sunrise, mostly books, grubbing, patching and scarifying

Good cycle early yesterday morning. Another dramatic sunrise.

Loved reading at the Kennington Literary Festival in the afternoon. Thanks to Sylvia Vetta for inviting me. Good to meet Mark Thornton from Mostly Books, Abingdon at long last, who was running the festival bookshop.

Today was a gardening day--taking advantage of the extraordinary hot weather.

Burning the big heap of couch and other weeds on the allotment, then taking down the runner bean wigwams and grubbing up the courgette plants, before digging over half that side of the plot.

Patching the felt roof of the shed this afternoon. Back at the house it was mowing the lawn then scarifying and spiking it. Great fun.

Now for a pint.

furniture, clowns, kennington, invisible, pinter, poem

Well, today was the day we visited the warehouse where the family furniture was stored (see post of 6th September 2011).

This was the strangest of days because I had not seen these things since January 1978. Another life away.

I have to say that the experience was made bearable because of the kindness of the three people who were there to help.

I cannot describe what it was like to see all those things--in containers stretching as far as the eye could see, almost--that I grew up with and that I had been told were in store for just six months.

However, as I wrote a month or so ago, I am now starting the rest of my life. In the short term, I am looking forward to the Kennington Literary Festival tomorrow and reading from Invisible.

I would now like to add a poem. This week, when I was thinking about what was going to happen today, I thought back to what I was doing around the time that the furniture went into storage in 1978. I remembered a poem I'd written in my last year at Stowe that got published in the school magazine. I tried finding the poem in the online database of the school magazine but the site was down for maintenance. Oddly, though, a copy of the magazine with the poem in was on the top of a teachest when we were looking through the containers today. It was only thing I was allowed to take away today and I've scanned it for this post. I remember, in 1977, being chuffed, not because of the poem itself, but because it was the first time that the word 'shit' had been published in the school magazine. The word appeared in a quote from Harold Pinter's diaries--how could the school authorities refuse? (Kids, eh?) I should also say the poem was a love poem. (I didn't get the girl.)

Here's the poem. (The photo above btw was taken on my bike ride this morning.)

Le Monde et La Fille

Undulating waves of emerald green
Flow beneath me, Tiber bound.
From an amber dolphin fountain-made
Glistening pearls ascend the purple sky.
As dusk envelopes beauty
A crouching temple I approach.
Up wide mosaic steps I glide
Through oak portals to the heart.
Central stands an incense pyre
Whose every golden tongue is echoed
By shadows dancing on white marble.
From the labours of Hercules
Sculpted parapet on high
My eye descends a rainbow of design.
In a corner a heap of books,
Knowledge and experience:

"Expende Hannibalem: quot libras in duce summo invenies?"

Dear Diary: in the city,
Filth and degeneration,
Grey paper-strewn streets,
Dried-up fountains of concrete
"rubbish shit scratch dung poison".

Le monde, Le monde,
My paragon unchanged by time
Je t'aime beaucoup.

Carpe diem.

[23.01.12 and 03.02.12: In the light of recent sad events I have decided to rewrite parts of the above post. I have kept a copy of the original.]

building, kennington literary festival

As I walk between the Bodleian Latin American Centre Library and the Taylor Institution Library, I pass three University building sites--St Antony's, St Anne's and the one glimpsed in the photo (where the old Radcliffe Infirmary is being redeveloped--see post of 24th June--and work on the so-called Radcliffe Observatory Quarter is beginning--observatory is on the right). The city-centre end of the Woodstock Road is alive with lorries coming and going, cranes and piling rigs, not to mention mud and dust.

Alarm went off early this morning as there is a mountain of marking to do. Cycling woke me up, although the morning is distinctly grey. Warm, though. A surprise after yesterday, when we had our first log fire since, I think, May.

Looking forward to reading from Invisible at the Kennington Literary Festival next Saturday, which is previewed in this week's Oxford Times.

harvest festival, that paris year

Busy at the library, what with the start of the Oxford term coming up--0th Week from Sunday.

Thank goodness for those days away in Somerset.

Headed for the allotment at 7.30 am before the temperature rose--and this is the first day of October!

Did an hour's digging and some picking. Everything is slowing now, despite the weather. I'll probably take down the runner bean wigwams tomorrow (you can just glimpse their tops in the second-from-bottom photo and the base of one is shown in the photo above that--some lush self-set Swiss chard is growing amongst the runners). Then, next week, I'll grub up the courgette and squash plants before digging the area over, and that will be more or less that for the winter, apart from the occasional harvest of the few remaining crops--chard, carrots and beetroot. Though in store are potatoes, onions and shallots.

It's been difficult to find enough time to do the allotment justice but great fun when I have got up there.

Meanwhile, a publisher friend in the States has a new Kindle ebook out: That Paris Year by Joanna Biggar: UK, US, DE.

crystal lemon, three horseshoes, batcombe, wildcru

Instead of cycling this morning, I went up to the allotment to do some digging and tidying. Taking advantage of the dry weather. Came back with lots of spinach, much of it self-set, some courgettes, a patty-pan squash, a round yellow cucumber (Crystal Lemon), some runner beans and carrots. Well, that should probably read 'the' carrot. Not a good year for carrots on our allotment...

Got back yesterday from a short break in Somerset. We stayed at the Three Horseshoes in Batcombe, just south-west of Frome. A very relaxing place to be, with good food, four delicious farm ciders and beautiful surrounding countryside to walk in (photos above).

Meanwhile, I was sad to read in the Times about a report from Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCru), which suggests that red squirrels could be extinct within twenty years and that hedgehog and Scottish wildcat populations are falling rapidly (only 400 wildcats are left and hedgehog numbers have fallen from 30m plus in the 1950s to 'well under 1m now').

The decline of the hedgehogs is blamed on 'pesticides and the destruction of the hedgerows and rough land on which they depend. Dormice and harvest mice have also been hit.'

The Times also reports that the 'destruction of habitat is affecting not just animals but the rural economy too, because it creates a monotonous countryside devoid of wildlife that discourages the walkers, birdwatchers and other recreational users whose spending is key to rural prosperity.'

To underline the importance of recreational users to the rural economy, the Times article points to the profits from farming amounting to £4.4 billion, whereas rural tourism 'generates sums estimated at between £70 billion and £80 billion a year across Britain.'

The report should be available on WildCru's website but when I tried to access it the link was broken.

spuds, snow patrol, kasabian

Lifted spuds this morning (planted 9th April). Weather was better than forecast and sacks were dry, although the moment I'd dug the last root there was a light shower that soon turned heavy and was quickly followed by another and another.

Still, this afternoon the wind had dried the spuds and I was able to bag them up. A better yield than expected. The four varieties should keep us going until the late spring--as long as the mice don't get them.

Potatoes are quite cheap and there isn't much of a saving in growing one's own, if any, but the pleasure of heading to the garden shed in the depths of winter and bringing back stored spuds is great.

The four varieties--shown above--are Charlotte, Cara, Kestrel and Estima.

Meanwhile, didn't really go for One Direction but loved Snow Patrol's Called Out in the Dark and Kasabian's Days Are Forgotten.

bleak, toadflax, wales, yorkshire, stories

The landscape looked harsh and bleak when I set off cycling this morning, especially to the east, thick cloud dulling the rising sun.

A few miles in, though, the light picked up and I saw a patch of toadflax by Kencot. Toadflax has been plentiful this year. Cheerful flowers.

I'd intended to lift spuds on the allotment this morning but the potato sacks aren't dry yet after I washed them on Thursday. Not that I'll need that many sacks. I dug some Cara last weekend and while the potatoes themselves were great--firm textured and delicious--the yield was poor. The dry start to the summer didn't help. Still, the spuds should be OK in the ground for a couple weeks before the keel slugs start munching them.

When I got home from cycling I was sad to read about the deaths of the four miners in south Wales.

It's a hundred years since my ancestors left Tredegar in the Rhonda for a new life but my mum passed down the old stories about my grandfather when he was a boy and what it was like in the mining villages when she visited Great-Granny Thomas during the thirties. Those stories are part of me somehow, just like the ones my dad told me about growing up in Yorkshire.

I'm grateful for those stories. They are a part of the family culture that withstands life's upsets. A part of me will always be Welsh, will always be Yorkshire, however imaginary that might seem.

the lock on kindle

Today sees the republication of my first novel The Lock as a Kindle ebook from StreetBooks.

The ebook is available from amazon.co.uk, amazon.com and amazon.de.

That the novel should come out on Kindle seems appropriate given that it first appeared as an ebook back in 2001, two years before it was published in paperback. It went on to be shortlisted for the Independent e-Book Awards in Santa Barbara in 2002.

Regular readers of this blog might recognise the photo on which the Kindle cover is based, which appeared here in June.

The cover shows the last lock on the Oxford Canal before it comes to an abrupt halt at the city centre. The lock and bridge appear in the closing chapters of the novel when Gerald, an unfaithful Oxford don, is on his way to try and make things up with his younger daughter Alison, who lives on a narrowboat called Civil Liberty.

'He marched up, round, over and down the S of the beautiful wrought-iron bridge crossing the last lock.  From the top he could see the green roof and purple side of Civil Liberty.  As before there was a column of smoke rising from its stack.  The smoke went straight up then spread out horizontally as if it had reached an invisible ceiling.

'The mist was clearer around the canal – just a low bed of it above the channel – but the landscape, the glimpses of dead water, the frosted grass, the bare trees, looked bleaker and colder than by the grebe pool.  But Gerald could feel nothing of the cold anymore.'

To the left of the bridge on the cover, you can see the last section of the canal which follows the western boundary of Worcester College. It was on this part of the canal that a friend called Lizzie used to moor her barge and it was she who told me all about what it was like to live on a narrowboat when I was researching the novel.

swindon viewpoint

On a lighter note, I was excited to read a comment made recently on my post mentioning Swindon Viewpoint community TV. It turns out that there is a Swindon Viewpoint website, www.swindonviewpoint.com.

I was fascinated by the project's long history and was really pleased to learn that the project continued after the cable TV funding ran out in 1980.

Terrific!