More books I have read

'Tokyo Ueno Station' by Yu Miri

On life: “There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”

Tokyo Ueno Station is anchored in Ueno Park in Tokyo. The narrator appears to be dead, lingering in the park where he previously lived in an encampment of homeless people. It is strongly implied, though not actually made explicit, that he ended his own life in front of a train.

The narrator, Kazu, was the eldest of eight children from Fukushima prefecture. He got no education beyond elementary school as he had to go to work to help provide for his younger siblings. He came to Tokyo in 1963, aged 30, to work on the construction of the stadium for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, leaving his wife and two small children back in their home village, and subsequently spent long periods away from his family, only going home twice a year. Kazu’s son Kōichi dies aged 21 in his flat in Tokyo, of unspecified causes. Aged 60, Kazu retires from work and returns home, but his wife dies a few years later. In due course Kazu’s granddaughter moves in with him to take care of him but one day, aged 67, he leaves her a note and returns to Tokyo, where he starts living in Ueno Park, one of several hundred homeless people there.

The novel paints a vivid and sympathetic picture of homelessness. The homeless community in Ueno Park suffer repeated short-notice evictions – e.g. when the Emperor is due to drive past to visit one of the museums nearby – and have to dismantle their huts and leave the park, before returning to the park once the ban is lifted and having to reassemble everything. Evictions from Ueno Park evidently became more common when the Tokyo city government was bidding for the 2020 Olympics.

Why does Kazu leave home and go back to Tokyo? The notion of him feeling a burden to his granddaughter didn’t seem quite sufficient to make someone voluntarily choose homelessness. It’s probably more that he only knows hard work, living in basic quarters, and he has never been used to living a settled life in an ordinary home. “I could adapt to any kind of work; it was life itself that I could not adjust to.”

Tokyo Ueno Station was published in 2019. The novel includes a longish Author’s Afterword that  provides some interesting context. Yu Miri is one of Japan’s “resident Koreans”, born and raised in Japan but with South Korean citizenship. This ethnic Korean community intermittently experiences hostility from the Japanese and she writes of a feeling of having outsider status in Japan, something that she says has given her empathy with those such as Kazu who, for other reasons, exist on the margins of Japanese society. She writes of the phenomenon of poor young men like Kazu leaving their villages to seek employment as labourers, doing back-breaking work only to end up, when they are too old for labouring work, homeless in Tokyo and wandering the streets.

One reviewer quoted sums up Tokyo Ueno Station as "a harsh, uncompromising look at existential despair", which seems a reasonable description. It's very good though.

Footnote: Kazu’s family are practitioners of Pure Land Buddhism, something I had not heard of. There’s a remarkably tedious seven pages or so (in an otherwise non-tedious novel) devoted to the traditions of the sect and the names of temples and their founders.

'DallerGut Dream Department Store' by Miye Lee

The customers of the DallerGut Dream Department Store are asleep. Once people are asleep, they can go to the store to choose a dream, for which they “pay” in emotions afterwards. These emotions seem to be stored in the form of colourful bottled liquids, which are occasionally then drunk. No, I didn’t really get that bit either.

Penny’s hometown manufactures sleep products. Penny is a new employee at the DDDS – working there is coveted, so she is very pleased to have landed the job. Each floor of the department store sells a different type of dream. Given the choice of which floor of the store she wants to work on, Penny chooses the front desk, where she assists the experienced Weather. Behind the front desk is an Eyelid Scale, which predicts the visiting hours of regular customers. Once the eyelids stay closed, the store knows the customer will arrive soon.

There are a number of “dreammakers” who create the dreams sold in the store. Dreams from the ‘Big Five’ dreammakers are highly sought-after and expensive. Dreams are advertised before their release. Customers open the dreams to dream them. Dream payments are made with the customer’s post-dream emotion. The Dream Pay Systems software connects the customers’ dream payments to the safe.

I suppose it’s all meant as feel-good escapism. I don’t mind a bit of that, but I did think this was fairly mediocre. Discussing this book at Book Group, Claire admitted that she’d chosen it because she liked the colourful cover. Ali commented that the book read as though it had been written by AI, which was a tad harsh but I did see what she meant. Ruth kept drawing unfavourable comparisons with Roald Dahl, which I found a little odd but I think she had seen some loose similarities with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I hadn’t particularly, but I suppose maybe the sparkly multicoloured fantastical element. I don't get the sense that DDDS was written as a children’s book though.

I found the rendering into English of some of the dreammakers’ names irritatingly childish (Wawa Sleepland; Yasnoozz Otra; Babynap Rockabye) but maybe there are some cultural differences here – presumably the translator must have tried to create English equivalents in the same spirit as the Korean originals.

DallerGut Dream Department Store was first published in 2020, and in English in 2023, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee.

'Jennings and Darbishire' by Anthony Buckeridge

Mum’s friend Clemency recently offloaded a couple of tatty copies of books in the ‘Jennings’ series, and Mum passed on one each to Dave and me. This is a 1956 edition, with presumably the original cover, but mainly still intact.

The ‘Jennings’ series relates the doings of Jennings, his best friend Darbishire and their classmates in Form Three at Linbury Court Preparatory School, somewhere on the Sussex coast. Dave had a number of books in the series when we were kids, most of which I think I read as well as I always found them funny, and still do. Most of the ones Dave had were from the 1970s Collins reprint, with front cover photographs. The Wikipedia entry on the ‘Jennings’ series states that there were 24 novels in total.

The events of Jennings and Darbishire kick off on Jennings’ birthday, when he receives two presents that trigger the action of the rest of the book: a camera from his father and an Ideal Junior Printing Outfit from his Aunt Angela. Armed with these two things, Jennings decides to start a regular publication, the Form Three Times. Their attempts to generate material for the publication lead to various unfortunate events, or ‘bishes’ as the boys would say. A typical story arc: a misunderstanding with some French fishermen they are hoping to photograph leads to them having to smuggle raw fish back into school, which Jennings attempts to fry for breakfast in the school dark room, setting fire to a developing dish in the process. Caught by Mr Wilkins, Jennings attempts to hide the parcel of fish by stuffing it up the chimney in Mr Wilkins’ study, leading to convoluted attempts to get it out again before the master decides to light a fire.

Jennings and Darbishire was first published in 1954 and was - according to the Wikipedia entry - the fourth novel in the series.

Some books I've read (relatively) recently

A few books I’ve finished over the past few months. All these were books we read in Book Group.

'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi

Subtitled ‘What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death’. An end of life memoir by American neurosurgeon Kalanithi, who died of lung cancer in 2015 at the age of 37.

Kalanithi’s parents were immigrants from India, who settled initially in New York City before moving to Arizona. Helped by an academically ambitious mother, he got into Stanford where he completed degrees in English literature and human biology. His decision to apply for medical school came while completing a subsequent masters in English literature. While waiting for the medical school application cycle to go through, he applied for and took a degree in the history and philosophy of science and medicine at Cambridge. After this, he started studies at Yale School of Medicine. The man was clearly a born student though I did find myself wondering quite how many years in total he’d spent in college.

Kalanithi’s cancer developed while he was still in residency – which I loosely understand as meaning you’ve left medical school but are still in training. He was in his final of six years as a neurosurgical resident and anticipating graduating at the end of the year. He was thirty-six at this point and married to Lucy, also a doctor. Kalanithi himself suspects that he has cancer “and not the good kind” before it is officially diagnosed. From the CT scans, he is able to spot himself what it is, and that it has already spread.

The second half of the book is Kalanithi’s reflections post-diagnosis, including on the switch to experiencing medicine from a patient perspective. He notes the passing from subject to object, and the becoming a person to whom things happened. There are some reflections on religion and a turning back towards Christianity, probably understandable from a man facing a premature death. I liked that he doesn’t claim to have had epiphanies through having cancer:

Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany – a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters – and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward.

Towards the end of the book, his reflections on tense are interesting: what tense is he living in now? Should he say “I am a neurosurgeon”, or, knowing that he will never return to duties, “I was a neurosurgeon”? What should he say when friends say that they will see him at some future event? The book ends with some words directed at his baby daughter Cady, who we learn from his wife’s epilogue was eight months old when he dies. Paul’s manuscript, written during the last year of his life, was unfinished, derailed by his rapid decline and death. The epilogue provides context and a concluding chapter to Paul’s story. (The foreword, written by a fellow doctor and author, is turgid – I think if I’d read that first, as I never do, it might just have put me off reading the book.)

This obituary in Stanford Medicine includes a video recording of Kalanithi talking about his diagnosis.

'Hamnet' by Maggie O'Farrell

I read (and enjoyed) this on Mum’s recommendation. It’s a fictionalised account of the childhoods and married life of William Shakespeare (henceforth WS) and his wife, called here Agnes. It’s set in Stratford in the late 16th century and framed (loosely) around the couple’s son, Hamnet, and on his parents' grief following his death.

Hamnet is eleven and has two sisters and lives with his parents on Henley Street, Stratford, next door to his grandparents’ house, where his grandfather John runs a glove-making business. The book opens with Hamnet trying to find medical help for his twin sister Judith, who has been taken ill. Judith has a fever and has developed ‘buboes’ – pale oval swellings under the skin. Hamnet’s mother has a reputation for being able to cure anything with her potions, but struggles to cure this one. In a twist, Judith recovers, but Hamnet falls ill with the plague and dies.

Hamnet’s mother Agnes tends a patch of land at the farm where she grew up. Local legend has it that Agnes’ mother emerged from the forest that bordered the farm, bewitching the farmer, who married her. Local people say that Agnes is a forest sprite and a sorceress. Hamnet’s father met Agnes when he was sent there to tutor the farmer’s sons in Latin. Agnes becomes pregnant, they marry and move in next door to WS' parents in Stratford. In due course, Agnes comes up with the idea of getting her husband to go away to London to find work, with a view to getting him away from his brute of a father; she would then follow him at a later date, with the children. WS’ father John is persuaded that it would be a good idea to expand the glove business to London; in the event, WS does make a great success of working in London, but as a writer leading a touring company of players, rather than in the glove business. WS spends more and more of his time in London, only returning home intermittently. O'Farrell explores Agnes' grief following Hamnet's death, and the shared understanding between the women - Agnes and her mother-in-law Mary have always had a fractious relationship, but both have lost a child, as very many women must have done then. In this fictionalised account, Agnes travels to London to seek her husband, and ends up at the opening performance of his new play, Hamlet.

In an Author’s Note, O’Farrell notes that only a limited amount is known about the Shakespeare family. The names of Shakespeare’s three children are known, and it is known that the boy, Hamnet, died young, but the cause of his death is not known. Having him die from bubonic plague in the novel is a fiction of O’Farrell’s, influenced, she says, by the apparent absence of any mention of the disease in any of Shakespeare’s literary output – her implication being, presumably, that this is odd given the time period in which they were written.

The suggestion in the novel is that WS named his play Hamlet after his deceased son. O’Farrell notes "Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries" and cites this 2004 article The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet in the New York Review of Books.

Hamnet was published in 2020 and was O'Farrell's eighth novel.

'The Guest' by Emma Cline

Ruth’s choice for our November Book Group book. We read Cline’s first novel The Girls in 2018 and I thought that was well written and atmospheric.

The story opens with a young woman, Alex, swimming in the sea off a beach somewhere “out east” from New York City – we don’t know where, exactly, but it’s somewhere where rich people have second homes. She is there with her older boyfriend, Simon, who invited her there for the summer to amuse herself while he’s working and then to go to parties with him in the evenings. Alex is 22, Simon in his fifties.

It quickly becomes clear that Alex has got herself into a bit of a mess back in NYC – she seems to routinely pilfer other people’s painkilling (and possibly other) medication, she has run up bills on various men’s credit cards, restaurants and nightspots have blacklisted her, her flatmates have thrown her out for non-payment of rent (and pilfering their meds). What she does for a living is not entirely clear but she appears to be some kind of escort, though work has tailed off and she’s had to reduce her rates. We never discover anything about her background or why she is in the position of doing this kind of work. She’s being persistently chased, via voicemail and text, by an ex, Dom, from whose apartment she has stolen drugs and cash.

One evening Alex and Simon attend a party at the home of an acquaintance of Simon’s, where Alex gets drunk and makes up to the hostess’ younger husband, whom she teases to throw her into the swimming pool, which he does. Simon takes exception to this sort of behaviour – and to the fact that Alex dented his car the previous day and didn’t tell him – and buys Alex a train ticket back to the city, suggesting that they talk “in a week or so”. Alex manages to convince herself that Simon doesn’t actually want rid of her but just wants a few days’ space, and decides not to return to the city but to find a way to stay in the area for a few days, planning to surprise Simon by returning to his house on the evening of his upcoming Labor Day party. By then, Alex imagines, Simon will have calmed down and be pleased to see her again. Alex proceeds to inveigle herself into various other houses in the area via making up to a series of complete strangers. In the book’s final scene Alex does, indeed, present herself at Simon’s party as she planned, fresh from the scene of a car crash driven by a troubled teenager she seduced.

Discussing this book, Ali mooted the idea that the ending and the final single-word sentence “Now.” might indicate Alex's death from injuries suffered in the car crash, but that would be too unsubtle a device for Cline, who commendably avoids melodrama, both here and in The Girls. It's enough that Alex has now burned all her bridges, even throwing away her mobile phone on her way to Simon’s, and is now faced with the dawning realization that she has hideously miscalculated.

What is this fascination Alex has with people’s swimming pools? I did wonder whether there was some symbolism being used in the form of the various pools, and of water generally. Early in the story Alex gets carried further out to sea than she intends while floating on her back and manages to rescue herself by swimming parallel to the shore until the current becomes less strong and she is able to return to land. Towards the end of the story, when things are unravelling, there is another incident when sea swimming, but this time Alex mis-times a wave and is thrown to the sand underwater, cutting herself. Early in the story the swimming pools Alex encounters are pristine, well cared for; as the story progresses, one pool is “a little gray”; “the dirty pool, the water probably half beer at this point”; the final pool she encounters is unheated and freezing, the water dirty, “biscuit-colored foam floated on the surface, visible grit settled on the pool’s bottom”. This Guardian review of The Guest does indeed have it that water is used as a leitmotif. So there.

The Guest was published in 2023 and was Cline's second novel.

Books I have read during lockdown (so far)

‘An Unkindness of Ravens’ by Ruth Rendell

Left to myself I’m not sure I would ever have picked up one of Rendell’s novels, but Ruth’s aunt passed two on to us a while back, seemingly under the (erroneous) impression that Ruth is a fan. Ruth would have put them straight into the charity pile but I thought that as they were there I’d give them a go (the other one was the later-published ‘Simisola’, which I read a few months back).

‘An Unkindness of Ravens’ was published in 1985 and was Rendell’s thirteenth ‘Inspector Wexford’ novel. The story focuses on the disappearance of Rodney Williams, a marketing manager for a paint company; Williams’ body is discovered fairly early on in the proceedings and the bulk of the story is taken up with Wexford trying to find out whodunnit. A quote from The Times at the front of this book reckons that Rendell has a “mesmerising capacity to shock, chill and disturb”. I wouldn’t say I’ve quite thought that about either of the books of hers I’ve read so far, but I did find the book pleasantly readable, though the twist in the end is more confusing than chilling, and it’s never adequately explained why Inspector Burden’s wife has gone a bit doolally on discovering her unborn child is a girl (in the event, the amniocentesis was wrong, and it’s a boy – phew).

These collective noun thingies are a fun curiosity for quizzes but some, like this one, must surely have just been made up by someone having a bit of fun. This Country Life piece lists a whole load of collective nouns for birds. Confusingly, some types of bird have more than one – for ravens, this lists both ‘unkindness’ and ‘conspiracy’. Off to see if I can spot a booby of nuthatches.

‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent

This was meant to be our March Book Group book – Alison’s choice – but it’s not clear yet whether we’re going to attempt some sort of remote discussion of it. Someone did suggest trying to meet via Zoom, but I’m not quite sure how that would go – my mother’s book group did attempt this, though Mum bowed out of attending so I’m not sure how it went.

Burial Rites was published in 2013 and was Hannah Kent’s first novel. It was apparently shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. It’s set in early 19th-century Iceland and the action takes place among a series of rural settlements in the north-west of the country. Kent has woven a story around the real-life execution of Agnes Magnúsdóttir in 1830 for her part in the murder of two men at an isolated farm.

Agnes was the last person to be executed in Iceland. As I usually avoid reading any forewords, author’s notes etc until after I’ve read the actual story, I didn’t realise at the outset that it was based in real life and was hoping until quite late on that Agnes would be granted a reprieve, and perhaps receive an offer of marriage from the nice Reverend Tóti. ‘Twas not to be. It’s not clear quite how much Kent had to go on in terms of known facts about Agnes’ life, but she has certainly managed to construct an absorbing story that represents Agnes as essentially a victim of her circumstances, but also as an intelligent and literate woman angry at where things have led and at the lack of choices open to her as a servant.

‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt

A few months back a friend lent me a copy of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, reckoning that it was a good read and I should give it a go. So far I haven’t been greatly tempted by the imposing hardback brick, and am not any more encouraged by discovering it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 – the only other Pulitzer Prize-winning novel I’m aware of having read (Philip Roth’s American Pastoral) was almost completely lost on me¹. Mum recently finished wading through The Goldfinch, but didn't seem overly enthused by it. In any case I decided that if I was going to read one of Tartt’s novels, I’d read The Secret History, especially as Ruth conveniently has a copy of it on her bookshelves. So I did.

Admittedly the current lockdown situation probably helped, but the fact that I romped through a >600-page novel in less than a week must be testament to something. It’s a great read and very well written. It’s set in a fictional ‘liberal arts’ college in New England (supposedly based on the one Tartt herself attended) and centres on a small élite group of students who have been admitted to the Classics degree run by eccentric professor Julian Morrow. The story is narrated by one of the students, Californian Richard Papen, a talented ancient Greek scholar from an ordinary background (his father runs a gas station) who has had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get to the college in the first place and then to get onto Morrow’s course. Papen is deeply impressed both by Morrow and by what he perceives as the glamour of the other five students on the Classics course, lying about his background and buying clothes in an attempt to dress like them. It soon turns out that the others aren’t quite including him in everything they do. Events escalate and things don’t turn out all that well for most of the group, though Papen is at least alive at the end.

The Secret History was published in 1992 and was Tartt’s first novel.

‘The Black Stallion’ by Walter Farley

First in a series of 1940s children’s books about, as the title suggests, a black stallion. I’d never heard of these books but Ruth has a number of them in the attic, brought back to the house along with several boxes of stuff from her childhood. I remember as a child being aware of some ‘horsey’ series – quite possibly books by the Pullein-Thompson sisters but I also remember the older My Friend Flicka, published the same year as The Black Stallion. Not being interested in horses – then or now – I never read any of them. I did read K. M. Peyton’s Flambards, though that’s more of a ‘people’ story with horses as a background.

The story: teenage Alec is on a sea voyage back from India where he has spent several months visiting his uncle. The ship calls at an Arabian port, where a magnificent black horse, along with his owner, come aboard. The ship is wrecked in a storm, and the black horse and Alec are the only survivors. They spend several weeks bonding together on an uninhabited island before they are rescued by another ship. They both are eventually returned to Alec’s home city of New York – Alec having assumed ownership of the horse – and Alec arranges for a neighbour to stable him. The neighbour, Henry Dailey, turns out to be a former champion jockey who spots champion material in the horse, and he and Alec set out to train the horse for racing.

The story is ludicrous but fun and feel-good enough. I think it would have been a bit Boy's Own for my tastes as a girl; Ruth claims that as a tomboy she went for these books over what she perceived as ‘girlier’ horse stories. There are evidently a number of sequels, though I’m not sure whether I’ll read them. They include The Black Stallion and Satan – I had had visions of the BS engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the very Devil himself, but it turns out that Satan is one of the stallion’s colts.

The Black Stallion was published in 1941; Ruth’s copy is a Knight Books edition from 1975. The book was the basis of a 1979 film of the same name.

‘A long way gone: memoirs of a boy soldier’ by Ishmael Beah

This was one of our Book Group books in 2008 (I’ve just checked – how time flies), but I abandoned it after a few chapters and must have skipped the meeting. It’s been languishing in the attic ever since, presumably because I had some sort of vague idea that I ought to read it before giving it away. Lockdown has presented an ideal opportunity to gather my strength and tackle it again; not that it’s a difficult read but it is, as the subtitle might suggest, somewhat harrowing.

As a 12-year-old in Sierra Leone, Ishmael Beah was visiting a neighbouring town with some friends when rebel RUF (Revolutionary United Front) forces overrun his home village, after which he never sees his family again. He wanders from village to village with various other boys for some time, before ending up in the town of Yele, in the south of the country. This village is protected by soldiers fighting for the government, who offer the boys food and give them work to do – but then issue the boys with guns and make them join them in fighting the rebels. Helped along by the drugs the boys are given, Ishmael seemingly becomes a pretty effective soldier. Two years on, he and other younger teenagers are rescued by UNICEF personnel and taken to a rehabilitation centre in the capital Freetown. Rehabilitation proves a struggle, but Ishmael is eventually found a foster home with an uncle and his family.

The civil war in Sierra Leone went on for most of the 1990s before being declared over in 2002. A long way gone was published in 2007. One of the worst bits of the book is when the RUF arrive in Freetown, just when you had thought Ishmael was safe and able to pick up his life again. It’s not to be, and he eventually manages to escape the country altogether into neighbouring Guinea. In the end, it’s partly a stroke of luck that saves him. While in Freetown, he had been picked along with another boy to go to the United Nations in New York to talk about his experiences as a boy soldier, and at the conference meets an American woman, Laura Simms, who befriends him and sends him money after he returns home to Sierra Leone. This money helps him pay for his way out of the country and – although this is not detailed in the story – he evidently eventually got to the US with Laura’s help, where she provided him with a home. He was certainly overdue some luck.

¹  Actually, scanning the list of Pulitzer winners, I've also read Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, though I remember precisely nothing about it.

Rundown of September

Started September by booking two cottages at the Low Briery park near Keswick for a family holiday next April. Hurrah. Lake District here we come. Don't think I've been since we had a family week there in 2005, which seems a long time really. On that holiday it rained quite a lot and Hannah and I spent quite a bit of time watching episodes of Dallas on DVD.

Booked the day off on Friday 1st for a day out with Mum and Hannah in London to see the Giacometti exhibition at Tate Modern. Mum and Dad had stayed overnight in London the night before and seemed to have enjoyed themselves, things only being marred by Dad wearing some ill-advised sharp shoes that had given him blisters. He was off to the Geological Society on the Friday; Mum, Hannah and I met near the Millennium Bridge where Mum lightened her own bag by offloading a jar of crab apple jelly onto each of us. Mum had also evidently been accosted by some people filming an ad for Galaxy chocolate, and been given several free bars.

The exhibition was crowded but interesting. After taking this selfie in the turbine hall we went for lunch at a nearby Carluccio’s, after which Hannah left us to go and see a friend elsewhere in London and Mum and I walked around for a bit, having a look at the new extension from the outside.

Went over to Gail and Rob's house on Saturday 3rd for little Emily's second birthday tea party. Small gathering of only us plus Rob's nice father Brian. Emily is an outrageously cute child with a mop of blonde hair. Amused to see that she is now speaking a few words, including "More icing, Dad".

As part of ongoing quest to find a suitable hearth, or a piece of stone that could be fashioned into a hearth, I drove Ruth out to a stone merchants’ near Basingstoke on the afternoon of the 8th. We stopped off at The Vyne on the way to have lunch and make some use of our National Trust cards. Had a walk around the walled garden which had a gorgeous bed of pompom dahlias. The house is under scaffolding at the moment as there seems to be a major roof project underway.



Then found our way to stoneCIRCLE where Ruth spent some time in the yard browsing offcuts, seemingly mainly from kitchen worktops. Some discussion with the saleswoman followed but we didn’t end up actually ordering anything.

Managed to mess up our visit to the London 'Open House' weekend this year, entirely through not being sufficiently organised. Firstly, we were too lazy to stir ourselves on the Saturday morning and postponed our visit to the Sunday, thereby missing the chance to view Goldfinger's Haggerston School in Hackney, which I had been interested in seeing. When we arrived at Reading station on the Sunday morning, it turned out there were no trains running between Reading and Paddington because of line works, so we had to travel in to Waterloo instead, which, if you're unlucky (we were) takes almost three times as long.

On arrival, we headed over to Regent's Park to visit the Royal College of Physicians, though on arrival we discovered that the building is actually open to the public most days throughout the year. We signed up for a tour of the building and gardens, which was quite interesting though the tour guide was a bit over-theatrical for my taste.



We then took the bus to Hackney intending to see a few things there, but lost some enthusiasm after an interminable circa 24-stop bus journey. Queued for a while to see a wooden eco-house whose name I've forgotten, behind a bickering family of four whose bickering then descended into a brawl between the father and his teenage son. We went off the whole idea after that and took the bus back to Islington, where we had beer and crisps in The York. We should have focused on one borough and a handful of properties within easy reach of each other, but we never quite seem to manage to do that.

On the following Monday, my colleague Galina saw fit to share that she'd managed to visit four Open House properties with her daughter, in between taking her son to the junior parkrun and seeing a show. Some people are just made of sterner stuff.

On the 22nd we hosted Book Group at the house, to discuss Ruth's book choice 'Exposure' by Helen Dunmore. Quite an easy read; background of Cold War, spies etc. Of the four regular attendees who might have come, two were away but Ali and Lesley managed to make it. Ruth had tackled a new recipe involving halloumi-stuffed meatballs in a chermoula sauce - the preparation involved some ridiculously middle-class bleating over the phone about how the Caversham Waitrose were out of chermoula. Luckily I did an emergency chermoula run to the bigger MK Waitrose and managed to get some. We served polenta as an accompaniment, which I'd only attempted to prepare once before and been slightly bemused by. It was OK. By the following day it had become a shiny bouncy lump as per the photo. We marvelled at it for a while, prodding it at intervals. I eventually cut off a couple of slices and fried them as a dinner accompaniment - OK but I can't say I'd go a long way to seek it out.

Ray came up to MK to visit me on the 27th and we went for dinner again at the Antep Kitchen over the road from Tesco. Busy and humming, as per the last time.

Went down to Abergavenny the last weekend in September, stopping on the way at Westbury Court Garden, to make yet more use of our NT cards. I'd located it on the map as being reasonably conveniently located en route - the blurb claims it's the finest example of a
Dutch-style water garden in the country. It turned out to be a small place (euphemism for the fact that it didn't have a tea room, which we were a bit disappointed about, though I think the lady at the admissions hut might have been selling KitKats) but it's a dear little formal garden with some eye-catching planting.

Cone-shaped trees	One of the canals
Prettiness	Reputedly the oldest evergreen oak in England

Autumn snippets

A rundown of activity since the last blog post:

September

Mind Body Spirit festival

 

Caffe Chai, Warwick

Few hours spent at the Mind Body Spirit Wellbeing Festival at the NEC on 12 September. I had acquired two reduced-price tickets via Amazon Local thinking it might be a bit of a laugh. Ray obligingly said he would come with me – perhaps feeling morally obligated after postponing a get-together the previous Saturday to take his dad to a football match – and offered to drive, so we set off early and took a detour into Warwick where we found a café for breakfast. Here I am outside it looking somewhat simple.

We arrived at the NEC – my first visit; main impression was of acres of car parks, that, cheekily, charge quite an expensive parking fee. The ‘festival’ itself was OK, though in a rather cramped arena. I tried to book in for a meditation session that was already booked up. We sat listening to some live singing for a while. Feeling I should try out one of the various sessions on offer, I decided to have a psychic reading – costing £30, as did all the ‘readings’ on offer; I’m quite surprised I paid for it – and foolishly took the first psychic that was free, an angel card reader named Rani. Can’t say I felt the 15 minutes was worth the money, but didn’t have the balls to ask for a refund, though the booker-in had told me that I could do so if I didn’t feel the reading had helped me. Rani dealt various cards and made a series of mainly inaccurate suggestions about me (Rani: “I feel you’re the sort of person others come to with their problems”; Me: “No, not really”), a series of banal observations based on things I had just told her, and displayed a startling lack of any psychic ability throughout. (When I mentioned having some discussions with my partner currently about what to do with our house, Rani responded with a suggestion about “him” – “Ah, she didn’t work that out then?” Ray scoffed over lunch). Left the reading when my time was up thinking I should have had my aura photographed instead.

What are angel cards anyway? According to Wikipedia they fall under the category of ‘OH cards’, though whether that stands for anything I’ve no idea. They seem to have their enthusiastic adherents, such as this woman quoted in an online forum re angel cards I found on a Google search:

“I truely [sic] believe in Angels too - especially when I have lost things I ask the Arc Angel Chamuelle for help in finding things … Also when I am feeling low I just talk to the Angels and within minutes see a single white feather so I know they are around us.”

The Hatton flight

This woman on Netmums (not my usual port of call for anything; it just came up in a Google search) says “I recently had my cards read, using Angel cards, and couldn't believe how accurate they were”. There you go then. There seem to be plenty available via Amazon, for example these, featuring a quite masculine-looking hunk of angel on the cover.

After having enough of the festival we retraced our steps towards Warwick and had lunch at the Hatton Arms, a large and quite smart pub near the Grand Union Canal. After lunch we walked down to the nearby Hatton Locks and had a look at the impressive flight. According to this history, the stretch of water that hosts the locks was the Warwick & Birmingham canal when it opened in 1799, part of a chain of eight canals connecting London and the Midlands. The Grand Union Canal Company took over the entire stretch in 1929 and did some modernizing in the form of widening the locks to allow boats to double up and traffic to thereby pass through more quickly.

Birth of Emily

Gail and Rob’s baby, Emily Charlotte Joyce, was born in early September. We visited Gail in the RBH the day after Emily was born and then again at home around a week later, when these pictures were taken. Emily has an insane shock of dark hair, which is very cute. 

Ruth actually had an hour alone with her a week or so ago while Gail went to a dental appointment, and apparently did manage to give her a bottle, but escaped having to change a nappy.

OpenHouse London

 

Alexandra Road estate

London OpenHouse weekend on 19-20 September and I had been determined to go this year, having missed out the last couple of years. Got over my moaning at the fact that you now have to pay for the hard copy catalogue of what’s on offer, and we bought one.

Inevitably with these things you end up not being able to pack in as many things as you think you’ll be able to. I had been keen for the last few years to see the Alexandra Road estate in Camden and go on the tour they offer of the interior of one of the flats, so we headed up there as our first port of call. When we arrived there was already quite a substantial queue for the flat tour, moving very slowly as they were only allowing four in at a time (due to the flat’s compactness) and evidently more people had turned up than the OH volunteers had expected, as they eventually started issuing people with timed tickets and asking us to come back later. We went off to have the tour of the estate garden that was on offer, and then returned to the flat an hour or so later, when, thankfully, we were admitted. Beautiful and well designed little space with a lovely balcony area that felt more like a little courtyard garden. The flat open to the public was evidently one that had had few changes made to it – the guide did say that a lot of the flats have had their interiors altered, but that there’s an attempt at clamping down on this with one chap in trouble currently for making some changes he wasn’t supposed to.

The estate was listed Grade II* in 1993, apparently the first post-war housing estate to be listed. Neave Brown, the architect, is distinguished by having had all his UK work listed, which seems incredible for a modernist architect. Go Neave. Though apparently he didn’t work in the UK again (he’s American) after Alexandra Road, thanks to the public enquiry into the project following its completion because it had cost so much.

Lunch outside at Poem

Bunhill Energy Centre

After spending more time than we’d planned to at AR because of the length of the wait, we sought out lunch nearby and settled on Poem, on the corner of Abbey Road and Boundary Road, where we had an OK light lunch. After this, we made our way over to the City area to visit Ruth’s choice, the Bunhill Heat and Power Energy Centre, a weeny little place doing all sorts of good things with energy in a way that I didn’t properly understand, probably through not being quite as interested as I should be. It opened in 2012 and supplies energy to three nearby estates.

At Salvador & Amanda

Returned to London on 26 September for celebrations of my university friend Helen’s 40th birthday. Ruth and I met Helen and seven or eight other people at Brown’s on St Martin’s Lane for afternoon tea – arranged to suit people who couldn’t stay out for an evening meal – then most of us went on for cocktails and dinner at the nearby Salvador & Amanda, a cellar restaurant on Great Newport Street. There was some disappointment with afternoon tea, mainly around the slowness of the service – though Ruth and I have enjoyed two pre-theatre dinners at that branch of Brown’s and not noticed any problems – but the dinner was nice and cellars are always atmospheric.

October

My digital life

Since early October am now studying my fourth OU module, this time the Level 1 module My digital life. Very interesting so far; it’s a broad-based module with a bit of programming, a bit of HTML and XML, a bit of (moderately) technical detail on networks and wireless communications, and no doubt other stuff to come. Am keeping a somewhat intermittent study blog on the OU's student blog area. Students are supposed to keep 'learning journals' but I find all that frankly a bit tedious. I consider myself to have done well if I spend time studying in the evenings after work, never mind then writing about it.

Discretionary increment

Pleased/smug in October to receive a merit award from the OU for the second year running. A certain number of these are made available to each unit every year as a way of rewarding specified individuals' performance. Judith handed me my letter with some kind words about the past year’s efforts. The additional increment on the pay scale doesn’t amount to a lot of extra money, but it’s better than a slap in the face.

Outing with Clarks

Went over to Maidenhead on 3 October and had lunch with Ray’s parents at Maidenhead Conservative Club. It was some years since I’d been there and I remembered the place as fairly dingy and thick with cigarette smoke, but it appeared much brighter and pleasanter on this occasion, no doubt substantially due to the smoking ban but I think also it might have had a coat of paint. Had a pleasant lunch with Ray senior and Carol and we then drove over to Hurley Riverside Park, where Ray’s sister Sharon now lives with her boyfriend Keith. Lovely setting; we admired Sharon’s garden and Carol, Sharon and I went for a walk down to the river, where I introduced them to the term ‘gongoozling’. Sharon and Keith have apparently been having issues with a mildly lunatic neighbour, which hopefully will be resolved soon.

Boat trip

Ruth and I were both pleased to have our first trip out on Ray’s boat for some time on 10 October. We went eastwards down the river as far as Sonning and moored up on the side of the river away from the path, where we had a lovely and leisurely breakfast. We passed the red spoon sculpture that Uri Geller had had erected by the Thames Path prior to his recent departure for Israel (audacious behaviour) - I attempted to take a picture of it, but there was plant life in the way, plus a number of other people on the path also taking pictures of it. Shortly after the spoon's installation, questions arose as to whether it had planning permission and a rude message was found taped to it. It then disappeared altogether, to be replaced with an actual bent spoon. It later turned out Uri himself had requested its removal, suspecting, quite probably correctly, that it wouldn't get planning permission. Geller's parting shot to the local council appears to have been "You can take my spoon, but you'll never be able to bend my creative freedom." Stirring stuff.

View of spoon through the trees

After breakfast we continued down river as far as Shiplake Lock, before turning round and returning to the marina. Ray has decided for the moment to pass up the prospect of moving to Enslow and is staying at Thames & Kennet for the time being. He has some grand refurb plans for the winter, including replacing his current cassette toilet with a pump out toilet, partly as this should prove easier for the klutzier visitor (e.g., me) to operate.  

November (first bit of)

Parents in MK

Tree Cathedral

Mum and Dad came for a visit the first weekend in November, Dad’s first to my Wolverton flat. I had carefully reserved them a space with my car in the Electrolux parking area – parking issues at Wolverton Park being the subject of a good deal of ranting on the Facebook group lately – and done a token tidy up. The Saturday was ushered in with possibly the worst weather I’ve seen since living here – lashing rain and really quite strong wind – and I was wondering slightly nervously what I would do with them for the afternoon if we couldn’t go outside, hoping not to be reduced to visiting the National Badminton Museum. We stalled for time once they arrived by having some lunch, but Dad, in a somewhat unusual display of optimism, thought we should go out anyway and perhaps it would clear up. Drove them (through increasingly heavy rain; asked at one point whether there was anything they wanted in John Lewis) to the Peace Pagoda car park and parked up, and we walked to the Pagoda and admired it briefly, by which point the rain was, thankfully, easing off.

I was mindful of not planning too long a walk, in deference to Dad’s recent bout of pneumonia, but he seemed up for a bit of a stroll so we walked past the Japanese temple and had a bit of a stroll around the garden, before carrying on to the bird hide on the south bit of North Willen Lake near the V10, where Mum and Dad had a sit down and a peruse of far-off birds, before concluding that it was a bit pointless as they’d forgotten their binoculars. We continued and had a brief visit to the Tree Cathedral – sun had come out by this point – before returning to the car and my flat. In the evening, we caught a bus into Stony Stratford and went for a couple of drinks at The Vaults before going for a nice dinner at the Calcutta. The next morning we went for a post-breakfast walk along the canal as far as the aqueduct, before retracing steps to my flat. After a brief sandwich lunch at Buskers they set off back to Wales.

Near the Peace Pagoda we noted the memorial of the Rev. Seiji Handa, with a small photo and a number of flowers. We couldn't really tell who he was - other than presumably a monk at the temple - but he would appear to have been this chap. What an unfortunate way to die.

On a more tranquil note - and hopefully no lawnmowers in sight - there's a brief commentary-free video about the Peace Pagoda and Buddhist temple here.  

Book Group

Got to go to my first Book Group meeting in a while on 13 November, as Claire M had kindly prevailed on the rest of the group to host the meeting on a Friday so that I could come. 6 out of the 8 of us (missing Lesley, and Sarah who hasn’t yet rejoined the group following the birth of her baby) met in Claire’s cosy back room to discuss Barbara Taylor’s ‘The Last Asylum’. Only Helen, Ali and myself had actually made any headway with reading the book, so it was a bit of a limited discussion, but we agreed that psychoanalysis is a bit of a mystery, and certainly can only have been the province of a rich (and leisured) few.

The book's cover photo is of the scarily long corridor at Friern Hospital in Barnet, the asylum referred to in the book's title where Taylor spent time as an in-patient in the 1980s. The building's now been converted into a luxury flat development called Princess Park Manor, which manages to avoid mentioning on its 'History' page that it was once a mental hospital. No clue whether they left the corridor intact.

Rambling for Pleasure

On the Sunday of that weekend I attempted to drag Ruth for a walk out of ‘Rambling for Pleasure around Reading’. I’d picked a walk around Arborfield with the sweetener of visiting Gail and Rob afterwards and then possibly going for a cheese toastie at Dobbies (that being about as grand as my gestures get). Entirely through my inept navigation, we started badly by walking quite a way down the wrong road, unsurprisingly being unable to find the entrance to Pudding Lane and having to retrace our steps to the Bull roundabout, where we picked up the correct road. As we’d used up a bit of time doing this, I cut the route short and we took a route back past Arborfield church, which appeared veritably packed with worshippers (Gail later told us that Arborfield's congregation is of a somewhat happy-clappy persuasion, including apparently sticking name badges on people when they arrive for a service) and thence slightly hazardously along the B3030 Sindlesham Road for a stretch before arriving back at the village.

St Bartholomew's, Arborfield

We paid a brief visit to Rob and Gail and said good morning to Emily, who was dozing peacefully in her baby carrier when we arrived, but was duly lifted up and passed around. In a laudable attempt to share Emily out, Gail whipped her off Ruth’s lap, where she’d just settled down relatively peacefully, and put her onto mine, where she perhaps understandably set up a lusty bawl and was duly removed, to be walked soothingly up and down the hallway.

We had a brief lunch in a crowded Dobbies, and may have bought some stuff but I forget now.

Henley

Went over to Henley for a few hours the following Saturday – I’ve hardly been at all the past few years but it is indeed a pleasant place for a wander around. Not sure whether my recent low iron levels were making me feel the cold more than usual, but it appeared bl**dy cold – we did go for a short stroll along the river but even I couldn’t face spending too much time on it. We spent most of the time having a wander around the shops and the Christmas market, and had a pleasant lunch at The Argyll. We went into Tudor House Antiques – don’t think I’d ever been inside while living in Henley, probably because neither Ray nor I care for antiques, but as Ruth likes them we went in and passed a mildly excruciating (at least from my point of view) 15 minutes or so staring at old stuff and banging my head on beams. Lingered for a while in Central Home, a new arrival in Henley, where I coveted a few things but didn’t buy them. Ruth bought a ring.

Must rest awhile before bringing this account up to date, as I am weary and must stitch a while on my sampler.