News from Nowhere

Today is cold and grey, and if we had any thoughts about going out, they have vanished.

Last Sunday, though, last Sunday was glorious, and we visited Crook Hall

The person who checked our passes boasted of the tree peony (a huge bloom, rather blotched and blowsy) and the Himalayan poppy (just the one, but they are very proud of it because apparently it is quite hard to get them to bloom). I was more impressed by a fine cluster of wild garlic (which has an apologetic sign in it: This garden in the process of remodelling - oh, well). Randomly, my favourite picture was of some lingering blossom:

There is a new sculpture of a toad, to replace the old wooden one, which was rotting, and has been put somewhere he can rot peacefully and productively; the new, metal toad is, inevitably, by Graeme Hopper. There is a moorhen on the pool. And there is a new second-hand bookshop, but I didn't buy anything (though I did photograph a copy of Pride and Prejudice for the previous post).

'Twas on a Wednesday morning
The electrician plumber came

We now have a fully flushing toilet in the upstairs bathroom. Just in time, because -

- we had a house guest for the end of the week:

Frances's three children, whose homes are scattered across the country, came to Durham to finalise her funeral arrangements, and make a start on clearing her house (in which they had lived as children). Their initial intention was for all three of them to stay at the house, but it would be a squeeze, especially since (and I find this rather sweet, both irrational and entirely understandable) no-one wanted to sleep in their mother's bed. So durham_rambler suggested to L. (middle 'child', with whom he maintains contact on - Bluesky, I think) that he should stay with us. Which worked very well: a practical, rather than a social, visit, but with some time for conversation, those peculiar conversations you have at these times with people who have known you not terribly well for all their lives...

Thursday evening, a civic event:

durham_rambler was invited, as a Parish Councillor, to the opening of 'Two Tales', a pop-up outpost of Seven Stories, the national centre for children's books in Newcastle. One of the many empty units in the shopping centre has been repurposed into a bookshop cum café cum events/ outreach venue: not the aspect of Seven Stories that most interests me, but surely a good thing nonetheless. The gathering was more civic than literary: no conversations about children's books, more (still) about the local elections. durham_rambler commiserated with one unsuccessful Labour candidate: "Sorry you weren't elected - " "I'm not!" was the reply, and I see his point. I almost left without buying a book (which would have been rude); we were already outside when I spotted in the window a supply of a book about illustrations in the Seven Stories collection, and had to go back in again.

Saturday was Eurovision!

But I have run out of time, so that'll have to wait...

After the count on Friday, since we were halfway to J's house, we took the roundabout route home, and called in for a cup of tea. And I'm glad we did, even though we then had a bit of a rush to make the Live to Your Living Room gig we had booked: luckily the start time was not the advertised 7.30 but 8 o' clock, and we used the extra half hour to inveigle our too-smart-by-half tv into showing us the live YuoTube stream.

Breathless, but worth it: a hybrid concert, with Nancy Kerr, James Fagan and Tim van Eyken, not a line-up I'd met before. It seems they used to play together twenty or so years ago, when they all lived on narrowboats, then other things happened - but now Tim van Eyken has moved to Sheffield, and they have relaunched the trio. This had a feeling of celebration about it, and I think was also an anniversary concert for the organiser (Live at Sam's), so it chimed well with our own celebratory mood: and lots of tunes, lots of songs, some old friends (Spirit of Free Enterprise is absolutely not celebratory, but always welcome!), some new to me - a setting of Locks and Bolts to the tune of Lads of Alnwick, dissolving into the familiar tune...

Nonetheless, durham_rambler wanted a small celebration to thank his team of supporters (leaflet distibutors and one brave canvasser). This was of necessity held at short notice (wait for the election result, but as soon as possible thereafter) and this is a Bnk Holiday weekend: so the party ended up being a very small one indeed. I don't know what it says about this household that we had enough fizzy wine already in the cellar even before one of those well-wishers turned up with a bottle before going away for the weekend; but we had to go shopping to top up the supply of wine glasses! We also did some intensive dusting and vacuuming and moving of boxes in the sitting room, which is now looking almost presentable. We had a grand total of two guests, which is in my opinion an excellent number for a party, because you get to talk to everyone in some depth. Conversation was, quite properly, about the election, and what it will mean for Durham, and techniques for pushing leaflet through letterboxes, and gossip about local figures - and then veered off in an unexpected direction when the guest I knew less well removed her jacket and revealed a Sandman t-shirt...

Today we went to the VE Day anniversary celebrations in the Market Place: regard this as durham_rambler resuming his civic duties rather than any desire to commemmorate VE Day. Actually, I'd be happy to celebrate VE Day, and suggested that we should make a 'War is Over' placard to do just that: but as I had feared, the historical re-enactors present did not seem to have heard that news; and the band - well, it was too loud for me to listen in comfort. There were fewer stalls than I had expected, too, but we went round the market, and chatted to people (including the Parish Clerk, so durham_rambler gets his brownie point for showing up) and I bought a book from the bookstall.

On our way back to the car park, we called in at the People's Bookshop, where there was a small selection of hardbacks by Neil Gaiman, and a note saying 'if you want to read Gaiman without him profiting from it, buy secondhand' - I wasn't sure how to take this, but I selected a collection that I don't already have. So I discovered that the assistant who had written that note was a big fan...

Three celebrations and two conversations about Neil Gaiman: how's that for a themed post?

J. gave me Judith Woolf's The Case of the Campus Cat for Christmas: J. doesn't read crime fiction, but Judith Woolf is a friend of hers... The publisher appears to be just a step or so away from self-publishing, but there was nothing amateurish about the presentation of the book: on the contrary, I was wary of a certain slickness, a sense of buttons being pressed. So the title - like the cover (I rather like the cat on the cover) - announces that this is a cat-related crime, itself a flourishing genre; the back cover presents the odd-couple detective team (she is a literary scholar, he is a ten year old maths prodigy, together they ...); and just to be on the safe side, she's a lesbian.

None of these elements is a bad thing, but I was relieved to discover that although they are all present in the book, that doesn't tell you much about what kind of book it is. And I'm not going to say much about that, either, because it would be mean to deprive readers of the pleasure of finding out. Two caveats, though. The first is that if you are, indeed, looking for a nice cosy mystery featuring a cat, you should be warned that the cat does not come out of this well. The second is that although I have described The Case of the Campus Cat as a murder mystery, the murder comes quite a long way into the book, and is solved only in a generic way. Most of the detective work, and most of the emotion, the suspense, concerns the abduction of a baby. This is disconcerting, and I don't think it's inadvertent: given that the person who spots the vital clue and finds the missing child is not any of the people who is actively investigating, surely Woolf is playing with the expectations of her readers? If you are looking for a classic mystery in which the Great Detective gathers the suspects in the library and explains his deductive process, look elsewhere. If. on the other hand, you want the unexpected, and would like to spend some time being both entertained and moved, then The Case of the Campus Cat is worth a try.

The murdered woman is an anthropologist, who has worked with the Kainu, a (presumably fictional) tribal people of South America. This is an important strand of the book, although not one that the publisher chooses to emphasise. So I will say only that, for a number of specific reasons, when I finished the book I picked up Peter Dickinson's Skin Deep / The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, in which the surviving members of a tribe from New Guinea are living in a terraced house in London - and detective Jimmy Pibble is called in to investigate the murder of their chief. I'm always glad of an excuse to re-read Peter Dickinson, and this was far from my first re-read of The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, so it's no surprise that I still like it just as much as I expected. More of a surprise, though, was that the parallel is even stronger than I thought: in addition to the importance of a tribal group with a traumatic event in their past, there's the rôle of a young boy who - oh, that would be telling. Not so much a parallel as an echo, perhaps, is the presence of an exclusive Christian group, Woolf's Sealed Brethren and Dickinson's Pure People.

Both books are recommended, then, but I'm surprised to find myself issuing so many content warnings (very much not my habit). The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest was published in 1968, and is told largely from the point of view of Jimmy Pibble, "ageing, unglamourous, greying towards retirement." I can discern no racial prejudice in his relations with the Ku, but the vocabulary in which he thinks of them was old-fashioned even by the standards of 1968 - and some of the minor characters are worse. They are presented as completely in the wrong, but if you are distressed by the very presence of the words, brace yourself.

I think I have mentioned that one of the quirks of the Elm Tree pub quiz is that we have a Book of the Moment: as a bonus for regular participants, the first question of the last round is always about whatever book we are working our way through at the time. If you read a chapter or so a week, and pay attention, you are pretty much guaranteed a correct answer.

As the end of the year approaches, so does the end of the current book, Swallows and Amazons. This was chosen by a vote from among titles suggested, and has not been an entirely popular choice. I'm not unhappy with it myself: the slow and careful reading doesn't do it any favours, but it's fun enough in its way. For whatever reason, though, the Quizmaster decided that he would take nominations, but would constitute himself an electoral college and his decision would be final.

He called for nominations for the next two Books of the Moment, the first to be more serious, the second lighter. To my surprise, I found it harder to think of a suitable suggestion for the serious option: I think of myself as, if anything, an excessively serious reader. Perhaps there were just too many candidates? At the last minute I proposed Susanna Clarke's Piranesi: I wasn't sure it would work, but it is such a good book.

And indeed, the Quizmaster told me later that he was very much enjoying reading it, but thought that the sort of questions he could have asked about it were just too detailed. I wasn't complaining, though, because he had already accepted my 'lighter' nomination, Frances Hardinge's Fly-by-Night. I am astonished, because I really didn't expect a children's fantasy to find favour; astonished, but delighted. The pleasure of a friend loving a book you have recommended to them, but dialled up to eleven.

I celebrated by reading Hardinge's The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, her second collaboration with illustrator Emily Gravett. The first one was good, but this one is just brilliant, and I would explain why at great length, but I have shopping to unpack and dinner to cook.

I was intrigued by sovay's post about this detective story, even before I registered what an apt coda it made to our recent adventures in Shropshire, Peters being, of course, a deeply Shropshire author. I had liked her Cadfael books well enough when I read them to have worked my way through most, if not all, of the series, but had never ventured into her other novels, and had no idea that she had set a murder mystery at a residential music college which is a hosting a week-end course on folk music.

"[A] residential music college" does not begin to describe Follymead. The opening of the novel is contrived to show it to the reader through the eyes of the astonished Liri. Two major aspects of the book each reveal the other, the singer and her reaction to the extraordinary location: the disproportionate grandeur of the gates, the full set of eighteenth century follies, the Grecian temple, the hermitage, the ruined tower ("No pagoda?" complains Liri, as the car rounds a corner and yes, there is the pagoda), the decoratively arched bridge over a river gleaming innocently like Chekhov's gun, the one element of genuine wildness in this artificial landscape... And then the house itself, a riot of towers and turrets and steeples and vanes - I enjoyed all of this enormously, and half-expected Michael Innes's Appleby to turn up. I cannot quite believe in it as a music college, especially a college in the ownership of the County Council. Peters offers some justification for this - the last of the family, for want of an heir, left it to the county with a handsome endowment fund, it operates under the aegis of a university - and plays up, too, quite how precarious it all is (the threat to Follymead is as urgent a concern of the narrative as any other) but even so... Ellis Peters was, says Carol Westron in an illuminating essay, passionate about education, "very active in the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) and helped to establish the Shropshire Adult Education College at Attringham Park. She also played a great part in setting up an Adult Education music college." In Follymead she gives free rein to a fantasy of a music college valued locally (Detective George Felse and his wife consider attending a forthcoming course on Mozart) and nationally.

If the book alloed the author to indulge in creating a fantasy music college, is the depiction of a folk music weekend similarly self-indulgent? She knows her ballads, and uses one of them for the scaffolding of her plot. (sovay recognised it ewven before the bog reveal, and identifies it as the version sung by Ewan MacColl: I defer to her expertise, and had to refer to the estimable Mainly Norfolk which offers achoice of variants.) But a passion for music and an eye for the potential of a balled do not add up to a love of folk music: maybe Liri is speaking for her author when she refuses the description "folk singer" as being ill-defined. "I'm not even sure I know exactly what a folk-singer is... About a ballad singer you can't be in much doubt, it's somebody who sings ballads. That's what I do ..."

How fortunate, then, that the story is set at a week-end course at which Professor Penrose will help us to examine the nature of folk music, with the promise of much debate, his record collection and some star live performances. I don't suppose Ellis Peters expected her background colour to be appealing enough that I am (at least) halfway to regretting that pesky murder investigation for getting in the way of some interesting music and talk, but there you go, that's what happened. ( The best I can do is to put it under a cut. At inordinate length, then: who's who, and who sings what? )

[Emerges, blinking, from the rabbit hole.]

sovay characterises as misdirection the use of a song - does it qualify as a balled? - to provide the nove's title. Indeed, and not just because Liri's vengeful rewrite invites the reader to anticpate an entirely different narrative to the one which eventually unfolds. It directs the reader's attention to the most obviously romantic pairing in the book, Liri and Lucien, the musical power couple between whom something has gone badly awry: contrast them with the rational observers, Tossa (short for Theodosia) and Dominic (Felse, son of the series detective, which is convenient), treading carefully through their a newly established relationship, and reflect that young couples tend to emerge well from the Cadfael books (this is from memory, but I'm pretty certain of it). Perhaps, then, the black-hearted true love is to be found in the third couple, the one introduced before the others, on the very first page ("only ine woman really existed in his life, and that was his wife.") There's a whole other post which grows from that reading, and considers the novel as it was surely intended to be considered, as a detective story. There's the character of the detrective to be considered, and whether he is a plausible policeman (to be set alongside the question of whether Cadfael is a plausible monk).

There's also a footnote about Ellis Peters' relationship with Czechoslovakia. But somebody stop me, before I launch into either of those...

When I was putting together this trip, my starting point was something I had seen about the Roman fortifications along the Cumbrian coast, which could be considered a continuation of Hadrian's Wall. It seemed ridiculous that we had spent so much time, one way and another, on Hadrian's Wall, but knew nothing about this "extension". The choice of Ravenglass was a bit more arbitrary. The name is irresistible, obviously. It has a Roman bath house; and I had been reading Martin Edwards' The Dungeon House, which is set here. Then, when I had made a booking, durham_rambler did some research of his own, and announced that it also has a steam railway. Suddenly, he was excited about this holiday, too, which has to be a good thing.

The Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway is a miniature steam railway which runs up the Esk valley from Ravenglass on the coast to Dalegarth, stopping just short of the village of Boot at the foot of Scafell. Or vice versa, because originally it was a mineral line, bringing rock and iron ore down from the quarry at the top. This morning we took a half-hour ride up the line, travelling first class (which means we had soft seats in a closed carriage) and got not the next but the next-but-one train back, which meant we had time at the top, at the catchily named Dalegarth for Boot, for a sandwich lunch and a look around the gift shop before we returned.

Here is our (outbound) driver, steering the engine (Northern Rock - there's a name from the past!) into the turning circle:



It's a pretty ride, with views of the river (running very high), and more of those decorative sheep (they must be Herdwicks, surely?), and primroses, and the very first bluebells. Back at Ravenglass, we dipped into the railway museum, and admired the engines with their polished brass and their glowing paintwork.

And then we considered the short walk to the Roman bath house. After all, it wasn't raining - not quite, not yet. That couldn't last, could it? Anyway, what I really wanted to do was come back to the hotel and make a cup of tea (or, in durham_rambler's case, go to the bar for a beer). And we're on holiday, so that's what we did.

I've been thinking about plans for a spring trip to Galloway, and about things I wanted to post about our visit there last summer. But this is not that post, because I was distracted, while sorting through some photos, by this glimpse of the house we rented in Pittenweem earlier that summer:



You could call it "Self-portrait with bears," and certainly it was the bears that caught my eye to begih with. You find all sorts of things in holiday cottages, and a soft toy or two isn't really surprising, but this abundance - bears and oels and hedgehogs, oh, my! - was exceptional. Then I noticed that one of the bears (the one waering purple satin) had fangs ...

But the real joy is the books. Not the Merriam-Webster, though you never know when you might need a thesaurus. I can't remember what the Alan Garner was, but the top two books in that pile are Joan Aiken's Night Birds on Nantucket and Diana Wynne Jones' Wilkins' Tooth. That's a well-furnished room.

On Friday we attended our first funeral of the year: someone who was more than a neighbour, however long-standing, but not quite a friend. Long ago, we met him and his wife at the Sunday lunch / buffet / wine tastings conducted by our favourite restaurant (gone but not forgotten); more recently, he was the treasurer of our residents' association. We knew just enough of his life beyond this to know that when there was conflict between the schedules of the residents' group and the choir, his was one of the voices we could hear making music in the hall above our meeting room. So I wasn't surprised that the choir played a part in the funeral: but I had not known, for example, about the passion for trains...

On the way to the Farmers' Market in Sedgefield this morning, I saw the year's first rainbow: just a fuzzy stub of colour in a grey and drizzly sky, but welcome nonetheless.

First Farmers' Market of the year, too, and it too was just a promise of things to come - maybe hald the usual stalls, no baker (there are usually several), no cheesemaker... But it's worth the trip just for the winter veg. We supplemented this shopping with a visit to the Co-op: bananax, moustrap and - since they have a shelf of books on sale for a donation to charity - the first books: a biography of Kirsty MacColl, and Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories.

I have a bee in my bonnet about so-called "cosy" crime fiction, so I was intrigued by the promise of an article on the subject in yesterday's Guardian. Inevitably, when I came to read the piece, it was about something completely different.

My rant goes something like this: when I started to read crime fiction, long ago, you could also refer to it as "detective fiction." There were variations, but mostly there were a group of people, someone would be murdered, and someone else would assume the task of examining the relationships between the survivors to find out which of them had both reason and ability to commit the crime. There were books in which the emphasis was on action, fear, suspense rather than motivation, but these were something slightly other (possibly thrillers). In the intervening period, the balance has changed, and now if you say "crime fiction," the reader will anticipate something noirish and violent. There may be a mystery to be solved, but equally all may be in the open, and the only question is who will survive and who will triumph. Classic, golden age type, stories in which the crime is a lens through which the characters and their world can be studied - these are regarded as "cosy" (which is to say, not very highly regarded at all). Once, at a crime fiction event, I asked a speaker, an expert on Scandi-noir, whether there was such a thing as Scandi-cosy? He said no, but he had to think quite hard about it: the question hadn't occurred to him before. The criticism, I think, is that "detective fiction" in this sense is cosy because by solving the crime, the detective restores order; such fiction is comforting, whereas noir crime is virtuous because it afflicts the comfortable. I think rather that tales of violence among gangsters, hard times on the margins, allow middle class readers (yes, like me) to feel that these are things that happen to other people; cosy crime brings murder and suspicion among people like us...

Anyway, the Guardian article considered cosy crime to be inherently light hearted, humorous. That's my Achilles heel right there, of course. "For my money," says author Oskar Jensen, "today’s greatest exponent of playful detective fiction is Alex Pavesi, whose Eight Detectives is a gloriously original, intricate and often very funny series of practical jokes played on the reader." boybear lent me a copy of Eight Detectives: I thought it clever, if cold-hearted and at times slightly macabre. It did not occur to me to consider it as humorous...

That aside, if crime is noir and cosy is funny, how am I to describe such classic crime as - well, I've just finished Ann Cleeves' (very early) Murder in Paradise. Perhaps I should go back to calling it "detective fiction."

Bonus link, from the same page: Tom Gauld's Christmas tree.

I don't have anything coherent to say about A.S. Byatt. I have a vague affection for her, because I always enjoyed hearing this very literary grande dame praising Terry Pratchett. I enjoyed some of her books, struggled with others.

Instead, since today is the 70th birthday of Alan Moore, I thought it would be a pleasure to write about someone who is still alive. Admittedly, he has turned away from those of his works which have given me such pleasure over the years, but they have given me very great pleasure ...

And I've never written here about The Birth Caul... In fact, what have I written here? And why have I never tagged the relevant entries?

So instead of writing anything new, what I have been doing is tagging all my previous entries about Alan Moore. Not so much a birthday tribute as a meta-tribute. Oh, well.