Packing Shed

Blog briefly hijacked today - this is a one-off and it'll be 'oi, get your own blog' next time - by the other half of Doyle & Co, just so you can see what it was like this crisp, frosty morning over at the old Packing Shed, which stands on the aptly named Packing Shed Island, just off the coast of West Mersea.

A working party of Canute-inspired volunteers chunters over there in boats at regular intervals to shovel shingle from one place and deposit it in another. Whereupon the sea gradually washes it back and the whole process starts all over again.

The idea is to keep the old shed (the history, significance and restoration of which you can read about here and here) standing upright on its own little island rather than allowing it to fall into the sea, which is easier said than done, hence the working parties and various heroic fund-raising efforts which have resulted in the importation of barge-loads of granite (necessitating even more shovelling).

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).

TBTE - now available with sound effects

Well, things were getting so bad (see comments to previous post) that I simply had to get out for a head-clearing walk. The sun sets so early these days that it's a mad dash to catch the last of the light immediately after collecting Small Doyle #3 from school. But it was well worth it - cold, clear and crisp - and the only nuisance was that I was too late for the cafe at which I had planned to treat myself to a large, frothy hot chocolate (disappointment level = extreme).

Anyway, here's TBTE (ie the beach this evening) - and I've just been remarkably clever (which proves that the walk worked its magic on my befuddled brain) and uploaded a video clip as well, so you can listen to the Muddy Island at dusk (and the panting noises in the background are my dog, incidentally, not me (or anyone else!)).

(If you'd like to see more photos of Mersea, Sam's taken some amazing ones on the beach recently, which you can see here, here and here. )

Here's the video :

The domestic non-genius

Just a quick update on all that Blog Readability Test nonsense: it turns out that the whole thing was not only a load of old tosh, but some kind of Google rating scam to boot. See Topsyturvydom for all the technical details. Basically, the message is: don't go there, don't do it, and, whatever you do, don't get the badge to prove it!

Even I'd noticed that the 'Test' didn't seem in any way linked to, or mentioned on, the website it purported to be part of. But once again, old fuzzy-brain here didn't go the extra mile and ask 'why not?' People exhibiting greater intellectual rigour have worked the whole thing out, so thank goodness for them, I say.

I'm just too busy wrestling with the statutory tables for a book on tax planning while peering over my shoulder to check whether the various mounds of laundry (dirty, clean, wet, dry, folded, unfolded and waiting (ha! as if . . .) to be ironed) have started to creep round the door of my study to mock me in muffled textile tones.

Which nightmare scenario allows me to introduce, quite effortlessly, my Muse of the Day:


There are so many Domestic Arts blogs out there, and they're gorgeous to look at and beautifully lifestyley, and make the lowly 'rest of us' all feel duly inadequate, which of course is a very large part of the Point of them, one suspects (through one's jaundiced eyes).

But they are all so completely filled with beautiful, tidy, clean, exquisitely arranged things, that it's rather like flicking through a year's worth of Country Living unrelieved by advertisements for conservatories, stairlifts and home gyms.

Do these people's homes never contain small dishes of assorted Action Man feet, odd Barbie sandals, broken sparkly hair ties, wrinkled conkers and pieces of unidentified Lego? Do domestic artists' children not solve the conundrum of 'room tidying' by scooping both dirty and clean clothes into big armfuls and depositing them in the laundry bin tangled with some festering bath towels they accidentally forgot to hang up to dry before the stench set in?

Is there never jam on these people's Farrow-and-Balled walls or chocolate biscuit trodden into their hand-woven carpets? And - to return to my original embittered theme du jour - where the heck is all their family laundry and why doesn't it dominate their lives utterly, or, if it does, why do they never mention it in the interests of Balance and some small, underlying sense of Reality?

Ach, ignore me, it's just been one of those days.

The tenor of which brings to mind the beautifully printed Philip Whalen poem on Susan's Green Chair Press blog . . .

10th December - A Special Birthday

Should it happen to be your birthday today, you share it with one of my favourite poets – Emily Dickinson , born 10 December 1830.

I’ve known some of Dickinson’s poems for years, but have only recently worked my way through the Complete Works - in fact, I haven’t quite finished yet. (As an Eng. Lit. girl, I'm probably a bit of a late-starter in this respect, to say the least.)

Because she’s on my ‘currently reading’ pile, she is constantly to hand on my bedside bookcase. But even when I’ve moved on to other books, there, by my bedside, she will be staying, along with my other favourite ‘dip into’ books.

I’ve found so much in her work that is exquisitely evocative and moving and personal. For anyone who’s a bit ‘scared’ of poetry, one of the best things about her work is that Emily Dickinson is often regarded as ‘coming from nowhere’. She doesn’t belong to any school or tradition of poetry, she simply ‘appeared’. And I wonder whether this doesn’t explain in large measure why her poems – 150 years old – seem so fresh and accessible and have gained her such a huge following. Her poems are completely timeless, it seems to me. Many of them could have been written yesterday. And when you see her handwritten versions, with their incomplete rhymes and unconventional punctuation (she was a great user of dashes and odd capitalisation) – they seem so spontaneous and full of life.

And yet, she was for the greater part of her life a recluse – the ‘Woman in White’ – who shied away from company and even from leaving the house at all.

How the words of a woman who saw hardly anyone, went hardly anywhere and, as far as is known, never consummated any of her loves, can be so alive, so direct and so bursting with meaning for contemporary readers remains a mystery. The enigma of the woman helps make her more accessible. There is so much there that is unknown, obscure, unresolved, that one reader’s response and guess at the true meaning of a Dickinson poems is as good as anyone else’s.



While providing vast trough-loads of fodder for academics, she has largely resisted their attempts to explain and confine her. And this she shares with another out-of-nowhere 'Great' – Shakespeare. You could spend your life analysing her work (and indeed millions have), but you’d never nail down that essential ‘yes’-ness which leaps into the reader’s heart when reading certain poems.

And so I’m not at all bothered by the fact that I don’t understand some of her poems, and find scholarly analysis of her rhyming structures (which, incidentally, until surprisingly recently, her editors ‘improved’ before publication) ultimately irrelevant. I don’t really care to explore what makes her poems ‘work’ – I simply know that certain of them tick to the beat of my heart, speak with a voice that I recognise.

Happy Birthday, Emily, and thank you for leaving us your poems (even though you probably didn’t mean to).

Here are a few of my favourites:



THERE is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!




YOU left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.




WILD nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!





I STARTED early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me,

And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.

But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,

And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion’s sleeve—
And then I started too.

And he—he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle,—then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.

Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.


There’s so much available on the internet about Emily Dickinson’s life and works, that it’s pretty pointless trying to give a potted version here. There's a huge collection of useful resources here , and her complete poems are available available online here . There’s a fantastic collection of links here for anyone who wants to delve further.

Gnossiennes

Since I discovered those clips of Göran Söllscher and his eleven-stringed guitar, I’ve been surfing around YouTube some more in odd idle moments.



And now, I bring you someone else who does amazing things with some extra guitar strings (in this case two extra - 8 altogether). These clips had me reaching for the Kleenex, even though I really do have quite a stiff upper lip most of the time - but the way this guy plays took me by surprise and did very strange and unexpected things to me.


There’s more about Antonio Lopez on his website, and he has his own YouTube and MySpace pages, too.



I confess I’m a bit smitten . . .

A lot smitten, actually . . .

Sigh.

A child of 11 could have written this blog!

I’ve just taken a Blog Readability Test.

I was quite surprised by my score of ‘High School’, because I’d have imagined that, in order to be understood by the average 11-16-year-old, a blog would have to be written in txt and full of :-) and ;-[ or like sooooo full of you know like kinda like cool stuff, know wot I mean? Yeah? Right? I’m like sooooo wo’evvah.

Had I achieved a ‘higher’ score, however, I think I’d have been a little worried that it meant my writing was obscure and impenetrable. The test very clearly states that it shows ‘what level of education is required to understand your blog’. This seems to me quite unambiguous. The higher the level of education required, the less lucid and intelligible your blog. It's not a test of the blogger's erudition, surely, but a test of its accessibilty to readers.

And yet, and yet, there are those out there (and I shan’t name names, but you know who you are) who are positively rejoicing (boasting even – would you credit it?) about the fact that their readers need to be of ‘Genius’-level intelligence to have the first clue what on earth they’re bloggin’ about. They even have a badge to prove it, which they display with no small modicum of pride. Maybe it's their not very coded way of saying 'this blog welcomes only those in academia - no riff-raff allowed'.

Hmmmmm. Maybe, not being very bright myself, I've completely misunderstood the purpose of this test. Perhaps my score means 'this blogger writes at sub-GCSE level, so if you're looking for anything interesting, please visit a Genius-level blog instead'.

I'm confused and slightly paranoid now.

If you want to test the readability of your blog and see what you make of all this nonsense, then click here (NB, I found I had to insert www. before my blog name to make it work.)

Leave a comment (if you dare to share), to let me know how you get on!

Oh, go on. Pleeeease?

Something to do

You've seen what a muddle my bookshelves are in, so it's hardly surprising, I suppose, that whilst rummaging for one thing I should happen unexpectedly on another. In this case an old, old friend - and just seeing its faded, battered cover and yellowed pages whisked me right back to 1968 (yes, I'm afraid I do go back that far, which is not an altogether edifying thought).


It's my copy of Something To Do by 'Septima', first published by Puffin Books in 1966. Mine is the 1968 reprint and it was given to me by a teacher at my Primary School, who was also a family friend. It must have been on my eighth or ninth birthday. One of my Puffin Club bookplates (inexpertly cut along the dotted line by me with my blunt-ended scissors, no doubt) was licked-and-sticked (luck-and-stuck?) to the flyleaf. Smudgy ink, new fountain pen.


Something To Do sums up what life was like in those far-off days. When children's telly came on for an hour and a half between Playschool and whatever 5.55 delight was on at the time (Tin-Tin, The Magic Roundabout, Hector's House . . .). Betweentimes it was 'The Testcard and Music' (quite nice music, sometimes, which one could dance to in one's dressing-up princess/ballerina/fairy clothes).


A rainy day meant that one couldn't play endlessly outdoors in the garden, or someone else's garden, or along the path beside the railway, or round the roads on one's bike or generally roam around looking for discarded Corona drinks bottles which one could take along to the corner shop and claim the 'deposit' back to spend on sweets (no mobile phones - our mothers hadn't a clue where we were - so long as we came home at tea-time it didn't really matter what we got up to).

A rainy day meant finding something else to do. And that's where Something To Do came into its own.

It is described by the Editor of Puffin Books, Kaye Webb, on the opening page thus:

'Here at last is a book to fill up all the wet days and dull days that produce the question "What can I do?" in every family. Something To Do has suggestions for things children can do at home, indoors and outside, without spending much money or being a terrible nuisance.'


Ha! Being a 'terrible nuisance', indeed. What we all tend to forget when we harp nostalgically back to the days when the majority of mothers were at home and 'there for' their children (and thus 'good' mothers, in contrast to the 'bad' working mothers of today) is that, in fact, they weren't. They were at home, yes, but by goodness most of them weren't sitting around reading us stories all the time, they were BUSY. In those days, running a home meant a bit more than organising the cleaning lady and loading the dishwasher/washing machine/tumble drier a couple of times a day. It meant a hard old grind, wrestling with pre-washing-machine 'boilers' and 'wringers'; scrubbing away at tough stains with bars of hard soap; heaving laundry out of hot water with huge wooden tongs; washing terry nappies; scouring pans with brillo pads and carpets with messy shampooers; making curtains and children's clothes; darning socks; growing vegetables; shoving leftover meat through the mincer without losing the ends of one's fingers.

Children had to 'run along a play' and 'be off out my kitchen' and generally avoid being a nuisance, just as much as my children have had to shove off and entertain themselves while I work at my PC. My mother may not have had client-imposed deadlines and the stresses of finding enough hours in the day to earn sufficient money, but she had other deadlines - home-made meals to put on the table at certain times; getting the washing dry enough on 'washing day' to iron on 'ironing day'; eking out the housekeeping money; catching the butcher's shop and the baker's before they closed for lunch (no 24/7 supermarkets for disorganised people then).

Before I was old enough to go to school, I remember having Little Grey Rabbit and Thomas the Tank Engine stories read to me in the afternoons, when a 'little sit down with a cup of tea' was permissible between the chores. The rest of the time, it was me on my own, with my knitted duck, my imagination, my garden, my Lego and, later, my sister to play with.

Enter Something To Do:

'Every busy mother's vade mecum. It will refresh her memory on half-forgotten pastimes, and save her any amount of brain-searching with its detailed information and plans for practical entertainments.'

And so it did. Looking through it now, it seems almost comical in its old-fashioned innocence. Every month there was a 'bird of the month' and a 'flower of the month', a poem, games to play, things to make, ideas for vaguely 'improving' activities outdoors and indoors. Detailed diagrams show how to make an Advent Calendar or some scenery for one's model railway. It's all very post-War and frugal, and pre-Blue Peter in its outlook. And, it goes without saying, entirely Middle-Class in its literary, domestic and environmental interests and aspirations.

But who cares? I was a child of that time and that class and this is why it has been such a delight to rediscover this battered pink paperback. I realise now how well I knew it. Not because my mother used it as her own good mother's handbook, particularly, but because it was very much mine. Its covers are faded because it was rarely on my bookcase, but out, sitting on the chest under my bedroom window, being referred to as I planted seeds in little pots and watered them daily, or made lavender bags out of old scarves, or paper fans with lolly-stick handles. I took it all very seriously!



The illustrations are by Shirley Hughes, in her characteristic homely, reassuring style, and they capture small things about the age which now seem charming. In the 'games to play' section for December, a group of children are playing 'What's the Time, Mr Wolf?'. The little girls are in party frocks with ribbons in their hair (not much has changed there, then), but the boys - the six-year-old boys of 1966 - are wearing shorts, long socks and ties! It's such details which bring home to me what another world I grew up in - and how very OLD I am now!!

Here are some pages from December. I may pop up some more each month next year.
Just for Something To Do.




While thinking about what to write about today, I visited some of my favourite blogs, only to find this most distressing example of the ghastly petty awfulness of some people. Why? Just, for goodness’ sake, why? My heart goes out to you and your family, Anne.

On a lighter and more frivolous note, I suddenly felt inspired to post a nude photograph of myself on my website. Cute, huh?!

Corrigendum

"Une oeuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix."

Which, roughly translated, means:

“A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”

Regular readers may remember this quote appearing in my 'Art Quote of the Day' widget, and I remarked upon in a post later that week . It sounded so modern, I squeaked, delightedly. Yet, look! - it was written by Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Wow!

Now along comes someone with a little more substance in the brain department - Rob Spence of Topsyturvydom (who seems to be some sort of Mancunian Selkie - but possibly the photo was taken when he wasn't looking quite his best). Anyway, for an aquatic mammal, Rob is very well read - which is probably just as well, given that he lectures in Eng Lit - and he's very kindly pointed out that I, the good people at Brainy Quotes who supply Art Quote of the Day, and several zillion other internet users have been Most Scandalously Misled.

It wasn't Alexander Pope who said this. It was Marcel Proust!

Mon Dieu! Quelle Horreur!

Goodness knows how this misattribution originated, but it must be pretty well established. Not only does it pop up comprehensively on Google, but it features in the WikiQuote page on Pope amongst a list of other quotes wrongly attributed to the great man. It has become a kind of literary urban myth. Now it's on the internet, it will never go away!

In my reply to Rob's comment, I expressed embarrassment that I'd perpetuated this bit of misinformation. 'What's to be embarrassed about?' he asked.

Here's what: I wrote that little post because it had struck me as quite amazing that Pope had written such a thing. I even checked it out with a bit of Googling, and . . . yep, yep, yep, sure enough, everyone was saying it was by Pope, so onto the bandwaggon I hopped and off I went. I didn't stop to enquire which essay, precisely, the passage came from. I didn't think: 'hang on, did things in shops have "price tags" in the early eighteenth century?'. And I didn't even notice the entries on the next page of Google in which Proust's name appeared beside those words.

OK, it was 12 minutes past midnight and I had probably (alright, definitely) sunk the odd glass or two of wine, but it was still lazy of me and I apologise.

(And there was me saying that my Art Quote of the Day widget would prove less 'controversial' than the others . . . Ha!)

Freelancers don't just do it for love

Here's a clip that's been doing the rounds in freelance circles. I discovered it courtesy of the Wordsmith (thanks, Wordsmith), since when I have noticed it appearing all over the place on the blogs of others who work at the freelance coalface in the arts/media/publishing.

Whether you're an editor whose clients make their low budget your problem rather than theirs ('sorry, we can't pay you more than £[derisory sum x] to do this, so take it or leave it but if you leave it we'll sulk and you'll never get any work from us again'); or a photographer whose image is selected for publication in a large-circulation national newspaper/magazine ('sorry we don't actually pay for photos, but you'll get a credit'); or a journalist who's asked to research and write a piece for peanuts because if you don't, then someone whose only goal is seeing their name in print will do it for nothing instead; or an artist who's offered twenty quid for an illustration that's taken days to create; or indeed anyone struggling to earn a living through their art, whose creative talent is completely undervalued or taken for granted or assumed to be available for nothing by those who bask in the certainty of a regular pay-cheque (I'm just setting the tone here, you understand, and the tone is full-blown RANT!) . . .

. . . then you're not alone. And this is for you . . .

More strings than most

Huge thanks to the email correspondent who alerted me to a wonderful series of YouTube clips featuring one of my favourite guitarists - Göran Söllscher - and his very special 11-string alto guitar.

I’ve never played the guitar myself beyond a few exploratory twangs and so speak entirely as a pathetically ignorant listener. (I am at a complete, vacant-eyed loss when people start talking knowledgeably about tuning and scordatura etc etc etc.) But, goodness me, do I know when I respond to what I hear, and Söllscher’s Eleven String Baroque CD is some of the most often played music on my PC’s iTunes collection while I’m working and on my kitchen CD player while I’m not.

I have only one quibble with the album, and that’s that he plays Weiss’s divine Passacaille quite criminally fast (i.m.h.o). In fact (sorry Mr S), but I’ve deleted that Passacaille from my iTunes list. If you’ve never heard this perfect little gem, then please, please listen to Julian Bream’s Baroque Guitar Recital. Bream's version just tears me to bits every time, and I have listened to it approximately 19,435 times.



Söllscher’s not stuck in a Baroque groove by any means. I recently acquired his compelling Schubert for Two – with violinist Gil Shaham – in which the guitar takes the piano part, and for which the accompanying leaflet in which the musicians discuss their approach to the music is unusually (for a CD insert) illuminating.



His Beatles collections - From Penny Lane . . . and Here, There and Everywhere - are clever and fun and demonstrate the kind of boundary-crossing musicianship which always appeals to me.

Having read a comment pointing out that Göran could easily be taken for Eric Clapton’s younger, slimmer, brother, this is now unfortunately a persistent notion which I’m finding difficult to put out of my mind. How can we persuade them to do a session together? Now that could be truly amazing!


(Mind you, given the comprehensive slating poor old Eric was given in yesterday’s Guardian, both as a man and as a musician, that is perhaps debatable – it will be interesting to see how balanced a view tonight’s South Bank Show (11.10 ITV1) does actually offer up: John Robinson’s ‘pick of the day’ summary doesn’t auger well, referring to ‘this deeply unsympathetic man’, his ‘grim self-obsession’ and Lord Melv’s ‘cushy interview’. Well, we’ll just have to watch and decide for ourselves . . . )

Back to Mr Söllscher, and just case Father Christmas is reading this (I am keeping an eye out for a tiny red blob appearing on the North Pole on my Visitor Locations map any day now) - The Renaissance Album is on my Christmas List.




I shall put a particularly large glass of port and a fat mince pie in the hearth on 24/12 and see what happens . . .



Here’s Göran playing Leopold Silvius Weiss’s Fantasie, in a recital in Tokyo in 2005 (and I’ve popped some other clips from the same concert down there on the right in my WeShow video favourites). Enjoy.

Not yet Christmassy, but getting there slowly . . .

A quiet, island-based Saturday for a change, and, on the way back from the Post Office with Small Doyles Nos 2 and 3, decided to pop in at the NSPCC Christmas Gift Sale at the MICA Centre . And very glad we did, too. Lots of familiar faces behind the stalls, and we came away with some delicious goodies: two gorgeous rouched silk ‘frou-frou’ scarves – at least one of which will be given as a Christmas gift (the other is hovering indecisively, in that no-woman’s land between selfless generosity and greedy must-haveness); some vibrant quince jelly from Clay Barn Orchard, Fingringhoe; lemon curd and sticky toffee sauce from Pure Preserves, Polstead (we know these are yummy, we've had them before); some birdy greetings cards by Leafy; a selection of Christmas cards, wrapping paper and paper chains sold in aid of Cancer Research, and various homemade cakes . . . of which there was no trace by the time I’d unpacked everything else and taken these pics.

I'm almost beginning to get my head round the idea of Christmas being only days away. Almost, but not quite.

It's dark in the park

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this novel. I’d read a couple of Rachel Cusk’s earlier books – Saving Agnes (which won the Whitbread First Novel Award) and The Country Life (Somerset Maugham Award) – so I knew how intense, darkly comic and keenly observed Cusk’s writing can be. And it is all these in Arlington Park. Yet while there are moments of grim humour, this is absolutely not a light comedy of middle-class suburban manners. It may be set in kitchens and bedrooms and within the maelstrom of domestic life, but it’s a whole world away from chic-lit and Aga-sagas.

And there’s a dead bird on the cover. Which kind of sets the tone.

This is not a book for domestic goddesses – nor for those for whom homemaking and motherhood are arts and ends in themselves. Neither will it be welcomed by those for whom the maintenance of hope and harmony and the preservation of a particular view of what women are for are made possible only by keeping too many awkward questions firmly at bay. It should be avoided at all costs by women who suspect that, if they once stop paddling furiously beneath the calm(ish) surface of domesticity, they will sink without trace – for the subject of Arlington Park is festering anger and dislocation; its characters women who stumble around their child-laden lives in a slightly puzzled daze, occasionally colliding with male partners who seem strange, alien creatures from a quite different world. (I fear that most male readers will be entirely baffled from start to finish.)

But, if you’re a woman and you’ve ever lifted your head from the chores for a moment, looked around and asked ‘who are these people around me?’, ‘do I really know them?’, ‘do I even like them?’, ‘how did I get here’, or ‘what is the point of all this, where will it all end and what will become of me?’, then this will strike some chords. And they won't be sweet, harmonious chords, but dangerous, dissonant ones. Cusk is fearless in laying bare the kind of awful truths that most would shy away from articulating. She exposes the fictions of middle-class women’s lives. Yet the writing is so very, very good and so intelligent that we are gripped by an almost morbid curiosity as we are offered windows into the day-filling activities (or inactivities) of a disparate group of women whose chief connection is that they all live within the leafy, aspirational boundaries of Arlington Park.

The chapters are often so loosely connected that at times I thought this might have worked better had it defined itself as a series of short stories rather than as a novel. Some of the women meet at a coffee morning, others on a shopping trip and there’s a gruesomely awful dinner party near the end which brings another group together, but there is no ‘storyline’ in the traditional sense. Everything takes place during the course of a single day, and the book's structure does lend emphasis to the aimlessness and disorganisation of the women, the tenuousness of their supposed friendships. Nothing really 'happens'. And that is the point.

While her observations can be searingly cruel, Cusk never holds up her characters for our derision. Neither does she ask us to pity them. She is simply showing us their situations as they are on the day in question. If we recognise them, and there's a resonance with our own lives, then so be it, but the writer doesn’t offer any answers:

'Maisie . . . felt entombed, unprotestingly, in the untidiness of the house: it was draped over her like a shroud with no openings for her arms and legs, so that when she walked around it or reached out to touch it she felt a kind of dragging following movement, and a sense of amputated numbness. Little plastic figures – of horses with gaudy pink fountains of hair, of girls with encephalitic heads, of miniature train drivers and men in hard hats, of jungle animals and red Indians and tiny women with plaits and gingham aprons – lay everywhere on the floor on their sides . . . There were balls of tissue paper and the empty lids of felt-tip pens, hair slides and plastic combs and pencil sharpeners, marbles and rulers and crayons and the little rubber carcasses of burst balloons; there was a rocking horse draped like a tramp in layers of contradictory garments, through which his head protruded with despondent dignity; there was a multicoloured landslide of Lego that spilled out over the tracks of a toy train. There was a big disorderly heap of books on the top of which a small magnifying glass rested. There were clothes, new and old, clean and dirty, that had escaped their allotted places and were joined all together in riotous celebration.’

In an interview in the Daily Mail in 2005 – Cusk, having weathered the critical storm surrounding her non-fiction account of becoming a mother, A Life’s Work, concluded:

‘Overall, I now find family life a great source of joy, but as a woman you pay a big price for it. I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.’

It is the possibility of ‘coming back’ which Arlington Park explores so starkly. As we leave the characters at the end of the book, the outlook isn’t great. All that these mothers can achieve, it seems to say – if they’re lucky - is some small turning point or other, some brief epiphany, through which they glimpse their true selves for an instant before returning helplessly to the domestic fray.

I’m very pleased that I read this book - I do believe that it's an extraordinary piece of writing - but I did make the mistake of reading it while at a low ebb, and I cannot pretend that it didn’t make me feel a whole lot worse! If you’re a mother, read it when you’re feeling strong. Or when your children have left home.

(NB A long and thought-provoking article in the Guardian by Rachel Cusk - which begins with some highly percipient observations about book clubs and goes on to meditate, via Chekhov, on the many difficulties facing a writer who tries to render the absolute truth about modern living can be found here .)

Not talking too much about a book to talk about

Well, I finished reading Pauline Rowson’s In Cold Daylight a week ago . . . since when I’ve been wrestling with something of a dilemma, which has resulted in a few days of the dreaded (for me, but probably a welcome relief for my hapless readers!) Blogger’s Block. How on earth does one review a crime novel without giving away the plot?

As I have lately confessed, I’m a relative newcomer to the world of crime fiction, so I’m not very well up on the conventions. Can one sensibly do any more than say ‘can’t say much about this one – you’d just better go and read it for yourself’? The risk of inadvertently inserting spoilers is huge, and should be avoided at all costs. It’s a pain in the neck at the best of times to read ‘reviews’ which simply offer a potted version of the entire plot - and goodness, so many do, especially in blog-land. I suppose it fills a space while saving people the bother of coming up with any interesting thoughts of their own. Unfortunately, it also saves readers the bother of finishing the book if the plot is the whole point of the novel. Which, of course, most especially in a mystery story, it very often is.

I checked out Martin Edwards’s blog and his crime-writing reviews on Tangled Web UK for guidance. How does the seasoned expert handle this thorny problem? I have concluded that the answer is most definitely along the lines of less is more. Whet the reader’s appetite, but say very little about the substance of the plot.

So here goes . . .

In In Cold Daylight, Pauline serves up a complicated plot which fair races along in true page-turning fashion, exploring en route some highly topical issues: environmental bio-hazards, heath and safety at work, and corruption in high places. It’s set on the English south coast – with the occasional foray up to London – and our ‘hero’, Adam Greene, is, at first, an unlikely one. Not a detective, but an artist – a quiet, self-effacing marine painter with a troubled past and a dysfunctional family, who finds himself compelled to investigate the death, in the line of duty, of a fire-fighter friend. As Adam delves ever deeper into the layers of mystery surrounding the death of his friend, his quest becomes not only a desperate race against time, but a personal journey of self-discovery.

OK, that’s your lot – if you want to know more, you’ll just have to go and buy the book!

As noted in a previous post , In Cold Daylight has been selected as one of the 100 titles in the World Book Day 2008 Books To Talk About competition. Do go and have a look at the terrific collection of titles the WBD panel have come up with.

The idea behind the long-list is to get book-groups and individual readers interested in a wide range of largely ‘undiscovered’ writers, with the aim of finding The Most Talked About Book of the Year. You can help create a buzz by leaving comments about your favourite book/s – and you’ll see that there is already a lot of enthusiastic praise for In Cold Daylight.

Pauline is married to a former fire-fighter and a true story was the inspiration behind the novel. If she wins the £5K prize money, Pauline’s going to donate it to the Fire Services National Benevolent Fund , so a vote for In Cold Daylight would be a step towards a great fund-raiser for this worthy cause – the bravery and commitment of fire-fighters having been brought to attention so terribly in the recent Warwickshire tragedy .

On a lighter note altogether, here’s a picture of Pauline suffering for her art in the arms of not one but FOUR hunky fire-fighters.

And look! They’re all reading In Cold Daylight! Would you believe it?

Life is – as I have oft observed – simply chock-full of the most amazing coincidences . . .