It’s been an up and down kind of week. In terms of A’s recovery we are still at the two days forward, one day back stage., but we are not downhearted because it is progress, no matter how fitful. And my new car should arrive next week but, to be honest, I can’t get excited about it at the moment. I’d rather have A well enough to be excited about it. Heigh ho. I’m not really as gloomy as I sound, just a bit tired and as the lady said “Tomorrow is another day.”

Here is a red-tailed bumblebee enjoying an eryngium. I think the eryngium is called Big Blue. I don’t know the bee’s name. Its family name is Bombus lapidarius. Which is quite enough to be going on with.

This morning I heard a terrific scuffle in the garden, a magpie ‘chack-chacking’ like mad and a lot of furiously beating wings. On investigation it was a crow attacking two magpies, having a real go at them, refusing to let them settle anywhere, and not stopping until they flew away. I know crows mob bigger birds—buzzards or a red kite for instance— to protect their nests and fledglings, but I’ve never seen one seriously attack two similar-sized birds before. The magpies were most put out, in every sense! It’s pretty normal corvid behaviour, they’re both very territorial and won’t allow neighbourly nesting, they are also both notorious nest predators so will attack to keep each other away from eggs and nestlings. The crow definitely had the upper hand, or wing, and the magpies have gone but live to fight another day. Which is good becasue shortly after the corvid fight I saw several fledgling baby Blue Tits finding their way around the cherry tree. Quite competent already at foraging for insects, but no match for a hungry crow or magpie.

Reading this week has been an interesting alignment of fiction and non-fiction. The non-fiction has been Winters in The World - A Journey Through The Anglo-Saxon Year by Eleanor Parker The book is a journey through a year in Anglo-Saxon England, from the depths of winter through spring, summer, autumn, and back to winter. Rather than being a political history, it explores how Anglo-Saxons experienced the changing seasons, celebrated festivals, understood nature, and connected religious life to the rhythms of the year. Parker draws on poetry, sermons, chronicles, and other medieval texts to reconstruct how people saw the world around them.

She presents the year as the framework that shaped everyday life, work, worship, and storytelling; showing how Anglo-Saxons saw strong links between the natural world and human experience. For their society, seasonal changes carried emotional, spiritual, and practical significance. The book traces the origins of many of our seasonal celebrations and examines both Christian observances and older customs that survived in medieval England. I particularly enjoyed her use of Old English poetry and prose to show how people understood winter’s hardship, spring’s renewal, summer’s abundance, and autumn’s reflection. She provides extracts from the texts together with a translation which I found fascinating, and often very moving. I neither read nor speak Old English, I have an idea how it sounds from hearing others speak it (TV, radio) and it was fun to try out the unfamiliar words and phrases. There is a softness to spoken Old English, and a thrill to hear the language of ancestors spoken aloud.

Parker is clearly a master of her subject. Her knowledge is obvious, and there is an emotional feeling for the period that is infectious, encouraging the reader to be as fascinated by the Anglo-Saxons as she is herself. The book is scholarly, but not daunting, the author has an eloquence that brings the period to life. Rather than the Anglo-Saxon era being a distant "Dark Age", Parker presents us with a people who are thoughtful, imaginative, and deeply attuned to the natural world. and reveals a culture that remains surprisingly recognisable today. If you’re interested in this period of history—its beliefs and customs and daily life—then I highly recommend it.

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The novel I was reading at the same time is A Swarming of Bees by Theresa Tomlinson. Set in 664 AD in the aftermath of the Synod of Whitby, the novel drops us into the bustling world of the monastery at Streonshalh (modern Whitby), led by Abbess Hild, where religion, politics, and survival intersect in unpredictable ways. At the centre is Fridgyth, a half-pagan herb-wife and healer whose practical wisdom often proves more useful than the theological debates occupying kings and bishops. When plague sweeps through the community and suspicious deaths begin to mount, Fridgyth is drawn into a murder investigation that reaches beyond the monastery walls.

I found Fridgyth an appealing protagonist. She is warm, curious, stubborn, and occasionally reckless—the sort of amateur detective whose strengths come from knowing people rather than outsmarting them. Her friendship with Abbess Hild, a historical figure portrayed with intelligence and authority, gives the novel much of its emotional depth. Their relationship also highlights one of the book’s central themes: the uneasy coexistence of old pagan traditions and the rapidly expanding Christian world. Readers expecting a fast-paced medieval thriller may find the story a little slower than some historical mysteries. What made it enjoyable for me wasn’t the mystery itself (although it’s cleverly plotted), instead, it’s the texture of everyday life. Tomlinson is deeply interested in how people lived: how food was grown, medicines prepared, boats built, and how communities held together during times of crisis. The monastery feels less like a religious institution and more like a small, self-sustaining town (which I suppose it was, really), full of labour, negotiation, and human complexity. The plot meanders at times, lingering over character interactions and historical detail, and that measured pace becomes part of the book’s charm, allowing the setting to become familiar and the characters to develop naturally within it. A Swarming of Bees feels less like a conventional whodunit and more like an historical exploration, one that chimed serendipitously with my reading of Winters In The World. The atmosphere is rich, and the author certainly gives the impression that she knows the 7th century and the events that stirred communities such as Streonshalh. If you enjoy historical fiction that prioritises place and community, it’s a very satisfying read.

If you’ve enjoyed this post do hit the little heart, it makes me easier to find and it also makes me very happy. If you have really enjoyed it, you can always:

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And so, until next week, take care and I’ll write soon.

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We have been considering getting rid of our second car for a while. When we were working it was necessary but since we’ve been retired we use it less and less, and so in the aftermath of A being ill, the decision was made. So that goes off this week, never to return. It’s a shame because it’s a two-seater convertible and was a lot of fun, but we only used it about once a fortnight just to keep it going, especially in the winter, and to be honest we have better things to do with the money that goes on tax, insurance and fuel. And at the moment that better thing is to change our main car for a newer one. My trusty SUV is now over ten years old and although still perfectly good it’s really too big for Devon lanes (and for most parking spaces) and the reasons I bought it—comfort, safety and road presence over a long commute to work—are no more. So we are downsizing the car and looking forward to getting to grips with all the technology that comes with a new car these days. You know that old cliché about it being like the inside of an aeroplane cockpit? Well, it’s like being inside an aeroplane cockpit. I’ll let you know how I get on. when we take delivery in a week or so’s time. 😬

The roses were briefly beautiful and then it rained. And rained. And gale force winds. Some have hung on determinedly but they are battered and there are petals everywhere. I am deadheading like mad (with the new Niwaki scissors) and hope to get further blooms as the season goes on. They are all repeat-flowerers so it should be okay. In the south west of England here the weather is mild and the seasons a little earlier than further up country. I always forget this and then wonder why it feels like it’s all over so quickly. Better planning is needed. Before I forget—on a whim I picked up a rather showy smallish/patio rose at the garden centre called Bright Smiles. Not my usual thing as I prefer the soft pinks etc., but my dears, it is a wonder. Beautiful golden yellow semi-double flowers edged with deep apricot, the flowers fade to palest lemon and the petals don’t fall. The foliage is a dark, glossy green. Add to that a rather lovely scent and I was very glad I submitted to my whim. I spent an inordinate amount of money on a large pot so it can stand outside the front door and cheerily greet me as I go in and out, but because A can’t lift anything heavier than a half-full kettle at the moment it has had to be delivered and will take TWO WEEKS to come five miles. The rose will very likely be past its best by then but heigh ho.

Last week I also had (another) go at teaching myself to crochet. I’ve tried before but never been able to get the hang of it, but I was determined to keep at it and so dug out some spare yarn and a decent sized hook and sat down in front of Youtube videos. I don’t know why I find it so difficult, but I do. Maybe it’s because the working yarn is held in the left hand when in knitting it’s held in the right and that confuses my muscle memory? Maybe because there’s so much ‘yarn round hook’ and pulling through one or two loops, or diving into the starter circle. It just feels so alien. Any how, after much perseverance and a seriously painful left thumb joint caused probably by hours of repetitive movement, I am now the owner of six hand-crocheted coasters of varying levels of skill, and I cannot tell you how inordinately proud of them I am.

Lastly, the week’s reading has been another Angela Thirkell novel, this time the eighth of her Barsetshire novels, Before Lunch, set in the fictional English county borrowed from the world of Anthony Trollope. As usual, it seems that nothing much happens: neighbours gossip, attend meetings, discuss cows (in some detail), worry about a proposed development in the village, and drift in and out of love. But this time, below that amusing surface lies one of Thirkell’s more thoughtful and bittersweet novels.

The story centres on Catherine Middleton, a capable, kind woman married to the self-important but not entirely unlovable Jack Middleton. Their summer routine is disrupted when Jack’s widowed sister Lilian Stoner arrives to stay nearby with her stepchildren, Denis and Daphne. From here on in, the plot lines interweave:

Daphne, quite a hearty, no nonsense young woman, finds herself torn between two suitors: the young heir Cedric (”C.W.”) Bond and the older architect Alistair Cameron. Denis meanwhile, a sensitive composer recovering from poor health, is seeking support for a ballet he hopes to produce. The denizens of local society become embroiled in a campaign to save “Pooker’s Piece,” a beloved stretch of countryside threatened by commercial development, and Catherine quietly becomes the emotional lynchpin, offering sympathy, wisdom and stability to those around her while managing the frustrations of her own marriage.

As always, misunderstandings are eventually resolved, engagements are rearranged into more suitable matches, and community harmony is largely restored. But not every emotional longing receives a conventional happy ending. Unusually (from the Thirkell’s I’ve read previously), there are a lot of unspoken feelings, and polite conversation and jolly exchanges conceal deeper emotional currents.

Catherine Middleton is an interesting protagonist. I found myself wondering how she came to marry the bore that is Jack, and stay married to him. At first she seems passive, but it doesn’t take long to see that everything revolves around her, that her husband is adoringly dependant, and that her patient and intelligent advice is freely given to help many of the other characters. She provides an unusual emotional depth to this particular novel.

There is no scintillatingly gripping plot (in fact it’s rather slow) but Thirkell’s dialogue is witty, observant and often very funny. The portrait of English county life just before the second World War is affectionate but not sentimental, and there is the usual retinue of regular ‘types’–overbearing aristocracy who turn out to have hearts of gold, mutually attractive couples who struggle to recognise their true soul-mate until almost the end of the book and much misplaced affection, and a good many ‘salt of the earth’ farmworkers and house staff who have a part to play in resolving the muddles. I’m sure there are lots of people who see Thirkell’s novels as patronising and full of outdated stereotypes etc., but I love the very particular English upper-middle class between-the-wars comedy of errors that she gives us so beautifully. It’s not the most eventful Barsetshire novel, but it is among the most emotionally nuanced. What begins as a gentle social comedy gradually reveals itself as a study of quiet disappointments, mature affection and the compromises of ordinary life. I heartily recommend it to you.

And that, my luvvers, is another week gone. Take care of yourselves and I’ll write soon. x

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There is nothing more fun than watching people (surreptitiously, of course) on the beach. AND people still do that mad wriggling thing of trying to get into or out of a swimsuit under a bath towel while husband and kids ignore the staggering about and balancing on one leg. Very little changes at a small, traditional seaside resort. Melting ice cream, sandy sandwiches, thieving seagulls, paddling with mom or dad, kicking a beach ball around, not enough water, and too far to the toilets. Ah, memories of childhood.

My childhood holidays were spent in east Sussex, staying with a maternal aunt in Battle. We would drive down from the West Midlands, rather thrillingly starting out at 3.30am, and six of us packed into an old Morris Oxford (8170 RE, the registration plate is clear in my memory from sixty five years ago, even though I have to keep a photo of my current car to remember it’s registration for parking…), mom and dad, me and my sister and brother, and my grandmother, plus our luggage and food for the six hour journey. It took six hours because way back then in the early 1960s my dad wouldn’t drive on the motorway, so we wound our way via the scenic route from South Staffordshire to East Sussex. I would be travel sick within the first six miles and every six or so miles after and everyone would hate me. My Dad and my sister would place bets on how many times I was sick between home and destination. One time she won half a crown and shared it with me because ‘I wouldn’t have won it without you’. Ah, sisterhood.

I’m going to stop writing for a minute and show you this, which has just appeared and is glowing palely (rather like me on the journey to Battle) but rather beautifully through the sitting room window. Not quite full, but very nearly.

It will be full tomorrow May 31st (I’m writing on Saturday) and will be a Blue moon, the second full moon in May (the last one was on May 1st). Two full moons can happen in a single month because the lunar cycle (29.5 days) is shorter than our calendar months (30 or 31 days). So, the moon cycle has completed again before the month ends. It only happens every two to three years so is not a common occurrence, hence (probably) the phrase ‘once in a Blue moon’, meaning not very often. If you’re in the same part of the world as me, pop out to look at it if you can. It will also be at its apogée meaning the furthest away from the earth so will appear smaller and not so bright as usual. Sometimes called a Micromoon. So a Blue micromoon.

It’s been too hot to have been doing anything in the garden except sit, read and drink tea, but thanks to from Craft and Thrift substack I have discovered Niwaki garden tools. I ordered a pair of secateurs for small hands and also some garden scissors and both arrived today, beautifully packaged with a catalogue (darlings, their garden clothes! Far beyond my budget but marvellous) and a perfectly sweet tote bag. They would make heavenly presents for a keen gardener. The scissors especially are a wonder to behold and a perfect weight for dead-heading, very light pruning etc. Just the sort of snippy snipping that I love doing around the garden. I am smitten and shall be saving up to replace my other small garden tools when they need it. Look:

Also arrived this week–two books from : ‘Heiresses’ and ‘Au revoir now darlint: The letters of Edith Thompson’. Both of them are going to the top of my reading pile, I am relishing reading them both. Thank you so much to Laura who has cheered me no end after a difficult couple of weeks. Already on my bedtime reading table is ’s latest novel The Given World. The reviews are so brilliant I am slightly scared to open it because I don’t want it to be over too quickly. I am planning a slow read and probably a re-read to make sure I get the most out of it. Reading new stuff is always so exciting.

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Books finished this week were The Public Image by Muriel Spark and Dear Mrs Bird by .

Muriel Spark’s The Public Image feels surprisingly contemporary. Published in 1968, it is ostensibly about celebrity culture in postwar Rome, but it reads like a tale of our social-media age. Its protagonist, Annabel Christopher, is a British actress whose fame depends less on artistic talent than on the careful cultivation of a public persona. She is known and adored (thanks to her publicity machine) as a wholesome, beautiful screen star, the embodiment of grace and good nature. Behind the scenes, however, her talent is small, her appearance enhanced, and her marriage to Frederick, a failed actor, is unhappy and increasingly toxic. Frederick resents both Annabel’s success and the falseness of the image on which it rests. As his bitterness deepens, he becomes determined to expose what he sees as the emptiness at the centre of her celebrity. The plot turns on the collision between private misery and public narrative. After a shocking tragedy, Annabel finds herself confronted with a choice: grieve (or not) honestly or preserve the image that has made her famous. Around her swarm journalists, agents and opportunists, all eager to shape her story for their own purposes. Spark unfolds the scandal with characteristic coolness, showing how quickly a human life can be transformed into a consumable spectacle. As ever, Spark refuses to sentimentalise anyone involved. Annabel is neither villain nor victim; Frederick is unpleasant but not entirely wrong. Even the media figures are portrayed less as monsters than as participants in a system that rewards performance above authenticity. The prose is lean, elegant and often very funny; in little more than 150 pages she produces a razor-sharp satire of fame, image-making and the uneasy relationship between who we are and who the world wants us to be. Nearly sixty years on, The Public Image feels like a warning that arrived early. I think this might be one of my favourite Spark novels.

I picked up Dear Mrs Bird because I follow and enjoy ’s substack Notes of Cheer. It is the first novel of a quartet following the fortunes of Emmy Lake, a young woman of optimism and considerable charm. Set in London during the Blitz, it combines wartime hardship with humour, friendship and romance, and the story is anchored by a protagonist whose positive nature feels hard-won rather than naïve, avoiding sentimentality or nostalgia. Emmeline Lake dreams of becoming a war correspondent but instead, after answering what she believes is an advertisement for a job with a newspaper, she finds herself working for Woman’s Friend magazine under the formidable Mrs Bird, an agony aunt whose list of forbidden topics is comically extensive. No letters concerning relationships (no sex, affairs, divorce or other ‘unpleasantness’), no loneliness, grief, financial troubles or anything remotely lowering are to be acknowledged. Her advice is of the ‘brace up and crack on’ sort. Faced with sifting through the often heartbreaking letters that arrive from readers, Emmy quietly begins responding to some of them herself. The plot unfolds against the backdrop of wartime London, where air raids and uncertainty are part of everyday life. Pearce captures both danger and the resilience of the period, but for me, the novel’s real strength lies in its attention to ordinary acts of kindness. Emmy’s friendship with Bunty, her determination to help strangers, and her stubborn belief that people deserve compassion are at the heart of the book. It’s also a very funny novel (I was laughing out loud by the second page), there are moments of terror and pathos (both well observed and without sentimentality) and an engaging cast of characters who I hope will be reappearing in the rest of the books. I really liked the way Pearce shows how laughter so often coexists with fear, and how small gestures acquire enormous significance during difficult times. Dear Mrs Bird is something rather lovely: an affectionate and engaging story about decency and friendship, with moments of history (the bombing of the Café de Paris is particularly well done) and plenty of sharp humour about every day life in 1940s wartime. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading the remaining three in the quartet.

And that, my dears, is that for this week. I hope you had as much fun reading as I had writing, and I hope you will hit the little heart to say so. For those who may wish to know, A is doing okay and pottering about. You take care of yourselves, and I will write again soon.

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In the garden the new border is really coming into its own. It’s all growing together quite beautifully and I’m really pleased with it. The Sceptr’d Isle rose has suffered a little in the rain, the flowers have ‘balled’ slightly but they look okay, and they should be cup-shaped anyway, so it’s getting away with it. Desdemona (white) is out and beautifully fragrant and I’m going to buy lots more and fill the rest of the garden with her. There are a couple of spaces to fill and I shall probably dot in hardy geraniums, Dreamland is a pale pink and doesn’t get too tall. That rather intrusive lupin is my husband’s contribution. It’s not that I’m thinking ‘come on, you slu-ugs’ or anything, but, you know…

There are other parts of the garden I am also pleased with as old friends begin to appear. I always love to see the allium siculum come up every year. I think they’re called something different now (nectaroscordum is in there somewhere), but they are such a delight with their heads of drooping bells that the bees just love. And I’ve some old small-headed osteospermum that are bright and garish, but I just can’t get rid of them, they’re so cheerful, and these white daisies just keep coming back too. Later on there will be the mauve of the erigeron glauca or sea asters. Perfect in a coastal garden. Nothing too tall or the wind plays havoc with it. I let the aquilegias self-seed where they want and those waving red-tipped stalks are geum Scarlet Tempest—always reliable and has a good thicket of foliage, not like some that are a bit sparse in the leaf department (I’m looking at you, Totally Tangerine).

Concentrating enough to read has been quite difficult, but I did manage to finish the last in Monica Dickens’ Chronicles of a Working Life trilogy, My Turn To Make The Tea. This covers her time as a junior journalist on a provincial newspaper and is as full of amusing anecdotes as the previous two. I didn’t enjoy it so much as the first two, but that’s probably my state of mind and no reflection on Monica. A little easier to get into was a favourite nature author of mine, John Lewis-Stempel, and his latest short book, Night Life. It builds on his earlier book, Night Walking (one of my favourite nature books), but he travels a little further afield from his Herefordshire farmland, visiting Wales, the Thames Valley and the Lake District. He shows us hares boxing in the moonlight, nightjars catching moths, but my favourite is his description of a shimmering barley field silver-lit by starlight. I have to say that I prefer his earlier nature writing (Meadowland, The Running Hare) but Night Life was engaging enough to help me stop fretting before going to sleep at night. So few of us have access to spaces without light pollution, sometimes reading about it is the best we can do.

Distraction whilst A was hospitalised also came by way of the television. Have any of you watched/streamed ‘This is Not a Murder Mystery’ on U and Drama? I totally loved it. It’s a Belgian - English language murder story, set in 1930s England. A group of ‘not yet famous’ Surrealist artists are gathered at the West Dean home of Lord James for an exhibition that will kickstart their fortunes, but…they are sharing the space with a murderer. Man Ray and Lee Miller, Salvador and Gala Dali, Max Ernst, and Renée Magritte are caught up in the action which includes the creation of the lobster telephone, Magritte’s association with the bowler hat, and Lee Miller’s glass pistol. There are, of course, two British police investigators - Inspector Thistlethwaite and Detective Constable Mary Quant (an absolute gem of a turn from Donna Banya). It really is surreal and a weird and wild 6 episodes, but at the heart of it is an engaging who-done-it, with added art and style. The show's title is a nod to Magritte's 1929 work The Treachery of Images, which features the image of a pipe alongside text saying "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe). Magritte is the amateur sleuth assisting the police and I am longing for there to be a second series. Do watch, it’s huge fun and it looks like it was very enjoyable to make.

And that’s it for this week. Thank you to all of you who have sent good wishes and kind thoughts—I really appreciate it and I promise you it has helped me so much. So, you all take care, and I will write again soon. x.

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Take care, and I’ll write again soon. x

Friend Alan has been here for the week so we were able to get out and about most days for a good walk and wander. On a trip to Teignmouth we called in at the Shaldon Botanic Gardens, sometimes known as the Homeyard gardens and discovered a little peaceful space, high on the hill above the village. The Gardens were created by Maria ‘Laetitia’ Kempe Homeyard in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, and were built by Thomas Rider of Southwark and designed by William Sears. Mrs. Homeyard was the widow of William Newcombe Homeyard, the wealthy inventor and manufacturer of Liqufruta cough syrup. The garden she created on a steep hill above the village is an informal terraced arboretum with a ‘castle’, a pond and rill, an Italian terraced garden and a ‘witch’s cave’. Development work continued until 1939. After Mrs Homeyards death in 1944 her estate was auctioned and the Gardens were purchased by Teignmouth Urban District Council in 1951. They were opened to the public in 1955 . Recently funding and grants paid for repairs to the Italian Garden, and restoration of the folly castle. Volunteers keep the garden neat and restoration of the beds and stonework continues slowly. It’s an interesting little place with plenty of sitting areas and glorious views across the Teign estuary to Teignmouth itself. There are some interesting trees—a paulownia tomentosa (Foxglove tree), its flowers just going over, abutus unedo (Strawberry tree), Monterey pine, tree ferns, a Hiba (thujopsis dolobrata, unfamiliar to me) and two glorious mature weeping beech trees.

There is street parking nearby (not very much, we couldn’t squeeze in anywhere) and we parked in the Ness car park and walked up to the main road and along to one of the entrances. Be warned, all of the access gates require a steep climb and the gardens have quite a lot of steep steps. Our route was up Ness Drive to the Torquay Road and, heavens, it felt like Everest to us three oldies. Coming down was much better, though hard on ageing knees! For those with an historical interest in medicines, Liquafruta was a garlic-based cough medicine, popular in my youth and available in the UK until around 2017 when it appears to have been discontinued. Looking online it is still available in some places. When I was a very youthful Saturday girl in Boots in the very early 1970s it was a good seller over the counter.

There’s lots of life in our own garden too as plants begin to bloom:

The new border is coming on a treat, the roses are full of bud and in a week or two it should be lovely. No photographs until it’s looking its best! Also looking rather splendid in the garden was this moth, in fact there were two of them. I’m pretty sure it’s a Pale Tussock moth (Calliteara pudibunda). They can be found in a wide range of bush and tree-filled places, from parks and gardens to hedgerows and woodland habitats. The adults emerge in spring and can be seen flying between May and June. As you can see from my photo, it’s a large, grey moth with very hairy legs. At rest, the front two legs are stretched straight out in front of the body - a characteristic pose that helps with identification. Apparently an old name for the caterpillars is ‘hop dogs’, because they were often found feeding on hops as the crops were picked.

This week’s reading has been two short autobiographical novels/memoir from Monica Dickens: the first, One Pair of Hands published in 1939, and the second, One Pair of Feet published in 1942.

Born in 1915, Monica was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Known as ‘Monty’ to family and friends, she was born in Paris and raised in a privileged London family, but rejected much of the lifestyle she was expected to live. She managed to get herself expelled from St Paul’s Girls’ School for throwing her uniform into the river Thames (!) and after presentation as a debutante at the court of George V, she rebelliously chose to be a domestic cook and general servant for a couple of years. She went on to work as a nurse, in an aircraft factory, and on a local newspaper, drawing on each job for her books. In the 1950s she married an American naval officer and moved to the United States, where they raised two adopted daughters while dividing their time between Washington DC and Cape Cod. Despite living abroad, most of her writing was firmly rooted in Britain, and she wrote for the periodical Woman’s Own for two decades.

Her writing often reflected her humanitarian interests: she supported organisations including the NSPCC, the RSPCA and the Samaritans, helping to establish the first American branch of the Samaritans in Massachusetts in 1974. From the 1970s she became well known for children’s fiction, especially the Follyfoot books, which became a popular ITV television series. Her autobiography, An Open Book, appeared in 1978. Widowed in 1985, she returned to Britain and continued writing until her death on Christmas Day 1992.

One Pair of Hands tells the story of Monica Dickens’s decision to rebel against the expectations of her upper-class family in the 1930s by becoming a cook/general domestic servant. She asks herself: “Surely, there’s something more to life than just going to parties that one doesn’t enjoy, with people one doesn’t even like?” and with no real experience of either cooking or housekeeping, she joins an agency and moves from one household to another, struggling with impossible employers, endless chores, and frequent misunderstandings. The anecdotes come thick and fast—ruined meals; rude guests; the habit of speaking in French assuming the servants wouldn’t understand (pas devant la bonne, mon cher); amorous visitors to the kitchen and so much more. The book mixes humour with social observation, showing the harsh realities faced by servants at the time while also highlighting the absurdities of British class society. Despite the hard work and occasional disasters, Dickens writes with warmth and wit, making the memoir both entertaining and revealing about life “below stairs” before the Second World War. I found it charming, sharp, and very funny.

In the sequel memoir, One Pair of Feet, Dickens describes her experiences training as a nurse and working in a provincial hospital during the Second World War. Beginning as a probationer nurse, she faces long hours, strict discipline, exhausting physical work, and the emotional challenge of caring for sick and dying patients. Alongside the difficulties, she also writes about the strong friendships, humour, and sense of purpose shared among the nurses. The memoir gives a vivid and honest picture of wartime hospital life, balancing touching moments with comic incidents and shrewd observations. Through her lively storytelling, Dickens captures both the pressures and rewards of nursing in a time of crisis. I started my nurse training some thirty years later in the early 1970s, but much of the environment and attitudes, and the situations were very familiar. Some technological changes, but to be honest, it was not so very different. Her observations about working night duty as a student were particularly reminiscent of my own—the killing tiredness at 3.30am; the endless cups of tea; the practical jokes; the fear of not being able to cope; the terrifyingly sarcastic Night Sister. Her nurses catchphrase, “I’ll never get done!” was still relevant and often quoted. Health care has always been a rapidly developing area but the change after the 80s was swift and exponential. The environment I had known as a student and which Dickens would have recognised, disappeared almost overnight. As a nurse, I think I enjoyed this book so much because it brought back so many memories, so many shared situations, that would probably feel like fairy tales to today’s student nurses!

Dickens writes in a conversational, lively style that is witty and funny whilst also sharply socially observant. You could be listening to her regale guests at the dinner table, or in the corner of a bar. In both One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet, she uses self-deprecating comedy, presenting her own mistakes and inexperience in a way that makes her immediately relatable to readers. Her descriptions are full of specific detail, allowing every-day employment situations—burnt meals, demanding employers, chaotic hospital wards—to become vividly entertaining anecdote. She leaps from one story to the next, and I can imagine her, breathless and gesticulating, doing all the voices, keeping friends and family enthralled. At the same time, beneath the humour there is subtle criticism of the rigid British class system, workplace hierarchy, and the treatment of working people, especially working women, who’s roles were often little more than hours of drudgery. Dickens cleverly balances her light-hearted storytelling with moments of genuine compassion and seriousness, and it is this mixture of wit, honesty, and social insight that gives her memoirs both charm and emotional depth, and provided me with many laugh-out-loud moments. I loved both books, and I shall certainly be going back for more.

I hope you enjoyed this affectionate reflection on the first two of Monica’s books as much as I enjoyed writing it, and reading them. I’m leaving it here for this week, so take care and I’ll write again soon. x

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My sister has been visiting this week and so I haven’t been doing very much except chatting and strolling about (weather permitting). That nasty little north/north east wind was back, this time with gusts up to 40 miles per hour so at times it was pretty cold even though the sun shone, occasionally, from clear blue skies. My sister NEVER STOPS talking so it’s quite tiring, but aways lovely to see her and catch up on everything. She’s two and a half years older than me and, you know, you can’t tell when we wont be able to meet anymore. She comes down from the midlands by train, but comes a totally convoluted route and it takes her hours. She is a creature of habit, and once she has something that she’s comfortable with, it’s hard to change her mind! She went home on Thursday lunchtime but as friend Alan is coming down on Tuesday for a few days the weekend has been cleaning up and bedlinen washing etc. It’s all go in the Girvin household but not very exciting for this post!

On Friday we put off the cleaning and went to Toby Buckland’s Garden Festival at Powderham Castle. It’s an annual thing, small and not over-advertised so it’s never packed out and there are very good plant stalls; a few stalls of garden accessories, food and drink stalls, and crafts etc. I bought some crocosmia (Harlequin) and some geum (Princess Juliana). We had a very pleasant saunter around for a couple of hours. The grounds of the castle are lovely and there was much lilac in bloom in every shade of mauve. The rain held off for most of the time, the coffee was good and the cakes sublime. I saw there but he was chatting to someone so I didn’t interrupt to say hallo. Plus I wasn’t sure I could do that thing of introducing myself to a total stranger just because I ‘know’ him from Substack!

This week’s reading has been pleasantly light. Ann Bridge’s The Episode at Toledo, the sixth in the Julia Probyn mystery series. I think, perhaps, this is the weakest I’ve read so far and only just held my attention. It suffers from the lack of Julia Probyn herself who, post-natal and comfortably recovering at her cousin’s estate in Scotland, appears only tangentially, to offer helpful advice by post. The action, such as it is, utilises two of Julia’s friends whom we have met in previous books—Luzia, the Portuguese Contessa, and Hetta, the feisty Hungarian refugee. Before one can say ‘knife’ Hetta has overheard and subsequently uncovered a communist plot to assassinate a visiting American Admiral. The plot is foiled, of course, by the intervention of Portuguese noblemen, British Intelligence officers, American attachés, but mostly by Hetta’s exploits of derring-do. As usual, Bridge tells a ripping yarn of European diplomacy tempered by descriptions of the Spanish countryside and places of local interest, and a dash of blossoming romance. It was okay but I did slightly wonder just how many Hungarian communist plots one young woman can expose single-handedly. Nevertheless, Bridge is a good storyteller and I am hoping that the seventh book in the series, The Malady in Madeira, brings back witty, nonchalant Julia, the woman who is always one step ahead of MI6. All of these books are set in the late 1950s and 1960s, but the style, characters and attitudes always have me imagining them firmly between the two world wars. They’re rather fun.

Next up will be an omnibus of Monica Dickens, combining her ‘employment’ novels: One Pair of Hands, One Pair of Feet and My Turn To Make The Tea. Dickens was Charles Dickens’s great-granddaughter and a prolific author, publishing some 45 novels between 1939 and her death in 1977. She wrote the popular children’s Follyfoot series, which some of you may remember from the tv series in the early 1970s. Anyway, depending on how far I get into it I shall write more next week. And then I must get into the non-fiction TBR pile.

That’s all for this week. I shall be back next weekend with more of the same. Take care and I’ll write soon.x

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Also at Bicton the wisteria is looking magnificent. This particular plant is said to be the oldest wisteria in the UK. Wisteria belongs to the pea family and was introduced to the UK from China around 1816, making this plant about 200 years old. The scent is terrific and it’s covered in bloom. I think it’s the best I’ve seen it since we have been visiting. It’s a venerable and glorious old thing with huge, distorted limbs. You can’t miss it, it’s at the entrance to the gardens from the courtyard.

My sister is coming to visit next week so hopefully we will be able to go out and about if the weather stays kind. I haven’t seen her since last October (she was ill before Christmas and then moved house in January and was really busy getting sorted, and then A was ill after Christmas so visiting wasn’t really possible) and I am looking forward to catching up on a whole load of things.

I’ve read two novels this week, both with overlapping themes. I didn’t know this before I read them, so the opportunity to compare them is serendipitous. Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent (1981) and Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel (1957) are often paired because they both centre on women writers and the shifting boundary between fiction and reality—but they approach that shared ground in very different ways.

Both novels centre on young women who write, publish, and in some sense live through their fiction. But where Spark gives us a heroine who understands the game, Taylor offers one who is entirely disconnected from it. Fleur Talbot, the narrator of Loitering with Intent, is witty, observant, and crucially, self-aware. She knows that she can shape reality with her writing; she can select, distort, and frame the experiences she tells us about. When elements of her novel begin to echo (or even influence) events in her life, Fleur doesn’t panic. She leans into the overlap with a kind of amused control because for her, fiction is a tool: flexible, playful even, and quietly powerful.

Angel Deverell however, the protagonist of Angel, exists at the opposite extreme. She writes (or over-writes) melodrama: wildly unrealistic romances couched in florid language and with ludicrous plots, and believes in them and in her own writing genius absolutely. Her success as a novelist only deepens her conviction that her version of the world is the correct one. Unlike Fleur, Angel has no ironic distance from her own work; she doesn’t shape reality so much as replace it, constructing a fantasy that becomes increasingly fragile as real life refuses to conform.

The tone of the novels is very different. Spark’s prose is cool, precise, and laced with irony. There’s a sense of intellectual play throughout Loitering with Intent—a delight in the slipperiness of truth and the possibilities of storytelling. Even when things turn sinister, and we become less sure of the reliability of Fleur as narrator, the novel retains a lightness of touch and a knowingness, as though everything might be just a tricksy author’s narrative experiment. Taylor, on the other hand, writes quietly and with the faintest hint of devastation to come. We watch Angel build her illusory world piece by piece, and we also watch it begin to degrade and rot because she cannot sustain it. For Angel there is no playful merging of fiction and reality, only a growing tension between the two—reality is waiting, patiently, to expose the inadequacy of her imagined world.

It’s interesting how each novel treats the idea of success. Fleur’s writing life may be precarious, even chaotic, but she maintains a sense of control and a clear-eyed view of her own place in the events that start to unfold. Angel, by contrast, achieves significant commercial success but gains no insights into the literary, or lasting, worth of her work. Her fame becomes part of the illusion, reinforcing rather than challenging her eccentricity and delusions. The novels offer very different visions of what it means to be a writer. Spark seems to tell us that writing is a form of control—a way of navigating and even reshaping reality. She writes, as always, with cool precision and a sharp, sometimes cruel wit in a narrative that is brisk and clever and laced with irony. Taylor gives more a sense of writing as refuge, a carapace in which to hide from unwelcome truths, and to create oneself at the centre of a self-built world. Her tone is always subtle and often unsettling; there is some gentle irony, but any humour dissolves over the course of the novel into painful tragedy as Angel’s illusions are exposed.

Perhaps that’s why I find that Angel has lingered in my mind in a more disconcerting way than Loitering…. Fleur’s world may be unstable, but she is never lost in it. Angel, however, cannot see beyond the stories she tells herself—and is inevitably consumed by them. I enjoyed the Spark, it’s nonchalance, it’s wit, and it’s cleverly drawn characters (the elderly mother of Flora’s boss is one of her absolute best), but it is Taylor’s stubborn, brittle, self-deluding Angel that has left a more emotional mark. I recommend both novels to you, to be read separately or together! I understand that there is a film adaptation of Angel, with Romola Garai, but I’m not sure whether I want to watch it or not…

I cannot recommend any television to you this week as I haven’t seen anything worthwhile. BUT, having written about Lord Peter Wimsey last week, one kind person informed me that the old TV adaptations could be found on YouTube. I found them, and have been revelling in them in every spare ‘sitting down’ moment. I’ve started with the Ian Carmichael ones—he is excellent—the production values are great and although the quality of the film isn’t brilliant, they are a real treat. When did you last see a tv book adaptation that was produced over 4 or 5 one hour long episodes? It means one gets every nuance of the books, pretty much all of the characters, and no hacking about to fit 21st century sensibilities. I’ve watched Murder Must Advertise (absolutely faithful to the book) and am currently watching The Nine Tailors. Do seek them out if you’re a Dorothy L Sayers fan.

Hope you enjoyed all that, and I’ll say ‘bye ‘til next time. Take care and I’ll write soon. x.

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The cold wind (and showers) have kept me out of the garden—I am so a fair weather gardener, I wonder I manage to do anything. Below are a few pics though of what is out at the moment. Much of the long border in the side garden is hopelessly invaded with Spanish bluebells and we will really have to do something about it when they’ve finished flowering. I can’t possibly decimate them when they look so lovely, but they are such THUGS. Where we had the new paving last year (remember the new paving?) the front beds got wrecked around the edges so I am going to replant them and that means a bit of lovely plant research and planning. I think it’s one of the most enjoyable aspects of gardening: thinking about new plants and how to arrange them, followed by trips to the nursery and garden centre to choose. I don’t much enjoy paying for them…

No walks in nature this week either (how I miss not getting out for a proper walk) but I did watch a pair of ravens soaring over the house, circling higher and higher and cronking at each other occasionally. Maybe just playing, maybe courtship behaviour; there was no barrel-rolling or anything, just circling and rising until they were invisible. It was lovely to see them. Usually we just see one now and again flying past on its way to the cliffs, so it was a treat to see a pair. Their collective noun is an ‘Unkindness’ which seems a bit, well, unkind. They do say that King Arthur was turned into a raven at the point of his death, and is known sometimes as the Raven King. Often seen as mystical messengers, carrying news, this probably stems from the Norse God Odin, who kept two ravens, Huginn (thought) and Muginn (memory) so obviously clever, intelligent birds. And, of course, there’s the Tower of London myth that says if the ravens ever leave the Tower then the kingdom will fall, so a few are kept there, presumably with their wings safely clipped? I do like a raven. We have a tile sculpture of one by the front door…it’s kind of a play on words…the house is called Core Edge…so Core Edge…Caw Edge…see? Just as well it’s not called Elephant Walk or Schitt’s Creek or something…

On the knitting needles is a simple knitted tee-shirt with short sleeves. It’s a nice silver-grey yarn (Debbie Bliss Cashmerino) and is from a sweater that I unravelled about a month ago. I didn’t wash it and re-wind it (very remiss of me) so it’s all a bit wiggly at the moment but it should sort itself out once it’s finished and washed and blocked. I don’t usually knit much in the summer months (too much gardening to do) but I will probably keep something small and portable on the go; a pair of socks maybe, or a light neckerchief kind of thing that I can knit in the garden or at the beach. The mustard-coloured slipover that I finished a couple of weeks ago is ready to wear, just as the weather begins to warm up. It’s ok, but nothing special. It will be useful in the evenings when it gets a bit chilly. Here it is:

Those of you who read regularly will know that I like a last-century crime novel, no gratuitous and graphic violence, a bit of well-placed humour, and a clever plot, and so I am turning my attention to writers that are new to me but well-loved by others. I have never read any Dorothy L Sayers (I know, I know, how could I not have read at least Gaudy Night?) and this week picked up an ancient copy of Murder Must Advertise (1933) from the charity shop. It’s a Lord Peter Wimsey story and I have really enjoyed it. I have a penchant for the era of The Bright Young Things and this dishes it up in spades.

An employee at the Pym’s Publicity agency dies in what looks like an accidental fall down a staircase. The agency hires Lord Peter Wimsey—undercover—to investigate quietly, since scandal would damage business. Wimsey joins the firm posing as a new copywriter and immerses himself in the chaotic, quick-witted world of advertising: slogans, office politics, and deadline pressures. As he digs deeper, he uncovers tensions among staff and soon deduces that the “accident” is indeed, murder. As the mystery unfolds, the case connects to suspicious financial dealings, drug use and the decadent party life of high society, and eventually a dangerous criminal enterprise operating under the surface. Wimsey must identify the killer while maintaining his cover, leading to a cleverly staged conclusion.

Unlike many Golden Age mysteries set in country houses, this one explores modern (for the time) urban work life. The advertising agency feels authentic—the clattering typewriters and gossiping office girls, the witty banter of the copywriters, the way that each character is drawn with a knowing nod to the ‘real’ industry. Sayers worked in advertising for some years and it shows. She uses the narrative deftly to poke fun at the rising culture of consumerism, cynical marketing tricks and office hierarchy. The dialogue is fast and often funny, making it more lively than many classic whodunits.

As this is my first Wimsey novel, I know him only by reputation and by dramatisation, and so can’t compare it to the others novels, but it seemed to me that there may be more balance here between the shenanigans of the upper classes (though there is plenty of that) and the everyday routine of office work. Beneath it all runs a quiet idea about persuasion. Advertising, after all, is about telling convincing stories, and the crime at the centre of the novel isn’t so different. Appearances are arranged, assumptions nudged in the right direction, and inconvenient details smoothed over. The line between selling a product and selling a version of reality begins to blur. It’s really very contemporary in that sense and that’s probably what gives the novel its lasting appeal. It’s not just about solving the mystery, but about recognising how easily we’re guided (duped?) by what we’re shown. And while it never loses its light touch, it spoke to me of the stories, commercial or otherwise, that surround us every day and that seek to persuade us of their reality. Murder Must Advertise isn’t just a detective story—it’s a clever, observant snapshot of a changing society. I shall certainly be reading more on the strength of this venture into the world of Lord Peter Wimsey.

And that’s all I have time for this week. We are repainting the kitchen cupboards and thinking how dingy it makes the rest of the kitchen looks (just don’t, get someone in, or better still, have a new kitchen and be done with it). I feign hopelessness with a paintbrush and am therefore banned from wielding one, instead I have to do apprentice jobs like making constant cups of tea, sugar-soaping surfaces, providing snacks and clearing away afterwards. I’m actually pretty nifty with a paintbrush but after 50 years of marriage one learns which battles are worth the fight and besides, I’d much rather be chatting to you on here!

So, take care and I’ll write soon. x

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On Friday we had a quiet day celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary. We don’t usually pay attention to these things, but this is quite a milestone so we went out for breakfast and started the day appreciating each other and remembering that cold spring day fifty years ago when we made a formal commitment to each other in front of family and friends. To be honest, I remember very little about that day—I must have been quite stressed—but beyond travelling to the church with my Dad, and then getting on a train to Bath for our honeymoon at the end of the day—in between is a bit of a blur I’m afraid. But here we are fifty years later; in sickness and in health, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, still doing our thing. I recommend laughter, forgiveness, and perseverance. I wouldn’t call my husband a soulmate (we differ on too many things) but he is A Good Companion. And that becomes more and more important as one gets older. Anyway, it was happy anniversary and well done to us!

We have started planting up the new front flower bed. An afternoon of work has seen the first plants go in and this weekend will see another tranche to fill the gaps. We are planting closely; we are about to be over seventy and don’t want to wait five years for it to look it’s best. The picture shows it half planted. There is more lavender (Hidcote), a couple of geum (Pink Petticoats), and some lithodora for along the front, foxgloves and verbena bonariensis for along the back. When it starts to come into flower I’ll post more pictures.

This week’s reading has been, firstly, Sky High (1955) by Michael Gilbert. A nice mixture of humour and tension, it concerns the murder of the lead tenor in a sleepy village church choir, and the subsequent attempts of the rather eccentric leader of the choir, her ex-commando son and a retired general to solve it. Post-war vengeance and cold war espionage is layered with cosy village settings and it’s a good read. These British Library Crime Classics are always reliably well written and well plotted and usually good fun.

In non-fiction, I have been reading The Notebook - A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. It’s full of interesting stuff and if you’re a notebook person (which I am) I feel sure you will enjoy it. Allen traces notebooks back to medieval Europe, probably beginning their life as financial ‘ledgers’ in Florence. A number of them were needed for sales, stock, purchases, payments to workmen etc.etc. And, you guessed it, the successful business person ‘balanced the books’ at intervals. Once they had been seen to be so useful they were picked up by engineers and architects for sketching out plans, and to keep ideas and snippets of information for future projects. Leonardo Da Vinci probably kept the most famous notebooks—full of his tiny backwards writing, plans for flying machines and weaponry, anatomical drawings and sketches, pages and pages of brilliance. Darwin’s notebooks helped him to develop the theory of evolution, Agatha Christie used them to plan her novels, and Marie Curie and Isaac Newton used notebooks in their scientific and mathematical deliberations. There’s a fascinating section on the conflicting accounts from notebooks describing the Magellan circumnavigation of the earth, and more latterly their use by writer/travellers such as Bruce Chatwin and Patrick Leigh-Fermor. Allen’s premise is that these notebooks were more than devices for recording ideas—they helped to create and develop the ideas, enabling people to organise, test and refine their thoughts—becoming more of a thinking tool rather than as a passive repository. It’s a fascinating read, full of anecdotes and information, well-researched and engagingly written. I recommend it.

I’m sure I don’t need to convince anyone reading this that using a notebook, whether it’s for sketching, drafting, travelling, or project notes, or whatever else you use it for, is still absolutely relevant in this digital age we live in. I’m with Roland Allen when he argues that using a notebook can improve creativity, help with focus and recall, and just plain make you feel better. When you open a fresh page, pencil or pen poised, all kinds of things are possible.

While I’ve been getting this ready to post I’ve been watching Sunset Boulevard. You know the 1950 film, with Gloria Swanson as the deranged, ageing, former silent screen goddess Norma Desmond, and William Holden as the fly caught in her web of self-deception, in his young prime, before the booze raddled him. There’s also a real star turn from Erich von Stroheim as Norma’s minder/carer/enabler of her fantasies and former husband Max. It’s a classic noir, and Swanson is glorious in it. The video below has some clips of the most famous quotes. My favourite is: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” But the one that everyone remembers is that last scene when she sashays down the marble staircase, quite unhinged, thinking the police and newsreel camera are film cameras, pale, pale face, dark lip, swathed in sequinned tulle and striking a grotesque pose, says: “You see, this is my life! It always will be! There's nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!… All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.”

What a diva. What a film. It really is a brilliant take on how difficult it was for many silent stars to transition to talking pictures. Here’s Gloria Swanson appearing on the Parkinson show in 1978. She was 79. I remember that interview, and I remember LOVING that jewelled cap! When (if) I get to 79 that will be my headgear of choice.

And that’s it for another week. I must find another way of signing off, even I’m bored with that sentence. Take care and I’ll write soon. x

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I’m hoping to get some gardening in. I’ve got pots of lavender, achillea, nepeta, and salvia to get in over the next few days, so I really need it to be dry for a few hours and reasonably warm. I know that Saturday is forecast gale force winds and rain, Sunday slightly better, but I think Monday and Tuesday will be the days for it. I’m looking forward to it and I’ll try to remember to get a photograph or two for next week’s newsletter. I got round to pruning back the hydrangeas, taking two thirds of the stems down to a strong pair of emerging leaves, and taking the remaining third right down to the ground. I find this helps to keep the plant renewing itself without getting too leggy. The ladybirds that were living in the dead stems I tried to save and put onto other plants. Our tulips are up and in bud, but no colour showing yet, but our patch of self-seeding cerinthe is in full deep blue flower and the bees are loving it. I didn’t plant it, it just appeared in the border a couple of years ago (I thought at first it was broad bean seedlings!) and has returned every spring ever since. It’s been flowering for a couple of weeks now and is really useful for early pollinators. There’s been a hairy-footed flower bee on it this week, and a few buff-tailed bumble bees. I couldn't get a picture myself, it was raining, but found this online.

This morning I had an Easter card from my sister. She’s the only person I know who sends Easter cards. My mother always used to, and opening it made me think of many Good Fridays in my childhood when we would accompany mom to church for the three hours Devotion service between noon and 3pm. We would stay usually for two or three rounds of reading, prayer and reflection and then return home. How we fidgeted during this service, but the solemnity of it was obviously very powerful because a feeling of it has stayed with me for 65 years. We also had some odd rituals on Good Friday - my grandmother, who lived with us, would not allow any water to go down the sink on Good Friday before 12 noon. I have no idea why. We also did no housework on that day, but made up for it by furiously cleaning everything on Maundy Thursday. And of course there was no meat eating. It’s fascinating how these things stick in one’s mind. I don’t attend church anymore, but the church year is still important to me—the festivals and celebrations—and quiet prayer/reflection has its place too.

This week I discovered The Other Bennet Sister on BBC One. It is a joy. Based on the book by Janice Hadlow, Ella Bruccoleri leads as Mary Bennet, the plain, awkward and rather more intellectual of the Bennet girls of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In half hour episodes we familiarise ourselves with Mary’s story as her sisters marry, one by one, and she is left at home with a distant father and a petulant mother (a study in ghastliness from Ruth Jones). Rescued by her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner, who invite her to London to act as governess to their children, Mary begins to see a different side to family life, meets the Gardiiner’s social circle and finds herself beginning to enjoy mixed company. As she is drawn out of herself with the encouragement and support of her aunt and uncle, Mary’s life takes an adventurous turn: romantic attentions, new clothes, dancing and holidays, but all is not plain sailing. All ten episodes are available on iPlayer if you can’t bear to wait week by week, but do watch it. It is warm, humorous, sweet and joyful, and in the midst of a world of fear and horror, it is an oasis of comfort. And I have become very fond of a young actor by the name of Dônal Finn, who plays Mr Hayward. Don’t miss it. I almost didn’t watch it because, well, I thought it just couldn’t do justice, but I watched the first two and was hooked and binged the whole lot over three days. Bliss. Now I shall read the book.

This week’s reading has been Rural Hours by Harriet Baker.

A study of the periods that three writers—Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann—spent living in the countryside, often during pauses in their creativity. It’s an interesting biographical approach to pay attention to the seemingly uneventful years, but Baker argues that these quiet periods were not incidental but essential to their writing craft; they did not disrupt the flow but made it possible. This is explored through three contrasting experiences: Woolf with rural retreat as convalescence and a means of creative recalibration; Townsend Warner whose rural life became liberation and political/sexual awakening; and Lehmann who turned to the countryside as emotional refuge and romantic space.

I loved the way so much of the book is built around the ordinary. The quotidian is treasure—yes, Baker lingers over diaries and letters, but also over shopping lists, descriptions of meals, gardens and gardening, household chores and maintenance. She gives us a sense that creativity emerges not in spite of these details but through them, and that they were formative experiences.

I found these domestic details fascinating, but I’m not sure how truly important they were to these three women as writers. The idea that environment shapes artistic imagination is not new, but Baker perhaps leans a little heavily on it. I did sometimes feel the absence of the other pressures we know so much about—relationships, politics, and recurrent illness. They are there, but folded into the background of a narrative strongly committed to the importance of place and in which place has to do a lot of heavy lifting. But maybe I’m being too critical of Baker’s approach because it doesn’t tread the well-worn biographical paths, and perhaps that’s the point. Rural Hours I think asks us to adjust our perspective and consider what happens if we stop poring over the obvious markers of literary success—the publications, the reviews, the more public lives—and instead pay attention to the quieter conditions that sustain them. Creativity, Baker suggests, is not only forged in moments of intensity but in stretches of apparent idleness; and through the household routine, resting, and long, uneventful hours that don’t usually make it into literary history.

Baker’s prose is measured and attentive, often quite beautiful. The book moves slowly and deliberately through these periods of three writer’s lives. I particularly enjoyed the section on Sylvia Townsend Warner (whose writing I love) and on Rosamund Lehmann (who I know much less about) and it will certainly send me in search of other biographical work. It is a selective narrative, but if you are willing to settle into its comfortable pace, it is a distinctively pleasurable read. Highly recommended.

And that, dear friends, is it for another week. I am off to optimistically remove my summer wardrobe from storage and iron about 100 tonnes of linen. Deep joy. But I am (almost)ready to set aside the dark colours of winter and emerge into lighter, brighter coverings. Next week I shall probably be writing about how many layers I have to wear and looking like Michelin man in order to keep warm, complete with knitted hat and socks.

Anyhow, take care and I’ll write soon. x

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Soon they will be over and it will be the turn of the early perennials. In the meantime I have these gorgeous little daffodils in my garden. They are narcissus bulbocodium Golden Bells and I adore them. Come the autumn they may be the only daffodil bulbs I buy. Aren’t they the cutest, daintiest things you have ever seen?

‘Proper’ gardening is beginning to get underway. The paving we had done last year means we have a new raised bed at the side of the house, about 15ft long and almost 4 feet deep. It’s been filled with topsoil over the winter and left to settle and now we are planning the planting for it. We’re going for a softish, cottagey look and have put in four shrub roses for structure this week. I buy roses from David Austin—I think they’re very good quality and although they’re not cheap, I have found them to be reliable. The four I went for are Gabriel Oak, Scepter’d Isle x 2, and Desdemona. If you click the link you can see them on the site. They’ll be joined by salvia, foxgloves and verbena bonariensis for height, I’m toying with the idea of a grass or two, maybe calamagrostis or a stipa. I’m not a grass person really, but I might just give a couple a try. Then infill with low nepeta, echinacea, echinops, and heuchera and erigeron at the front. That’s just for starters. It will probably be whatever we can get at the garden centre, so likely some substitutions/additions. I’m excited about it and I’m looking forward to some planting over the next few weeks.

The rest of the garden is still messy, one part of it is beset with ivy; it doesn’t seem to matter how much I pull out it keeps making its way back. Neil the gardener (spoken in our house in the style of Nessa from Gavin and Stacey when she says ‘Neil, the baby’), has cleared the vegetable bed for us and we just have to add some fresh compost before sowing can start. I love the start of the new growing season, when it’s just beginning to warm up properly, the seed trays are waiting to be washed, and the seed box is beckoning me toward the greenhouse.

Have you watched the ITV series ‘Gone’? Starring the mighty David Morrissey as a repressed and unhappy private school headmaster, and Eve Myles as a Detective Sergeant investigating the death of his wife. The rest of the cast pale into insignificance in the presence of Morrissey, he acts them all off the screen. At the start he is the buttoned-up, emotionless man, rules-bound and constantly showing authority, and then, as the loss of his wife bites, the unravelling begins. It’s well worth a watch, or a binge over a few days. It’s on ITVX at the moment.

This week’s reading has been another of Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire novel: ‘Pomfret Towers’. I’m romping through these at the moment and this one, once again, is a delight.

Poor Alice Barton—painfully shy, quietly self-doubting—is invited to a weekend house party at Pomfret Towers and is quite convinced she will hate every moment of it. The prospect of unfamiliar people in an imposing setting is almost too much to bear. Still, she has reinforcements: her brother Guy, and the ever-capable siblings Sally and Roddy Wicklow, will also be there to protectively shepherd her into the experience. And, as so often happens in Thirkell’s novels, Alice not only survives but finds herself—rather alarmingly—falling in love.

Of course, she chooses the worst possible object for her affections. Julian Rivers is an aspiring artist of the most objectionable sort—self-important, dismissive, excruciatingly rude, and thoroughly tedious—and perfectly content to be admired in reverent silence. It is all embarrassing to witness…and very funny. Around them, other attachments begin to form: Sally’s brisk, no-nonsense manner appeals to Pomfret heir Gillie Foster as, in contrast, does quiet, nervous Alice. Guy is briefly entangled with the agreeable but unhappy Phoebe Rivers, sister of the ghastly Julian. Thirkell manages these romantic threads with her usual lightness of touch, never overplaying the will-they, won’t-they hand but providing just enough hiccups to keep the reader guessing until it all works out right in the end.

I think quite a lot of the novel’s charm lies in its digressions. The house party setting allows Thirkell to introduce, and just as quickly discard, a succession of minor characters, each contributing some small, perfect comic moment. Lady Wimple, reminiscing about a lifetime of reading aloud that began on her honeymoon in Rome fifty years ago, is one such delight. Mr Johns, a publisher and experienced guest, who always arranges for a telegram to be sent to him asking him to return urgently to his business, to be used if he is bored and needs to escape, or to tear up if he is happy to stay, is another.

Thirkell writes brilliantly on authors and the world of publishing, and Pomfret Towers offers a number of excellent examples. Mrs Barton, Alice’s mother, writes dense historical novels that are much respected and little read, and drifts through domestic life in a state of scholarly abstraction. Mrs Rivers, mother of Julian and Phoebe, produces enormously popular, deeply repetitive novels set in picturesque foreign locations and featuring the romantic exploits of a middle-aged lady—to the mingled pride and mortification of her family and the condescension of almost everyone else. There is a lovely set-piece meeting between two publishers and an agent which is a glorious mix of archness, faux politeness, and downright lies. One gets the impression that Thirkell is very happy to tease and gently poke fun at the publishing business!

There is also an underlying thread about the relationships between parents and children beneath the comedy—some of it affectionate, some less so—but never laboured. And, as always, there is a happy ending for everyone who deserves one, and a ‘right’ ending for everyone else.

Altogether, Pomfret Towers is a thoroughly satisfying read, with all the hallmarks of Thirkell: neatly constructed, consistently amusing, and full of sharply observed social detail. It stands well on its own and I think would make a really good introduction for those not familiar with this particular novelist. I loved it!

That’s all for this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this round-up of gardening and reading and that you’ll join me again next week for more of the same, or similar! Take care, and I’ll write soon. x

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Anyway, we had a good hour of birdwatching: curlew, oystercatcher, cormorant, little egret, widgeon (paired up), black-headed gull, mute swan, robins, chaffinch, greenfinch, chiffchaff (first for me this year, yay!), goldcrest, goldfinch, blackbird. Dunnock and wren in the dead hedge. Pheasants calling from the fields and a woodpecker drumming in the pines. Blackcap (another first for me this year). Blackthorn blossom on bare branches, hawthorn leaves not quite released from tight buds. Golden lichen. Celandines and the dreaded alexanders. Alexanders are rampant and crowd other things out, like the lighter cow parsleys and wild carrot which make such a froth of the spring hedge banks around here.

Later in the week when the wind dropped and you really could feel some warmth from the sun, I was rewarded with first sightings of butterflies in the garden. The acid yellow of a Brimstone flying through, a Comma in smart orange and black with it’s wavy-edged wings basking on a rock, and a Peacock with it’s heavy-winged flight, so dark underneath and so richly gorgeous seen from above. So lovely to see them and so reassuring that they have survived the winter, hibernating in some dark, sheltered spot.

Here’s something stupid. We had a new mattress delivered last week and I thought we should get new pillows too. So off we went and bought four new beautiful soft, down pillows. They were so luxuriantly soft. I slept on them for two or three nights, and my husband said: ‘You’re coughing a lot in the mornings, aren’t you? More than usual.’ I had also complained of feeling wheezier than normal. Reader, I FORGOT that I have asthma, and feather pillows are a big no-no. How can one forget that one has asthma? I take a prevention inhaler diligently twice a day. The asthma is very well controlled, but clearly my brain is not. I FORGOT I have asthma. How is that even possible? Anyway, the pillows have gone. The wheezing has gone.

Slipover knitting is going okay. I’m powering up the back BUT, courtesy of a spot of mild gardening on Saturday morning, my tennis elbow is bothersome again. It was feeling a little better but I think hoeing and moving a pile of bricks has tickled it up. Knitting isn’t usually too bad as long as I don’t try to go too fast, but I suspect when I pick it up later today I shall notice the old elbow.

This week I finished reading Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence (2008). Maitland is a British writer with a background that spans academia, feminism, and Christian theology, and she has long been interested in the intersections between storytelling, belief, and the structures that shape women’s lives. Her earlier work moves between fiction and non-fiction, but there is a consistent preoccupation with voice—who has it, who is denied it, and what it means to step outside of it altogether. This book grows out of that background, but also takes a more personal approach: an attempt to test, through lived experience, the possibilities of silence. In the years leading up to this book, she chose to live in near-total solitude in rural Scotland, effectively as a modern hermit, testing what a life structured around silence might look like in practice.

The book surprised me in that it is not really about silence in the way I was expecting it to be. It is not a quiet, contemplative text on how to reach some meditative state and improve well-being, rather it is restless and curious, even occasionally argumentative. I think that challenging and questioning is what gives the book its peculiar energy: it is a record of someone trying to understand a condition that resists explanation—what is silence? what does it mean? is it achievable?

Maitland approaches silence from multiple angles: memoir, theology, history, and a kind of practical fieldwork. After a period of personal upheaval, she retreats to rural Scotland, seeking not just quiet but sustained, chosen silence. What follows is not really a traditional narrative, it’s more a series of encounters: with landscape, with religious traditions, and with her own mind as it adjusts (or fails to adjust) to the absence of noise.

One of the things I liked about the book, and I think one of its strengths, is Maitland’s refusal to over-romanticise. For her, silence is not automatically peaceful or restorative; it can be destabilising, even frightening. Early on, she notes that “silence is not the absence of something but the presence of something,” a line that reframes silence as an active medium, something with texture and pressure, rather than just a blank space.

Chapters move between personal anecdote—walking alone, living without speaking for days—and wider cultural reflections. There are passages on religious traditions that revere quiet, and on the politics of who is allowed to speak and who is silenced. What lingers most is Maitland’s attention to the psychological shifts that come with prolonged silence. She writes about heightened awareness, but also about the internal noise that persists, that silence is never really absolute and is less about escape than exposure.

Near the end, she reflects that “learning to trust silence is learning to trust oneself.” It’s a neat conclusion, though perhaps a little too neat for a book that otherwise embraces complexity. Nonetheless this is a searching account—one that doesn’t demand or even encourage you to follow her into solitude, but does make you think differently about quietness. It’s an interesting book, but quite hard work.

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I also finished another of Ann Bridge’s Julia Probyn mysteries, ‘Emergency in the Pyrenees’ (1965). Another jaunt with Julia (now married to her MI6 Colonel, and pregnant) helping to solve espionage issues in Europe. The action centres in and around Pau in the Nouvelles-Aquitaine region and involves shenanigans on the border with Spain. One of the emergencies is the removal of a war-time spy out of France and to safety in Britain, the other is the premature arrival of Julia’s baby. Good clean fun. It could’ve been set anywhere from 1920 onwards.

I’m also really enjoying BBC TV series The Capture. It’s Season 3 right now, but I’ve rewatched Seasons 1 and 2 to get myself up to speed again. It’s a lively thriller that explores the unsettling power of surveillance and manipulated reality. Season 1 follows soldier Shaun Emery (a tour de force from Callum Turner), who is accused of a violent crime caught on CCTV—except the footage may have been tampered with. Detective Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) investigates, uncovering a conspiracy involving doctored video evidence.

Season 2 expands the story into a larger, global plot involving “correction”—a secret technology that can alter live video feeds in real time. A promoted Carey digs deeper into how governments and intelligence agencies use this to control narratives. Full of twists and turns and no-one being honest or straightforward, this is a chilling look at how AI and Virtual Reality can be misused for nefarious ends—commercial and political. It all feels very plausible.

Season 3 starts with Carey now leading the department as Acting Head when she realises the person who will be replacing her in the permanent post is a plant—but planted by whom? The Chinese? The Russians? I’m just two episodes in and nothing and no-one can be trusted. It’s a whirl of deception. There are fine returning turns from the excellent Lia Williams and Ben Miles; and a truly terrifyingly ruthless performance from Ron Perlman as a CIA big guy. Plus, I love Holliday Grainger and her particular brand of steely vulnerability, which she has in spades in this show. I’ve never seen another actor who can make her eyes fill with tears at the drop of a hat–happy, sad, angry, frustrated—her eyes overflow with liquid emotion. The Capture questions whether we can trust anything we see in a world where video evidence—once considered undeniable truth—can be manipulated. Deepfakes, deception and the dissolving of truth and reality feel very now. It’s scary but also very cool. I recommend it, but do watch from start of Series 1, all on iPlayer.

And that’s it for now. Take care and I’ll write soon. x.

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Out walking at Bicton on the driest day of the week we were disappointed to see that one of my favourite old trees has been felled. It’s a huge, old sweet chestnut and was a remarkable old boy with deeply fissured bark and massive limbs. It seems that its core was rotten and with the changing weather patterns it was becoming too unstable to leave standing. Such a shame. I confess I went and stood by it and said goodbye.

They were also taking limbs off oak trees and I know this kind of maintenance needs to be done but it seems so heavy-handed when you’ve come to know and love these trees. There is a beauty in the exposed interior that is left behind, but it’s still a shame to lose the limb.

On a more positive note, this rhododendron was doing its sugar pink thing and there were some gorgeous plants flowering in the Arid House.

It’s always a treat to visit there, we have an annual pass and often go to check out the herbaceous borders and see what we should be doing at home, and there is always something to see at any time of year. If you visit east Devon, maybe try a visit. https://www.bictongardens.co.uk

Walking through the trees we saw (or heard) Great Tit, Blue Tit, Robin, Nuthatch, Blackbird, Goldcrest, Wren, Greenfinch, Chaffinch, Green Woodpecker, Wood pigeon, Pheasant, Crow, Rook and Jackdaw, and a Great Spotted Woodpecker drumming loudly but out of sight; the latter a first for me this year. The birds are becoming really active now and it’s so heartening to hear them calling and singing. We had a pair of pheasants that visited our garden regularly, the male strutting his stuff, the female wandering quietly behind. There is only the male now—the female we found as a mess of feathers in a heap in one of the borders. I guess taken by a fox, although we’ve yet to see a fox in the garden. As I write this (on Friday) the mild temperatures of early in the week have dropped by 8 degrees and there’s a freezing wind giving us a ‘feels-like’ of 2 degrees C. It’s intermittently sunny so I’m sitting in the conservatory and it’s warming up nicely as the sun shines on it. Last week the window-cleaner (Handsome Sam as he is known around here) cleaned the conservatory roof and it’s made a huge difference. Cleaning the conservatory roof, the first lawn trim—these early Spring tasks are optimistic markers of warmer times to come.

I am dithering over my knitting. I have given up on the ten stitch blanket and put it away. The yarn (which was gifted) is just not lending itself to a good-looking project, so I’m probably going to have to think again. I’m swatching to start on a cabled slipover. Or just a patterned one. Swatching very diligently after the massive cardigan and the tiny waistcoat experience. So we shall see.

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This week’s reading has been a British Library Crime Classic, Still Waters (1949) by E C R Lorac (pseudonym of Edith Caroline Rivett). In short, Caroline Bourne has bought a rundown smallholding near to her cousin and her husband, the Hoggetts, in Lunesdale in the Lancashire dales. Caroline’s property has a tumbledown cottage on it near to an old flooded quarry. All seems to be going well until an architect friend exploring the property by the quarry gets hit on the head and left unconscious. Soon Scotland Yard is involved and Lorac regular, Inspector MacDonald, an old friend of the Hoggetts, is investigating potential criminal activity. It’s a solid crime story, nicely plotted and the Hoggetts are a delightful couple, very keen to assist with the sleuthing. I always enjoy these British Library Crime Classics, and this one’s no exception.

I’ve also just finished another Elizabeth Taylor novel, In a Summer Season (1961). The story centres on the household of Kate Heron, a wealthy, attractive widow in her forties, who has remarried and is seemingly balancing family life with her new second marriage. Kate now lives in comfortable circumstances in the Thames Valley with her husband Dermot (a good ten years her junior), and her two children from her first marriage: Tom, twenty-two, and Louisa, sixteen. Also living with them are Kate’s elderly aunt Ethel and the family cook, Mrs Meacock, both of whom add their own distinctive presence, and opinions, to the household.

Kate’s second marriage is almost the opposite of her first. Her late husband Alan had been steady, cultured and dependable, whereas Dermot is feckless and impulsive. He struggles to settle into employment and is frequently short of money, ostensibly living off Kate, yet she appears willing to overlook these shortcomings. In some ways she seems to view the marriage as a sort of liberation from the stability of her first; she enjoys the frequent and vigorous sex and sees it as a reassurance of their love. For Dermot’s part, he loves Kate, although love is a relatively unfamiliar experience for him and does not always override his sense of insecurity. Aunt Ethel, Mrs Meacock (and a good many of Kate’s neighbours) feel that the marriage is doomed to failure, unequal in so many ways as it is. Tom enjoys Dermot’s company, is bored working in his grandfather’s factory and has a string of girlfriends with whom he is less than satisfied. Louise is tentatively enjoying her first ‘love’—the local Curate. The first half of the book sets this everyday scene, interior and exterior lives juxtaposed in the way Taylor does so well.

The wavering equilibrium of the household is disturbed by the arrival of Charles, an old family friend returning from abroad with his daughter, the beautiful and delightful Araminta. Charles is a widower who had been married to Kate’s closest friend Dorothea—a presence much missed by them both. His calm solidity, sophistication and long-standing familiarity with Kate immediately unsettle Dermot, who becomes rather defensive and petulantly hostile. As Dermot’s irritability grows, the weaknesses within the Heron marriage begin to surface. His tendency to find confidence (and solace) in alcohol and his habit of being childishly quarrelsome serve to raise the tension, and Kate responds by throwing herself into a round of restless activity, avoiding difficult conversations and masking her anxiety with a brittle, constant busy-ness.

At the same time, Kate’s children are experiencing their own romantic confusions. Tom, haphazard drifter through casual relationships, suddenly finds himself completely captivated by Araminta. She is not the girl he had known and spent time with in childhood, when their families were so close. Araminta has grown into a fashionable and glamorous young woman. Her cool self-possession and flirtatious charm leave Tom both fascinated and unsettled, and he quickly becomes consumed by an intensity of feelings he has not experienced before.

Louisa’s emotional world is more complicated. Still grieving the loss of her father and feeling a little overlooked at home, she forms a close attachment to Father Blizzard, the local curate. Her affection for him is real and tenderly felt, showing a naive teenage longing and a need for emotional stability. The curate himself is a kind but slightly frustrated figure, his lowly position in the parish leaving him feeling sidelined into the more tedious duties. Watching all of this unfold (unravel?) is Aunt Ethel, who observes the household dynamics with keen interest, sharing her thoughts in letters to her old friend, Gertrude. Through Ethel’s shrewd eyes, the small tensions, misunderstandings and shifting loyalties within the family are crystallised for the reader.

Typically Taylor, the novel is an acutely observed study of relationships and emotional shifts; the contrasting sides of internal and external voices revealing each person as a multi-dimensional whole. Their everyday small habits and private anxieties are subtly used to expose them as flawed and insecure, and recognisably real. Taylor peels away the layers of love around this group—familial, sexual, intense infatuation, desire, companionship, compatibility, and most of all, complicated.

Set against the warmth and languor of an English summer, (the title is taken from the opening lines* of Langland’s Piers Ploughman) Taylor gives us her perceptive social observations and moments of gentle humour. But, as always, there is also the familiar undercurrent of unease, and the narrative closes with a dramatic event where several lives are permanently changed.

This novel simmered away at me: now light, now profound, humour, then pathos, weaving the characters into a tangle of feelings that made me wonder how Taylor would resolve things. Part of me expected her not to, as so often her novels are ambiguous in their endings, with no easy tying up of loose ends. Here, I thought she took the only practical exit that fitted with the narrative principle of love in all its complexity—the contradictions of loving—the insecurity versus the stability, the excitement versus the familiar, the intensity versus the casual, need versus complacency, youth versus age and on and on. It can last a lifetime, or be gone in an instant. I loved it. Do read.

And here I shall leave you until next week. If you’ve enjoyed reading then do click the little heart as it helps others to find me (and also makes me very happy). Take care, enjoy the sunshine if you see any, and I’ll write soon. x.

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*”In a summer season, when soft was the sun…”

The lovely colour-work waistcoat I showed you last week, or was it the week before?, anyway, the green waistcoat with the yellow flowers, has had to be ripped back. When I had joined the shoulder seams I thought I’d better try it on before I cut the front steek. Too tight. Much too tight. And I’d swatched and knit one size up from normal for ease, and everything. So, in a fit of pique I ripped the whole lot back, rewound the yarn and have put it away for later in the year before I try again. Not having much luck with garments—the massive cardigan and now the tiny waistcoat. Grrr. I have to have some knitting on the go so I’ve started a 10 stitch blanket with the not very nice yarn that was gifted to me last week. I thought that even in its ghastliness it might make a blanket for the garden seats. So, to make it more interesting I am knitting it as a temperature blanket (that’s with colours organised as to the noonday temperature everyday.) Obviously I have to catch up to March a bit but it’s working out okay. The colours in the gifted wool are not brilliant but there’s enough to make 3 degree gradations. To be honest it looks pretty bad, but I shall carry on regardless, as a blanket that will only be for outside use it doesn’t have to be a work of art. And it won’t be. Also, because the yarn is quite thick, somewhere around aran/heavy worsted weight, that ridge that you get on 10 stitch blankets is very prominent and horrible. But I DON”T CARE. In the spirit of ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’ it WILL be a garden blanket. I won’t photograph it out of a sense of shame. If you are wondering how I know the noon-day temperatures from the beginning of the year, well, shoot me now, I asked Chatgpt. And it gave me a nice easy table of every day for the two months. So, it has its uses. If you want to knit your own 10 stitch blanket, the pattern is by Frankie Brown, it is free and available on Ravelry here. This is what a decent one looks like.

I’m back to lighter reading this week. Angela Thirkell’s Summer Half was exactly what I expected; bright and breezy, temporarily star-crossed would-be lovers, picnics and punting on the river, a sideways look at all kinds of relationships: father and son, mothers and children, platonic and romantic friendships. It’s a delight. Here’s a quick look at the main characters:

Colin Keith arrives at Southbridge School as a temporary Master with the noble but slightly misguided idea that he ought to earn his own living before becoming a barrister. Teaching classics to a room full of intelligent and faintly predatory boys turns out to be rather more alarming than he had imagined. Colin is clever, sensitive, and just self-aware enough to realise he may have made a mistake.

Every boys school needs at least one person who appears quietly in control, and at Southbridge that is Everard Carter. In his thirties and far more experienced than the younger masters, he manages boys, crises, and colleagues with calm efficiency. Carter understands that school life runs on tact, routine, occasional firmness, and a love for the job and the well-being of the boys. Beneath this steady competence is a thoughtful man who has been quietly waiting for the right person to love.

That person is not, however, Rose Birkett, the headmaster’s daughter. Rose is a terrific comedic invention of Thirkell’s and sweeps through the story on a wave of astounding empty-headedness. Beautiful (of course), impulsive, and magnificently silly, she has an alarming propensity for serial romantic engagements. At the beginning of the novel her latest fiancé is the classics master Philip Winter—a situation that fills the entire school with dread. Rose loves fun, jolly young men, admiration, romantic scenes, and emotional attention, though she has very little idea what any of these things mean in practice. Watching the adults attempting to manage the consequences of her nit-wittery is one of Thirkell’s most delicious jokes. Poor Philip Winter is completely undone by Rose; he is in a state of emotional agitation that the rest of the staff observe with deep unease. He argues, broods, is wildly jealous and far too serious for his own good.

Of the younger cast, Lydia, Colin’s younger sister, is a glorious force of nature. In her mid-teens, she is boisterous, loud and enthusiastic about everything, and expresses her opinions at a volume that explodes off the pages. Lydia has absolutely no instinct for social caution, which allows her to say the things everyone else is politely avoiding. She brings energy, chaos, and unexpected honesty wherever she appears, and the novel is livelier for her presence. Her older sister Kate, is quiet, unassuming, and helpful, but doesn’t go unnoticed. In addition, we are reintroduced to an older (and less annoying)Tony Morland, first met in Thirkell’s High Rising. He and his friends Swan and Hacker (with pet chameleon) act as something of a Greek chorus to the adult drama. Tony is bright, articulate, and a bit scary in intelligence for one so young, and he has an unnerving habit of speaking to all adults, including the schoolmasters, as though he were their contemporary. The boys watch the romantic entanglements of the staff with fascinated amusement while pursuing their own serious concerns —cricket matches, friendships, rivalries, cleaning out the frog pond and testing authority without quite getting caught.

Together with parents, adult friends, and village neighbours, these characters create the gentle machinery of Summer Half: a term full of boys who think they are grown up, masters who are discovering that they may not be, and a Barsetshire summer in which love affairs, cricket matches, and Latin lessons all seem — for the moment — equally important. Loved it and can’t wait to get hold of a couple more in Thirkell’s Barsetshire series.

I also read most of Marble Hall Murders, Anthony Horowitz’s latest Atticus Pünt/Susan Ryeland offering. I admire Horowitz immensely but this trio of books have left me a bit cold. At this point I should say that I really enjoyed the TV adaptations with Lesley Manville (who is a favourite actress) and found them much more digestible than the novels themselves. The ‘book-in-a-book’ conceit annoys me and makes heavy weather of the reading for me. I enjoyed and was impressed by the first one, Magpie Murders, less enamoured of Moonflower Murders and this last one never really took off at all for me. Right at the beginning there is a family tree, and one look at it made me stop and think, surely not, he’s surely not going to do the clichéd thing here, is he? But reader, he did. Which means I pretty much knew who the murderer was going to be from the start. I confess to skim-reading it. Hey ho, win some, lose some.

Before I go I must tell you about a TV programme I’ve just watched: L. S Lowry—The Unheard Tapes. It makes use of a series of tape recordings made by a young woman in 1972, Angela Barratt. She was a fan, and spent time with the artist, asking a range of interesting and telling questions. The BBC have dramatised the interviews, with Ian McKellen lip-synching to Lowry’s voice from the tapes. It’s remarkable and a tour de force by McKellen who is lip perfect with Lowry’s voice. Do watch if you can. I’ve also been catching up with the new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, which is challenging and fascinating in equal measure. I remember reading it at school, but I don’t remember finding it this disturbing. Their behaviour seems all too possible now. Inevitable even. To see these boys alive and real is very, very unsettling.

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My mother died ten years ago this year. She would’ve been 100 last week. I wrote about her here. I didn’t like her very much, but I can honour her memory.

And that’s it for this week. Take care and I’ll write soon. x

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And here are our garden camellias. I have no real idea what variety they are, but I think the pink one is probably ‘Donation’. They are lovely right now. I raised the crowns on them myself and am underplanting with foxgloves and brunnera this year. Every year I long to bring some blooms indoors, but I can’t bear to take them off the tree.

The waistcoat/vest I’ve been knitting is coming on nicely. I’ve finished the colour work (in spite of the excitement of the curling in the Winter Olympics); I did have to rip a few rows back because my tension changed and it puckered a bit, but all is well now. With a bit of luck it could be finished by next weekend. Also a friend has gifted me a whole load of yarn, notions, needles and crochet hook sets. I may take the opportunity to teach myself to crochet. Honestly, there is so much - a huge plastic storage box full of yarn, 6 knitting kits, 4 sets of crochet hooks, some wadding, and a huge box of stitch markers, tapestry needles, small scissors etc etc. It comes courtesy of a colleague of his who thought if she bought enough yarn and tools then she would be able to make all manner of things for herself. When she realised that knitting and crochet was harder than it looked, she gave up. Said friend saw all the stuff about to go to the tip (!!!) and rescued it for me. It’s not brilliant quality—a lot of it is that Easy Simple Yarn that’s made of tubular cotton and is about aran weight—but I haven’t had to pay for it and I’m sure I can turn it into something. Or several somethings. Anyway, here’s the colour work on the vest, I’m pretty pleased with it. Isn’t it cheery? I can’t wait for it to be finished.

The latest edition of Slightly Foxed came this week so that has been most of my bed-time reading, although I have just started another Angela Thirkell. This time it’s Summer Half, in which we are re-introduced to the little beast that is Tony Moreland, first encountered in High Rising. More about that when I’ve finished it.

I have managed to finish the 1995 biography of William Blake by Peter Ackroyd and it has been quite a testing read. As always with Ackroyd, there is a deep delving into the historical world until one feels enveloped by the late eighteenth century and the environment of the unsuccessful artisan. In addition, there is also something faintly unnerving about the book. Not because of the visions, angels and prophecies, but because Ackroyd writes with such assurance about them that I found myself almost accepting their possibility. He doesn’t spend time arguing for Blake’s sanity; but rather seems to make the question of sanity/insanity irrelevant. The material world Blake inhabited is reconstructed with such density: the monumental London of empire is a world away from his dark, working London of furnaces, ink, and metal. We linger over the physical act of engraving—the scraping of copper, the preparation of plates, the intimacy between hand and surface through to the emergence of his visions on paper—an activity presented not as an escape from material life but as an intensification of his life experiences. Ackroyd refuses to translate Blake into modern psychological terms or reduce the visions to symptoms or metaphors. Blake believed he saw angels, and Ackroyd allows that belief to stand. Blake’s cosmology—Urizen, Albion, the whole symbolic architecture of his prophetic books—is not presented as some sort of literary ornamentation but as the framework through which Blake understood his reality. This acceptance is the core of the biography’s impact. Blake is suddenly alive on the page: a real man, struggling to be heard, refusing to be swayed, steadfast in his desire to show and tell the world what he had seen and what it meant for mankind.

Sadly, there was no market for prophecy and visions. The public and the art world were indifferent, and Ackroyd posits that Blake was not simply neglected; but that he was incompatible with his time. The eighteenth century valued polish, refinement, and adherence to aesthetic convention, whereas Blake preferred severity, symbolism, and revelation. Where his contemporaries sought beauty, Blake sought truth, and truth, in his hands, was often pretty scary. Ackroyd has an obvious sympathy with his subject, perhaps less interested in analysis/interrogation than in preserving Blake in his whole intense, messy way of being. I found myself increasingly in agreement with the sense that to over-explain the man would be to diminish him somehow. Ackroyd’s biography has helped me to understand that what Blake meant by imagination is very different from our modern definitions: Blake’s imagination was an additional, and superior, faculty to our five senses, and more in tune with reality, rather than less. But even he recognised that it was an imagination not experienced by everyone. As an adult he observed:

"I know that this is a world of Imagination and Vision. I see everything I paint in this world but everybody does not see alike."

William Blake died in obscurity and poverty, convinced of the reality of what he had seen. Ackroyd left me with the impression that obscurity was not a judgement on the man, rather that the visionary man was ahead of his time’s ability to recognise him as an artist and writer of extra-ordinary power. It’s a fascinating look at a remarkable man.

I thought I’d share my current reading pile with you. On the left is the non-fiction pile, on the right, fiction. This is the usual size amount of books waiting to be read. They’re not in order, I read them in terms of whatever I fancy, so some books get read soon after purchase, others hang around a while. What does your TBR pile look like? Are you a strict ‘in order’ reader? or more arbitrary? I’d love to know!

And that’s it for this week. Take care and I’ll write soon. x.

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The Winter Olympics continue to be a source of entertainment and joy and I hope by the time this appears in your inbox that the GB men’s Curling team is in possession of the Gold medal. I have been surprised by the range of things I have found enthralling. Biathlon anyone? Skiing Uphill? Amazing strength and perseverance. Any event which requires powering up a ramp and launching oneself high into the air to perform tricks—I’m in. And most surprising of all, if anyone had said 6 months ago that I would happily spend hours watching Ice Hockey I would have laughed out loud. But I have been loving the sheer physicality of it; the speed, the crashing about, the broken sticks, and most of all the goals that happen so quickly I’d no chance of seeing them without a slo-mo replay. Remarkable.

And when not living vicariously through much younger, much fitter and much braver people than me, I have been savouring the gentle loveliness of BBC One series Small Prophets. The writing genius that is Mackenzie Crook has produced a dream of a six-part series and if you haven’t seen it yet, then do watch. It is glorious—funny, poignant, weird, philosophical, tender—all ‘the feels’ as the young people say. In spite of it being available on BBC Iplayer to watch all in one go, I am eking it out week by week and savouring every delicious moment. We have already adopted catch-phrases (Are you on your break?), and identified our favourite moments so far (the buckets, the oil-spill rabbit, the conversation in the coffee shop about hopes and dreams) and oh, so much more. Crook’s writing has so much compassion, and we don’t see much of that on TV. It is pure pleasure.

We’ve had two periods of dry weather this week too, and so have been able to get out for a couple of walks. Not brisk, but steady, and enough weak sun to feel on our faces. There are things beginning to happen in the garden. Iris reticulata are flowering; we have lost the pale blue this year but the deep purple are ok. The camellia are in bloom, but the rain really disfigures them, bashing off the petals and turning the flowers brown. None the less, in the dry hours they are lovely. I’ve noticed the Portuguese Squill (Scilla peruviana) is forming its flower heads tucked down in the clusters of strappy leaves, and whorled shoots of yellow loosestrife (Lysimachia punctata) are coming up. Robins and blackbirds are investigating our front hedge already, the greenfinch has joined them in song with his wheezy ‘tcheeeew’ and I’ve seen two buff-tailed bumblebees searching for early nectar. Spring is definitely out there, slowly approaching. I feel sure that after next weekend, when we turn into March, there will be visits to the garden centre or nursery.

This week’s reading has been a bit of a mix and match. I’ve started Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Blake, but it’s not a book for reading every night. I love Ackroyd’s prose but it demands concentration, it is so vivid. And as so often in his work, the book gives us Blake embedded in the Romantic, shadowy London of the eighteenth century. He described Blake in a 2012 interview as ‘…the most powerful and most significant philosopher or thinker in the course of English history.’, and I’m really looking forward to getting deeper into this book. Of course, it is full of the most glorious illustrations of Blake’s work, but not my own favourite ‘Pity’, which is an illustration of a quote from Macbeth:

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air.

- Macbeth

Lighter reading this week has been Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington, a novel with an acute understanding of the moral life of a woman in a rented room in 1950s London. The novel is centred on Mrs. Hawkins—a plump war widow of 28 years old—who lives in a rooming house, works in publishing and commits the gravest of social sins: she tells the truth. Not grand, trumpet-blast Truth, but the conversational sort. The sort that says a bad book is bad, and a bad author is worse.

The formidable Mrs Hawkins—a large young woman in both body and moral presence—narrates with the calm assurance of someone who has already survived the worst of it. What she mostly survives is mediocrity: bad writers, bad men, bad food, and the small, petty tyrannies of literary London. When she calls one particularly hopeless author a “pisseur de copie,” (a copious spewer out of hack journalism) the insult detonates a chain reaction that exposes just how fragile the egos of minor men can be. What makes the novel linger, though, is its atmosphere of mild menace. Spark threads in a subplot involving blackmail and violence so lightly that you might miss the chill. Evil, here, is not operatic. It is vindictive and shabby, opportunistic even. The moral drama unfolds in bed-sitting rooms over weak tea.

Spark’s comedy is bone-dry and surgical; she wastes nothing. The sentences are crisp, lightly ironic, and faintly dangerous. She writes like a woman who has seen too much nonsense to waste time on it. There is something wonderfully controlled about her prose; she doesn’t force it, but allows absurdity to incriminate itself. The “pisseur de copie” Mrs. Hawkins offends—a weasel by the name of Hector Bartlett—becomes less a villain than a scientific specimen. She doesn’t rant at his mediocrity, she classifies it and pins it down mercilessly. There is no performative rage at him, instead Spark lets moral clarity do the work. Mrs Hawkins believes in standards and though she may be unfashionable, she is not naive. She knows that truth-telling carries consequences but she tells the truth anyway and her insistence on plain speaking ripples out in unexpected ways, touching lives she initially barely registers. The comedy darkens and what seemed merely sharp becomes quietly menacing. You begin to see how reputations are made and unmade, how gossip curdles into threat, then shades into harm.

But this is not just a literary satire on the world of publishing in the 1950s, it seems to me that the novel’s true subject is conscience. Reading A Far Cry…I was struck by how contemporary it feels. The novel’s question—what do we owe the truth, and what does it cost us?—lands neatly in our present moment of ‘be nice’ strategies, and deference to the applause of the algorithm. How far one must travel from the comfort zone in order to see clearly that integrity is rarely glamorous and never safe, but is absolutely necessary. The Far Cry itself speaks of the sound of distress in that anonymous rooming house, but it is really about distance: of geography, of memory, of circumstances and of proportion. It is a novel about scale. Spark maps that distance with a smile sharp enough to cut glass. And her humour finds, and makes, its mark.

If the book has a flaw, it is that its wonders are so controlled they can feel elusive on first reading (I finished it and went straight back to the beginning to read again). I was slightly discombobulated by the reflective narrative—Mrs Hawkins is looking back on the 1950s from her happy and successful life in the 1980s. It took me about a third of the book to get to grips with that, and I was almost at the end before all the pieces began to fall into place. It’s a very clever structure and a much more profound novel than I first realised. The enjoyment on second reading was worth it.

And that’s it for this week. Take care and I’ll write again soon. x

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We’ve had a quiet week. Gearing up for A to have further investigations on Thursday, but that’s over now and we await results. He is doing okay, thank you for asking. A little anxious still (normal) and the occasional wobble when his mortality confronts him, but otherwise, I think, pretty good, all things considered. We are just waiting to see if the second opinion suggests anything further.

The knitting is proceeding slowly, mostly because of my (very painful) tennis elbow, but also because I have been distracted by the winter Olympics, which I enjoy much more than the summer ones. All those weird and wild events: Big Air, Skeleton (bravo Matt Weston), Half-pipe, Mogul, it’s a whole new wintry world of sport. Listening to the commentary in the snowboard events is like listening to gibberish: “Oh, it’s a nose butt and a backside rodeo!’ or ‘And a lovely double cork there!’. But I adore the commentators, they get so excited and the competitors are all so young and fresh and supportive of each other. None of that needling that you see in other sports. The competition doesn’t feel personal, it’s just them and the board or the bob and their skill and the time clock. Most commentators handle the general air of bonhomie very well, and some (I’m looking at you Steve Cram) can’t shake off the feeling that it should be all do or die and competitive ‘eat my dust’ stuff. His carping quite spoils the curling for me. Anyway, I love the whole thing; the snow, the mountains, the skinsuits, the effort, the achievement. Except for the Men’s free skating where, oh, how the mighty are fallen—quite literally, and the meek inherited the gold medal. (If you don’t watch you could skip the above paragraph).

This week’s reading has been a slim volume of Simenon’s Maigret, perfect for out-patient waiting rooms where I felt vaguely superior reading my book whilst others pinged and scrolled their phones endlessly. It was Maigret’s Madwoman and I read over half of it while waiting for A to have his stress perfusion MRI. They’re always a good read, and I highly recommend any or all of them for waiting rooms of any kind.

More substantial reading has been Elizabeth Taylor’s A Game of Hide and Seek. I do love Taylor’s precise, witty prose, her dispassionate, even cool, observations of middle-class life. I love that she never judges her characters, just shows them to us in her typical, understated way. A Game of Hide and Seek begins in youth, with Harriet and Vesey circling one another in the charged atmosphere of adolescence. Taylor has an unsparing eye for teenage longing: the way it inflates small gestures into omens, and pride and vulnerability are often interchangeable. Harriet, serious and inward, feels everything too much, yearns for a look, a word, or a gesture to underpin the intensity of her feelings. Vesey, bright and careless, glides just above the emotional consequences of his own charm. Well-meaning adults and adulthood separate them, but this missed connection will torment them for years to come.

Harriet and Vesey vanish into marriages, into work, into the versions of adulthood they think will be enough for them. Harriet marries, has a daughter and settles into suburban middle-class life with husband, Charles. Vesey becomes an indifferent actor in a mediocre touring company. When Vesey reappears, twenty years later, Harriet’s respectable, settled life shimmers into the background; his feelings for her are stronger than in their youth but has too much time passed? Will they re-connect? Or slide past each other, love left in their adolescence? Harriet knows it is too late, but the glamour of their youthful intensity set against the compromises of her married life is too much to resist; she is still in love with him. As ever with Taylor, lonely lives collide and the potential for fantasy outcomes leads to tortured decisions, but satisfaction is rarely guaranteed.

In our current social environment, where closure is all, reading Taylor feels almost radical. She allows her characters to live with ambiguity, and her readers must too—we do not always get the life that would have justified our younger feelings. We get the life we make after them. I suspect if I’d read this novel when I was younger, I might have interpreted it with a rather more romantic eye, and I also suspect that if I read it again I may see something different in it. Harriet and Vesey can shift with our own shifting experiences. Hide and seek is a children’s game. Taylor’s genius is to show how long we are prepared to keep playing it.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as some of Taylor’s other novels. I’ve read where some say this is her best, but so far nothing has eclipsed A View of the Harbour for me, and At Mrs Lippincot’s runs it a close second. I often find it hard to like her characters, although I can usually identify with many of the situations and feelings, and I love that she provides no moral framework, just social convention and how it both releases and constrains. Another recommend from me.

Can I let today go without mentioning Saint Valentine? Of course not.

I think there is something quietly defiant about Saint Valentine. Not the lace-and-pink-paper version or the supermarket aisle of heart-shaped chocolates sometime after New Year when the tinsel has barely come down. I mean the man himself; or at least the story of him that has survived, threadbare and luminous, through the centuries.

In third-century Rome love was inconvenient. The State was not sentimental, it was practical and strategic. Men were needed for war, and family attachment was considered a liability. Legend says that Emperor Claudius II decided unmarried soldiers were better fighters and banned young men from marrying. It was an administrative decision, efficient and logical. And then along came Valentine. A priest—or perhaps a bishop; history is not precise—who continued to marry couples in secret. So, imagine dimly lit rooms, whispered vows, a lookout and the sound of sandals in corridors outside. A formalising of love that carried real risk, and required a certain amount of courage. Valentine didn’t protest publicly about the State keeping lovers apart, he performed secret weddings. A loving rebellion.

Eventually, of course, he was arrested. Systems rarely tolerate small, persistent acts of conscience. While imprisoned, legend tells us he befriended his jailer and restored the sight of the jailer’s blind daughter. Before his execution, he wrote her a last note signed “From your Valentine.” A gentle phrase, affectionate, no drama, no justification of his actions, just a loving farewell to a young girl who had trusted in him, and who he had healed. Today we remember the signature but we forget the sacrifice.

What fascinates me is how this story that is half-history, half-myth, has transformed over time. By the Middle Ages, mid-February had become associated with the mating season of birds. Poets made the most of it. Romance (human pairing) attached itself to the date and gradually, the martyr became a patron of lovers. The courage became courtship, eventually leading to the sending of cards etc.

I am one of those cynics who finds it easy to dismiss the modern Saint’s day as commercial excess. The roses flown across continents, the over-priced menus, the anxiety over reservations and expectations. But beneath the crassness and the noise, I can still hope that there is something fragile and sincere happening below the superficiality. I’d like to think that some people are trying to sincerely say: I am choosing you. I care. You matter.

Is it radical in its own quiet way? To proclaim love publicly? To commit? To prioritise being together in a world that often rewards detachment? Saint Valentine’s story, however embellished, reminds us that love has always required some measure of bravery. Not the grand romantic gestures, but steady ones: showing up, keeping promises, trust and confidence, sending a note to cheer and remember. We have turned Valentine into a symbol of romance, but perhaps he is more accurately a symbol of allegiance—to faith, to connection, to the belief that human bonds are worth protecting.

In a culture that cycles quickly through trends and affections, alliances and mis-alliances, Valentine’s legacy endures. Not because of the chocolates, or the scentless roses, but because his story/legend speaks to a truth we recognise instinctively: love is not soft in the way we imagine. It is sturdy. It stands up to empires and Emperors. It survives reinterpretation and responds to support. It is collective as well as singular. And sometimes, it signs its name simply, quietly, and without spectacle.

And that’s it for this week. Take care and I’ll write soon. From your Valentine,

It does mean I have been getting some knitting in though. I have started a Nordic Bloom vest by Caitlin Hunter (see below). I’ve just started the colour work flowers and it’s going well so far. I’ve chosen a dark green background and an eggy yellow for the blooms, both from Ístex Léttlopi, which is a 100% pure Icelandic wool yarn. It is a worsted/aran weight, and should be useful a little later in the year. The pattern is a bit too cropped for me so I shall put in a few extra rows at the top of the flowers before the armholes, which should help. I might also put in a couple more buttonholes. I’m taking it slowly because in addition to my arthritic thumbs I seem to have developed tennis elbow. (I don’t play tennis. Knitting is about as sporty as I get). It’s jolly painful. If anyone has any tips for improving it, they’d be most welcome. I’m struggling to rest it — which is what it says on the NHS website — because it’s my right arm and other than when I’m asleep it’s in pretty constant use.

Last Monday night I woke up at about 2am. I could see bright light around the curtains and everything in the bedroom was clearly visible. ‘Full moon’, I thought and got out of bed to see if I could see it. It was almost overhead and so not huge like the supermoons, but it was SO bright I could hardly look at it. The garden was washed in a silvery-white light, every tree and shrub and blade of grass picked out in stark monochrome and as clear as daylight. There is something utterly unreal about bright moonlight, and so often we miss it because we’re sleeping. I stood at the window for a good ten minutes just marvelling at the pale, cool light, the strangeness of the garden without colour, the moon like a lamp in the sky illuminating everything. So, so beautiful. I love the poem-fragment below by Shelley, it describes the enchantment I felt, looking out through the bedroom window. Shelley shows us the moon as a woman—elegant but a little sad, tired, lonely and with a hint of insanity—she stands apart, separate from the myriad stars, able only to reflect the sun’s light; not make any of her own.

Gorgeous. I do love the Romantic poets.

To The Moon

And, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

This week’s read has been Mollie Panter-Downes novel One Fine Day (1947). It took me a day or two to get into this, but once I’d caught the rhythm, I soon became an interested observer in the village. There are novels that announce themselves with drama, and there are novels that slip quietly into your consciousness. One Fine Day is very much the latter. Mollie Panter-Downes sets the novel in 1946, on a single warm summer day, in a village just outside London. The war is over. Life is meant to be returning to normal. But of course “normal” no longer exists — and that is the real subject of the book.

Laura Marshall, the novel’s central character, is 38, married to Stephen, mother to 10 year old Victoria, and outwardly comfortable. Her day is filled with small errands: tending the garden, shopping, interacting with neighbours. Nothing remarkable happens on the surface. And yet everything is happening, quietly, internally. The book is less interested in events than in the way Laura’s mind roams — how memory intrudes, how the smallest domestic detail can suddenly open onto grief or regret.

What Panter-Downes does so well is capture that post-war emotional flatness; not despair exactly, but a kind of bewildered exhaustion. The world has survived something enormous, and now people must learn how to live inside the aftermath. Houses are shabby, gardens overgrown, servants gone. Social structures have shifted, but no one quite knows what should replace them. Laura feels this acutely, though she rarely articulates it directly. Instead, the novel lets us sense it in the way she notices the weeds in the garden, the endless preparation and cooking of meals, the half-formed thoughts about her marriage and her life.

The writing is exquisitely observant. Panter-Downes has an eye for the telling detail: the heat of the day, the feel of a neglected garden, the tone of a casual conversation that reveals far more than it intends to. There is a wonderful passage when Laura visits a neighbour to ask about help with the garden, encountering the beautiful eldest son of the house, strong, tender with his baby siblings and realises that she is not a desirable woman to him, more a comfortable sofa. (She is 38 by the way, but I guess the perception of middle age began earlier 80 years ago). If you’re expecting plot, you may be disappointed. It’s not a book that builds toward some sort of dénouement. Rather, it trusts the reader to understand that living itself, especially after the traumas of war, is enough.

That said, it did feel rather rooted in the class perspectives of the time. Some of the secondary characters, particularly those from outside Laura’s social circle, felt very lightly sketched and rather stereotypical. But even this I thought had a certain truthfulness, intended or not: dreamy Laura does not fully see the people around her, and the novel doesn’t pretend otherwise. It all feels very restrained. There is no catharsis, no moral lesson neatly tied up by evening. The day simply ends. Laura returns home. Life goes on, slightly altered, as it always does.

If you love atmosphere, are willing to sit with ambiguity, and don’t need a plot and resolution to enjoy a book, you will enjoy this. It doesn’t have the ‘what-ho’ jollity of Angela Thirkell’s villages, or the sly humour and often crushed interior lives of Barbara Pym. It is closest perhaps to Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver in its concentration on the everyday, and the role of women to hold hearth and home together while their men marched off to war, returning to a changed life. It doesn’t demand your attention, but it does invite you in to Laura’s day and her thoughts — whether they be about unidentifiable fish at the fishmonger, or more philosophical as she climbs the Downs behind her home. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but I enjoyed it.

(And, just an aside: was every middle-class woman of that era named Laura?)

And there we are, another week flown by. Take care, and i’ll write again soon. x

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Even the gulls couldn’t settle on the water.

Last weekend’s Big Garden Birdwatch was, to use the obvious cliché, a washout. In my hour of watching I spotted only a robin, a blackbird and a magpie, and they were wetly miserable. The usual birds were nowhere to be seen—the wren, dunnock, blue and great tits, no goldfinch or greenfinch, not even the woodpigeons braved the sluicing rain. I added just one new bird to my 2026 spotted list this week—a grey wagtail. A pretty little thing, grey on top and a yellowy buff underneath, flicking its tail, exploring the roof tiles on next door’s garage. They have this sweet habit of foraging in one place, then flying up and away a few yards and then running back to the place they were foraging at. We see their pied cousins a lot, often in pairs, but the grey is more usually down by the river than around our gardens. I guess the water got too high for him to forage in the usual places.

As mentioned last week I have been reading Ian Collins’ biography of Ronald Blythe, ‘Blythe Spirit’. Ronald Blythe (1922–2023) was a writer devoted to attention: to people, to landscape, to the passing of time, and to the most important thing in his life—his writing. He is best known for Akenfield (1969), the portrait of an English village, built from many voices and using lived experience as well as invention. Leaving school at fourteen, Blythe educated himself through reading, libraries, long walks, the cultivation of cultured friends, and conversation. When asked about his background he would speak vaguely of coming from ‘an old farming family’ and rarely discussed his personal life. He settled in East Anglia, where the rhythms of rural life and the Church of England shaped both his work and his thinking. Across essays, memoir, criticism and nature writing, he wrote with clarity, humility and moral seriousness, recording the old and changing ways of life without sentimentality.

Blythe Spirit is an interesting book, both in content and in structure. This is no linear, chronological biography; rather each short chapter concentrates on a single theme, and relies heavily on Blythe’s own words from conversations over the later years of his life. Drawing on years of friendship, letters and close observation, Collins shows us a man both reticent and intense: offering us an intimate and revealing insight into ‘Ronnie’, carefully and affectionately unwrapping those areas of his life that Blythe rarely shared with others—the impoverished hardship of his childhood and his sexuality. Far from being from an old farming family Blythe was born into poverty, the eldest of six children born to a nurse and a Suffolk labourer, sharing a room with his siblings and a bed with a younger brother until he left home. He tells of the ignominy of cousins having to bring straw to stuff the family mattresses as the Blythe’s were too poor to provide their own. Of having nothing. Of walking everywhere, miles and miles to anywhere he needed to go. He left school at 14 and began his self-education through books, libraries and better educated friends. He discarded his Suffolk accent and developed the patrician tones that made him such a popular and affecting Lay Preacher in the churches of his parish. His famed farmhouse home, ‘Bottengoms’ was left to him by artist friends John and Christina Nash, he mixed with cultural luminaries such as E M Forster, Ben Britten and Peter Pears, Sir Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines, Patricia Highsmith, Imogen Holst, Roger Deakin and Richard Mabey. The book is full of wonderful, gossipy anecdotes about this circle of friends and how he was influenced and learned from them—always watching, listening, paying attention. His development as a writer, countryman, essayist, everything he became, is the weft through the stabilising warp of these relationships.

Collins is honest without being salacious about Ronnie’s private life, but the extent of his casual sexual relationships may be something of a surprise to some readers. In his youth there is sex in haystacks and in fields, ‘the best sex ever’ with other young soldiers when he was conscripted in war time, a beautiful, blonde civil servant, and then regular assignations with a local indolent 21-stone rector. As he moved in more rarefied circles his lovers (if the word can be applied to these casual sexual encounters) included the writer James Hamilton-Paterson, the artist Arthur Lett-Haines, an un-named but physically ‘perfect’ Bajun poet, even a dalliance with crime-writer and lesbian Highsmith. In later life, when he lived alone at Bottengoms he managed to take ‘opportunities’ with a temporary postman. But none of this ever got in the way of his writing. He was matter-of-fact about sex, an enjoyable necessity but never a distraction from his main purpose.

As I said earlier, it’s a fascinating book. Because Collins relies so much on quotes from conversations with Blythe, I sometimes found the narrative a little disjointed. The mixed use of first names and surnames meant I was occasionally confused about who was talking about whom. I learned quite a bit about E M Forster, and a lot about Britten and Pears and Imogen Holst during Blythe’s time helping with communications for the Aldeburgh Festival. We get a good look at Cedric Morris and Lett, the Nashes and his great friend poet James Turner. The biography is candid, amusing, enlightening, surprising. Blythe’s life emerges like a moth from a cocoon, but I felt a little sadness that the Blythe whose writing I enjoy so much, the wise and rurally-rooted champion of passing times, the sage and erudite wordsmith, the literary country and church man, came into sharper focus as a truly ‘self-made’ man, a self-invented man. A conscientiously air-brushed start in life, a discarded ‘peasant’ accent, a lively but hidden private life; it felt like the soft inside of a carefully constructed shell. Did it matter? Not in the end, although the words of artist Maggi Hambling resonated with me, quoted from a discussion with Ian Collins about the biography:

Reflecting on their enduring friendship – with mutual affection, but with neither party being in the other’s inner circle – she says: ‘I never saw Ronnie with anyone. I always imagined he was gay, but without any evidence. He wasn’t physical in the sense of giving you a great big hug or even pecking a kiss. He was reserved, watchful.’ Surprised when enlightened, Maggi especially loves the idea that the formally dressed figure was a lifelong naturist. And she’s astonished by the depths of his early poverty, the lack of formal schooling and the jettisoned peasant burr. Then, after musing in a long silence, in which new pieces are slotting into an old mental image, she says: ‘So he was a complete invention, like Noël Coward. How amazing.’

Blythe Spirit by Ian Collins. pp. 219-20

How amazing indeed. To live for a hundred years and be so known and so unknown. I admire that, Blythe was exactly who he wanted to be, and he was happy with that. I admire him for it. I shall still revisit the old volumes of Word from Wormingford on my shelves, Akenfield and The Yeoman’s House, and The Time By The Sea, and I shall still seek out his other books with a heightened interest from knowing a little more about the man. I commend it to you, it’s an instructive read about so many people and places, and relationships, and in my view, Blythe’s considerable legacy is strengthened by it.

And that’s where I finish for this week. Take care and I’ll write soon. x.

P.S. There is a transcript here of a terrific conversation between Ian Collins and John Goodridge about the writing of the biography.

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