15 August 1958

It's my parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary today.

More pics after the weekend.

And, I sincerely hope, a return to daily Musings.

TBTE

In Memoriam

Received the very sad and shocking news of the death of Steve the Doggerelist, via Michele's announcement on Steve's blog today.

His loss will be greatly felt by his many cyber-friends and correspondents. We will miss him not only for his own blog posts but for his frequent, thought-provoking comments - some of them in verse - on the Guardian Poetry Blog.

It was on the Guardian blog that I first encountered Steve, and through him, Michele and the whole Mersea Sea Glass story began here on Musings. One of life's serendipitous connections which unfolded in a joyous and unforgettable way.

Steve's blog was as unique as his extraordinary gifts for parody and incisive criticism. And I do hope that Michele will feel able to leave it in the blogosphere as a lasting memorial to Steve and so that his admirers will continue to be able to remember and enjoy both his inimitable wit and his wonderful flower photographs.

My thoughts and those of all your blogging friends around the world are very much with you, Michele.

Still here . . .

. . . but have been barricaded in for the weekend with a huge manuscript to edit and everything else has gone on hold. Dispatched rest of family to the other end of the island for the duration, where they have been enjoying cycling, barbecues and generally getting rather dirty and smelly. Two of them are back now and the other two are somewhere north of Cambridge (I think), photographing a gig.

The weather has been changeable, to say the least. Just after lunch it was so hot and sunny that I decamped to the garden to work outside for a while. I stepped indoors to put the kettle on, weighting down 200 pages with my mobile phone, and returned 30 seconds later to discover 200 individual pages gusting around the lawn in a strong breeze which had whipped up from absolutely nowhere. Luckily, the pages were numbered. And luckily, I found them all!

So in I came again, and when next I lifted my head and put the kettle on, this is what I saw:

Which prompted a quick run down to the beach for some fresh air and the day's only exercise (apart from switching on the kettle). There was the most spectacular sunset, but I didn't think to grab the camera before I skipped out of the door.

Am hoping to achieve some semblance of blogging normality during the week, but right now must get back to my pile of paper and trusty red pen.

Essex and Suffolk Landscapes

If you live in East Anglia, don't miss this exhibition of Essex and Suffolk landscape paintings by Mersea artists David Britton and Andrew Hester at the Cinema Gallery in Aldeburgh.



I've known David for 20-odd years, ever since I first saw a small black and white photocopy of a photo of his large canvas Low Tide, Mersea Island (above) and I thought - 'I must have that!'. When I first met him, he was living and painting in the, to him, rather alien environment of Sheffield. But now he is back in his beloved native landscape of north-east Essex, living on Mersea and once again creating vast, haunting canvases which capture the big skies and the special play of light on land and water in Essex/Suffolk border country.




You can read more about David here.






All images copyright David Britton. Portrait by Jonathan Doyle.

Silly Season continues . . .

Another imported TV favourite from summers long past. This one from the early 70s, when I must already have been old enough to appreciate half-hour daily doses of well-honed, bronzed male torso, glistening in the salty spray . . . because that's just about all I can remember about it, apart from the theme tune and the glorious ship:



. . . just off to see if it's been re-released on DVD.

Listen but don't look

Avert your gaze from the rather hideous video and share some of the music that’s accompanying my afternoon’s work.

Roses in a Lime Juice bottle

Several people have emailed me about my biggest piece of Mersea sea glass, and I can confirm that it's definitely a Rose's Lime Juice bottle, at least 100 years old, and would once have looked like this.

My original pic was slightly disingenuous (sorry) because the bottle was actually found half-buried in mud, not sand - the photo was taken after it had been cleaned up. Most of its opacity will have been caused by the high pH of the sea-water rather than by the abrasive action of the waves, hence the slight iridescence and the relatively sharp edge at what remains of the neck.


It's currently in use as a vase on the kitchen windowsill - here it is with some random bits from the garden (nothing like such an impressive display as these sweetpeas, though).

La Belle (et Sébastien) Époque

Remember when summers were long and the sun always shone and from first waking until going happily to bed there was nothing to do but play, play, play?


And there were two and a half hours of children's telly on every day?


And between programmes, there was just the Testcard and music (which was quite good for dancing to on rainy days)?



And this was one of the programmes we looked forward to most?

And we sang this song in the back of the car all the way from Berkshire to North Yorkshire?

If so, then this website will bring back a few memories.

Silly Season continues . . .

Reading much? Hah! I think not. Where does the time go during the school hols?

Still very much enjoying Clare Wigfall's amazing collection of short stories, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, though. Of which more soon.

Meanwhile, however, here's my very favouritest in the whole world ever episode of Tom & Jerry:

My biggest piece of Mersea Sea Glass

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.

Not TBTE

. . . because I forgot to take the camera on my quick walk between downpours.

But look! It's my first ever piece of lilac sea glass and I'm rather pleased about that.

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)

Feelin' good

Reflected once again last night on the curious ability of a well-made 'feel-good' movie to make one, in short, Feel Good.

At the end of a day in which I achieved nothing more than some inconsequential domestic cleaning and tidying, followed by further cleaning and tidying, most of it carried out with extremely bad grace whilst railing silently at absent family members through clenched teeth . . . I was utterly ready for bed shortly after nine.

Was also feeling grumpy at having twisted my knee whilst negotiating a groyne* earlier in the evening.

While waiting for the kettle to boil for two large restorative mugs of tea, I slumped on the sofa, flicked on the telly and there was good old Bridget Jones's Diary. I've seen it dozens of times so I wasn't going to bother watching it again, especially given how out of kilter it was with my extremely foul mood.

Well, OK, just until I down the first mug of tea, then. Hmm, actually, it's worth watching just a tiny bit more, so I'll just pour myself a small glass of wine . . .

By the closing credits I was purring. And I went to bed a happy woman. How incredibly shallow and easily manipulated I am!

* note crucial spelling here - I'm referring to inadvisedly jumping off a wooden structure jutting out of the sea , rather than anything of a more intimate nature ...

A perfect English summer - in musical form

(Shame about the split, but it's worth it. The best performance of this on youtube in mho.)

TBTE

It's Friday night. Which means it's fish 'n' chips on the beach night!

It's the first day of August . . .

. . . and that means (I have this instant decided and declared) that it's officially the Silly Season here on Musings.

Juggling work and children is taking up all my time and energy, so I've just crossed 'Write something mildly interesting for blog' off my lengthy To Do list, and I bring you instead . . .

A different kind of manuscript to round off the day

Sighhhhh. There are so many books I want to blog about, but here I am at 23.56 on a Thursday night and I've only just finished work (school holiday shift patterns currently in operation). And am feeling utterly devoid of the mental energy required to string more than a dozen words together in a coherent fashion. So, instead, here's a video which has just refreshed a few parts that belatedly listening to tonight's episode of The Archers with a glass of cheap Merlot frankly did not.

Another little rant about book cover design

How very interesting to read Diane Shipley on 'The great chick lit cover-up' on yesterday's Guardian Book Blog. Particularly given its special mention of Rosy Thornton's wonderful Hearts and Minds, the book which has recently had me spitting about publishers' misguided rush to jump on the 'chick-lit' bandwagon, regardless of whether the books thus branded are actually 'chick lit' at all.

Shipley's piece is so spot-on that I hope she doesn't mind if I quote from it at some length:

'When we look at a book, its cover tells us what to expect. A pink paperback featuring a smiling young woman is most likely a female-centric summer read, whereas a gun on a black background is probably a murder story. A few simple aesthetic rules narrow our options, make life easier and ensure none of us has to wander Waterstone's for hours, wailing in confusion. And yet the rules seem to be changing.

Having cottoned on to the fact that chick lit books sell like cupcakes, publishers are now adding chick lit-style covers to any book written by a woman whether it fits the genre definition or not.

Fay Weldon has spoken out against the use of chick lit branding on her books as she feels it's misleading to readers. And I've talked to several authors of contemporary fiction who hate the way their books have been similarly marketed: one pleaded with her publisher to change her covers, to no avail.

Instead, books aimed at women are becoming increasingly homogenised, girly and bland-looking.

Rosy Thornton's Hearts and Minds has been described as a book which "tackles some very pertinent contemporary issues in education as well as [a] tangle of moral dilemmas" in a large scale, 19th century-style drama. It sounds positively Dickensian, and yet it would be hard to find a book that looked more like a light romantic comedy. '

To read the full article, click here:



Rosy Thornton herself, in a post on Vulpes Libris, said (slightly tongue in cheek, but, given the awful, misleading cover her publishers have imposed on her own novel, perhaps only very slightly so!):

'Cover design is the enemy of the level playing field: the insidious perpetuator of stereotypical assumptions. Look at that figure-in-a-landscape in oils: Literature. Look at that soft focus photograph of a child’s feet: Fiction. In my brave new world (Aldous Huxley: Literature) all publishers would be obliged to turn out novels in plain brown covers, bearing only the title and the author’s name – rather like those lovely old orange Penguin paperbacks which filled my parents’ bookshelves.'

Ahh, yes, the old Penguin paperbacks - has anything ever touched their perfect, democratising design? I very much doubt it. And how we loved the celebratory re-issues. And how we rushed to buy (or at least rushed to add to our wish lists) all the gorgeous must-have Penguin merchandise.

Why? Because they are timeless and beautiful and they say nothing about the book inside except that it's damned well worth reading. For itself. By readers.

Plain, simple, truthful covers.

The same could be said of Persephone books , which have an army of adoring fans and collectors, who delight in the books' understated, uniform, ultra-cool and tasteful covers.

Book covers matter hugely. We do judge books by their covers. Maybe we shouldn't, but we do. As this recent report pointed out. And here's a blog review I landed on the other day which couldn't have illustrated this more clearly.

Readers of good, thoughtful fiction appreciate good, thoughtful covers on their books. And they don't take kindly to being patronised or manipulated by publishers and their design and marketing departments.

Long-time visitors to Musings will be used to my rants about covers ever since I reviewed this book and mentioned (right at the end of the review) how very much I hated its deeply ghastly cover (for the same kind of reasons I hated the cover of Hearts and Minds - ie it entirely belies the nature of the novel and does a huge disservice both to the author and to potential buyers). The whole issue has become a frequent and long-running topic on the author's blog which is all very amusing but it's also a deadly serious point for a 'mid-list' author for whom every single sale counts.

Ah well, I must climb down from my hobbyhorse and try to relax because I've a very busy day ahead of me tomorrow.

But . . . before I go, I absolutely must add that one of the very best blogs I've discovered in recent months is Caustic Cover Critic (subtitled 'one man's endless ranting about book design'). Though he can be pretty caustic about lazy, sloppy or just plain bad book covers, the Caustic Critic actually offers a constant flow of fascinating posts about the art and design of books. Always full of insight, not just about the covers but the contents of the books as well - because he is fabulously well read and an erudite literary critic as well as a design historian.

If you haven't already discovered this blog (and for all I know, I may be so out of touch that I'm the last person on earth to have done so), for a sample of what this guy is about, I'd recommend this one and this one.