Local things

Reading Walks Festival

Sunday 11 May

Back in March I booked Ruth and me onto two walks that were part of the Reading Walks Festival. The festival was organized by “REDA” (Reading’s Economy & Destination Agency), an organization I can’t say I’d heard of but it seems to be a rebrand of the former 'Reading UK'. I note from the web link that one of its aims is to enable Reading "to reach its full potential as a world-class destination and achieve its 2050 City Vision". I like Reading well enough but the first part seems a bit of an unnecessarily lofty aim and as for the second, Reading's multiple failed bids for city status will be passing into legend at this rate. This YouTube video Why British cities make no sense mentions Reading more than once.

Walk 1: University Heritage Trail (Earley Gate)

We met at the Earley Gate entrance to the Whiteknights campus, me slightly agitated as the bus ride had been slower than expected and Ruth and I were the last to arrive, which meant we had to be the annoying people who rush up at the last minute when everyone else is there and waiting to go.

Mustering at the start. Ruth's and my back views either side of the 'hump' sign

Things I learned on this walk:

• Temporary Office Building 1 has been demolished. Last year, apparently. There was a fence around it. A bit sad – even though I was a bit rude about Spur K at the end of this blog post in 2010; see also the end of this one. I only worked in the TOB for the last six months of my three-year stint at Progress South Central, after we were kicked out of the London Road campus to allow for its refurb. Apparently the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), currently on Shinfield Road, is going to move there, once a new building has been built to house it.

Site of TOB1

• TOB2, however, is still standing. We paused by it while the guide pointed out the entrance to a former air raid shelter, and gave us a bit of history. Apparently, the TOBs were originally meant as field hospitals for returners from the D-day landings. (Ruth and I both pondered why somewhere nearer the coast hadn’t made more sense.)



Former entrance to air raid shelter, near TOB2

TOB2

• Close to TOB2, we passed the site of a folly, apparently still visible on the 1890s OS map. We were shown a photo, taken maybe in the 1980s, which showed a small part of it still standing, but there's nothing there now.
• We heard quite a bit about the a former Marquess of Blandford, who acquired Whiteknights Park in the late eighteenth century and built himself a house. The two little lodges at the Earley Gate entrance stem from the same period as Blandford's house (and evidently currently have people living in them). After Blandford's departure, his house was demolished and the estate was split into six units. Park House (which used to house the Senior Common Room; don't know whether it still does) was built on its site. The drive to Blandford's house used to be carried over Whiteknights Lake by a stone bridge, wide enough for a carriage. William Martin’s stone bridge was demolished in the 1950s. Friends Bridge, which replaced it, was built in 1966.

Friends Bridge

Looking across towards Park House

• Walking over through the 'science' side of campus towards the Harris Garden, we passed Young’s Folly, apparently named after a member of the Buildings department as a joke, but I've forgotten the surrounding detail.

Young's Folly

• We went briefly into the Harris Garden for a photo. This is a lovely place which Ruth and I had visited earlier this month, the first time I'd been there since I worked at the university. It used to be managed by the School of Plant Sciences before that closed. It's now managed by Reading's Estates department.



Group photo in the Harris Garden



• 
  We walked through The Wilderness, an area of woodland of, apparently, about 11 hectares (27 acres). There used to be a house of this name, one of the houses built in the Victorian era after Whiteknights Park was split into six units. It was demolished around 1950. (A frustration: it’s very difficult to find photographs online of the former big houses on Whiteknights that were demolished. Pictures were shown briefly at a tour of Foxhill Ruth and I did as part of Heritage Open Days last September, but I didn’t get a proper chance to look at them and a follow up email query has yielded nothing.)



In the Wilderness



• There's a walled garden, that used to be in the grounds of The Wilderness. It's currently used as a big compost heap.



One of the walls of the walled garden



• Returning to the starting point, the guides took us past the Region 6 War Room, which used to be tucked away behind TOB1 and is now "tucked away" behind a building site and hence rather more noticeable. Post-civil defence use, it was used by the university library for storage but was closed after there was a flood and some of the library archives went mouldy. Officially there's no public access, but it's been entered by urban explorers, see YouTube. This drone footage is quite good and also shows TOB1.

The War Room building right-hand side of pic

The walk leads were a collection of friendly chaps, though there was a faint air of genial chaos. Several of the group leads were evidently leading similar-but-different walks over the course of the week. I was amused by one exchange conducted in the middle of the campus:

Assistant guide to lead guide: Are you going to talk about the cedars, Chris?
Chris: No.

After the walk, we walked the short distance over to the Three Tuns for lunch.

In memory of TOB1, here are a couple of pics I took of it in June 2011, around the time I left Progress South Central and started work at the OU.

Walk 2: Exploring East Reading's Lakes

This one met outside the Three Tuns (the reason we’d decided to have lunch there) and was led by two members of Loddon Valley Ramblers. I had had a bit of a fail with this one as I had overlooked the length, assuming it was about three miles and was surprised to hear the walk lead announced it would be five and a half miles. I tried to adopt a breezy “won’t this be good for us” attitude, while Ruth glared at me.

We turned left up Church Road for a while, crossing over the railway and the A3290, and turned in to the right through Highwood Local Nature Reserve. Don’t think I’d ever been through here.

We passed through an area with a pond that I was told is known as the Water Garden. Shortly after that we emerged onto the shores of South Lake. We were led around a circuit of the lake and then through some roads to the footbridge that crosses back over the A3290 and the railway at Earley station.

South Lake

Trains at Earley station

We crossed over Wokingham Road and then walked southwards through roads for a while. Although I had thought of all this area broadly as ‘Earley’, one of the walk leads told us that the area we were in, the poshest bit of Earley, is properly known as Maiden Erlegh. There used to be a Maiden Erlegh House in this area. Here's a picture of it just before its demolition in 1960.

We reached Maiden Erlegh Lake, which is quite small, and did a more-or-less circuit of it. Shortly before we reached the lake, we came across this goose with a number of goslings; there was another gosling the other side of the hedge, seemingly having trouble working out that it needed to push its way through the hedge to join the rest of its family. Hopefully it figured it out.

Maiden Erlegh Lake

We then walked along Beech Lane to where it joins Wilderness Road. This section was a bit tedious as it had got hot by this point. Thankfully we then crossed Wilderness Road and entered the shade of the Wilderness again, just by the walled garden that Ruth and I had passed on the morning walk. We walked past the Grotto and posed for a picture on this little bridge. I think it had replaced several other bridges on the same spot, but I've forgotten the detail.

The last part of the walk did a circuit of Whiteknights Lake, passing Foxhill House, the extravaganza that the architect Alfred Waterhouse built for himself in the 1860s.

Whiteknights Lake. Looking towards the Whiteknights Road end

Foxhill House

Before getting the bus back into town, we ducked into the Three Tuns again for a cold drink, and were joined by one of the other women who had been on the walk. She was evidently taking the upcoming week off work and was having a staycation doing quite a number of the walking festival walks. Sounded just my idea of a nice way to spend leave.

Our route:

Caversham Arts Trail

Saturday 17 May

We hadn’t been to this for a few years, partly because we had started to feel we’d seen everything on it, and there are only so many things that need displaying that you can buy, unless you a) live in a mansion; or b) keep a constant rotation of your possessions going on, which I can’t be arsed to do. However, Ruth noted that this year’s programme featured a few venues we hadn’t been to before. Also, it was a lovely sunny day for a walkabout.

We started by walking up to a property on Uplands Road, displaying its wares in its front garden. I hadn’t been intending to buy anything but surprised myself by buying a star-shaped pendant from SeasprayCove. The stall was also displaying some adorable crocheted (or knitted) sea creatures, made by the jewellery lady’s daughter, but I thought I didn’t really need additional cuddly stuff.

From there we walked to a smart 60s/70s-era house on Woodford Close, featuring mixed media works on paper plus organic handcrafted silver jewellery. The mixed media lady, the resident of the house, was involved in a conversation in the kitchen the entire time we were there, seemingly concerning some sort of culinary disaster that had just happened. The handcrafted silver jewellery lady, Molten Silver Jewellery, went into quite a bit of detail about the process of working with molten silver and the particular slant she puts on it. (This reflects a risk you run at these types of events, particularly if as at this house Ruth and I were the only punters there, where a polite noise of admiration in respect of someone’s silversmithing, appliquéng etc is taken as an invitation to talk in great detail about the intricacies of the production process.)

It’s fair enough for artists to want to talk about their work, I suppose – I just happen not to be all that interested in the creative process that led to the finished object, preferring to just go on whether I like the finished product. Additionally, for my part (and probably for a lot of others’ parts), a substantial ulterior motive in going round these sorts of events is to have a chance to have a bit of a gander at the exposed bits of people’s houses and gardens. In the case of the Caversham Arts Trail, most (though not all) of the host properties are in Caversham Heights, the poshest part of Caversham (and of Reading). I suppose I could imagine cutting to the chase as follows:

ARTIST: Are you interested in how I produced this work?
PUNTER: Not desperately, no.
ARTIST: Are you going to buy anything?
PUNTER: Realistically, no, probably not, but I shall “sweep browse” your wares while making a “Mmmmm” noise of vague admiration.
ARTIST: Are you actually just here to have a look at my house?
PUNTER: Well, yes, tbh.

The owners of the Woodford Close house have – to judge by the house’s ground floor living area – done a great job of respecting its origins, with a gorgeous parquet floor and a collection of appropriate Sixties-style furniture and display units.

After this we made our way to a property on Oakley Road showing off a couple of different things in their back garden (it was, luckily, a lovely sunny day). I bought a cute little pot from Noms Home (I am, shortly, going to do an audit of how many cute little pots I have) and two cakes from a cake sale, with proceeds going to the British Heart Foundation. The cakes on this occasion were very nice, but Ruth recalled an (apparently) particularly unpalatable scone she had had at a property on the Arts Trail some years back which she had ended up smuggling out stuffed into her pocket so as not to offend the host. I still can't understand how a scone can have been quite THAT bad.

Thence to Hemdean Road, to an end terrace with driveway, garage and nice-sized garden (jackpot!) that was hosting three artists, including The Welsh Woodman. I couldn’t resist his gorgeous collection of birds and bought this little oak chap on a hawthorn base. Ruth bought a trug – slightly curiously, but she has lofty garden ambitions.

Finally we called in at a studio behind the picture framers on Church Road. I was a bit done on art by this point so waited outside with the trug while Ruth had a browse.

The trug

My purchases

Walk with Hai via Newport Pagnell and Linford Lakes, 7.5 miles

Saturday 12 April

We wanted to meet up for an activity but decided against a parkrun as we’ve both been crap at them recently; also that would have meant an earlier start, and I wanted some time to recover from my Premier Inn breakfast and Hai had to drive a neighbour to the station.

We set off from Hai’s flat in Great Linford and followed the old railway path under the M1 to Newport Pagnell, where we stopped at a café for a drink. As it was quite warm, I went for an iced latte, which possibly could have done with some sugar. I rarely drink iced coffee as an adult but used to make them quite often as a teenager at home, using “Camp” coffee – I haven’t consumed Camp since and not sure whether it was sweetened or whether we added sugar, but the result is that I expect iced coffee to be sweet, so if I have one again I’ll be adding some sugar. It was quite nice though.

Iced lattes

After leaving the café we walked across the lower part of Bury Field to join Lakes Lane, which becomes the Ouse Valley Way and enters an area of fishing lakes. The footpath was poorly signposted here and I was glad I’d taken my OS map as it enabled me to get us across the correct footbridge.

Crossing Bury Field

Lane

River Ouse from the footbridge

We walked alongside the Ouse for a bit, through an area that looks from my map as though it would be pleasantly tree-lined, but in fact all the trees had been felled and it all looked a bit post-apocalyptic. Strava also shows it as an area called The Cob.

The not-so-green reality

After passing under the M1 (for the second time today), the path eventually reached a road, and we turned left and through Little Linford. There was a bit of roadside verge walking until we reached Mill Lane and were able to turn off into the Linford Lakes Nature Reserve. We followed the path – labelled as ‘Swan’s Way’ for the last bit – to where it joins the canal towpath and meets Wolverton Road. There are some posh new builds here.

Following the path

The path in the picture above is the yellow minor road with the dotted edges in the map snip below. We were about where the little red arrow is pointing.

Ruins of St Peter's Church

We followed the towpath under Black Horse Bridge and back along the canal to Great Linford.

Our route:

Returning to the annoying question of poor/absent footpath signage: Hai and I did a previous walk in July 2023 in the same area that was particularly bad. On that occasion we took a path leading off Little Linford Lane where the stile leading from the road to the path was borderline impassable – we lucked out as there happened to be a chap nearby, probably an angler with a permit, who opened the adjacent locked gate for us and let us in. I had a poke on Street View last night and from this October 2024 photo it looks to have possibly been cleared a bit, but still looks pretty overgrown.

Google Street View image of the footpath entrance (red star on map below)

Once we got in, we had to fight our way along a very overgrown “footpath” and, further on near Hill Farm, dithered for quite a while unsure whether to walk across a field - it did look from the map as though that was the correct route but again, there was no sign and I am not always robust enough to take a path if it's not made clear that it's public access. Hai and I did, eventually, take the path, in the absence of much other choice, and it was fine, but still. Speaking to Matt about it afterwards he reckoned that whoever owns the land just doesn’t want walkers there. Tsk. Needs some concerted Ramblers to complain to the council for better signposting.

There was supposedly a footpath in there somewhere ...

A book I read

‘Riders’ by Jilly Cooper

This March’s Book Group read. Claire, a JC fan, had flirted with putting Cooper’s 2023 novel Tackle! on our reading list, but then thought better of it, I think because she thought the rest of us wouldn’t like it. However, I quite fancied reading a JC as although I read a number of blockbusters in my teens, notably Lace and several of Jackie Collins’ novels, I had never read any Cooper. Most likely I was put off by the horsey theme suggested by Riders’ famous “bum in jodhpurs” cover art. However, I picked it for our book list as being a Cooper novel I knew of, and it’s also the first in the "Rutshire Chronicles” series of which Tackle! is the eleventh and latest (the term "Rutshire" is not mentioned in Riders so must have been something Cooper thought up for subsequent novels).

Characters

The main characters:

• Rupert Campbell-Black, successful show-jumper, Adonis and vile posho. Lives at Penscombe, a country house and estate in Gloucestershire;
• Jake Lovell, half-Romany ex-children’s home boy. When we meet him, he is working at a riding school, being great with the horses and rude to the children and their mothers. Jake’s gypsy father walked out on the family when Jake was eight. Jake first met Rupert Campbell-Black at prep school, which Jake was attending thanks to his mother being the school cook;
• Helen Campbell-Black, née Macaulay, at the start of the novel a 20-something American who’s just come over to the UK and is working for a London publisher. For most of the novel, Rupert Campbell-Black’s wife, after she idiotically marries him despite knowing perfectly well by a few dates in that they have nothing in common;
• Billy Lloyd-Foxe, Rupert’s schoolfriend and live-in chum. Nice but weak;
• Victoria “Tory” Lovell, née Maxwell, at the start of the book a pudgy 18-year-old reluctantly being dragged around the deb circuit by her mother, and later Jake’s loyal and long-suffering wife;
• Fenella “Fen” Maxwell, Tory’s younger sister and, by the end of the novel, champion showjumper at only 19. Behaves in a bit of a bratty way, but then she is still only a teenager by the end of the novel;
• Colonel Malise Gordon, distinguished Chef d’Equipe of the UK equestrian team

Blurb re story

I’m not going to attempt a synopsis of the story as it’s an endless rollercoaster of events, with Jake on top one minute, Rupert the next. It’s structured around a series of horse trials/events/whatever it is they’re called. The horsey stuff was actually reasonably engaging and I did find myself getting quite into the various horses and their personalities.

Much of the stuff in the novel that would nowadays be considered on the problematic side, I was able to reasonably gloss over as being to be expected from a novel of this age and type. It’s all loaded with sexist and boorish behaviour, infidelity and general reckless irresponsibility: the latter including shedloads of drink driving, and several times I found myself chiding characters for drinking so much on empty stomachs (e.g. reading page 141, I found myself shouting at Helen HAVE A SANDWICH). But I think getting too aerated about all that is a bit pointless. What was more difficult to gloss over is Rupert’s cruelty – to his horses, his son, his wife and tbh most of the people he comes across: not content with having bullied Jake in school, he won’t let up when he encounters him again in adult life, calling him “Hopalong”, “Gyppo” and mocking his mother’s suicide.

I was pleased that Jake has slightly rescued his life by the end of the book, though that only happens in the last few pages. I was aghast at his idiocy in starting an affair with Helen Campbell-Black – however pathetic Helen appeared, he should have steered well clear for his own sake. Jake’s genius with horses, plus his excessive nerves before competitions, presumably suggest that he’s better suited to being a trainer than competing as a rider. And I was pleased that he does, against the odds, secure the sponsorship that Rupert wanted, so one over on Rupert. Unfortunately, though, it’s left open whether Rupert’s spite and (completely unjustified) desire for vengeance might mean he continues to try and thwart Jake at every opportunity. We’ll never know.

Rupert Campbell-Black

Skimming back covers and snips of reviews of Cooper’s books over the years, I had got the impression that Rupert Campbell-Black was a recurring character and some sort of hero, albeit a roguish one. Ruth has read another one of Cooper’s "Rutshire" novels – Appassionata, I think – and confirms that RCB is in it, albeit in a more minor role. Reading Riders, I was shocked at how horrible Rupert is. Heroes in romance and other popular novels are definitely of a type: handsome, taciturn, occasionally domineering – but RCB goes beyond that into sheer unpleasantness. He thrashes his horses, punts his toddler son across the room, beats Helen up when she confesses to an affair and constantly baits and demeans others, including his wife (“You must be the only person who’s excited my dear wife in years. I certainly don’t.”). (Rupert, of course, has been sleeping around for years, which he blames on Helen’s frigidity; when Helen is faced with photographs of Rupert cavorting with his groom in one of their fields, he turns it on her, with “Why should I apologize for your inadequacies?”)

In general, cruelty to animals and hitting women and children would completely debar a man from hero status. But I got the strong impression that despite Rupert’s flaws, Cooper was representing him as a hero. There were several points where I suspected Cooper was depicting a character she herself fancied: at one point a horse is “driven on [around the course] by Rupert’s erotic pelvic thrusts”. Wearing a new designer suit, "such was Rupert's masculinity, and the enhanced blueness of his eyes, and the lean, broad-shouldered length of his body" - Christ, calm down, woman. When he attempts sex with his wife when she is upset after their baby's hospitalisation, he was, apparently, trying to comfort her "in the only way he knew". Diddums. The distinctly non-consensual group sex scene that Rupert ropes Helen into with Billy and Billy's wife Janey (Rupert locks Helen in with them and orders her not to be “a fucking spoilsport”) is distasteful beyond the general macho behaviour that permeates the book.

Towards the end of the novel, Rupert jumps a clear round at the Los Angeles Olympics despite having one arm in a sling and is feted even by the usually-disapproving Malise Gordon, who makes a sick-making speech telling Rupert that “without doubt you produced the finest and bravest display of riding I’ve ever seen”. Rupert isn’t brave, he’s an utter pig and sufficiently unpleasant to put me off reading any of Cooper’s subsequent novels, which I might have done otherwise.¹

Riders was published in 1985. The story begins in 1970 and works its way up to the mid-eighties.

 

¹  I've never been attracted to complete bastards, however ropey their arsing childhoods might have been - see Christian in Fifty Shades of Grey, and back in the eighties I remember having a dispute with my sister as to the merits of Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club. I maintained that he had zero merits; Hannah felt I think that he had some sort of tortured soul quality caused by childhood neglect that excused him. Yeah, sod that.

Some books read in 2025

‘When I Fell From The Sky’ by Juliane Koepcke

I remember reading a version of Juliane Koepcke’s story as a child and it was one of those stories that stuck with me (though Koepcke observes at several points in this 2011 memoir that many of the accounts written in the 1970s about her experience took a lot of liberties with the truth).

On Christmas Eve 1971, Juliane, then 17, was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her mother and left her stranded in a remote part of the Peruvian rainforest, where she spent 11 days before being picked up by forest workers and taken to safety. (Her survival of the crash seems incredible, though evidently some people have contrived to survive plane crashes.) Koepcke notes that the forest canopy probably served to break her fall, and there is a suggestion that because she remained strapped into her seat, part of a bank of three that had originally contained her mother and another passenger, this had a slowing effect similar to a parachute; she also observes that she landed underneath the seat, which may have given her some protection from the elements until she recovered consciousness. Her subsequent survival in the jungle is attributable partly to her familiarity with it but also to her own determination, given that she was injured, presumably suffering from some degree of shock and must have realized that her mother was probably dead. “I think of my mother during each of my nights, in which I barely sleep.” “I have to keep going. Keep going. Here I will perish.” At one point she comes across three corpses, still in their seats but driven head-first into the ground with only the lower portions of their bodies visible; Juliane is only able to tell that the female corpse is not her mother because she knew her mother never painted her toenails.

Her recall of how she managed in the days after the crash, and the strategy she adopted, make for fascinating reading. On regaining consciousness, Juliane was unable to locate any of her fellow passengers and although she could hear search planes overhead, realized that the tree cover was too dense for them to ever see her in the area she was in, so decided to move off. She remembered advice her father gave her: “If you get lost in the jungle and you find flowing water, then stay near it, follow its course. It will bring you to other people.” She locates a tiny rivulet nearby, which becomes a stream, and eventually a river, the Río Shebonya. Finding it difficult to proceed on foot – she had lost a shoe in the crash, and was worried about stepping on a stingray – she resorted to swimming in the river. The water contained caimans – a type of alligator – but she knew that these creatures did not generally attack people. Koepcke acknowledges her debt to her parents in teaching her what creatures to look out for and avoid and which could be ignored. Before reaching the river, she had heard and recognised the calls of hoatzins, which she knew nest exclusively near open stretches of water, which had reassured her that she was on the right track.

After the crash, Juliane spent four weeks recovering in a mission station in Yarinacocha, home of the missionaries of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. Her father, perhaps understandably, appears to have been distracted, going daily to the temporary morgue that had been set up, waiting for his wife’s body, but I did think that his daughter ought to have been better protected and shielded from journalists and visitors: in addition to their hanging around the mission station, she seems to have been relentlessly mobbed by them after returning to Lima. She must have felt like public property, at a time when she needed to get back to as much normality as was possible. On a lighter note, Koepcke relates the vast numbers of letters she received, including, inevitably, some from weirdos, including a bizarre letter urging Juliane to learn Esperanto and to write a book in that language about her experience.

Koepcke is German but was born and brought up in Peru, and lived there her whole life until her father sent her “back” (she’d never lived there) to Germany after the crash to complete her schooling. For the three years prior to the crash, Juliane had been living with her zoologist parents at ‘Panguana’, the biological research station they had established in order to analyse the ecosystem of a small area of the Peruvian rainforest. She relates incredible journeys with her parents from Lima over the Andes and into the rainforest to the research station, the whole thing about a week’s journey. Koepcke’s affection for the rainforest permeates the book: “It is no green hell. It is a part of me.” Koepcke followed in her parents’ footsteps and became a zoologist, doing her doctoral thesis on rainforest bats.

Koepcke frames her memoir from the viewpoint of a present day trip to Peru with her husband to wrestle with the Peruvian authorities to have Panguana declared a nature reserve and in doing so hopefully saving it from encroaching civilization and deforestation. The book’s cover shows a still from Werner Herzog’s 1998 documentary Wings of Hope, which featured Koepcke returning to the crash site in the company of Herzog and the film crew (it's available to watch on YouTube here).

On a side note: the safety record of LANSA, the Peruvian domestic airline that the Koepckes were flying with on the fateful flight, would read as comical if so many deaths hadn’t been involved. At the time of the 1971 crash, LANSA had already lost two planes in crashes, with a total of around 150 fatalities. The airline was notorious in Peru and Juliane recalls a Spanish saying that roughly translated as “LANSA lands on its belly”. Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke had urged his wife not to fly with LANSA but all other flights for that day were booked up. The plane itself was a type that had been taken out of service in the US some years earlier, and of a design that had trouble withstanding turbulence; to top all that off, it had been assembled from spare parts of other aircraft. It was LANSA’s last airworthy plane and the airline’s operating licence was revoked shortly after the 1971 crash. Shame it took that long.

When I Fell From The Sky was published in 2011, and in English in 2012, translated by Ross Benjamin.

‘The Corset’ by Laura Purcell

It’s Victorian times. Dorothea Truelove is 25, wealthy and does charitable work that includes visiting women prisoners at New Oakgate Prison, the Oakgate Charitable Women’s Society having deemed it “beneficial for lady visitors to call upon the inmates and improve them with edifying conversation”. Ruth Butterham is 16 and has just been banged up in said prison for – allegedly – poisoning her mistress with arsenic. The novel alternates between Ruth’s telling of her own story to Dorothea, and Dorothea’s perspective on things.

Ruth’s story is relentlessly grim from start to finish. After her father, a struggling artist, commits suicide, her mother, a seamstress, is left impoverished and is reduced to having Ruth, a talented needlewoman, apprenticed to a dressmaker in order to pay off her debts. Unfortunately, the dressmaker is the vile Mrs Metyard, who has four other girls, all foundlings, already apprenticed to her and living a wretched existence. Mrs M enjoys occasionally dressing up as her late husband and administering brutal thrashings. Early on, Ruth had become convinced that she can cause damage to people with her needle and by the time Dorothea meets her in prison, is convinced that she has caused the deaths of more than one person. It started after she embroidered a silver angel on a blanket for her baby sister and, when her sister died from the “strangling angel” (diphtheria), was convinced that she had caused the baby’s death. While at Metyards, she sews a corset for the bridal trousseau of Rosalind Oldacre, a former schoolmate who had tormented Ruth, and Rosalind subsequently dies – actually from arsenic poisoning from green dye in her clothes, but the death further confirms to Ruth her own terrible powers.

Dorothea’s mother is dead and she has a tense relationship with her father, who wants her well married. Dorothea is an enthusiastic amateur phrenologist and keeps a human skull in a drawer in her desk, hidden from her father, who disapproves of her interest in phrenology. Dorothea seems to be of the view that phrenology has the power to detect evil propensities through head mapping and that the shape of the skull may actually change if certain organs of the mind are developed; she measures Ruth’s head regularly while Ruth is in prison, and is forced to conclude that Ruth is irredeemeable because she has observed no change in the shape of her head, though she also observes that Ruth’s “moral organs” are more developed than she expected, and is confused by this.

Late in the novel, the theme of poisoning spills over into Dorothea’s life, when a concerned family friend informs her that Dorothea’s father poisoned her mother, and that he believes Dorothea to be in danger from the same fate. At Dorothea’s last visit to the condemned Ruth, Ruth embroiders an ‘R’ onto Dorothea’s handkerchief and bids her deliver it to her late mistress’s husband. I have to say I was a bit confused by the ending: has Ruth somehow killed Dorothea’s father? How has the handkerchief ended up back at the Trueloves’ home? Maybe I missed something here.

The Corset was published in 2018 and was Purcell's fourth novel.

‘Trust Me, I'm a Junior Doctor’ by Max Pemberton

“Medical school has been rather like a long holiday, punctuated by the odd sick person.”

Engaging memoir based on Max Pemberton’s Telegraph columns, recounting his first year of working as a doctor in the NHS. It kicks off as he and his medical school peers start their first jobs as junior doctors, aka “house officers”.

By Pemberton's account, new house officers are dropped in at the deep end, immediately expected by nurses to know how to do everything without being shown and kicked around by the more senior doctors. It does sound a complete baptism of fire. The junior doctors feel tyrannized by their pagers; addressing his, Max says: “Bleep, I know you’re going to, and you know I won’t know what to do.” He relates being alone on night shift, sprinting from one ward to another, having to put in endless cannulas.

Pemberton’s first, six month, stint as a junior doctor was on a surgical ward, after which he decided surgery was not for him. Apparently the system is: six months on general surgery, six on general medicine. The eventual completion of his 12-month stint meant registration with the General Medical Council, and becoming “a slightly more senior junior doctor”.

He has a bit of a rant about various things. He has a dig at hospital managers and targets. Good nurses leaving because they are overwhelmed by excessive demands and excessive paperwork. He relates how, during his first year, he had doubts, despite all his training, about whether medicine was for him. Towards the end of the book, he bemoans how medical school did not prepare him for life on the wards: although he knew the details of how paracetamol worked on the body, he had not been taught how to prescribe it. He also relates plenty of amusing incidents, including how the man turning up at A&E with a hairbrush inserted into his rectum provided enough amusement to make six years at medical school seem worth it.

“Max Pemberton” (it’s a pseudonym) is an NHS psychiatrist who also writes a column for the Daily Mail.

Ruth's birthday 2025

3-4 January 2025

We did that thing we’ve done a few times now of having an overnight stay in London and going to a show of Ruth’s choice. This time, she chose the long-running Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap, probably from curiosity at its having been knocking around in the West End for so long, which I’d guess is the reason most people go and see it. We booked an overnight stay at the Hub by Premier Inn Covent Garden, and dinner beforehand at the cellar wine bar The Cork & Bottle – a gem of a place that we’ve now been to two or three times.

With this journey in mind, Ruth had recently renewed our Two Together Railcard. I don't currently take trains as much as I used to, but these are useful to have, enabling Ruth and me to get a third off the price of journeys we take together. Ruth was particularly pleased to change the photo she had in last year’s card. The pair of us did look a bit mugshotty. This year’s pictures are definitely better. Well, I think so.

Last year's railcard

The pictures on last year's railcard reminded me of a photo on a library card I had while a student that Dad said made me look like a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Looking back, I had a number of cards from that era, and can't now say for sure which one it was, but it might have been this one. I didn’t really know who the BMG were but I seem to remember taking it as a vague compliment, though I’m not sure whether that was what he intended.

Also: best not to ponder photographs of yourself from c. thirty years ago, as I now realise having looked at that photo.

Our renewed railcard

Felt very high-tech managing to get both my theatre ticket AND our train tickets into my Google Wallet – no old-fashioned bits of paper for me on this trip. Ruth has been doing the electronic train ticket thing for a while but I haven’t really dabbled with it up until now, probably due to mild paranoia at the unlikely-but-possible prospect of my phone’s battery dying. Of course, it’s also possible to lose a paper ticket, which I certainly remember doing on one occasion.

Before dinner we went for a bit of a stroll around the Covent Garden/Bloomsbury area - Ruth had had a notion of popping in to the British Museum but we were put off by the enormous queue. Dinner was lovely, and as previously, we admired this mammoth wine bottle. There's probably a name for a wine bottle of that size, but neither of us knew it. I had crab and prawn linguine; Ruth had a steak. Definitely a special occasion restaurant. The white wine I tried - the Viognier shown on the bill - was delicious.

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

The mammoth wine bottle

St Martin's Theatre

The Mousetrap started out as a radio play called Three Blind Mice, apparently written for Queen Mary’s 80th birthday in 1947. It has been playing on the London stage since 1952, and at its current theatre (St Martin’s) since 1974. Ruth could have got the performance number stamped in her programme, but after the play we were funnelled out directly onto the street, bypassing the foyer, and she decided she couldn’t be arsed to go back in again.

Before curtain up

The above photo was taken while we were waiting for kick off. I am not someone who keeps their phone switched on during theatre performances, although there are people who do this and they should of course be swiftly ejected and booted down the street for doing so.

I enjoyed the play (though not the cramped seating – this is common in old London theatres but does make me assume people were smaller in the olden days). I have only ever read one of Christie’s novels, more through not having got around to it than from any distaste for the idea. Dad has a large collection of Christie novels that belonged to his mother. The one I’ve read was 4:50 from Paddington, which I remember thinking a bit meh. No idea whether it’s considered one of her better ones. 

The Mousetrap is set in a country guesthouse that’s recently been taken over by a young couple; a motley crew of guests arrives, and it goes from there. In addition to the inevitable murders, it has a reasonably gritty theme (child abuse). In terms of whodunnit, there's a tradition that anyone who goes to see the play is supposed to remain schtum about the twist towards the end: after curtain call, a member of the cast steps forward and tells the audience never to reveal the secret of The Mousetrap. I had, as it happened, correctly guessed which one of the characters it was who was not quite who they seemed.

Walking back to the hotel after the play

It was my second time staying in one of Premier Inn's 'Hub' hotels, after a solo stay in the Soho hotel in 2021. The Covent Garden hotel on St Martins Lane is wonderfully placed for any theatre activity, and priced accordingly. The 'Hubs' have tiny rooms, most of which is the bed. There's no room for any tea and coffee-making facilities, but you can get free hot drinks from the hotel bar/restaurant.

We could have got a continental breakfast at the hotel the following morning but decided we fancied something in the cooked line. We ended up at Ristorante Roma on Irving Street, one of a line of restaurants behind the National Gallery. Italian restaurants in London often seem to do breakfast and they always have good coffee, as this one did. They sat us outside, which I was initially sceptical about given that it was early January and quite cold. However, we were seated in a covered area next to an outdoor heater and they gave us a blanket each, and it ended up being nicer than sitting in the dark interior, although a number of lightweights who arrived after us did request to be seated indoors.

Ristorante Roma

Blanket supplied

Celebrations of Ruth’s birthday over the past few years:

2024: London day trip. We went to the Red Eight Gallery in the Royal Exchange building to see a collection of Hannah’s paintings that were temporarily being exhibited there. Then for lunch at Larry’s in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery. Ruth had a bacon roll that was so posh it was barely recognizable as one such. I can’t remember what I had but I think it was some sort of artsy Ploughman’s.

Hannah's paintings

Extremely fancy bacon roll

2023: Oxford day trip to see an exhibition at the Bodleian of photos and other bits and pieces from the Tutankhamun dig. Then later for dinner at the London Street Brasserie in Reading.

2022: Cabaret! At the Playhouse Theatre, fully decked out as the Kit Kat Club. With the ORIGINAL LEADS, Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne. I am not a huge fan of musical theatre so Ruth normally refrains from picking it for a joint theatre trip, but she is a big fan of the 1972 film and felt she couldn’t pass up the chance of seeing this stage version while it still had its original cast. In fairness, it was very well done and I was glad to have seen it. I wasn’t familiar with Buckley but she has a belter of a voice. It was apparently Redmayne’s musical theatre debut. This London Theatre piece notes that they both won Olivier Awards for their performances. We stayed at the Premier Inn London Waterloo, part of which is a former lying-in hospital.

The Playhouse, done up as the Kit Kat Club

2021: from looking back, nothing – we would still have been under the newly-invented ‘Tier 4’ restrictions that had prevented me travelling to Mum and Dad’s for Christmas a few weeks earlier.

2020: The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre. Trip already blogged about here. We had dinner beforehand at the Cork & Bottle then too and almost lost our table through failing to spot the entrance to the restaurant (it's got two, and we'd been in via the Bear Street entrance previously).

Previous dinner at The Cork & Bottle

2019: Circus 1903 at the Royal Festival Hall. Stayed at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge. Mentioned here.

2018: in Wales. Windy walk up Blorenge and then afternoon tea at The Angel in Abergavenny. This was one of a couple of hill walks in 2018 that resulted in my decision later that year to take up running.

In 2017: This House, a political play, at the Garrick Theatre. Mentioned in this post. We ate at the Cork & Bottle before that one too.

We've been together a few years longer than that but that'll probably do.