NOVEMBER 2022  

Tales From The Hobbit-Hole: The Social Event of 2022

 

Possibly better late than never

 

As many of you know, P and I got spliced last December – on the Winter Solstice, with a date of 21/12/21, so P has no excuse for forgetting our anniversary!

However, due to the Covid pandemic, we had to postpone our reception party. After much deliberation, we finally decided to have the ‘do’ on Saturday 29 October 2022, almost a year after the wedding, and slightly too close to Halloween for comfort – there was always the risk that some people would turn up dressed as zombies or skeletons.

There were several downers in the run-up to the reception, including guests cancelling due to trivial issues such as having a serious heart condition or being stalked by elephants on safari in Kenya. People can be so self-centred! On the morning of the party, one of our neighbours died suddenly and the street was full of police cars and ambulances, which felt like a bad omen. One of our oldest friends, Martin, who was actually supposed to be giving one of the speeches, had to drop out because his elderly mother was in hospital after a fall and had taken a sudden turn for the worse on Saturday morning (she has improved since). We didn’t find out that Martin and his partner wouldn’t be there until the last moment, so there were two empty chairs throughout the meal, like ghosts at the feast!

              Despite this, the party went off fairly well, though there was in the end no dancing, despite the best efforts of my two friends from Kent, both of whom are more than a decade older than me but have twice my energy. I hadn’t seen Jude and Carole in the flesh for many years and when they arrived the day before the reception and we took them to a local restaurant, I flung my arms round them when I saw them, even though I am a non-hugger of long standing. In fact, I must have drunk a little more than I thought because I hugged several people at the reception, including one of P’s university friends whom I barely know, which startled him even more than it startled me!  Anyway, even the good-humoured enthusiasm of Carole and Jude, nor our kick-ass playlist, wasn't enough to get the toes tapping – it was like trying to get the good folk of Bomont to do the macarena.

We had paid a firm of venue decorators to decorate the room, and they did a great job. I spent hours in the run-up to the actual wedding last December, which had a Christmas theme, putting together handmade Christmas crackers, which were surprisingly fiddly and irritating. So, even though it was no longer a Christmas event, I felt obliged to use the crackers. P, the MC and The Best Woman went over to the venue and put them out on the table, along with the name-cards I had made (each with a personalized painting on it) and the favour bags. 

  

Some of the crackers contained those long balloons used by children’s entertainers who make animals out of them. I thought this would keep some guests amused, but the box the balloons came in only contained one little air-pump to blow them up, and people didn’t seem inclined to share it. It was amusing to see guests going purple-faced with the effort of trying to blow up the balloons by mouth. My sister managed to make half a poodle with hers, but it ended up being a kind of hammer that my eight-year-old great-nephew used to hit people on the head with when he became fed-up with the intrinsic dullness of a wedding reception with no drunken dancing. We had feared that he would be bored out of his skull, as the only child present, and of course he was, but we made sure his favour-bag was full of things to entertain him. He spent the first hour being painfully shy and the last being just painful, but I didn’t see much of him in the middle part of the evening.

I had used up all the original silver and white favour bags that I’d prepared last December (we gave them to people as extra Christmas presents along with a piece of our original wedding cake) so I had to buy new ones. However, the only ones I could get hold of at short notice in the right colour were about twice the size of the original ones and I just couldn’t stop myself wanting to fill them up. Several people have commented since, in slightly disapproving tones, that they were ‘rather on the large size’, but my attitude is ‘Who wants three jelly beans in a net bag anyway?’. If you’re going to have a ‘Thank you for coming to the wedding’ gift, it might as well be a large bag stuffed with pointless rubbish rather than a single small example of pointless rubbish. I also printed out the menu choices individuals had made and attached this to the favour bags, which I considered to be a thoughtful and helpful touch, though I was informed by two separate family members that it was an example of my control-freakery.  It didn’t help much anyway, as there was still some confusion when the food was served, particularly because Martin and Angela were absent. One guest didn’t get the pie he'd asked for and ended up having to have the fish instead – but he was compensated to some extent by getting an extra portion of sticky toffee pudding, as my mum couldn’t face hers. He will henceforward be known as ‘Two Puds John’.

P and The Best Woman

Several things failed to go to plan. My hair colour wasn’t quite what I wanted and it wasn’t styled quite as well as on the actual wedding day. I wore the same outfit but bought a new bag and new shoes as the glittery stilettos I wore to the wedding were like instruments of torture, and the matching bag continually slipped off my shoulder. I ended up dropping the new bag into a box in which we’d transported some gifts and, as it had my phone in it, I forgot to take any photos after the first few we took when we arrived. I actually have no photos of myself at the reception at all.

              Though the staff worked very hard, the woman who was supposedly in charge, Natalie, wasn’t there as it was her day off, and there were several minor things which didn’t go the way she had assured us they would. They thought the meal was happening at 7.30 rather than 7.00; they said they would provide a child menu for our single child guest but we had to ask for this; there was no rack for people to hang their coats on so we had to pile all the coats on a table at the back of the room. The room was incredibly warm, particularly once everyone arrived, and several of us ended up chatting in the car-park just to cool down – it was an unseasonably warm evening for late October in Yorkshire! The venue appeared to have two large windows which were covered by blinds, but in fact these were either windows that couldn’t be opened or else they were bricked up! The staff didn’t turn the music off during the speeches, until we actually asked them to, halfway through the first speech. The waitress was standing right next to the music system at the time, but our hand gestures and meaningful facial expressions didn’t cut through her screensaver day-dream  and the groom had to get up, go over to her and ask her to turn it off, during the MC’s opening words.

              There was a remarkably steep staircase with a wobbly banister up to the actual room where the reception party took place. I had to hoist myself up, hand-over-hand, as if dragging myself aboard a schooner in choppy waters, and there were many people there older or even more infirm than me. My friend’s husband, who has ‘a wonky ankle’, managed to both fall up the stairs and slip coming down, and he wasn’t even drunk. However, he also tripped over a plant pot in the outdoor seating area on his way to his car, so I think he was just having a Norman Wisdom evening.

Natalie had also assured me that the chef at the venue would cut up the wedding cake, but when I asked the waitress, she shrugged and said the chef had gone home! We had paid for an expensive, professionally-made cake for the original wedding reception last December, so we had decided to just buy a pre-made one this time from Marks and Spencers or somewhere, but our friend Helen stepped in and made us an absolutely delicious cake (fruit cake on bottom layer, chocolate cake on top) which she iced and decorated with autumnal flowers, rosehips, pine cones etc. It was gorgeous. The waitress gave us a ridiculously pathetic knife so that Helen could cut up the cake herself, which I was embarrassed about.

The Wedding Cake, decorated with Autumnal flowers and foliage

The highlight of the evening was of course the speeches. I wasn’t giving one myself so I was able to sit back and quietly make judgements on the performances of others. I was hoping they would be short and sweet but this wasn’t quite what happened. The Best Woman's speech was beyond reproach, but then she is female. P’s speech was heartfelt but due to his insistence on mentioning everyone who was present, it went on a bit – and even then he forgot to mention his university friends and quickly added them in just before the toast. He wouldn’t let me see or hear his speech before the event, but when I saw the number of A4 sheets he took out of his pocket, my heart sank! 

He’d been worried that the suit he’d worn for the wedding would now, eight months later, be too tight but in fact he just squeezed into it. However, after his pie and sticky toffee pudding, the waistcoat was rather tight so, as he stood up to deliver his speech, he unbuttoned it, saying ‘If wearing an unbuttoned waistcoat is good enough for Art Garfunkel, it's good enough for me’. Later, the Best Woman –  who was sitting opposite him –  told me that his fly was partially open, so it looked as if he was deliberately exposing himself to the guests, possibly as a form of performance art. I don’t think many people noticed, however.

The MC made the biggest impression. I have to say that he was brilliant at greeting the guests, taking their coats, liaising with the staff, keeping things moving and chatting to people, and we are both very grateful to him for this. Before the meal, his impromptu shoe-exploding act was pure genius (the heels of his Ecco shoes spontaneously fell off, quite spectacularly, something we later discovered happens to around 1% of Ecco shoes due to something called Hydrolysis, and it even happened to someone at a swish do where Joe Biden was a guest, apparently, so the MC is in good company). However, it did mean he had to spend the remainder of the evening walking round more or less in his socks. We suggested he might craft makeshift heels out of Pontefract Cakes [licorice] stuck on with sticky toffee pudding, but he didn’t seem convinced.

          His own speech was more 1970s Working Men’s Club than 2022 Wedding Reception, but it was nice of him to have put in so much effort. At one point he pretended he’d got a call from the owner of The Spencer Arms (where the venue was) and he left the room, only to return wearing a beret and doing an impersonation of Frank Spencer. Those who remembered the pub was called The Spencer Arms, and who were old enough to remember Michael Crawford’s hapless character, enjoyed this, but many of us were mystified. For younger guests, the impersonation was incomprehensible as they had no idea who Frank Spencer was, which in itself actually made many of us feel like dinosaurs from a lost world. And for people like myself who did remember Frank Spencer, but who didn’t make the connection with the pub’s name until some time afterwards, it seemed like a rather random and bewilderingly outdated character to impersonate. However, the MC’s speech will go down in everyone’s memory as a highlight of the evening. Personally, I know I’ll remember the exploding shoes with fondness for many years to come. 

Check out Carole and Jude's article about their experiences in Barnsley [below]

The Barnsley Experience: a southerner's impression of a northern town

Two of the guests at the wedding reception, Judith Worham and Carole Blacher, as well as being beloved friends, are also writers, and have written a series of humorous and helpful travel guides describing their journeys on the London Underground. Both women live in Kent and ventured up north for the reception, having never visited Barnsley before, so I thought it would be interesting to get their impressions of South Yorkshire for the blog, and they have written a lovely piece below, complete with original photographs. 

The Barnsley Experience

Friday 28^th October

Barnsley Market facade

At 4.52 precisely we arrive at Barnsley Station, or Barnsley Interchange as it is now known since they covered it, and the adjacent bus station, with an arcing glass roof and joined everything together with walkways and escalators.  Its an architectural equation (2s + e + g = I),  a most welcome addition to any transport hub where people have to wait for their chosen conveyance during the wettest month of the year.  To be fair, however, Barnsley’s wettest month sees only 5mm more rain than Manchester’s driest and rumour has it that Mancunians flock here in October to dry out.  Our delight at having reached our destination unscathed is enhanced by the fact a couple of fit and friendly young people offer to carry our bags up the stairway from the platform, and a watery evening sun greets us as we step out on to the pavement.

               Judy looks bemused, having no idea where we are in relation to our destination – The Grand Hotel Premier Inn – but I, in true Baden-Powell mode, have printed off a map which indicates that we should proceed along Regent Street to the town hall.  Lacking the breadth and retail splendour of its London counterpart, this thoroughfare has the advantage of being dead straight and relatively traffic free, but is, unfortunately, uphill.  Hardly a mountain, but when you are in your seventies, carrying a bulging rucksack and dragging a suitcase, enough to slow your progress and induce some heavy breathing.  At the end we stop to get our breath back and admire the architectural qualities of this magnificent pre-war municipal building, constructed in a symmetrically classical style of creamy-white Portland stone. 

Barnsley Town Hall

‘Impressive,’ says Judy, gazing up at the central clock tower.

‘George Orwell didn’t think so,’ I reply.  ‘Came here when he was researching The Road to Wigan Pier, and declared that the money would have been better spent improving the housing of the poor.’

‘He was probably right, but nobody ever visited a town and went home singing the praises of the design and provision of social housing,’ Judy observes.

‘It’s like going shopping at Christmas and trying to decide between thermals and furry slippers from Tesco’s or a Stella McCartney Christmas jumper.’

Judy gives me the look, and says:

‘ White stone probably wasn’t the best choice of building material either given that there used to be dozens of collieries around here.’

‘ Bet they’ve had to have had it cleaned a few times.  Anyway, we’ll be back tomorrow to investigate the Barnsley Experience Museum and learn about the town’s illustrious past.’

            We circumnavigate the grand edifice and proceed, still uphill, along Westgate, past Barnsley Sixth form college, a functional, but not unpleasant building, and the back of the Lamproom Theatre, an altogether more quirky looking structure.  Since we are only here for less than 48 hours we will not have time to attend any productions, but this is just as well because we would have to wait until mid-November to see Elf, the musical, a prospect which is unlikely to inspire us to lengthen our stay.

            Ahead of us, tucked between two tall new buildings is the entrance to Gateway Plaza.  Nestling in the corner of this new development, seemingly built on top of a cliff, is the Premier Inn.  Unsurprisingly, the interior looks like every other hotel in this chain, clean, bright, welcoming and totally lacking in any sort of character whatsoever, but, let’s face it, you don’t stay at a Premier Inn for the cultural experience (unless the Barnsley Sinfonia Orchestra happens to be in residence and playing nightly in the foyer).  My room looks down over the Shambles, not a comment on the state of the townscape before me, but the name of the street below leading to the Townend Roundabout.

             Judy joins me, as her room is on the other side of the building and from her window she can only see a hundred or so other windows, and we watch the sun set over Barnsley.  Unfortunately, this is the last we will see of the sun on our trip, apart from a brief rainbow-creation appearance over the Glassworks between downpours.

Sighing as the day slips away in a rosy hue behind a distant housing estate, we decide it’s time for a pre-prandial before dinner at the Little Sicilian (good food, but he was larger than expected and likes to go to bed early.)  Having noticed a nearby hostelry on our way in, we make our way around the corner to the Tin Oyle Bar.  It is situated on the site of the former Barnsley Canister Factory, referred to affectionally as Tin Oyle. This bar pays homage to a part of Barnsley’s industrial past. On display are expertly crafted large cannisters made for Twinings Tea, all in different colours, as well as photographs of the factory and its former staff working. The atmosphere in the bar is happy, friendly and cheerful and the two young, jolly barmen are happy to engage in conversation while making a great G&T.

 

Saturday 29^th October

It’s raining, more of a drizzle than a downpour, but we have waterproofs and our chosen destinations mostly involve indoor mooching.  Having decided to start at the bottom and work upwards, we make our way down Market Hill, turning left at M&S to come face to face with the Glass Works.  The name, an acknowledgement of Barnsley’s industrial past, given to the transformative town centre redevelopment which incorporates a new town square, both outdoor and indoor markets, shopping and leisure space and a Library.  Given that one shopping mall tends to be very much like another, we head for the market in the hope of finding something more indicative of local culture, and are not disappointed.  Stopping only to buy two bananas from one of the brave, outdoor stallholders sheltering under her standard, white, Barnsley Market gazebo, we head for the indoor Tyke bazaar.  I understand that Tyke is a word used to describe people from Barnsley and I sincerely hope it’s an affectionate one, because we have developed a distinct fondness for both the people and the place.  Whoever designed this market had given it a lot of thought. It is clean, spacious and despite efforts to give it a more homogenous, corporate appearance by the standardised use of fonts and stall fronts, each stallholder had obviously taken great pride in presenting their goods in an attractive, accessible and sometimes artistic manner. 

We walk round looking at products and prices. It’s all here: vegetables and fruit, fish and sea food, cheeses, bakeries, a deli, knitting wool and needles, bolts of cloth and pins, jewellery, clothes, flowers, craft activities, pet food, babies’ things, and of course, mobile phone accessories. The most popular stall with a lengthy queue and only one man serving is the pie and cold meats stall.
              ‘Maybe his assistant is having a day off or has gone home injured,’ I suggest.

‘Or maybe he’s attending a cold meats health and safety training day,’ says Judy as we both eye the lethal-looking meat slicer.

It's underwear and night wear of the substantial, post middle-age variety.  It’s funny how winceyette becomes a more palatable proposition as one ages, even when it is rebranded as brushed cotton – and don’t get me started on hot water bottles.  The display of upper-body receptacles were also designed for the ‘fuller figure’ and put me in mind of Les Dawson’s iconic Cissie and Ada comedy sketches. 

            More in the mood for a brasserie than a brassiere, Judy leads me to the escalator and I dutifully follow her to the food hall.  Now this is truly impressive.  A vast seating area serves a range of food outlets from standard British café sausage-egg-and-chips type menus to more exotic Thai, Indian, Turkish and Italian fare.  All are very busy and manage to cook your order and serve it to your table with minimal delay.  Judy thoroughly enjoys her sausage sandwich even if she has to seek help to open the brown sauce sachet after an increasingly desperate struggle to tear the plastic.  My toasted teacake is similarly tasty and ready prepared with lashings of butter, but an accompanying cup of Earl Grey tea was just too much to expect so, I settle for Tetley. 

Statue of character from Barry Hines' novel A Kestrel For A Knave

Suitably fortified, we exit via the pristine and plentiful Ladies toilets, stopping only to admire the colourful Halloween witches and pumpkins display.  In fact, pumpkins are very much in evidence as Halloween is only two days away and there are pumpkin carving displays and a workshop for children.  Plenty to keep the kids amused while the adults browse and buy.  This place is wonderful – vibrant, colourful and exuding a great sense of community and civic pride, and everyone we spoke to was friendly, helpful and very positive about their new town centre in general and the indoor market in particular. 

              Outside, the rain has stopped, but it’s still overcast and cloudy as we make our way across the new town square past a captivating statue of Billy Casper and his kestrel from the film Kes, and a water feature with little dancing fountains.  No time to linger as we have our sights set on the Town hall and the Barnsley Experience Museum to learn more of this wonderful town’s former glories.

              Choosing a different return route, thanks to my trusty map, we pass through the narrow Victorian Arcade with its passageway of small retro shops, admiring the ironwork decoration and the very different atmosphere.  Crossing the road, we stop at the corner to look at an introductory display of old photographs advertising the museum, arranged around the base of a strange-looking modern sculpture called Crossing (Vertical) by Nigel Hall.  We are not surprised to learn later, that it is locally referred to as the Barnsley nit comb, and wonder if it’s some mutant strain of giant nit unknown south of Chesterfield.  Up the steps, past more fountains, we finally enter the museum.

            Inside, first we sit and watch a screen showing actors playing various characters from the past, dressed in period costume. All perform in the same small room decorated to reflect the times they come from. Beginning in the seventeenth century, it carries on up to the second world war, telling us of their lives in Barnsley, linking them to important historical events. There are things to look at in glass cases, things to touch, films to watch, aspects of Barnsley life on display.  Its industrial past is fascinating, a hive of activity leading to it being a positive hub for trade, so it has long had a thriving market. Barnsley Main is the name of the local colliery that closed in 1965. Its former name was Oaks Colliery, opened in 1824. Thirteen explosions occurred in 1866 resulting in the deaths of 383 miners, England’s biggest ever mining disaster. The shafts were filled in and Barnsley Main took over. This town has a proud but also tragic coal mining heritage and the headquarters of the NUM is still located here

            Sadly, the display about Tin Oyle comprises only a few decorated tins, from the tiny suitcase sort to those with elaborate coronation pictures. The writing about the factory is behind glass and too far away for me to read. We’ve only just missed their display in the museum’s small room to show work from the factory. It’s the same space that was used to advertise the former importance to the world of Barnsley’s balls.  Not a macho boast, rather a surprising fact that the Slazenger factory opened here in 1945. It was, for many years, the sole supplier of Wimbledon’s tennis balls, each one hand finished, and they were given away for free.  On the sporting front we also learn that Barnsley FC, founded in 1887 by a clergyman from his church football team, actually won the FA Cup in 1912.

The current exhibition is of artefacts linked to the life and brief reign of Tutankhamun.  We fail to see the link with Barnsley until we later encounter a lifesize ‘mummy’ trapped in a telephone box further down the road.

‘He must be making a long-distance call,’ says Judy

Feeling so much better informed about Barnsley, we make our way to the Art Gallery in time for a spot of lunch. We’re only just in time.  Judy has long been bemoaning the lack of a decent ham sandwich, so she orders one just to see if the café’s excellent reputation is deserved. It is.

             ‘It’s one of the best ham sandwiches I’ve ever had,’ she says dabbing her mouth appreciatively with the paper serviette.
              ‘Praise indeed given the number of them you’ve probably eaten.  Almost a Which Best Buy,’ I say, sipping the last of my Earl Grey while ostentatiously extending my pinkie.  This is a place of culture after all!

The Cooper Gallery is named after the philanthropist who left his art collection to the people of Barnsley. It houses contemporary travelling exhibitions of modern art, the current one being Brains in a Dish, a display of illuminated molecules showing damage suffered by Alzheimer’s patients.  Upstairs is a large room used for workshops and educational activities, which is currently displaying the boldly colourful work of Sheffield artist, Kate Sully.  In the smaller galleries downstairs, Judy admires the Turner (Joseph Mallord William that is, not Tina) and a marble sculpture of a veiled lady, which is both beautiful and spooky at the same time.  
        It’s a small gallery, but the entrance is free, the café is great and the gift shop sells a variety of cards, art books and, much to my surprise, a series of mugs with Yorkshire slang such as Ey up and Be Reyt written on them.  My attention is particularly drawn to one that says Mardy Bum and I ask the assistant whether it describes someone in a bad mood.  She nods but insists that it is almost a term of endearment.  We are not sufficiently convinced to buy one and settle for a Barnsley fridge magnet instead.  I later discover that the Arctic Monkeys, who hail from Sheffield, have written a song called Mardy Bum which features on one of their alBums.

Sunday 30^th October

Even after an extra hour in bed on the day the clocks fall back, we are left with little time for further exploration before we have to say farewell to Barnsley.  The food hall is sadly closed today so we wander down to the Joseph Bramah for breakfast.  A misleadingly small façade opens up into a tardis-like, extensive Wetherspoons on two floors with early drinkers and late breakfasters scattered about the many tables.  The pub is named after a 18^th century locksmith and prolific inventor native to the area. He is famous for making a lock that nobody managed to pick for 67 years, also responsible for significant improvements in the design of the flush toilet.  I wonder if Oh, dear, what can the matter be was written in his honour.  A Wetherspoons breakfast is good value for money in any part of the country, but seems all the more enjoyable here.  

        

We are sad to be leaving and make a fleeting visit to the Alhambra shopping centre, ending up in a sleazier part of town.  But even here there are some wonderful examples of magnificent Victorian architecture such as the old Barnsley British Co-operative Society Building and the grand Public Hall built in 1877.

         After an overcast, but rain-free morning we collect our cases and make our way back to the Interchange.  Barnsley is obviously devastated at the thought of our departure and, as we reach the town hall, it spontaneously bursts into floods of tears, and I do mean floods.  Apres nous, le deluge.  We shelter briefly in a doorway which offers little protection from a South Yorkshire cloudburst, and when the downpour abates slightly, make a bolt for the Interchange, arriving on the drenched side of the wet continuum.  The train to Sheffield is thankfully on time and we manage to find a seat, for it is also pretty crowded.

              ‘It’s all those disillusioned Mancunians on their way back to Manchester,’ I say.

Judy grins as we wave a fond farewell to Barnsley and resolve to come back in the Summer to sample the delights of a sunny sojourn in the land of the Tykes and Mardy Bums.  Maybe we will even get to listen to Barnsley’s wonderful Brass Band and spend an evening in the pub with The Bar-steward sons of Val Doonican, singing The Devil went down t’Barnsley town.

We look forward to it.

 

The authors:

Carole, Judy and Louise worked together at a college where they wrote a scurrilous magazine called ‘Rant’. Louise escaped to the north, leaving Carole and Judy to pursue their inclination for travel and each other’s company. They foolishly decided to travel along the Northern Line, getting off at each of its fifty stations and mooching about to see what they could see. They saw a lot, and in the process, had great fun, met interesting people and drank a lot of coffee. They have shared their experiences and produced a book which is in some ways a travel guide, and in others just two friends indulging their curiosity. They went on to travel the Jubilee Line and the Hammersmith and City Line.

All three journeys are available from Amazon on Kindle if you search “Down the Tube – Northern/Jubilee/Hammersmith and City Line.”  We only have a few hard copies of the Jubilee/Hammersmith and City Lines left.  Please email us if you would like one at worblerpress@yahoo.com the cost is £10 including P&P.

BOOK REVIEWS: A writer's opinion of the books she's read since last month

 Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

 

The fifth in the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, this one finds Jackson living on the North Yorkshire coast, occasionally with his son while his actress ex-partner Julia films a TV series (about a fictional detective, because Atkinson loves that sort of Russian Doll technique) in the area.

              Jackson Brodie is not really a very successful detective, and Atkinson’s genius is in highlighting his flaws by telling most of the story from the viewpoints of various characters who are directly involved in the current crime du jour, this time a very nasty ring of human sex traffickers. We frequently know much more about what is going on than Jackson himself does, and he stumbles across the crimes often serendipitously.

              Atkinson loves to undermine the detective genre formula, using narrative devices that often teeter on the edge of magic realism while never fully falling over the precipice. In this book, Jackson’s urge to protect the vulnerable leads him to try to save at least two people’s lives before he becomes fully involved in the major crime going on nearby. There are numerous references to events from previous episodes in the Brodie saga, so if you haven’t read them you will find some elements of this novel confusing. There is Atkinson’s trademark humour, her characteristic moments of sly wit or unlikely coincidence. The two young women police officers are called Ronnie and Reggie, for instance, and one happens to have saved Jackson’s life in a previous novel.

              I love all this stuff. As I have said before, I consider Atkinson to be a fabulous writer, though I am increasingly recognizing her stylistic devices. She often has characters thinking something but other characters responding as if the thought has been spoken aloud, for instance.

              What I really love about her work is her ability to create and present characters who are highly distinctive, highly memorable, both intensely realistic but also often so eccentric that they are simultaneously unconvincing. She jumps from character to character, giving us glimpses of the central story from different angles, and she controls the various voices, the different viewpoints, deftly, skipping from one to another with great skill and confidence. And she does it so quickly and succinctly. I found myself really caring about many of the characters as if they were real people – the Polish girls who are rescued from the hell-hole created by the triumvirate of evil ‘businessmen’ at the heart of the story, the possibly gay, sensitive son of one of those men, poor naïve Vince who has no idea about what his ‘golf-friends’ are up to and whose life is slowly falling apart around him. Atkinson likes to break down stereotypes. Beautiful, over-made-up Crystal, once an exploited teen escaping from a brutal care home into an even more brutal world, now the wife of rich Tommy, who treats her like a mixture of domestic servant and sex doll, turns out to be much more intelligent, moral and brave than you’d expect.

              Jackson himself doesn’t feel like the central character in the book. He rarely does. Yet his basic human decency, his old-fashioned sense of what is right and what is wrong, beyond the exigencies of the law itself, his physical courage, his ‘Luddite’ qualities, his awkward relationships with his children and his ex-partners, his loneliness, his love of dogs – well, he is a vivid presence throughout, a thread that holds the narrative in place. Many of Atkinson’s novels feature dogs – her first success, Behind The Scenes At The Museum, was set largely in a pet store. Dogs pop up here and there, as they do in life, plodding through the action, indifferent or confused, often inconvenient. Jackson himself has had a dog in previous books in the series, and was once almost killed by a dog. Here, he is looking after the phlegmatic Dido, Julia’s elderly Labrador, in a novel which also features Brutus, Tommy’s scary-looking but actually very gentle dog, and Lottie, the family dog whom Vince misses more than he does his ex-wife.

Atkinson also creates a wonderful sense of place. The seaside resorts of the north east – Scarborough, Whitby, Bridlington – are brought to life from their sordid theatres and amusement arcades to their majestic hills and beaches. The novel opens with the famous miniature sea battles enacted on the lake at Peasholme Park in Scarborough, and mentions Whitby’s abbey and Robin Hood’s Bay and the gypsum mines and the long coastal path, once a disused train line. For someone like myself who knows the area well, I could taste the salt in the air.  

What can I say? I loved it.

 

*****  [Highly recommended]

 

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

I am a big fan of Frances Hardinge. She writes superb fantasy fiction, highly imaginative, beautifully written, intelligently-plotted. If you like to be taken to new worlds, Hardinge is the woman to guide you. Her stories are dazzlingly original, presenting us with imagined places that are unlike anything else I’ve read, yet they are also, like all the best fantasy, works which are at their core morality tales. They are mostly aimed at a YA audience, as are many of the greatest fantasy novels, but they are sophisticated enough to appeal to older readers.

              This one is about Kellen and Nettle, two teenagers who live in a world where curses are real. Mysterious and sinister spiderlike creatures from The Wild, known as The Little Brothers, give some people the power to curse others. Cursers cannot be cursed themselves, and their curses can only be reversed by a skilled unraveller like Kellen. Cursers cannot be cured, and can only be restrained by being imprisoned in a literally ironclad jail, as iron dampens their powers.  Nettle was cursed in the past, being transformed into a heron by her evil stepmother, but was later de-cursed by Kellen, and has been left with a strange connection to The Wild.

              As you can see, there is an element of the fairy tale about this story. However, don’t let that put you off. Hardinge might weave such ideas through her plots but the intricate details of the characters’ lives, the richness of the worlds she creates, the naturalistic dialogue, the twists and turns of the plot, the sheer brilliance of her set piece scenes and the effortless quality of her ideas draw you in and raise her novels to the top level of fantasy fiction. Winner of the Costa Prize for her novel The Lie Tree, this is not a novelist whose imaginative powers are in any way fading. If you haven’t discovered her yet, read this – she has a large back-catalogue of other equally surprising and equally gripping novels to explore once you are hooked.

 

***** [highly recommended]

 

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

I realise this novel is now old news and Osman has since written several more. I bought it for a friend when it first came out, and I read the first chapter at that time and quite enjoyed the mildly witty style. Osman’s voice came through strongly and I actually thought it was quite entertaining and I intended to read the rest at some time.

              However, the fact that I didn’t get round to it until this year maybe suggests that I wasn’t as drawn in by the narrative as I thought. Also, I joined Audible earlier this year and downloaded Osman’s novel as my first, free, Audible book, so I listened to Leslie Manville reading it, rather than reading it for myself. I thought I’d enjoy being read to, and it was certainly quite a convenient way of keeping myself entertained while doing the housework. However, I can’t say that I was ever completely enthralled by the novel, and I’m not sure whether this was due to the novel itself or to Leslie Manville’s narration.  There was an interview with Richard Osman at the end, I think by Marian Keyes, which was a nice addition for fans.

              Anyway, as a novel, it is firmly in the genre of ‘cosy fiction’ – a bunch of elderly, affluent, middle-class ex-professionals get together to solve a crime. There are red herrings, false clues, unexpected detours, occasional insights into the central characters’ individual lives, unorthodox detective-ing, and a few implausible twists and turns. The characters are a tad stereotypical but generally likeable. It is mildly amusing, poignant in places, and I think I could have worked out whodunnit relatively easily had I been paying full attention. However, one thing I found with Audible is that my mind wanders in a way it rarely does when I am reading to myself.

              Overall, a pleasant middle-of-the-road cosy detective novel which will pass a few hours pleasantly.

 

***  [will pass a few hours pleasantly and easily, without offering anything more]

 

 

 

Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet by Charlie Holmberg

 

Charlie N Holmberg is an US author who has written numerous successful fantasy novels. I first came across her when I read ‘The Paper Magician’ and several of its sequels, about ten years ago. She is one of a large number of excellent young female fantasy writers, and I would recommend her highly if you like this genre.

              I listened to half this novel on Audible but I found the American narrator unbearable after a while so I read the last half myself on my kindle. Holmberg has an excellent imagination, original, quirky and enjoyable. This novel is a stand-alone story about a young woman with no memory of her past. Maire is a baker who can instil emotions into her cakes. She can make cakes which make people feel loved, content, excited, angry, whatever. Set entirely in a fantasy universe, the story follows Maire’s adventures which are often very grim indeed, until she finally remembers her true identity.

              Weaving in fairy-tales such as Hansel & Gretel and The Little Gingerbread Boy, and creating at least one particularly creepy character, Holmberg writes beautifully, on the whole, creating a magical atmosphere. I found the final chapters a little tedious, though they are necessary to tie up the loose ends of the plot. I won’t recommend the Audible version as I hated it, but the novel itself is definitely worth a read if you like this sort of thing.

 

**** [recommended]