The week before Christmas

Next weekend we will be in London for the Bears' Carol Evening (and associated visiting).

This falls early this year: a result of how the days of the week accommodate the season. This weekend is very early, but next weekend would be very late. So we will drive to London on Thursday, and I am not ready. I am even more not ready than usual.

durham_rambler is out at a Parish Council event: his second meeting of the day (and another one tomorrow, the one that had to be rescheduled not to clash with this evening's thing). Before he went out he printed out a list of the addresses we sent cards to last year; and I have sorted through the cards we received, and spread them all over the kitchen table. I have wrapped up a present ready to post when we have both signed the accompanying card (can it be possible that I now only post one present? or will there be an awful realisation later?).

No doubt there are all sorts of useful things I could be doing; and no doubt tomorrow I will regret not doing them. Right now, though, I am giving myself a break...

Elspeth Barker: O Caledonia!

This is a long overdue post in invisible conversation with a friend's locked posts about a book we had both been reading. They had come to it through a recommendation from someone on DW; I had picked it off a charity shelf, knowing nothing about it but intrigued by the title. They were enthusiastic about it, and inspired to creativity; I was ambivalent, but inspired to read out great chunk of it to anyone who would listen.

It's a novel, I suppose, an odd sort of novel, but a beautifully written one: hence both the ambivalence and the urge to quote, at length. Maybe it's the very beauty of the writing that holds me at arm's length: instead of being drawn in to the narrative, I'm standing back, admiring the narration. The opening, too, discourages emotional involvement. The book opens with the heroine lying dead at the foot of a stone staircase, in some lofty Scottish baronial hall, under a stained glass window whose top panel depicts a cockatoo, "oddly attired" in her mother's black lace evening dress... So far, so gothic, but other passages describing a realistic small-town upbringing in post-war Scotland are, Maggie O'Farrell's introduction assures me, autobiographical. I think of it as A Portrait of the Artist as a young Titus Groan.

So I didn't at any point feel sad that Janet was going to die: I read that opening passage as a bravura piece of description and a statement that what Barker wants to write about is childhood and adolescence (which makes even more sense if she is looking back on her own childhood and adolescence). Once Janet is poised to leave the nest, the book is over: as much metamorphosis as death. But on the way there, there are many wonderful things, a heap of disconnected jewels. And here is one of them:

Now that Janet and Francis were older, Grandpa would let them visit him in his study, where the parrot lived. Grandpa came from a long line of parrot-keeping men, and Polly's predecessor, a white cockatoo, had fought with Wellington's armies in the Napoleonic Wars. Janet's father's earliest memories were of the astonishing oaths known to this bird, who was then a hundred and two years old and spoke in ripe gamey accents long since gone from the world of men. Grandpa believed Scotland there must be a fair number of such long-lived birds in - even perhaps in England - and it would be a fine thing to have them all gathered in a great dining hall, invoking ghostly midshipmen and dragoons, violent drinkers and merry rhymesters, perhaps even occasionally an elderly lady of refinement. This, he said, would afford a historical experience of rare value; indeed, ancient parrots should be feted and cultivated as true archivists.