OCTOBER 2022 

Tales from the first year of respectable married life...

 Judging a book by its cover (or its name)

I don’t think politicians should be judged on their appearance. For example, there are far more important criticisms to make of Donald Trump than his comb-over and the fact that he looks like he’s been tango-ed.  Complaining about Boris Johnson’s hair being like a thinning blonde floor mop or his face resembling a potato simply distracts from serious consideration of his inadequacies as a human being. The fact that someone looks old (Joe Biden), robotic (Theresa May), or like an unhinged doll possessed by a demon (Vladimir Putin) is irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.

‘Good-looking’ doesn’t equate to ‘good person’ and ‘ugly’ doesn’t equate to ‘evil’, though admittedly Margaret Thatcher’s various cabinets were remarkably unattractive.

However, I must highlight one thing about Liz Truss’s appearance. I personally find her face remarkably anonymous, almost forgettable, the sort of face that blends into the crowd. One US TV presenter apparently failed to recognize her at the queen’s funeral and I can sort of see why. She has a great figure, but her face is, to my eyes, the paradigm case of plainness – I don’t mean she is ugly or particularly unattractive, just that her face is so ordinary, so everyday, that it becomes unmemorable.

However, it also has a strange capacity to make elderly people see it as astonishingly ugly, for some reason. My mum says she can’t stand ‘that woman’s face – she has no chin’, even though Truss looks to me as if she has been normally-endowed in the chin department. And my mother-in-law thinks she looks as if she’s had a stroke, though I can’t see that myself. Having said this, my mum-in-law thinks Adele can’t sing (‘She just shouts,’ she claims), so she’s obviously not a reliable judge. An elderly neighbour recently told me she thought Truss’s face looked like a cushion, and a friend told me that her father had described our PM as having ‘a face like a poached egg’ (!!!).

Can the elderly see something we younger people are missing?

Personally, it’s her name that I find more problematic. When I first heard it, I muddled her up with Lynne Truss who wrote ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’, so now I can’t help vaguely thinking our PM is a member of the Clear and Correct English Brigade. The name ‘Truss’ suggests ‘trust’ and ‘truth’ (thereby seeming ironic when associated with Lizzie), and also makes me think of my grandma telling me once when I was a child that a man she knew had a hernia and had to wear a truss. I have no idea what a truss is. I imagine a harness of some sort, something designed to hold something up or hold something in….

 

Afternoon Tea In God's Own County

Two old schoolfriends and myself have begun going out for regular afternoon teas during the past eighteen months. This is a bad thing as one of us is diabetic, and one is pre-diabetic, but we will gloss over that. There is something about an afternoon tea that makes you feel warm and fuzzy, I think – the theatrics of having tiers of goodies placed in the middle of your table by a smiling waitress, the intimacy of sharing the collection of sandwiches and cakes, the peculiar buzz of anticipation as you wait to see what treasures will be included (which is odd because it is usually very much the usual suspects, isn’t it?).

I always wish there was more savoury stuff and fewer cakes. My favourite afternoon teas include things like sausage rolls, mini quiches and pork pies. Nevertheless, I am partial to the one thing that seems to be a certainty on every afternoon tea, which is a cream scone. However, I object to the recent default position adopted by many local cafes which is to warm the scone up. In my view, the only reason to warm up a scone is if it is stale, and a warm cream scone is horrible as it melts the clotted cream. However, as always, I am swimming against the tide on this...

 Our most recent afternoon tea was at a local upmarket Garden Centre, where we were led out of the main restaurant, through a little garden and into a large wooden hut like a very large and very swish garden shed. Here, a smily waitress stood, throughout our meal, as if on guard, close enough to our table to listen in to our inane conversation, which was very slightly inhibiting. It didn't stop us wittering on however. I don't think anything less than a direct nuclear strike could.  As always, we were the last ones to leave the restaurant and all the chairs had been put on the tables in readiness for floor washing, when we did finally wend our way out of the building! 

The service was excellent, though the smily waitress had to bring the tiered plates containing the food from the main restaurant and through the garden to us. It was a drizzly day, so a second waitress had to hold a golfing umbrella over the first waitress as they proceeded through the garden. It gave us something to watch during lulls in the conversation.

One problem we’ve had is that one of our trio is one of those people who are picky with food. At the garden centre afternoon tea, there was a pleasant array of crustless finger sandwiches – cheese, ham, egg mayo, prawn, tuna – but the café had put tomato chutney on the ham sandwiches and Branston pickle on the cheese sandwiches, rendering them inedible to our picky friend. As she won’t allow a prawn to pass her lips, she was left with very little to choose from. Could they not put the pickles in little dishes on the side for those who want them? Some places do that. There was a lovely array of high quality tarts and cakes – miniature cream scones, chocolate mousse cake, bakewell tart, meringues, carrot cake, little cheese cakes in plastic pots – but they hadn’t provided three of everything, which might have led to squabbles, had we been the sort of women who would squabble over a meringue.

Sharing food doesn’t always work well with Yorkshire people. Tapas bars haven’t taken off up here as well as they have elsewhere. Many of us are fussy eaters, which means others have to give up things they like to make sure the fussy eater doesn't expire of starvation. Many of us are hygiene freaks who can’t bear the thought of eating a sandwich that might have been touched by the hand of one of their close friends or family members (you might scoff at this and think I’m exaggerating, but my own mother won’t share a melted camembert or a dish of olives of a sharing platter with anyone. She’d rather go hungry). And if there is a variety of items to choose from, there is always the potential for resentment over perceived unfairness.

My two friends and I, of course,  aren’t at all like this. Other than the before-mentioned fussy-eatership of one of our number, we are delightful models of tolerance, politeness and generous-spirit, who value the scintillating conversation more than the opportunity to raise our blood sugar to dangerous levels.

            But if ever you are lost and have no idea where you are – let’s say you have suffered a bump on the head during a train journey and lost your memory, and are now wandering round the streets of some small grey-stoned town wondering where in hell you have landed – all you have to do to locate yourself is look into the nearest teashop window. If a group of women are yelling obscenities over a tiered set of plates, throwing meringues at one another and flicking Branston pickle at the waitress, you’ll know you’re in Yorkshire…

Book Reviews: A Writer's opinion on other writers

 Here are my thoughts on the books I have read since my last book review:

The Unhappy Medium: Tom Fool by T.J.Brown, [Book 2]

I read this a few weeks ago and I've already forgotten a great deal about it, which probably tells you all you need to know. I can honestly say that I enjoyed both books in this series, but they aren't the type of novel that makes you think, or changes your life, or even remains for very long in your consciousness. 

Book 2 is about art theft and some characters from Book 1 reappear. It is mildly amusing, fast-paced, good fun, and it entertained me for a few hours.

*** [passes time in a pleasant way]

White Silence, Dark Light, Long Shadows by Jodi Taylor

     

     

This new series by Jodi Taylor has several things in common with her Chronicles Of St Mary's series, as I believe I mentioned in a previous review. I have now read all three of the Elizabeth Cage series, all that Taylor has published so far, and I have to admit that they were page-turners. They kept me awake for most of the night on at least three occasions. However, I am quite easy to please when it comes to mildly comic fantasy set in the contemporary world. 

As with the St Mary's books, the novels aren't without plot loopholes, or at least things you question while you're reading. I can't quite understand why Elizabeth Cage keeps returning to Rushford, for instance, or why she and Michael Jones haven't got down and dirty yet. However, the third book provides answers to several questions readers of books one and two might have, resolving some issues and raising others. 

These books are a bit of a mish-mash of different fantasy motifs, psychological horror, modern mystery and dystopian communities, but they aren't hard-core. There are some scary set-pieces, but it is 'cosy' scary rather than ''hide behind the settee peering out between your fingers' terrifying. The books have an oddly old-fashioned, Hammer-horror, atmosphere. Modern technology takes a back seat. Elizabeth Cage might be a magnet for paranormal activity and weird shenanigans, but she is also a heroine who wouldn't be completely out of place in a 1950s suburb. I quite like this oddness, myself, though I admit it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Taylor's stories tend to twist and turn, sometimes implausibly, and this series is definitely compelling, if you can suspend your disbelief. We are talking genre-fiction here, guys, however - this isn't literary fiction, and there is a degree of light-heartedness here and there which lovers of horror might not approve of.

**** [recommended]

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

You will know by now that I am a MASSIVE Kate Atkinson fan, and I admit that I haven't reached the end of her latest novel yet so this review is a little premature. However, I thought I would write something here about it, nevertheless.

I'm not keen on the title, and not just because 'gaiety' is difficult to spell. It doesn't quite tell me what to expect - it's a bit vague, a bit melodramatic, despite also being quite apt for a novel concerned with London nightclubs in the 1920s.  This isn't a 'bright young things' novel like Evelyn Waugh's 'Vile Bodies', however. It is about the grimy underworld of post-WW1 London, a world where the ruthless Old Ma Coker and her family run several lucrative nightclubs, notably The Amethyst, and where a spate of murders and handbag-snatching are taking place. This is a world of gangs and corrupt policemen, drugs and criminals, illegal abortionists and missing girls. The Coker offspring's contempt for the 'bright young things' is expressed forcefully several times.

Gwendolin Kelling, a librarian from York, is in London searching for two runaway teenage girls, Freda and Florence. There she meets Inspector Frobisher, tasked with ridding Bow Street of its corruption, homesick for the rural Shropshire where he grew up, and unhappily married to a French would-be suicide driven to drugs and despair by the loss of her child. Niven Coker, Mrs Coker's eldest son, is a man of almost James-Bondian mystery, driving a cream Hispano-Suiza, always accompanied by his German shepherd dog, Keeper. At the point I am at, it is hard to tell whether he is a good guy or a bad one. As always, with Kate Atkinson, no one wears the right coloured hat.  

In fact, the best-selling novel 'The Green Hat' by Michael Arlen is a motif running through the story, and always, along with the 'Bright Young Things' themselves, with a sneer. One of my reservations about the novel is that, at times, it wears it's period research a little too obviously. Atkinson is at her best when she uses her imagination.  One of her characteristic devices is to have characters respond verbally to things that other characters have only thought, not said aloud, which began to jar for me in this novel. Nevertheless it fits with the slender thread of the almost-supernatural that weaves through the story - Mrs Coker's recurring hallucination of Maud, a dead night-club hostess, and her 'reading' of cards and tea-leaves, for instance. You feel that Atkinson is always itching to bring in some magical realism.

My favourite sections were those which tell Freda's story. Despite being a 'stage child', I found Freda an appealing character. Similarly, Gwendolin is compelling too, though she reminds me of Harriet Vane. 

I haven't read the entire book yet so it is unfair to judge it too soon, but it is not gripping me quite as much as other Atkinson books I have read. Her Jackson Brody novels are utterly absorbing, and I love Life After Life and A God In Ruins. I even loved Emotionally Weird, which had very mixed reviews, and her book of short stories Not The End Of The World, which many people I know loathed. Maybe by the time I reach the end of The Shrines Of Gaiety, I'll love this one too - but so far it is falling a little short of my expectations.

14 October update:

I have now read the entire novel and my opinion of it has changed a little. This is, like many of Atkinson's novels, an exercise in exploring the nature of writing itself. As with other of her novels, she uses intertextuality (the amusing excerpts from Ramsay's putative novel, among other things), highlighting the role of artifice and satirising people who think writing a novel is easy. Atkinson shuffles back and forth in time, sometimes describing exactly the same event but from another character's viewpoint, which is particularly effective in what is, at least in part, a crime novel. But it is the ending of the novel which highlights the fictionality of novels most obviously. It is both satisfying and also pared down, with a deliberate feeling that it is being rushed, invented as the writer goes along. The various plot threads come together in often implausible ways, but with a bright fizz of energy as everything is rounded off neatly. Yet the final plot strand mentioned is left open, in an enjoyable way.  This is very self-conscious writing and few novelists could pull it off as well as Atkinson does. 

    

Atkinson's sense of humour glimmers throughout. Frequently, I found myself being deeply frustrated by Frobisher's inability to actually do anything about police corruption or about the spate of murders in the city. He only discovers what the bad cops are up to by being told by another character. He never finds Florence and he finds Freda completely serendipitously after saving her life in a random act of heroism. He is actually  a fairly incompetent police officer, and it is amusing how he always seems to just miss the crucial clue. Gwendolin Kelling, breezy and capable, is much better than him. Their relationship is funny and convincing.  Frobisher's fate too feels like the sort of thing a novelist might do when she doesn't really know how to resolve a situation she has created - there is a deus ex machina aspect to it, but the contrivance feels planned and deliberate nevertheless. Atkinson is playing around with fictional cliches, plot stereotypes, narrative expectations. 

The novel has a strong feminist undercurrent. The misogyny exhibited by many of the men in the book is shocking. This is a novel where the influence of the #MeToo movement is apparent, but where women generally come out on top.

***** [highly recommended - not the best Kate Atkinson book I've read but still up there in the five-star bracket]

 Rosie

[acrylic paint]

Cushions

[acrylic paint]

 

  SEPTEMBER 2022 

God Bless Our Gracious Queen

 On Thursday the 8th of September, 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral, aged 96, just a day or so after meeting outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his successor Liz Truss. 

You wouldn't want your own nonagenarian grandma to meet either of them, would you?

I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I'm not a monarchist. I think most of the Royal Family are a waste of space and money, and ought to get proper jobs. However, I've always had a sneaking admiration for the queen herself. Being born into wealth and privilege is just as much an accident of birth as being born into poverty and destitution, and neither makes you automatically deserving or undeserving. It's not as if you get a choice in the matter, is it? And there are vanishingly few people who would willingly relinquish their fortunes for the good of mankind.

So, yes, the queen was an immensely privileged woman. She had the best of medical care, the best food, servants and carers and helpers, multiple properties with a full staff to run them, as much foreign travel as she desired with the most convenient and luxurious methods of transport; she had horses, dogs, hairdressers, specially-designed clothes. She also married a handsome, dashing young man and had four healthy children. Her life was, in many ways, blessed in a way that 'ordinary people' can barely imagine.

However, she had her share of personal tragedies too. Her beloved father died young, and in a life of almost a century she lost many others close to her. Even rich people feel grief, despite what many poor people seem to think! She experienced the soap opera that has been her children's adult lives, including the whole 'Diana Debacle' and the discovery that her second son is probably a sexual predator with questionable friends. 

But more than anything else, she has existed within the confines of a system of protocol and tradition, of inflexible expectations, of ritual and duty that the rest of us can't really imagine. Queen Elizabeth always seemed to me to take her Royal duties very seriously. Whatever you think of the Royal Family, Elizabeth was always hard-working, highly-conscientious, and believed in fulfilling her role in the best way she could. When I think of her, words like 'tireless' and 'devoted' spring to mind. She had no real material power to change anything substantial, but she was nevertheless expected to be our ambassador, a diplomatic host for foreign dignitaries whether she liked them or not, always our charming and dignified representative. She wasn't able to express her true opinions on anything. We all recognised her, seeing her face on bank notes, coins and stamps all our lives, watching her wave from carriages and on walkabouts, wearing those distinctive pastel-coloured outfits that many found funny, unflattering or outdated, but which seemed apt - slightly out of touch, slightly off-kilter, as befits a woman who lived such a strange and off-kilter life.

She travelled the world. She met famous people. She rode her horses and walked her dogs and played Christmas games at Balmoral with her family. She watched TV. She interacted with fourteen different Prime Ministers of Great Britain, starting with Winston Churchill and ending, in an example of wincing bathos, with Liz Truss. She was by all accounts a bit of a philistine, a woman of action rather than intellectualism, a woman who had a sense of humour despite her sometimes dour outward appearance. 

I could not have done her job. I don't care how many huge mansions and foreign holidays I was given, I could not have spent so much of my time waving and smiling, small-talking strangers, attending tedious formal dinners and nonsensical rituals, remembering I was always on public display and so were the rest of my closest family. And not being able to retire! I don't have it in me to devote my existence to this type of life. But Queen Elizabeth believed in 'Public Service' and that this was what she had dedicated her life to, when taking on the role of queen. She might have been deluded in this. Her religious faith and her upbringing might have led her to a false idea of what being a monarch was about. But we must surely admire her dedication, her quiet conscientiousness, her hard work.

There are of course much worse ways to live than the life lived by our deceased queen, but let's be honest - in this country, most of us don't live in those ways. Most of us aren't starving or freezing or homeless (not yet, anyway), and we can choose what we want to do, most of the time, within reason. We can slob around in our night-clothes all day if we want, when we're not at work - we can be rude to the neighbours if we're feeling pre-menstrual - we can get drunk and snog a strippagram without fear of it being splashed over the front page of the papers next day. We don't have to spend hours in the company of people we don't like, being nice to them, except occasionally (at Christmas, for instance!). We don't have to live in ridiculously large, draughty houses or wear clothes chosen for us by other people. And we don't have to work until the day we die. 

I was much more upset by the death of Queen Elizabeth than I expected to be. It is the end of an era. Her demise, though expected, has saddened even a staunch republican like myself, and I'm not afraid to admit it. She was tough, competent, determined and devoted to what she saw as her duty, and those qualities are not often seen these days.