Judith Johnson
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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #10 : GerryWolstenholme

30/11/2021

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​When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines.
 

Thanks to Gerry Wolstenholme for No 10 in the series. Blackpool-born, he  attended Baines Grammar School before moving to London. He was a career civil servant, and also ran a successful secondhand and antiquarian bookselling business for many years, with a speciality in 19th century English literature.
 
He has written a number of books, as well as contributing to a wide variety of magazines and also producing his own such as ‘The Cheltenham Spectator and Festival News’. In addition he commentated on cricket and football for various radio stations (in his younger days he was also an extremely keen amateur sportsman, playing football, cricket, squash, badminton and tennis.)  He writes: 

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​The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
 
I had read Dumas’ The Three Musketeers in an abridged edition as a youngster and enjoyed the swashbuckling and storytelling so much I wanted to read more of his works. For an early birthday of mine (perhaps my 9th), my Mum said that I could choose a book as an extra present. So I took her down to our local bookshop, Sweetens, and chose The Count of Monte Cristo. My Mum was slightly taken aback because many of the books I bought were two shillings and sixpence from Woolworths but this one was 12 shillings and sixpence; it was in the Collins Classics series in a blue pseudo leather binding and I can still vividly remember walking into the bookshop because it had a sloping floor going upwards towards where the classics were shelved. But true to her word my Mum bought it for me and the exciting and nail-biting storyline has stuck with me ever since. I loved Edmond Dantès who, about to marry his fiancée Mercédès, was falsely accused of treason and was imprisoned in the Château d'If, an island fortress off the coast of Marseille. It was a forbidding place and I grieved with Edmond at his wrongful arrest and subsequence imprisonment. 

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The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan
 
Perhaps unusually, The Thirty Nine Steps was a set book in my second year at Baines Grammar School. I wasn’t used to such a book being on the syllabus and it was a delight, for it was unlike, say, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey that we had previously read. From the very moment when Richard Hannay encounters Scudder, to his daring escape from his London flat, through his wanderings in the Scottish border country, which Buchan knew so well, to the exciting ending, the book was spell binding. It was so much so that when it came to that year’s English Literature examinations, I was so enthralled with the book that in answer to the question on it I very nearly rewrote it – in synopsis of course. Satisfied with my effort I put my pen down close to the end of the specified time of the examination only to notice the instructions on the examination paper, ‘Answer three questions’! I had to very hastily attempt to get some thoughts down on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum. You can imagine the shortness of the hurried answers to those two! And Buchan’s novel also has another happy memory for me. When I was dating my future wife, Linda, we sat in the sun one afternoon and I read ​her the complete Thirty Nine Steps. How’s that for romancing a young lady?! I should just add an amusing story about this title. At a cricket match a couple of years ago a good friend of mine had been to London and he remarked that he had been to theatre. In answer to a question as to what he had seen, he replied, ‘A comedy’. I asked what it was and he replied, to my utter astonishment, ‘The Thirty Nine Steps’. I am afraid I laughed out loud and asked him what he thought he had been watching because that title was, arguably one of the first and finest of spy novels. I must admit I went out and bought him a copy that I presented to him with the words, ‘Please have a read of that and have a laugh!’

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Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
 
I have managed to find an illustration to accompany this choice of the edition that I purchased many, many years ago when I first encountered the book. Woolworths had a book section and their books were in a generic series that sold for less than the recognised publisher’s editions. This one, if I remember rightly, was in the Regency Classics series and it cost two shillings and sixpence, a price I could run to when saving my spending money. The attraction at the time was the pirate, on the front cover plus the frontispiece of the book that was a map of the island where treasure was hidden. It was a swashbuckling tale from the beginning when Jim Hawkins and his mother have Billy Bones as a mysterious visitor to their inn The Admiral Benbow. The book was such a favourite that I now have a variety of editions, retellings and sequels and I have read the original a number of times and it still gives me the thrill that it did all those years ago. I should add that it also made me fall in love with RLS and my first published writing many years ago was an appreciation of the great man, who underwent such hardship to produce his works.

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The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens
 
I was aware of the name Charles Dickens from a young age because my Mum and Dad had some shelves of books and amongst my Mum’s Forever Amber and Gone with the Wind (which I read at the time) and my Dad’s novels by Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase plus his speeches of Churchill and I Sank the Royal Oak by Günther Prien was Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. I used to take it from the shelf just to look at the quirky illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne (using the ​name Phiz), so when I began my secondhand and antiquarian bookselling career I used to buy Dickens books all the time. And when I first had a copy of Pickwick in stock I decided to begin reading it. I started one Saturday morning and was quickly transported to the world of Pickwick and his followers but early in the book I discovered that there was a page missing. I was living in Chiswick at the time so I immediately walked down to WH Smith on Chiswick High Road, found a new copy on the shelves, surreptitiously read the missing paragraphs, returned home and carried on reading! Pickwick was not the initial success that it became when it was first published in monthly parts but once Sam Weller appeared in the story, it took off enormously. And that was not surprising for after Pickwick, Sam is, arguably, the most memorable character. I know the four members of the club who travelled around England are Messrs Tracy Tupman, Nathaniel Snodgrass and Augustus Winkle but Alfred Jingle also presents a fascinating portrait while the misunderstanding between Pickwick and Mrs Bardell results in one of the most famous fictional court cases of all time; both of them were incarcerated in the Fleet Prison (as was Dickens’ father in real life) for debt. There is also the memorable cricket match, Dingley Dell versus All-Muggleton to read about, all of which made it a book that has remained with me for all time. Indeed I studied the writing of Pickwick in some detail and have since amassed a large collection of Dickensiana and have even written various pieces on Dickens myself.

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The Tower of London by William Harrison Ainsworth
 
I should pay tribute to my late wife Linda for introducing me to William Harrison Ainsworth for, despite him being from my native Lancashire, I did not know the name when I was a young bookseller. Fortunately on one of my buying trips to Charing Cross Road, and with Linda, my then girlfriend, accompanying me, we were looking at Jackson’s stock and he always had a rack of books outside at two shillings and sixpence. Linda spotted this book entitled The Tower of London and being a Londoner she took a fancy to it so we bought it in the leather bound version of the Everyman’s Library. I took little notice, other than pay for it with my other purchases, but after Linda had read it she suggested that I would enjoy it as an historical read. I took her advice, did so and thoroughly enjoyed it so much that I investigated who this Harrison Ainsworth was and that was when I discovered he was a Manchester man. This started me on a quest for his works, some of which, Old St Paul’s, Guy Fawkes, and Jack Shepherd, for instance, were relatively easy to find, particularly when we were living in London with all the outlets to go searching in. But others were difficult to come by so I made it a point to begin looking for them, even writing the titles of missing volumes in a ‘books wanted’ notebook that I still have, but don’t use, today. Anyway back to The Tower of London, which covers Lady Jane Grey’s short-lived reign through to her execution. Ainsworth wrote it while also writing Guy Fawkes for serial publication and at the same time planning the setting up his own magazine, Ainsworth’s Magazine. I was not particularly an historian when I was at school but the reading of this book started me on the trail of British history that continues to this day. I should add that, having sold Ainsworth collections in the  past, I now have a small collection of his works, including some more uncommon titles, and have also written a couple of articles on him.

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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #9 - Gareth Writer-Davies

8/2/2021

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​When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines.
 
Thanks to Gareth Writer-Davies*, a poet from Brecon, Wales, for No 9 in the series.

​He writes:

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​John Betjeman's Collected Poems

​We were not a bookish household, and especially not poetry, but my father got me this book after he read an article about Betjeman in the newspaper. His style didn’t do a lot for me though like Larkin I came to appreciate it, but his subject matter was all around me, from tennis clubs to the keeping of social face to the Underground trains that jolted along the tracks through leafy suburbia and were the reason we and our neighbours were here. He’s very good on death and lust (he never really came to terms with either) but can be trite in other poems; a “Collected” can be exposing, I don’t know why poets agree to them, a “Selected” is so much safer!

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The novels that have stuck with me come from my teenage years; I guess longevity in the mind is as good a test of worth as any. This is such and comes with the advantage of being one of Dickens’ shorter novels (it took me fifteen years to finish Martin Chuzzlewit ...). For me, Pip remains the unquestioning eternal child, really quite out of his depth and at the disposal of others even when good fortune comes his way. Miss Haversham is a wonderful creation and the story arc of the convict has conviction. The marshes, the graveyard, the crumbling wedding cake, have all stayed with me; no wonder it is a popular adaptation for film, television and the stage. I would recommend the novel Jack Maggs by the Australian author Peter Carey; a wonderful re-reading of the Magwitch character.  


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The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

This was my introduction to Hardy and his grinding wheel of fate; goodness me, that wheel was in every book and never tired of turning…..I bought The Hand of Ethelberta, his only comedy, and even in that fate was the implacable foe never to be defeated. However, I read this at an impressionable age, and in a relatively short novel (this seems to be a recurring theme based on my concentration span) I was knocked out by the story of remorse and redemption and ill founded pride and Henchard’s wish to be obliterated and forgotten. That summer I took a bicycle trip around “Wessex” staying in many of the places he renamed as locations including Dorchester and Corfe Castle, and this cemented the story in my head for ever. There was a TV adaptation at the time starring Alan Bates as the eponymous character, and so convinced was I by his performance that it was a surprise to me a couple of years later to overhear him talking to his agent in a restaurant and find that he was quite the effete thespian and not a gruff son of the Dorset soil! That was my introduction to the art of disguise and bloody actors….  

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The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I was in a bookshop where I grew up and idly fluffing through the shelves when I stopped at this book. I started reading the back cover when the local rabbi spoke from behind me: “Read it, you’ll never forget it”. So I bought it, read it and have never forgotten it. Led me onto many other Steinbeck books and was probably my first taste of an American author, but none of his books  topped this for ambition and story telling and a voice of righteous indignation; nowadays, he would probably be considered very left wing in the USA. He won the Nobel Prize, though I’m not sure he deserved it and you could equally argue that, say The Great Gatsby, was the great American novel. But The Grapes of Wrath has had a huge effect throughout the world (certainly the post war years) on social policy and government action and on the minds of readers. “Once read, never forgotten” is a pretty good blurb to put on a book!      


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Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop

Bishop is a touchstone for me. Whenever I am struggling to make sense of the flow of a line, when I have screwed up a verse with a loud clunk, I open this collection and my way forward becomes clear. She wasn’t one for confessing, indeed went out of her way to hide herself, so many of the poems are seemingly observational (The Moose and The Waiting Room) whilst staying in the first person. One Art is probably the most famous poem here, a tight villanelle, and there are many other joys. but it’s her invisible techniques that keep bringing me back when I’ve had enough of Hughes and Larkin.
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*Gareth Writer- Davies

Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2014 and 2017)

Commended in the Prole Laureate Competition (2015) and Prole Laureate for 2017
Co
mmended in the Welsh Poetry Competition (2015) and Highly Commended in 2017
Hawthornden Fellow (2019).
 
Publications: 
"Bodies" (2015)  "Cry Baby" (2017) via Indigo Dreams

https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/gareth-writer-davies/4587920255
https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/gwdcrybaby/4594091370
 
"The Lover's Pinch" (2018) The End (2019)  Via Arenig Press
 
https://www.arenig.co.uk/product/the-lovers-pinch/
https://www.arenig.co.uk/product/the-end-gareth-writer-davies/
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Unidentified Growing Object!

28/6/2020

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One of our lockdown activities over the last few months has been lifting turf to make three 6 foot wide borders, a long-held ambition -  one for vegetables, and two herbaceous.We visited the nearby Walled Garden Treberfydd Nursery last year soon after we moved to Brecon and, having much admired the borders there, were able, in mid-May this year, to have a selection of lovely healthy hardy perennials delivered. Having planted out one modest border, we had some left over to plant the remainder in our second flower border, some 78 foot long! 

We’re happy to let the borders mature over the next few years, dividing perennials once big enough, and adding in the odd acquisition from time to time. In the meantime, for an enjoyable display for this season, we bought some great value shake and rake seed boxes from ALDI - at £1.49 a pop. The Season Long Flower and Cottage Garden mixtures between them contained 30,000 seeds, in over 35 varieties, all the old favourites like cornflowers, calendula, nigella etc plus things we’d never heard of before, like Hare’s Ear, Nodding Catchfly and Siberian Wallfower.

Every morning we take a look at the borders, and it’s a huge pleasure to see what’s popping up, unfurling, and, this last week or so, starting to flower.  The packet does say that varieties may differ from the front image and can be replaced due to crop and seasonal circumstances, and among the plants not mentioned there which have appeared are coriander and fennel, both very welcome.

One seedling however, featuring two semicircles with a flat edge, was very unfamiliar. We were fascinated to see about six examples in the border, and watched to see what would unfold. After a couple of weeks, alarming thoughts came to mind. The seedling was beginning to look distinctly like it might be that most feared garden escape of all - the dreaded Japanese knotweed! 

Action stations!

We went through all the plants named on the packet and looked at images of each one on the internet to see if we could identify it.

We looked at blogs, images, you-tubes etc of knotweed - and googled for images of seedlings with similar characteristics.

We went painstakingly through our gardening and botanical reference books.

We still weren’t sure whether this was the culprit, but in the meantime the anxiety was growing faster than the plant: if it was JK, it would very likely take drastic measures to eradicate it, and what’s more it might even have a sizeable effect on the value of our property.

Hell, what to do? We couldn’t ask the neighbours.

I belong to a Facebook gardening group and asked what the best plant identifying app was (I’m fairly app-averse so have very few on my phone). 

“Why not post a picture on here?” several people suggested, “With over 600 members, someone will know any plant, no need for an app.”

Yeah, but they might report us to the Knotweed Police!!!

We were losing sleep by now. Time to grasp the nettle and download an app.

I snapped one of our merrily burgeoning offenders and uploaded it. 

We could have sobbed on each other’s shoulders...

It’s bloody buckwheat! 

No ambiguity about it! Buckwheat without a shadow of a doubt! Thank you, modern technology!

Ironically enough, had we leafed through our trusty Organic Gardening Catalogue, we would have found easily identifiable photographs of it in the Green Manure Section ...

Anyway, panic over, it’s growing nicely in the border. We like buckwheat.
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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #8 - Gail Sequeira

14/6/2020

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When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines. Thanks to Gail Sequeira for No 8 in the series. She writes:

I was born in Bombay and grew up primarily in Bombay and Delhi. Both cities have had a profound impact on my life, my reading and my cooking. My first menu for the Comfort Kitchen, the small scale cantina which I opened recently with my husband Kevin in Brecon, Wales,  was inspired by both cities: kababs and rajma from Delhi, and to finish off,  a delicate sweet coconut dessert inspired by tender coconut ice cream made famous by Natural's of Bombay.


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​The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This book is no easy read in a sense, even though it flows like water running downhill. The subject matter is very personal for me, being an Indian woman, and it ripped my carefully sheltered life apart at the seams. This is the moment in my own history I began to question the status quo.


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​The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
 
This one is a beautiful tapestry of intertwining lives. It’s hard to describe, the main characters are so very diverse! There’s an illegal immigrant in America, the remainder of old colonials in the Himalayas. A fascinating and heart wrenching read.

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Five Point Someone by Chetan Bharat
 
This is a coming of age story set in one of the most prestigious campuses in India. It’s nostalgic and sweet and it captures Indian childhood and young adulthood in a way that hasn’t been done before.

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Bombay Rains Bombay Girls by Anirban Bose
 
There is no city in the world like Bombay! This one tells the story of a small town boy who moved to Bombay for medical school. It’s like opening a window into an aspect of Bombay life the rest of the world doesn’t get to experience and a very nostalgic read for someone who grew up there.

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Those Pricey Thakur Girls by Anuja Chauhan
 
This is the first of three books about the five Thakur sisters, growing up in a lovely old neighbourhood in Delhi. The word ’pricey’ is slang for high maintenance. And besides a strong storyline, this book speaks in the language of the people and of the times. It captures the change in Indian society as the economy opened up. It’s just a beautiful read.

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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #7 - Owen Williams

8/6/2020

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PicturePhoto by Hilary Williams
When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines. Thanks to Owen Williams for No 7 in the series:  

Owen grew up as an only child in Talbot Green (Llantrisant ) where his father worked as an  electrician. The family background was in farming in the Vale of Glamorgan. He studied Creative Design at Loughborough University, specialising in Furniture Design, and after a  post graduate diploma in Technology (now an MA/MSc) at Swansea Met, he taught Design and Technology. He also worked professionally in theatre lighting, and for many years has also provided both lighting, and a huge variety of props, to local amateur theatre and dance companies in and around Brecon.

Owen's interests also include motorcycling, amateur radio (he holds an advanced licence) and poetry, and he has recently been included in Onward/Ymlaen, an anthology of radical poetry from contemporary Wales. 


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​The Boy Electrician by Armac


This is the first book I ever bought and about the only book I read for pleasure when at secondary school (having dyslexia didn't help).

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Dylan Thomas: ​The Poems

This is the first book I bought when I arrived in Brecon. I fell in love with Thomas's writing after helping my dad stage-light a production of Under Milk Wood for a community project in the village of Gilfach Goch.

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​Reminiscences of Motorcycling
by 'Ixion'


I bought my first motorcycle at the age of sixteen and have loved them ever since. I studied engineering history for A level so was naturally interested in the history of motorcycle development. This book is about riding very early machines around the turn of the last century. Ixion (Canon Basil H Davies) was a motorcycling vicar and author. He started riding motorcycles in 1898 and wrote for The Motor Cycle magazine from 1903 to his death in 1961. This book was originally published in 1920. Interesting stuff for a geek!

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T S Eliot's Four Quartets


I'm not sure how I discovered Eliot but I do love the Quartets. I do have them published all together in a book however they were published first in pamphlet form in the early 1940s. My copies are early, though not first editions. Love the deckled edge paper.

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Kilvert’s Diary
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A glimpse into a forgotten Victorian world around Hay-on-Wye.

​Great fun to visit the locations of his entries. A world without cars, so lots of walking.


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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #6 - J E L Lehnsherr

3/6/2020

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When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I just love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines. Here is No 6, with thanks to Jack Endeavour Leto Lehnsherr, who writes:
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​​I'm a 22 year old aspiring author, published poet, bokar and future mad scientist, on the spectrum of neurodiversity. As the child of a Scot and a Hungarian immigrant in Germany, I spent most of my life moving around .Just like my ancestors, a restless traveller with an endless hunger for knowledge and stories. Libraries, especially the one in Brecon, have ever since I was a child been the only place to rest and to call home. Just another kid in love with Keats, Housman and Morse.

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The Road to Grantchester by James Runcie 

If it weren't for a story on AO3 called Heart's at Peace (Grantchester TV), I would never have known of this book, let aside have contributed four more stories on said page.

Robert Kendall, no offence to Morse, had captured my heart with his wit within a tick.

The book isn't about him though.

​It's about young Sidney Chambers'  journey to become the brilliant, cheeky vicar and part time detective he's known and loved for in the Grantchester mysteries. They are alright too, just not as marvellous as Road to Grantchester.


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The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter
(The Inspector Morse mysteries #13)

It's one of those slow Thursday afternoons in 2019; it's raining cats and dogs as I wait for my friend Alex in the shadow of the library. She has just returned from London with this treasure in her bag. Judging from the preserves poppy and bus ticket it must have been May.

It is the last case for my beloved Inspector Morse, the last hurrah in a long life as a terrific detective. Why choose this book knowing the ending from afar? Cause it's so light... Like Lewis' kiss in Chapter 77. It is not one of your average quick solved murder cases, in fact a rather haunting tale, filled with lots of obstacles, that lingers on.

My favourite chapter (73) begins with a quote from Keats. The last time we get to experience everything we love about Morse before his light fades.Morse resonates to me on a deeper level. Two souls alike divided by ink and paper. In the aftermath of finishing this book I wrote a requiem poem on the steps of the Bodleian library. "A remorseful day" appeared  about two months after that rainy Thursday afternoon in the Brecon Beacons.


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Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian
(The Aubrey-Maturin saga #2) 

Nothing beats a good cup of tea and an Age of Sail story on a rainy afternoon. The Aubrey Maturin books have just the right amount of wit, action, in combination of history. 

Lucky Jack Aubrey , my name patron, isn't yet the Captain of his beloved HMS Surprise but just a mere Commander. Alongside his companion, the faithful Irish-Catalan Doctor Stephen Maturin, Jack spends the brief period of the Peace of Amiens (1802-1803) in the countryside, hunting and courting. My favourite quote: "Anyone would think you were married to that man", captures their unique bond perfectly. Hornblower's Indefatigable makes a cameo appearance too.

Unlike the rest of the series, they spend a lot of their time on shore. Here we get to see a different Jack Aubrey. Courageous in battle, embracing every storm like it's a soft breeze, but here he is oh so awkward on shore. The follow up book HMS Surprise has its prime moments too, with a drunk sloth, so I highly recommend reading this one after.


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Good Omens
by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett 

An angel and a demon, knowing each other for the better half of some centuries, have to save the world only to realise they are each other's world. Armageddon was trying to happen (or well, trying to be prevented) at the wrong place with the wrong anti-Christ as the result of a lot of funny misunderstandings.

When Tilly, one of those magic ethereal beings called librarians, introduced me to the wonderfulness that is Good Omens and handed me their copy, I would never have guessed that I would end up travelling one day as Aziraphale across countries to conventions.


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Interview with the Vampire
by Anne Rice 

"I'm going to give you a chance I never had..."

When Lestat spoke those words for the first time, I was 10 and had sneaked into the living room past my bed time where my siblings were watching the movie. Several days later I held the copy of the book in my hands and was dragged into the world of the glorious Lestat de Lioncourt and his melancholy companion Louis.

Claudia was my favourite character back then. She had lost her mother to the plague, which was wiping out whole families in New Orleans at that time, and got turned into a vampire by Lestat as a gift for Louis.
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The New Orleans chapter with Lestat and Louis being fathers to their own love child is still my favourite part of the novel, although Claudia isn't my favourite character anymore. Loss and years of experience changes people and I guess that's why nowadays I prefer Louis. The book isn't everyone's cup of tea. Yet whoever is into real, not sparkling, vampires might actually enjoy this piece of Eden.


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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #5 - Helen Smith

21/5/2020

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When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I just love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines. Here is the fifth, with thanks to Helen Smith, who writes:
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​I grew up on the border between England and Wales, then went to study Zoology at Cambridge University, followed by Psychology at St Andrews. I am now a hypnotherapist and mindful movement/dance teacher, and part-time poet and crafter. I love and am greatly influenced by the natural world, myths and legends, and the complex connection between people, our bodies, and nature. Having recently started attempting to write my own novel, I have a renewed respect for those authors whose books I have read and enjoyed! I have so many favourite books it was a real challenge to get it down to just five, but here they are…

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​Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver

This is one of those books that is equally enchanting for adults as it is for children. I love how Michelle Paver has captured the essence of what it might be like to live in the forests of our hunter-gatherer past, where humans lived in more spiritual connection with the natural world. She has employed extensive and thorough research, making Torak and Wolf’s world come alive as they search for the Mountain of the World Spirit on a quest to slay the demon bear. The first in a book series I come back to time and time again.


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​If Women Rose Rooted
by Sharon Blackie

​I remember when I first read this thinking that a copy should be given to every girl at school (then revising this to include boys too). It explores the connection between women and the land, and the journey to finding a sense of belonging in the modern corporate ‘wasteland’, gaining inspiration from Celtic myths as well as contemporary women who have found ways of living more rooted lives. It has been described as a Celtic ‘Women who Run with the Wolves’, though in my opinion it is much better, easier to read, and more relevant to life in the UK.

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The Mabinogion translation by Sioned Davies

This book is a collection of truly wonderful and magical stories from ancient Wales, which take place both in this world and the Celtic Otherworld. I have a particular love of the 4th branch, the story of Lleu and Blodeuwedd: I have studied it thoroughly, through multiple layers of meaning, and it has made a huge impression on my life. I also highly recommend Damh the Bard’s musical interpretations (find them here: www.paganmusic.co.uk).


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A Brief History of Nakedness
by Philip Carr-Gomm

​This book takes the reader on a journey that spans from ancient religious sadhus all the way to contemporary pagans, advertisers and protesters, exploring and tracing humans’ sometimes bizarre, sometimes touching, and often complex, relationships with our naked bodies. I found it both entertaining and enlightening - not only informative and thought-provoking, but also a thoroughly enjoyable read.


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Instrumental by James Rhodes

This is not an easy book to read, but one I bought a second copy of - to lend out to others so they could read it too. Both an autobiography and a love letter to music, the book tells of how music was a lifeline to Rhodes as he faced a childhood full of unspeakable trauma, and how, against all the odds, he pursued his passion to become a renowned concert pianist. A remarkable man. Hear him play here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ82pECqiUg.


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Who Owns Britain?

11/5/2020

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I first came across mention of Kevin Cahill's book Who Owns Britain when I was reading George Monbiot's Feral, and I made a mental note then to read it sometime. It was published by Canongate in 2001 and is now out of print. I didn't have the funds to shell out for the cheapest second-hand copy advertised on Amazon, but fortunately Kent Libraries had a copy. It duly arrived, obviously much-handled, and much annotated in the margins. When, after three weeks, I went online to extend my borrowing period, I was informed I couldn't do so as another reader was waiting for it. Luckily I'm a fast reader, so I mashed my way through the last third of the book in a few fevered reading sessions!

Fascinating that Kevin Cahill’s review of our country’s land ownership is so hard to track down; much of its subject matter was dealt with previously by The Return of Owners of Land, published in 1872, and which has been pretty comprehensively erased from public knowledge for the last century or so. In 1876 every citizen of Great Britain could go to his or her local county hall, parish office or library and find the names and addresses of the owners of 95% of the land area of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales - but in the last 125 years access to information about the ownership of land has receded rather than advanced.The land-owning records, once available in every parish, were abolished.

I'm known at Johnson Towers for ploughing my way through weighty tomes (the school librarian in one of my former workplaces once remarked that I was the only person who had checked out Iona & Peter Opie's The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren in all her years there!), and this one was very densely textual, but serious readers will, I hope, be grateful for the facts which Kevin Cahill has assembled in order to reveal some home truths about our 'sceptred isle'.

I own I have not fully digested every fact this book presents, but I was deeply impressed by its main message, which is that large amounts of the land in Britain are not properly registered. At the time of publication, more than 30% and maybe as much as half of the actual acreage of England and Wales was not recorded in the Land Registry for those two countries. This impacts on the availability and, crucially, the cost of, land for development.

This review would become an enormous essay if I were to lay out all of the book’s salient points, so here are a few nuggets to whet your appetite:

1. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he freed up around 10 million acres of England alone to distribute to his followers - a group of about 1500 families. The incomes from the old church lands put huge wealth at the barons' disposal.

2. The industrial revolution was paralleled by the enclosures, the legal device used to include common land into landed estates, thus excluding the peasantry who had lived off the common land, and increasing the labour supply to the factories. It is a truism of conventional British history that the landowners were the dominant force in British politics right up to World War Two... what the history of landownership in Britain proves, and modern political economics demonstrates, is the inseparable bond between land and power.

3. Since the late 19th century, all formal tax on land has been abolished, and the specific taxes which have been substituted have placed the larger burden of taxes on the smallest landowners, domestic homeowners, while removing it altogether on the largest landowners. In addition, the larger landowners, (189,000 people own 88% of the land) are in receipt of subsidy to the tune of £4 billion annually. They pay no tax on that asset.

4. Those closest to and most likely to have real influence with the Queen are almost all hereditary aristocrats (the book gives details of the lands owned by these and the Royal Family) and landowners ... overwhelmingly connected to a very small group of banks ... the particular coalition which crowds the Palace, the Crown Estate and the two duchies (Lancaster and Cornwall), with its secret lobbyists and advocates, is the same group that stands to benefit the most from perpetuating the black hole at the heart of the land registry. These are people distinguished from the rest of the population by owning the vast bulk of the land on which the population at large depends for homes, and, to a lesser extent, food.

5. Since 1993, as part of the general and undisclosed settlement made between the Queen and the government in relation to tax, Prince Charles has paid normal tax rates, but his private company, The Duchy of Cornwall, pays no capital gains and no corporation tax.

6. The Duchy of Lancaster (created in 1351) is a very large landed estate, mostly based in the north of England with some land in London. The Queen, who is also Duke of Lancaster, receives the revenues from this estate tax free. It now runs to almost 47,220 land-based acres, but taken with its estuarial waters and riverbeds of 125,000 acres, it actually comprises close on 172,000 acres. To these can be added £66 million in Stock Exchange investments and £5 million in cash. The Duchy pays no tax on anything. The money it pays to the Queen, £5.7 million in the most recent account, is tax-free. If the Duchy had paid corporation tax and capital gains tax at the standard rate of 40% in 1997 that would have been at least £3 million to the Exchequer.

7. Professor Cannadine, in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, wrote of the late 19th century: 'the contemporary cult of the country house depicts the old land-owning classes as elegant, exquisite patrons of the arts, living lives of tasteful ease in beautiful surroundings. Of course, there is some truth in this. But as a representation of the totality of patrician existence, it misleads and distorts, by failing to recognise them for what they really were: a tough, tenacious and resourceful elite, who loved money, loved power and loved the good life'.
(And the British public love Downton Abbey..... talk about the opiate of the masses! Ed.)

8. Cahill goes into much detail of one of the Plantagenet families still very much in evidence : the Howards, and comments 'It is quite an achievement to have kept £2 billion in the family for almost 400 years'. In all, 20 Plantagenet descendants appear in the Sunday Times Rich List.

Incidentally, Kevin Cahill has now written Who Owns the World: The Hidden Facts Behind Landownership. I look forward to reading it.
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We'll All Be Ben Gunns Soon!

10/4/2020

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A side-effect of the current Covid-19 lockdown, and admittedly a very high-class problem, is our growing hair, and the likelihood of not getting to the hairdresser's any time soon! The only other similar situation that comes to mind is that of the residents of the village of Oberammergau in Passion Play* year, which, incidentally has, along with so many other events, been postponed.

I, along with one of my five brothers, and my son, were all blessed with the same unusually thick hair. I recall at Hastings College in the early 1970s, I spent a whole hour in the student common room merrily braiding my long hair in tiny plaits. The problem was that my sister-in-law, who I was emulating, had very fine hair, and used this method to plump hers up. When I undid mine in the changing room, I found I had something that verged on a giant Afro, and I crept home praying that no-one would see me.

My son has now resorted to buying a pair of clippers, and my daughter-in-law has done a good job. But I don't think I can risk it, as Cell Block H is not currently casting, and that's certainly the look I'd end up with. That or Magwitch on a bad day.

Two salutory tales:

When really quite small, I found a pair of interesting large scissors (wallpaper scissors I later discovered) in our laundry room (I also found a pack of Robin starch which I innocently fed to the birds, but that's another story). I thought it might be a good idea to cut my hair, as I truly loathed hairdresser visits. However, when I regarded my work in a mirror, it must have struck me that it didn't look too great, as I went and put on my swimming-cap and went out to play for the day. Tea-time came, and Mum stood me on the kitchen table for a strip-wash. When she asked me to take that silly hat off, I refused, at which point she removed it herself, and, viewing the results, gave me a good slap on the legs. The next day I was escorted to Dieter Henri's Salon up the Moor to have a corrective cut, no doubt with the habitual frown on my face!

A few years on, in the late sixties, my brother Jonny came down to the kitchen, where I and other members of the family were gathered, in his Vespa scooter crash-helmet. 

"Why are you wearing your crash-helmet, Jonny?"

"Erm, well, I've been cutting my hair with my new clippers."

"Yeah, so ...?"

"Well, erm, I've cut it a bit short..."

Chuckles from us, as he was a bit of a joker, and we thought this was one of his japes.

"No, really - if I take it off, you won't laugh, will you?"

"Course not," sympathetically.

"Promise?"

"Yeah, we won't laugh, honestly."

At which point my hapless brother removed his helmet to reveal a convict-like dome, resembling nothing so much as a newly-mown striped lawn. And this was in the days long before males in every walk of life went round with virtually shaven heads.

Poor Jonny. We fell about, screaming with mocking laughter.  And for some weeks afterwards, he was to be seen about the streets of Cranbrook sporting a woolly bobble-hat, until his hair grew back.

So be warned!

*​http://www.judithjohnson.co.uk/blog/the-passion-play-of-oberammergau






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Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

29/11/2019

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 I have resolved, since moving house with dozens of boxes of books, including an entire bookshelf’s worth to be read, not to buy any more second-hand books if I can help it, but to use public libraries, except for books for birthday and Christmas presents, which I’ll  purchase from independent bookshops. Libraries, in Austerity Britain, are under constant threat of closure . They are being forced to justify their existence, which includes tallying books taken out by library users. Since 2010, more than 478 libraries have closed in England, Wales and Scotland.*

There is a wonderful library in Brecon, staffed by exceptionally friendly, helpful librarians. It is currently in transit, having closed in November in order to make the move to a new site adjacent to the Brecon Museum.  Before they closed, they allowed users to take out a nice big pile of books to keep them going over the break, and one of my serendipitous finds was Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther by Elizabeth von Arnim.

I had never read this author, and assumed she was German, but actually she was a New Zealander, cousin to Katherine Mansfield, and her first marriage was to a Prussian aristocrat, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin.  This interested me, as my great-great aunt Lucy (pictured below with her two children), who was born in Kashmir, also married a Prussian - Count Radolin Radolinski, Chamberlain to the royal Prussian court; privy councillor; supreme steward to Kaiser Friedrich III and  imperial German ambassador. 



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In this really excellent epistolatory novel, von Arnim lays out Fraulein Schmidt’s thoughts and  a whole cast of beautifully-drawn characters so skilfully, using the device of a one-sided correspondence  ie Fraulein Schmidt’s letters to Mr Anstruther. It was published in 1907, seven years before the First World War must have put a temporary stop to young English gentlemen travelling to Germany to learn the language and culture.

I loved reading this, and  will definitely be recommending it not only to friends but also possibly laying in a copy for my baby granddaughters for some future reading. Yes, it’s that good!


*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/15/tories-libraries-social-mobility-conservative
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    Lifelong bookworm, love writing too. Have been a theatrical agent and reflexologist among other things, attitude to life summed up by Walt Whitman's MIRACLES.

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