Welcome to justthoughtsnstuff

I started posting to jtns on 20 February 2010 with just one word, 'Mosaic'. This seemed an appropriate introduction to a blog that would juxtapose fragments of memoir and life-writing. Since 1996, I'd been coming to terms with the consequences of emotional and economic abuse that had begun in childhood, and which, amongst other things, had sought to stifle self-expression. While I'd explored some aspects of my life through fiction and, to a lesser extent, journalism, it was only in 2010 that I felt confident enough to write openly about myself. I believed this was an important part of the healing process. Yet within weeks, the final scenes of my family's fifty-year nightmare started to play themselves out and the purpose of the blog became one of survival through writing. Although some posts are about my family's suffering - most explicitly, Life-Writing Talk, with Reference to Trust: A family story - the majority are about happier subjects (including, Bampton in rural west Oxfordshire, where I live, Oxford, where I work, the seasons and the countryside, walking and cycling) and I hope that these, together with their accompanying photos, are enjoyable and positive. Note: In February 2020, on jtns' tenth birthday, I stopped posting to this blog. It is now a contained work of life-writing about ten years of my life. Frank, 21 February 2020.

New blog: morethoughtsnstuff.com.

Saturday 1 September 2018

holiday, montreux, freddie mercury, abondance cheese, dippers, back to west ox, the black prince by iris murdoch







A brilliant trip to the French Alps, via Montreux, Évian-les-Bains and Lausanne.

Photos and post, part one.

In part two there will be a recording of cow bells from the high meadows.

Delicious Abondance cheese.

Amazing walks. Saw so many dippers - a dozen or more - on one particular walk beside an Alpine river just before thunder and storms, including the one getting ready to dive in the video.

Also a lovely visit to the Casino restaurant in Montreux - past the Freddy Mercury memorial statue on Lac Léman. (Generous, beloved hosts' uncle Jim soon to be seen played by Tom Hollander in Bohemian Rhapsody.)

Back to a still summery west Ox. Some of the fierceness has gone out of the days but they remain gorgeous.

Decided to take a break from Jane Eyre and read The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch. What a novel - dated to begin with but then the sense of past idioms falls away and one is immersed in the essential humanity of the writer. And what momentum. Unputdownable!

Some prime quotes - three rather bleak, if wry, a fourth rather sublime:

--

The wicked prosper in front of our eyes and go on and on and on prospering. What a blessing it must have been once to be able to believe in hell.

--

The wicked regard time as discontinuous, the wicked dull their sense of natural causality. The good feel being as a total dense mesh of tiny interconnections. My lightest whim can affect the whole future.

--

It stirred some memory of a childhood holiday. Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist.

--

Some clever writer (probably a Frenchman) has said: it is not enough to succeed; others must fail.
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1 comment:

  1. Margaret Keeping13 September 2018 at 17:20

    Glad you have had a great holiday. I'm a fan of Iris Murdoch (I remember you knew her) and reread them. I do have all her novels and some difficult essays. I'll go for the Black Prince next - after binging on wonderful forgotten Shirley Hazzard.

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