All at Sea

Fans of first-rate radio drama might be interested to know that Colin MacDonald's new play, All at Sea, will be broadcast on Radio 4 today at 2.15 pm.

David Murdoch is on a post-redundancy cruise in the Indian Ocean when the ship runs into trouble off the pirate-ridden Somali coast. The cast includes Maynard Eziashi.

This highly topical thriller has been produced in an astonishingly short space of time. Colin told me on Friday:

I was only commissioned to write it on the 22nd December. It was written (somehow) between then and now, and recorded at the BBC studios in Glasgow on Monday and Tuesday, edited on Wednesday and Thursday ... and goes out this coming Monday!

It will be available to UK listeners on iPlayer for seven days.

Friday Interview: Colin MacDonald - The Whole of the Moon

The subject of this week's Friday Interview is Scottish playwright Colin MacDonald, whose poignant radio play Hill of Rains I blogged about earlier this year.

Colin (centre) with cast members from his comedy, King Of Hearts, BBC Scotland

Colin, your latest radio work is a five-parter, The Whole of the Moon. What is it about?

It's a story about secrets, set in Edinburgh's legal world. It's about an up-and-coming prosecutor, Jo Ross, who finds herself investigating the secret history of her own family, and in particular the deeds of her father, a veteran police officer. I was allowed unlimited access behind-the-scenes in the Scottish courts while doing research for the story.

The title comes from The Waterboys' song of the same name:

'I pictured a rainbow
You held in your hands
I had flashes
But you saw then plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon . . .'

How much have you been involved in the casting and production?

A lot! I have worked with the producer and director Patrick Rayner many times and we talked about casting as I was writing. But Patrick is a renowned expert when it comes to casting. In his long and award-strewn career he has worked with so many actors, and knows instinctively who could play a certain role best. As a result, we have a superb cast who worked so very well together in the studio.

Vicki Liddell and Steve McNicoll are the two leads and they inhabit wonderfully the characters I created. I was there, as always, during the two days of recording. Lines have to be changed because even although I might say them out loud when I've written them (and I do!) they might not have the proper rhythm when actors say them in the studio. Also scenes may need changing when cuts, because of timings, have to be made.


Is writing five daily episodes more of a challenge than writing a single, self-contained play?

I'd never done it before, so writing five fifteen-minute episodes certainly concentrated my mind on getting on with the story. I like a challenge - it is good to be shaken out of your comfort zone!


The characters sound fascinating. Do you have plans to explore their stories further in the future?

Yes, Radio 4 have just commissioned a second series. That will go out next year. The two central characters Jo Ross and Iain Rae have been 'with me' for a long time and I am keen that they develop and grow as people as the stories progress.


I first came across your work through your radio play, Hill of Rains, which starred two of radio's most distinctive voices - Bill Paterson and Lorelei King. What were they like to work with, and how well do you think they interpreted the characters you'd written?

They were extraordinary people to work with. I could not now differentiate between the characters I heard in my head and those two wonderful actors. When you have people that gifted working on something you wrote it is an absolute joy. They brought magic to it, and an intimacy that is rare.


Hill of Rains made a marked impression on me because of the great depth of feeling which seemed to underpin the 'romantic comedy' aspect of the story. Did you set out to write a romantic piece or was it always your intention to explore more profound themes at the same time?

I don't ever set out to write about a particular theme. It is normally the person who 'appears' to me. And that can be triggered by observing someone's hand movement, or someone's gesture. In this case, I was walking in Edinburgh on a winter's afternoon. The sun was low and I became aware of someone walking over a small hill away from me, and the person's silhouette in the sun was exactly the same as my mother's. She had died a couple of years before. The story grew out of that mood, and that extraordinary moment.


And the music - Peter Maxwell Davies's Farewell to Stromness - for me it was absolutely perfect. Whose idea was that?

The producer and director Marilyn Imrie takes all the credit for that.


You've also dramatised one of my favourite books, Nancy Brysson Morrisson's The Gowk Storm , as a stage play. (How I wish I'd seen that!) What inspired you to turn that particular novel into a play?

The cover of the book! I was in a bookshop . . . and the cover stood out from all the other covers. It was spooky, as if I was being haunted by that face. I bought the book, took it home, and read it in an afternoon. I knew as I was reading it that I wanted to bring it to the stage. It was so dramatic, so moody, so atmospheric.

Cover of the Canongate edition, featuring 'Head of a Young Girl' by George Clausen

So, some similar themes to those in Hill of Rains, then?

Women trapped by men! It's beginning to sound like a familiar theme although I don't do themes!


And full of the importance of Scottish weather, too. Is that a coincidence?

I am affected by the weather. I remember running wild in the wind when I was a child. And growing up in the far North of Scotland you are affected, deeply, by whatever the climate brings!

Are there any plans for another stage production of The Gowk Storm?

In these financially straightened times it would be difficult. It had a cast of ten, which is enormous. But if any millionaire philanthropist is reading this blog . . . you know where to find me.


And after The Whole of the Moon - what's next in the pipeline?

I am finishing a stage play which will be staged at Oran mor in Glasgow at the end of November. It's called The Bones Boys, and will be staged in the A Play A Pie A Pint series. It's about two monks, on a journey fraught with danger.

Oran mor

Many thanks, Colin, for being the subject of this week's Friday Interview.

You can listen to The Whole of the Moon every weekday on Woman's Hour from Monday 29th September, at 10.45-11.00 am and again at 7.45-8.00 pm on Radio 4, and each episode will be available on 'listen again' for seven days following its broadcast.

And finally, for anyone unfamiliar with the original Water Boys song which inspired the title of the drama, here they are singing The Whole of the Moon in 1985:

A few updates

● Re last Wednesday's post: you can hear Katie Hafner talking to James Naughtie about her book A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano here .

● Re Race for Life - thank you, thank you to all my very generous sponsors - so many of whom this year have been blogging friends I've never actually met. Which moves me more than I can say. I received another unexpected donation this morning and some more cheques are, I'm told, in the post, so I'm expecting to meet my £500 fund-raising target quite soon. In the light of some news received during the week, I've decided to abandon the wimpish idea of hanging up my trainers after all. I'm going to be running Race for Life every year until I have to walk it, and then walking every year thereafter.

● Listened to a deeply affecting programme on R4 yesterday - Leonard and Marianne - a poignant celebration of a great but ultimately lost love, which D at 60goingon16 has pipped me to posting about - you can read all about it on her blog here.

● In response to the comments on Friday's post: I've long considered that a view of the sea is well nigh essential when eating fish and chips. One of my earliest memories of sheer foody bliss is eating chips in the pouring rain in Polperro aged 7. I was a skinny, picky child, not given to associating food with pleasure, so this vivid recollection of overwhelming sensory delight is definitely one of life's Proustian moments. (For readers outside the UK, I should add that rain is an integral feature of the Traditional British Seaside Holiday, so one learns from an early age to accept that being cold and damp is All Part of the Fun.)

As a student I lived for a year in an insalubrious shared flat in Westgate-on-Sea - a dismal small town then populated almost entirely by pensioners and students. It was a year given over largely to Chaucer and the major works of nineteenth-century fiction, so, for me, the expression 'beach reading' conjures Middlemarch or Little Dorrit, rather than a bit of fluffy nonsense.

I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the ships,
And there I'll sit on Westgate sands,
Eating fish and chips.

Other classic coastal fish and chip memories include: the spray-drenched Cobb at Lyme Regis as the tide came in; perched on the jetty at Tobermory, feet resting on one of the fishing boats which landed the very fish I was eating (from the famous Fish and Chip Van); gazing down at Whitby harbour from a precariously high vantage point (slippery cobbles in the inevitable rain); and at Seahouses, following a bracing boat trip to the Farne Islands.

● The plant I photographed on Friday, Kim, is sea holly (Eryngium maritimum) now beloved of florists, once prized as an aphrodisiac (you can read more about it here).

● There's a great book giveaway happening on Random Distractions this week. For your chance to grab one of a selection of interesting titles, all you have to do is a spot of Latin translation and/or demonstrate your innate sense of humour. (My own scant reserves of scholarship and wit have yet to throw up anything worth posting, but I'm working on it.)

● And finally, happily recovered from her recent operation, Jane is back at Books, Mud and Compost, with some evocative thoughts on childhood winters in the 1960s. If you're of a Certain Age, and you live in the UK, you will 'relate bigtime', as they say.

My Sunday of Shame

Sunday mornings are a celebration of the hypocrisies of my life, it seems.

First, it's breakfast. And finding the bread-bin empty of all but a few stale crusts (usual inefficient housekeeping having taken a steep nosedive since school hols arrived), I nipped down the road to Tesco Express to pick up some croissants. Six for the price of four - hurrah! Now I wasn't at all keen on Tesco's arrival on Mersea when it was first mooted. I perused the Tescopoly website in some detail and thought to myself, yup, I agree with all of that. Tesco is a Thoroughly Bad Thing, and I won't be shopping there. No, not ever. Not under any circumstances.

Yeah, right . . . (Shame score 9.5/10)

And you'll note that word 'croissants' above. I'm on a diet. I've been on one for about 15 years, ever since my first pregnancy transformed me overnight from sylph to giant whale and somehow - what with a chronic lack of willpower and an excessive fondness for, er, basically, eating stuff - this is a state of affairs which has persisted. But a few weeks ago it was all made official. I had a health-check with our doctors' practice nurse and, while attempting to reassemble the scales I'd just broken, she remarked: 'you do realise, of course, that you are overweight?'. 'Um, yes, thanks, I did sort of assume that I was.' 'It's just a question of eating less, really', she added, helpfully. 'Oh, right, OK then, I'll do that. Thanks.'

There is a surprisingly vast difference between glancing at oneself in mirrors for a decade and a half and thinking 'ugh, yuck, hideous, really must do something about this' and actually being told by a medical professional that one firmly resides in the wrong segment of the graph indicating the divide between 'desirable' and 'undesirable'.

I am actually being quite good, on the whole (though observant readers will have noticed the giveaway words 'fish' and 'chips' with reference to Friday evening). During the week, I exist virtuously on fruit and veg and seeds and salads and prawns and herrings etc etc. But Sunday is my Day of Rest [from virtue]. So it's croissants and Fortnum & Mason's Nonpareil Marmalade (the latter a gift, I hasten to add). (Shame score 7/10)

(But . . . 'Lovingly handmade in England', it says on the marmalade label. Gosh! Even when I'm making marmalade for my family, I find that the love goes out of it pretty early in the blister-inducing, wrist-aching business of chopping up a ton of citrus fruit. The image of happy, smiling marmalade-makers in Cath Kidston pinnies, giving every orange a tender little kiss before gently caressing it with their razor-sharp Sabatiers is an edifying but, I suspect, wholly unlikely one. Can trading standards officers check the levels of love in marmalade? And if so, how?)

And then there's The Archers. To highlight the hypocrisy of my devotion to this programme, I should explain that I absolutely loathe television soap operas. I can't understand why on earth anyone would wish to spend whole tracts of every evening of their lives slumped in front of them. I detest the racks and racks of magazines and newspapers (newspapers, for heavens' sake) devoted to their characters and plots and actors. I get most especially ranty about the fact that the majority of British children (if my children's friends are anything to go by) absorb from earliest infancy these unedifying tales of domestic violence, rampant partner-swapping, incest, murder, excessive drinking and general foul-mouthed human interaction. But that's telly.


Radio is, of course, different! And my addiction to radio's longest-running 'soap opera', or, as it used to be described and I prefer to think of it, 'everyday tale of country folk' is thus, from my own blinkered viewpoint, entirely excusable. Indeed, I have absorbed it from earliest infancy! I took a short, defiant break from listening when I was first a rebellious student, affecting to despise it because it reminded me of home. But by the time I was sitting my finals, it had become a comforting life-line, and so it has remained. So despite having listened every night this week, I also listened to the Omnibus edition this morning while folding piles of laundry and wiping croissant crumbs from various surface. As fellow devotees will be aware, right now the drama is high-octane stuff and come 7.00 tonight there'll be no tearing us away from our radios. (Shame score 1/10)

So that's my Sunday of Shame score.

Oh, all apart from one. I was brought up in the heart of the Anglican church and have wafted in an out of it at various points in life. Right now, I'm further from it than I've ever been. Churchgoing is not a feature of my Sundays. (Shame score: not really mine to call)

Romance on the Radio

An email today from Katie Hafner brought two extremely exciting bits of news about her excellent book, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano, which I reviewed here (and also held a prize draw for a review copy!):


First, her publishers, Bloomsbury, have decided to publish a UK edition , which will be available in the middle of August. You will see from the reviews on Amazon.com and also those linked here (where you can also read some pages from the book) how enthusiastically the book has been received in the US and in Canada. I'm convinced it will do really well over here, too.

Secondly (and this should really help to boost interest in the UK), Katie is over this side of the Pond at the moment and will be talking about the book on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme tomorrow (Thursday) morning sometime after 8.30 (I think, but best listen from about 8.15 or check the running order in the morning to be sure of catching her).

The joys of a good hardback

I hardly ever listen to Saturday Live on R4, but I did today and - gosh! - there was Jane, from Books, Mud and Compost, extolling the virtues of the hardback book - from her Folio Society edition of Diary of a Provincial Lady to the wonderful red 1950s/60s hardback versions of Enid Blyton's Famous Five stories.

You can catch the programme again on the R4 website for the next seven days - Jane's about three-quarters of the way through, just after Howard Jacobson's thoughts about the importance of hardback books from an author's point of view (apropos Picador's decision to abandon publishing in hardback).

Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton (23 May 1921 - 25 April 2008

"As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication."

Humph.

National Treasure.

RIP.

Warbling away

Wassily Kandinsky - "All Saints I"

Just in the middle of the second great choral offering this week on Performance on 3 . Yesterday it was Handel's Messiah . Today, Bach's Cantata No 21, Ich hatte viel Bekummernis, followed by Brahms' German Requiem. What bliss.

Luckily, I'm shut away in my office so it doesn't matter to anyone else that I'm indulging in a bit of singing along. It's ages since I sang in a decent choir. This is something that must be remedied, I think, before I become one of those warbly elderly ladies whom choirmasters agonise over sacking in a tactful fashion.

Tomorrow, for Good Friday, we will be treated to Bach's St John Passion , with the Choir of the Enlightenment and the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment.

(You can catch all three concerts again for the next seven days.)

Farewell to Stromness . . . and the January blues

A melancholic January cloud has descended upon me - despite today's intermittently glorious weather - and I've been listening to music which echoes that mood, since I know from experience that anything jolly will simply jar and annoy me rather than cheering me up.

One of my downbeat iTunes du jour has been Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness - a wistful piano interlude from The Yellow Cake Revue, a sequence written in protest against uranium mining in the Orkney Islands. The Revue was first performed at the St Magnus Festival, Orkney, by Eleanor Bron, with the composer at the piano, in June 1980.

I was captivated by the original piano version when I first heard it back in the 80s and then I rediscovered it three or four years ago when it was used as the soundtrack to a wonderful R4 play by Colin Macdonald, Hill of Rains, starring Bill Paterson and Lorelei King (surely two of the very best voices in radio drama and what a joy to hear them together in this transatlantic love story).

Farewell to Stromness was absolutely perfect as a leitmotif in this story of two lonely, troubled people from opposite ends of the world who meet in the south-west Highlands. He’s a librarian, she’s over from New York, researching some family history. On their first encounter they dislike each other quite fiercely, but gradually, through their shared love of music and words, and a day spent walking in the hills and getting thoroughly drenched in a very Scottish downpour . . . well, yes, of course (it being a love story and everything), they fall in love. It had a tremendously romantic ending and I ‘listened again’ to it every day for a week!

(I also promptly ordered the sheet music and learned to play [the easy bits of] it [very badly] on the piano. Bit of a lost cause, me and the piano, these days.)

Apparently, hearing Maxwell Davies giving the premier performance of Farewell to Stromness inspired a member of the audience, Timothy Walker, to transcribe it for solo guitar, which he performed himself, two days later, in Kirkwall Cathedral, as part of the same Festival. I hadn't known that when I came across the guitar version by chance, on Graham Anthony Devine's album of British Guitar Music. (Regular readers will know that I have a bit of a thing about classical guitarists . . .!)

This is what Classical Guitar Magazine said about Mr Devine in 2006:

‘Fluency, beautiful tone, power, clarity, timing, phrasing, technical brilliance, a keen musical intelligence- none of these is a stranger to the guitar recital hall, but this young player confounds criticism by possessing them all, and in spades. We can expect even greater things, my guess is that Graham Devine is well on his way to becoming a musician of stellar magnitude.’

Here he is, playing Farewell to Stromness, accompanied by some lovely images of Orkney.

Portraits of East Anglia

I don't listen to anything like as much radio as I would wish - nor half as much as I used to, back in the days when my workload was more dominated by typesetting than by editing (which needs a different kind of concentration).

But I have been making time for this week's treat on Radio 4 - Portraits of East Anglia, five specially commissioned stories by local authors, inspired by paintings of the East Anglian landscape, read by well-known actors and recorded in front of an audience in Halesworth, Suffolk.

Well worth a listen - each one's only 15 minutes long.

Man in the Water by Rose Tremain, read by Richard Hope

Jenny swears that she sees a man in the water and her father takes his fishing boat out to search for him. But when he finds nobody and there are no reports of a missing person, he begins to question her motives.


Teeny Weeny Little World by DJ Taylor, read by Stephen Critchlow

As a new school term begins, the recently appointed headmaster is making his mark with all sorts of changes - far too many for Mr Crowther's liking.


Days of Rest by Jill Laurimore, read by Rachel Atkins

On a beautiful summer Sunday, Jules is paying a visit to see Gran in her Suffolk care home. But it's not long before her London employers track her down.


Time and Tide by Anthony Horowitz, read by Gerard McDermott

On a Sunday afternoon in late September, two men make their way home across the quay at Orford. The dreaded weekenders have left and the village is once again quiet. But is everything quite as it seems?


The Red Digger by Raffaella Barker, read by Alex Tregear

Jules and Dino have arranged to meet their Dad on the beach after his fishing trip to walk the dog. But when the dog appears and Dad doesn't, the teenagers fear the worst.


You can listen to the stories here for a week following each broadcast.

And to see the paintings which inspired the writers, click here.

Forgot to say . . .

Re Christmas Day - the Cooking of the Lunch was considerably enhanced by listening to the bizarre and brilliant Humph in Wonderland - which you can catch again if you're quick between now and New Year's Day.

Re the Mersea Boxing Day Swim - you can see more photos here . For infomation on supporting the RNLI and to find out more about the West Mersea station, click here. And there's also a video clip of the swim here.

Radio 4 me

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up with Radio 4 . My mother stopped teaching when I was came along and stayed at home ever after, being a full-time mum and all-round domestic goddess. And everything that she did around the house – and continues to do, with the same energy and accomplishment even as she heads towards her eighties – was to the strains of Radio 4 (or the Home Service, as it was formerly known).

And apart from a brief defection into the frequencies of Radio 1, Radio Luxembourg and Capital Radio in my teens, I’ve been listening largely to R4 ever since (with a bit of R2 and R3 thrown in depending on my mood and what’s on). The ‘tone’ or R4 is very deeply ingrained in my consciousness, and rather difficult to shake off. I find that I can’t even take quite seriously news programmes on other radio stations, on which the headlines are read in urgent tones, or interspersed with music and sound effects. Give me the measured newsreading of Charlotte Green, or Peter Donaldson any day.

I’m not an uncritical devotee. There are things about Radio 4 I actively loathe, among them Bells on Sunday (I have nothing whatever against the sound of church bells - in fact I think they sound rather nice - I just don’t want to hear them on the radio. Ever.); the ultra-sanctimonious You and Yours, and the utterly vile and awful Sailing By – a piece of ‘music’ composed by the late Ronald Binge, which makes me rush for the off-switch if I have the misfortune still to be awake with the radio playing at quarter to one in the morning. It is sooooo hideous (and all the worse for being very ‘catchy’ - listen if you dare!) that if I am accidentally subjected to so much as two bars of it, I need to listen to at least ten minutes of something half decent to wash it from my brain. I celebrated its demise some years ago – prematurely, as it turned out, because a clamorous protest from its fans - amongst them Jarvis Cocker - brought it back again (strange but sadly true).

Anyway, I didn’t actually set out to list all the things I detest about good old Radio 4. The list of programmes which I treasure is long and diverse. Today, having listened to the latest episode while pootling around the kitchen, I felt inspired to write in praise of one of the most priceless Jewels in the Radio 4 Crown – the funniest show on radio, I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue , sadly nearing the end of its current season (you can catch the latest episode here).

If you’ve never caught this long-running (since 1972) feast of surreal but intelligent silliness, then you can hear some tiny snippets here (Fingers on Buzzers and Name that Barcode recommended) and here (of which the first is the longest and best). Annoyingly, some of the best games – One Song to the Tune of Another, for example, are not included. Better by far, buy the CDs , sit well back (so you don’t fall off whatever you’re sitting on) and enjoy.

The brightest star in the ISIHAC firmament is is Humphrey Lyttelton - 'Humph' - whose bewildered-sounding chairmanship, outrageous double-entendres and constant putting-down of the panellists are priceless. I've never been in the audience at a recording of the programme - something I've been meaning to do for years - but I have been lucky enough to see Humph and his jazz band performing. He signed a CD for me and, as you'll see, his handwriting bears witness to his passion for calligraphy.

There's was an excellent 85th birthday interview with Humph in the Independent earlier this year.

The 48 at 8

Tune in to Radio 3 at 8 every morning and listen to the Well-Tempered Clavier - a prelude or fugue played daily until 17 January.

Meanwhile, the recent book of the same name either is, or is not, going great guns, depending on one's interpretation of the daily updates on the author's increasingly bizarre blog (of the same name).

Fame and fortune and deadlines

Deadlines.

Dead. Lines.

D-e-a-d-l-i-n-e-s.

I am under fire. But I’m hanging on in there. Like this rose in my garden. Despite some extremely squally showers, and heavy rain overnight, it is still not in tatters. Not yet.

While performing some routine tasks in the last couple of days, I’ve been catching up on some Radio 4. Notably Frederic Raphael’s radio adaptation of his Fame and Fortune, which is being serialised in six parts. It’s very Raphaelite – stagey and self-conscious, with dialogue that’s as contrived as can be. But it works. There’s real truth in there. The students from The Glittering Prizes are middle-aged now. Aren’t we all. It’s engaging, it grips, it flows and I love it. I’m debating whether to read the book – I’ll have to have a dip in a bookshop before deciding. I rather suspect that, having listened to Tom Conti, Miranda Richardson, Harriet Walter, Nigel Havers et al, there will be little that the novel can add to this. But I may, of course, be entirely wrong. I often am.

Watched the third programme in the Genius of Photography series on BBC4 last night. This is a truly excellent series in every way – it goes that extra mile compared with so many TV documentaries. Riveting, intelligent and visually enlightening stuff from beginning to end. And knitting the whole lot together is the ideal narration by Dennis Lawson (which verges on the seductive, but maybe that’s just me),

Although, please, why don’t good actors ever query bad writing when they’re asked to read it? There was a less instead of a fewer and a mis-use of ‘comprised’. So routine these days that they don’t even register, I suppose. Except with people like me. Which is why I was so delighted to alight unexpectedly (as one does) upon this delicious blog the other day: my grammar could hit the target from that distance . It’s for People Who Care.

That William Coles fellow, author of The Well-Tempered Clavier, has his own special WTC blog. He seems to take great exception to people getting his name wrong . Which I find mildly amusing . . .

Worrying times out here on the East Coast. Many further north-east of here, in Suffolk and Norfolk, have woken this morning to the prospect of evacuation. The Muddy Island and its environs haven't yet featured in any of the flood warnings, but we're staying tuned for further news.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. I love this site: We Blog Cartoons You can re-use Dave's cartoons on your blog free and gratis. I shall be unable to resist posting some more from time to time.

Better get on with my work.

Middling, pedantic and covered in blackberries

I spent an interesting couple of hours earlier today surfing round various websites which offer us freelance publishing types an opportunity to advertise our services, link up with potential clients and do a bit of networking with our fellow wordsmiths. It was fascinating to see the range of websites through which editors and proofreaders offer their services to the world. Some are incredibly slick, snappy and seductive. Others look rather like one might suppose websites would have looked had they been around circa 1972 - brown/orange/red colour scheme, bad typography, unedifying content, uninspiring layout - just plan dull, frankly.

I have concluded that my site is probably somewhere in the middle. Which is at once both reassuring and vaguely alarming. It may not be glitzy, but with luck will not bore anyone to death. It receives a steadily increasing number of hits. And it brings in plenty of enquiries, so it must be serving its purpose.

And yet . . . who wants to be ‘middle’ anything? –aged? –of-the-road? -England? No thanks!

Except that by definition that’s exactly what the majority of us are (or is, if one is being quibbly over the singularity or plurality of ‘the majority’, which I suppose, in this game, one should be).

Having very nearly resolved, as a result of today's survey, to wrench my own website to tiny pieces and put it back together in a hip, cool and trendy fashion, I decided to take time out over a cup of tea and a (very small, I can assure you) portion of you-know-what, while listening to the Classic Serial on Radio 4. Which might be taken, I suppose, as proof beyond reasonable doubt of middle-just-about-everythingness.

Suffice to say, having mused on the matter for a little while, I concluded that I might as well leave the site as it is for the time being. After all, no single provider of publishing services is going to appeal to all potential clients, and it’s generally advisable to ‘be oneself’ rather than to cultivate an image, whether online or in person, which is likely, in the long run, to mislead.

One of the sites on which I have just listed my editorial ‘credentials’ describes proofreaders as ‘pedantic people with no friends’. Ha ha ha ha. Possibly not the ideal way to encourage potential advertisers – particular since it’s a pay-to-list site – but, yeah, well, we know what you mean, although some of us are really quite nice and friendly, actually, and haven’t worn an anorak since 1968.

Anyway, in the course of all this surfing around, I happened upon two particularly memorable sites, to which I’m sure I shall return on a frequent basis. The first is Hoopoe Prints - artist and printmaker Lisa Hooper’s beautifully presented site, in which her passion for landscape and the natural world shines through her work. Her mastery of a wide range of printmaking techniques, as well as painting, and her covetable handmade books are a delight to see.

Today’s other major discovery is dovegreyreader scribbles. I am probably the last bibliophile on earth to have discovered this, the ultimate reader’s blog. So forgive me for being behind the times and feel free to say 'like, duh, hello? you are soooo last year'. But it really is tremendous. You might not agree with all her verdicts, but you have to admit, dovegreyreader sure gets through a vast number of books in a month. And there are between-book vignettes on home, garden, craft-making, jam-making and Agas, too. What could be nicer?

I had a good-ish crop of blackberries in the garden myself, which I was planning to gather in and turn into delicious things to eat and drink. And then my son had a friend round to play. And they came in from the garden after some lengthy time, completely purple from tousled head to filthy toe. They had been having a battle. Naturally. The ammunition had been . . . blackberries. Why not? A handy and plentiful supply; spectacularly messy results – absolutely ideal for the purpose. Their bewilderment at the ensuing rant from the mad mother was so disarming that I nearly stopped mid-flow. But then thought better of it and continued unabated, from 'disgraceful waste of food', through 'purple footprints on kitchen floor', right up to 'get-those-clothes-off-straight-away-so-I-can-wash-them-or-the-stains-will-never-come-out'. I am going to have to search a little further afield for bramble bushes in the next week or two.

I really miss my Aga.

Curlews and call centres

My sincere thanks to the friend who, continuing the theme of curlew poems, sent me a link to this poem by Jeremy Hooker on the Poetry Archive website. Not only can you read the poem, you can also hear the poet reading it. Hooker says that he 'tries' to 'capture the haunting cry in words' and in my view he succeeds beautifully. A quick visit to the homepage of the Poetry Archive will be enough to get anyone going back and dipping in on a regular basis.

Isn't it sad when voicemail messages disappear of one's phone? A message on my mobile this morning warned me that some of mine were coming up for deletion in the next [different voice: 'three'] days, which reminded me of a poignant radio play I listened to, probably a couple of years ago, in which a woman had lost her dear friend (? daughter/sister . . . my memory of the facts is vague) in some catastrophe and the only link she retained with her loved one was a voicemail message, which was about to be deleted in [different voice: 'two'] days' time. What stayed in my mind was the mounting desperation with which she tried to get some sense out of the telephone call-centre staff - 'Where will the message go?' 'It's been recorded, so there must be a copy somewhere that can be saved for me? - It must exist somewhere. Why can't I keep it forever? Why can't you make an exception and not delete it? Please?' Of course, nobody could help. She listened to the voicemail for the very last time and then it was gone, forever, and with it her last tangible connection with her friend. It was a devastating scene.

Well, I'm off to see Shrek III this afternoon, so I'd better get on with some work while I can. Enjoy the curlew poem, and if anyone comes across any others on the same theme, do please send them along. I can feel an anthology coming on!