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14 Friday Jun 2013
Monthly Archives: June 2013
The Sublime and the Compelling
12 Wednesday Jun 2013
It was only just over a week ago that I declared I had a new favourite author – Barbara Pym. She’s refined, restrained, very English, writing with an acerbic and witty pen about “good women” and church affairs, genteelly fading areas of London and the deluded convictions of high church protestant vicars that they will remain celibate – (deluded because a vicar in possession of a living is always in want of a wife, according to some of his parishioners anyway) and other such matters which could be sneered at for not being very important but are so enjoyable to read about, especially from her pen.
I’ve only read three of her books so far; Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence and, for the Barbara Pym reading Week, A Glass of Blessings which has a self-confident heroine not unlike Emma in many ways but to my mind so much more appealing.
This is the cover of my copy, from a 1989 edition, which gives padded shoulders to the elegant Wilmet Forsyth as if she’d just stepped out of one of those women-rising-to-the-top-and-doing-everything-including-getting-the-best-man-in-town novels of the 80’s. If I’d been buying on cover alone I’d have passed it by but I’d already been alerted to Barbara Pym and I absolutely loved A Glass of Blessings. It’s not as funny as Excellent Women, it’s more subtle and a delight. I’m going to be grabbing every Pym I can in future, but I won’t be reading them one after another for this is delicious stuff, to be savoured and appreciated at your leisure, not something to gollop down in one hit lest you miss something and where you allow yourself the luxury to re-read paragraphs for the sheer pleasure of her prose and sly humour.
And at the same time that I fell in to the joys of slow-reading with Barbara Pym I discovered an author who is quite, quite different. Margaret from Books Please wrote a post about her six years blogging and mentioned Blood Harvest by S J Bolton as being one of the books she has most enjoyed. I wasn’t totally sure if it was my sort of thing. I usually find books that promise terror barely raise a ripple down my spine (in the same way whose covers say that “only the hardest-hearted won’t cry at the end” merely prove that I must be made of grante) but Margaret was so enthusiastic, and she shares my tastes in a lot of books, that I put in an order. Here’s what she had to say:
“Crime fiction set in the fictional town of Heptonclough in Lancashire where the Fletcher family have just moved into a new house built on land right next to the boundary wall of the churchyard. I was completely convinced not only by the setting but also by the characterisation that the place and the people in this book were real. It’s full of tension, terror and suspense and I was in several minds before the end as to what it was all about. I had an inkling but I hadn’t realised the full and shocking truth.”
If I really enjoy a book I’ll usually buy one other by the author and build the collection up quite slowly. I finished Blood Harvest and ordered the whole of S J Bolton’s back list that evening. When it arrived a few days later I went through three of her books on the trot, something I don’t do often as I get bored with reading the same style over and over again. Sacrifice, her first book, is slightly slow to start and I’d agree with Margaret that it’s far-fetched in places but so riveting that I didn’t give a toss.
Now You See Me and Dead Scared, are the first two in a police procedural series with a more straightforward tone than her previous ones. Dead Scared is frightening in the sort of way that gives you bad dreams and I’d challenge anyone to read it slowly. My general tension level wasn’t helped by my daughter, who’d been snatching up the books as I finished them, eyeballing me and going, ‘Mum, haven’t you finished that yet?’ (About an hour after I’d started it).
As you might gather I’d wholeheartedly recommend S J Bolton. And Barbara Pym. But perhaps not to read at the same time.
The Weather Gods smiled…
03 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in France, Vieux Chateau du Cros
and Les Journées Médiévals were a rip-roaring success.
Despite the weather being so filthy that we couldn’t hand out flyers at all the local markets there was a record number of people there.
There was a great variety of stalls from leather jewellery and accessories
to exotic fruit syrups, medieval clothing, supposedly “medieval” leather wear that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Fifty Shades of Grey,
artisanal beer made locally (strangely enough that had a lot of people around it!), a local artist, pottery, manuscript maker, a seller of leather-bound dream books, all the gear a small wanna-be medieval soldier could want
though sometimes it took a long time to make up minds about what colour of sword to have.
The blacksmith was doing his stuff and it seems impossible to think that this elfin creature (she comes up to my shoulder) is a stone mason and worked on the restauration of the doorway at the château.
Lots of people came dressed in the spirit of the day;
This gentleman turned up in a car with “Mage” written across the back.
Over in the medieval camp by the castle there was fighting going on, 
This lady could have been the inspiration for ‘kick ass female’, her opponents never seemed to win.
Brian Blessed’s relation was doing a splendid job of demonstrating basic fighting techniques
and in getting on with people…
Lots of people got to try their hand at archery (more of that later!)
and much use was made of the rack
Out of delicacy I haven’t included the picture where the torturer gave feathers to a crowd of grinning girls who then stripped the victim’s socks off…
And one of the most pleasing things of all: the rescue association for the galgos, Spanish hunting dogs that are treated appallingly, was there.
These dogs are so loving, so forgiving, and there are associations all over France desperately looking for homes for them. One of my daughter’s friends adopted little Cara, the smallest of the galgos,
All being well Cara starts her new life next weekend.
It all went well except…
03 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in France
my daughter was shot in the eye with an arrow on Saturday evening… One of her friends was fooling around with a crossbow threatening to shoot her boyfriend and didn’t realise she was there. Or Julianne might just be a really bad shot. Anyway this is the result…
luckily the arrow was one of the ones used in role-playing games and had a rubber tip but still anything comes out of a crossbow with some force. It fractured the bone under her eye. it should heal up of it’s own accord but
Ouch!
Serendipity – aka Barbara Pym
02 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted in Books
Tags
My new favourite author has to be Barbara Pym. One of the great advantages of being a compulsive tsundoko-ist (if the Japanese will allow such a word) is that amongst the sheer quantity if volumes piled up on bookcases around the house you sometimes get wonderful surprises and find books that you can’t remember buying. So it was with Excellent Women. I have no idea how it got there, I have a feeling that I must have thought that Barbara Pym was a writer I should read “one day” but not just yet. For some reason I just didn’t fancy her.
Then the time just seemed right to start reading Excellent Women, so I did – and had the book glued to my hand until I finished it.
It’s an absolute joy and Amanda at Fig and Thistle is so right when she writes about Pym’s superb dialogue. She also very funny – not laugh out loud funny but smile and ‘I want to remember that’ funny, like much of Wodehouse in fact.
I discovered that tsundoko was also concealing Jane and Prudence which I gobbled up while on holiday in Sicily, events in the C of E made a nice contrast to the high baroque churches we were visiting. I left it behind for my daughter to read with firm instructions it is to make its way back to France.
Then this morning I chanced on this, the Barbara Pym reading week, it’s the hundredth anniversary of her birth this week and realised that I have yet another unread Barbara Pym so I can join in too.
And it gives me an excuse to abandon the boring detective novel set in France that I’ve been reading out of a sense that I should know about stories set in this area. I’ve got A Glass of Blessings which I’ve heard doesn’t quite match up to Excellent Women, but even if it’s only half as good who cares?
Do check out some of the other blogs that are participating in the reading week too.
Victoria Corby 