a walk through nearby Queen’s Square is a fascinating education in the changing face of the architecture of public health. Queen’s Square and Great Ormond Street, which runs to the north of the Square, are well known for their hospitals. Queen’s Square has the National Hospital for Neurology and the National Homeopathic Hospital sitting side by side on the north side of the Square, while Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children takes up other buildings across the road and all of one side of Great Ormond Street. A huge portion of the National Hospital for Neurology is a great big hulk of a red brick Victorian monstrosity, whereas the other portion is a 1930s extension, with huge windows and balconies to let in plenty of fresh air and sunlight. There are lovely stone carved murals above its doors, illustrating ‘healing’ and ‘research’ - the healing image illustrates sunlight, emphasising how much more important fresh air, sunlight and nature had become to ensuring good health by the 1930s, as opposed to the gloomy and dark wards of the Victorian hospital at the other end of the street.

On the other side of the Square is another nineteenth century Great Ormond Street hospital building, which I’d never paid much attention to before. Looking up, I saw that above the sign for Great Ormond Street was another sign, carved into the building - ‘The Italian Hospital.’ I hadn’t known such a place existed! A Google later, and I found out that it was founded in 1884 by an Italian businessman, for Italian immigrants to London who couldn’t afford medical care. This link has more information - check out the headgear on the nurses in the photo from 1903! It just goes to show - there’s always something new to discover on your own doorstep, and it makes total sense for there to have been an Italian hospital in Bloomsbury, as there was a considerable Italian population in Clerkenwell and Holborn in the 19th century - there are two large Victorian Italian Catholic Churches just a stone’s throw from my flat.

As I made my way up Great Ormond Street, I stopped to look down a little alleyway - and found a wonderful Victorian sign for a coach builder, which I must have seen before, but forgot was there. A glimpse down the cobbled alleyway shows what must have once been the coach builder’s premises, now a private home, and a 1970s council estate - not as inspired as the Brunswick, sadly, opposite which is a Victorian equivalent - a yellow brick terrace of houses for the poor of the district, which is still largely social housing today. Walking back to the Brunswick from Great Ormond Street allows you to walk past the Colonnade, one of Bloomsbury’s few remaining mews, complete with its cobbles and horse hospital (built for the sick horses of London cab drivers, and now an arts venue). It also has a fabulous bakery, Fortitude, which is well worth a visit if you’re in the neighbourhood - they do the best bread and pastries, and lovely coffee.

Arriving at the supermarket, I was delighted with all of the interesting and new sights and revelations I had experienced, just by unplugging, slowing down and looking up for a change. I should do it more often.