Recent stuff

Car

My darling little Ford Fiesta has been making a new noise for the last few months, but on taking it to J P Motors, one of the two Caversham garages I use, back in March, they claimed they couldn’t hear anything amiss, so I assumed everything was OK. However, during the second week in July when I had to do quite a bit of driving, it seemed to have got louder, so I’ve now booked it in with Reading Service Centre, my other garage of choice, for an inspection, though annoyingly they didn’t have an opening until 2 August so I’ve been limiting my driving for the past week or so. Keeping fingers crossed that RSC can actually diagnose the problem.

A quick Google suggests it’s most likely something to do with the exhaust. Our friend Helen recently traded her 10-year-old car in for salvage after being faced with a bill for an exhaust issue, so I’m hoping it’s not too big a job. The Fiesta is 17 years old, but I’ve been told previously by JP that Fiestas can go on for ever (which I don’t take as literal truth, but do take to mean that it may have a few years in it yet). A more significant issue than its age may be the fact that it’s now done in excess of 170,000 miles, most of that accrued under my watch (it was four years old when I got it). I have been relatively lucky with repairs to it – a replacement clutch in 2014 is so far the most expensive bill I’ve had. Aside from being a bit sentimental – though if the Fiesta develops serious mechanical problems the sentiment will probably evaporate quite quickly – I just don’t relish the thought of car shopping, though I realise people do do it. Maybe one day soon.

Derbyshire visit

The driving stint earlier in July was to go with Mum to Derbyshire to visit Mum’s older sister Anne, who is now in a nursing home up there (Anne is also, obviously, my aunt). My cousin Helen has lived in the Derbyshire Dales for many years now after moving there back in the nineties for a teaching job. A few years ago Anne and her late husband moved up there to be near Helen, their health having deteriorated to the point where they needed more organized care. Mum and I booked ourselves a night in the Premier Inn just outside Matlock, where we have now stayed I think three times. We drove up on a Wednesday morning and met Helen and Anne for lunch at the Grouse & Claret at Rowsley, just a short drive west along the A6 from Matlock, and then went back to Anne’s care home to see the place and her room (which Mum had seen before but I hadn’t).

After this we went to check in to the hotel and had a short pre-dinner stroll along a straight path running alongside the railway line just the other side of the A6 from the hotel. This turned out to involve quite a lot of bird and plant ID-ing, the latter using the PlantNet app, which I already had installed on my phone, and the former using the Merlin bird app, which I didn’t. Mum was particularly keen to identify the bird engaged in a concerted bout of tweeting in a tree by the path, so I was obliged to install Merlin while hoping that the bird would obligingly keep singing, which thankfully it did, and the app suggested that it was a song thrush, which was what Mum had already suspected.

The railway line

Plant ID

Since installing Merlin, it keeps telling me to take breaks and listen to birdsong.

We went back to see Anne again the following morning. During this visit I was offered a fig roll by one of the staff – don’t think I’d eaten one of those since the 1980s but I did always like them. Anne seemed to be in a mood to offload her books, and Mum and I were involved in a lot of pushing back and persuading her that she really ought to keep them. I did concede to taking two, one a book about William Morris, about whom I know almost nothing but the book contains some photographs of Arts and Crafts houses and other figures in the movement. It also includes this photograph, which I have seen in another book of Mum’s and love simply for bringing home to a modern audience how bloody tedious sitting for photographs in the 1870s must have been. The expression of the girl on the left says it all. The sitters are Morris and the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and their families.

The other book Anne gave me was Pigsties and Paradise by Liz Pitman, a collection of extracts from lady travellers to Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century. I'm only a couple of chapters in but it's quite interesting. I very much enjoyed this:

[Wales] was, until the eighteenth century, regarded as a wild, foreign place, with a mainly peasant population, who were said to eat toasted cheese because they couldn't afford meat.

Colliery band

Prior to the trip Anne had sent me some emails relating to the Lewis Merthyr Band, apparently the oldest brass band in the Rhondda Valleys. Because of Anne’s interest in genealogy, I had assumed that there was some family connection but she had been a bit vague about what it actually was, unless she’d told me before and I didn’t pay proper attention (not impossible). Thankfully Mum managed to clarify it for me:

Basically my Mum's mother's father was called Richard Martyn and came from Cornwall in the late nineteenth century with his young family to work in the mines in South Wales. He was your great great grandfather. He was very musical and became bandmaster of the then called Cymmer brass band. His brother George succeeded him as bandmaster as well.

The band website’s ‘Historical Images’ page has a photograph dated 1898 featuring Richard Martyn as conductor sitting front and centre (at least, I assume that’s him with the baton), and a further photo dated 1910, apparently showing George F Martyn as conductor. A little harder in this one to make out, but I assume he’s the chap in front behind the drum, to the left of the chap with the massive beard. The images on the page also include several of a visit of King George V and Queen Mary to the Lewis Merthyr Colliery in 1912. The Queen was evidently pulled around the colliery on a purpose-built cart drawn by a pit pony. Hope she enjoyed herself.

The internet tells me that the Lewis Merthyr Colliery was situated in the village of Trehafod, about 18 miles from Cardiff, and that the site of the former colliery now hosts the Rhondda Heritage Park.

New vet

We have a family holiday booked later in August, largely in honour of Mum and Dad’s upcoming 60th wedding anniversary. As I seem to have persuaded Ruth to come with me, if only for the first half of the week, we have been obliged to get our rabbits (still two – Chloe lives on) up to date with their vaccinations, as Reggie’s Retreat won’t take them otherwise. Ever since Ruth moved in we have been taking rabbits to the ‘Active Vetcare’ vets on Oakley Road, as it’s reasonably close to the house, but Ruth has become increasingly miffed at quite substantial increases in their prices. A new veterinary practice opened in May this year at Gallowstree Common, a village (or poss hamlet) a few miles north of Reading, run by a vet we’ve seen a few times at Oakley Road and who has impressed Ruth as good with rabbits. We went on a recce a couple of Saturdays back to locate it, incorporating a bus ride and circular walk from Sonning Common (the nearest bus stop).

Cherry Orchard Vets

Walk back to Sonning Common across fields

A week or so later we took Cassius and Chloe there to have their vaccinations. I think Ruth’s impressions of the practice are more or less favourable, though it may take more exposure. We didn’t get to see Sarah Moffat, instead getting a younger colleague, but the consultation seemed to go OK; a minor annoyance was that the vet had some difficulty examining Cassius’ teeth, which is common but I tend to think vets should have mastered a technique for it. Ruth was also a bit perturbed that the scales used for weighing animals was across the room from the examining table, necessitating the vet carrying the animal across the room, and did not appear to have a non-slip surface. (This sort of thing matters much more with rabbits than with, say, cats, who can leap off things from some height and land gracefully on their springy paws; rabbits can break their backs jumping off things in a panic.) Also, the waiting room had separate areas for cats vs. dogs, which is a nice gesture but a bit bloody pointless if they're still in the same room - the ideal would be a whole separate entrance for dogs so that their barking doesn't frighten other animals. I appreciate space is a consideration, but they could wait in their owners' cars and then just come in via the back door. Problem solved.

Cherry Orchard Vets is occupying the former Reformation pub, which closed in 2019 despite some community action to attempt to save it. I don't remember ever going there, though it's possible I did at some point. The new veterinary practice has a piece in our latest issue of Round & About.

Marrow

Ray came for dinner a couple of Fridays ago bringing some selected produce from his employer's vegetable garden (taken with permission of owner, not stolen in manner of Peter Rabbit). Two onions, two cucumbers and two alleged courgettes though one was a sizeable enough specimen to be classed as a marrow in my eyes. I used about a third of it in this recipe a couple of nights later, before having to consign the rest to the food waste bucket.

The recipe is one Mum used to cook us occasionally as kids. I think I typed it out from a Korean cookbook.

More books I have read

'Briefly, a Delicious Life' by Nell Stevens

It’s 1838. The narrator is the ghost of a young girl, Blanca, who died in 1473 at 14 years old. Blanca died in childbirth, after becoming pregnant by a novice monk of a similar age. After she died, Blanca expected to meet the ghosts of other dead people, but she never has. She amuses herself by going inside the heads of the living and rummaging around in their pasts. (She has discovered that she can also see into their futures – but tries to stop herself doing this.) She has spent most of her time since death around the Charterhouse at Valldemossa, the monastery in the remote Mallorcan hillside village where she lived and died.

The story opens when Blanca sees what appears to be two men kissing in the garden of the abandoned monastery. One of the men turns out to be a woman, though apparently called George. This is George Sand, a successful writer who has come to Mallorca from Paris with her two children and her lover, the composer Frédéric Chopin, seemingly with the intention of improving everyone’s health. Things don’t actually work out that way. The winter in the remote hillside region turns out to be brutal and the village more or less cut off. The locals are hostile to the family, partly because they assume Chopin’s coughing and general air of ill health indicates TB (it’s never clear whether it actually does or not), partly because George and her daughter wear trousers, partly because it gets around that George and Chopin are not in fact married. The woman employed to cook for them fleeces them at every opportunity, pinching portions of their food for herself and watering down their milk. The villagers are reluctant to sell to them and charge them way over the odds for food and transport. The family don’t exactly help themselves by seemingly making not much effort to participate in the life of the village, including not turning up to Sunday Mass. I felt a bit sorry for the driver who loses his carriage in a flood after George has intransigently insisted on being driven back to the village from Palma despite having been warned about the poor weather conditions. As a reader, you do wonder why on earth George and Chopin didn't draw a line under the venture sooner than they did, particularly after the village children set upon George's daughter Solange with rocks - in the event it's only when the villagers come to the monastery with flaming torches that it occurs to George that it's not really working out.

It’s a lovely story and Blanca’s ghost is a most appealing character. Blanca has reached the conclusion that her “in between” state – clearly dead, disembodied but not seeing the ghosts of other dead or apparently being admitted to any kind of afterlife – must be a bit of a glitch that’ll be rectified in due course. She imagines that heaven, when she’s eventually admitted, will involve “a lot of good seafood and gentle harp music of the kind I had never actually heard while alive”. When the family returns to Paris at the end of the novel, Blanca, who has developed an attraction to George, goes with them, seeming to have realized that not much is going to change vis à vis her afterlife and she might as well effect a change of scene for herself.

George Sand was the pen name of Aurore Dupin. Her Wikipedia entry currently notes that she “is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era”. Sand evidently grew up in the countryside but moved to Paris after the breakdown of her marriage, where she took up trouser-wearing and cigar-smoking in addition to novel-writing. Sand did spend a winter in Majorca with Chopin and her children, detailed in her book A Winter in Majorca. It looks from Google Maps as though her country home in central France is now a museum.

Briefly, a Delicious Life was published in 2022 and was Nell Stevens’ debut novel.

‘The New Long Life’ by Andrew J Scott and Lynda Gratton

Subtitled ‘A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World’. The focus is on the challenges posed by both technological advances and increased longevity. Longevity was evidently addressed in Scott and Gratton’s earlier book The 100-Year Life (which I haven’t read) and they claim to have found, in discussing the issues around it, that these also raised a lot of questions relating to technology.

The authors define “social ingenuity” as a new form of human ingenuity, required by advances in technology and in the expected human lifespan. Technological advances, they argue, initially cause disruption and require social ingenuity to get over. They state that this need for social ingenuity is their motivation for writing this book. We need to see the consequences of technological ingenuity, and the advances that have resulted in longer lifespan, as opportunities not risks. Scott and Gratton introduce a cast of personas – “everybodies” – which they use to illustrate the need for social ingenuity.

The authors suggest a need to move from a three-stage life (education-work-retirement) to a “multistage” life. They discuss the demographic transition that many countries have experienced whereby both mortality rates and fertility rates have fallen, leading to older people forming an increasing proportion of the population. If we’re to exploit the gains of longevity, the authors argue, we have to adjust our perspective on ageing and what we think of as old. They argue that there is a need for corporate practices to catch up with the multistage life, breaking the link between age and stage: i.e. the idea that you join a company after leaving university, get a series of promotions if you’re good enough; be winding down in your late 50s/early 60s. People will need more education as they live and work for longer and it will need to be spread out, rather than front-loaded. Education needs to be something people can access in their sixties as easily as in their twenties.

This was an interesting read. The personas were a neat idea though I wish they had been made more use of – having been introduced, they are then only mentioned briefly throughout the rest of the book. The idea of a midlife MOT, apparently suggested in a 2017 review of the UK state pension age, is interesting, as was the idea of the benefits of compounding as not only related to money: investing in your health etc. The suggestion in the chapter “The Government Agenda” of protecting the worker not the job, was interesting, the argument being that it’s not good for the economy to impose rigid rules on companies to project existing jobs from new technology, but that workers should be supported to get alternative jobs via re-education and training programmes. Also, if we need people to stay working for longer, then simply raising the retirement age isn’t enough in itself; it has to be done in conjunction with policies aimed at supporting older people to stay working. (I also liked the description of generational labels such as “millennial” as a “demographic version of astrology”.)

The authors claim that we’re currently – the book was published in 2020 – living through a period where the gap between technological and social ingenuity is widening, though I’d guess that worries about the effect of technological advances on people’s jobs has been around at least since the Industrial Revolution, the development of the power loom being a case in point. I seem to recall that learning about this sort of thing was one of the things that put me off taking History as an O-level subject, but I was young and foolish then and would of course find such things much more interesting now.

‘Lessons’ by Ian McEwan

“How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.”

Lessons covers most of the lifetime of Roland Baines, starting from his arrival in England from Tripoli with his parents in 1959, aged 11, to start at boarding school. The story is set against a backdrop of significant world events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Chernobyl disaster; the Eastern Bloc; the fall of the Berlin Wall; more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pivotal to the course of Roland’s life is a teenage involvement with his school piano teacher, Miriam Cornell. The “affair” with Cornell resulted in neglect of his schoolwork and a distancing from his peers, feeling himself way beyond them in terms of life experience. (“He believed he had entered a transcendent state that most of them would never know. Schoolwork he could sort out later. He believed he was in love.”) Roland fails all his O-levels; he is accepted into the school sixth form after a teacher advocates for him, but he again falls under the influence of Cornell, who tells him to leave school and move in with her; once he arrives at her house she locks his clothes in the shed and compels him to live in pyjamas, effectively confining him to her house. Their involvement ends when Cornell suggests they get married, which seems to trigger something in the sixteen-year-old Roland and he demurs, resulting in her throwing him out.

The experience with Cornell seems to have far-reaching consequences for Roland’s subsequent relationships. A string of initially promising relationships end when the women break up with him. His wife Alissa deserts him and their infant son, leaving a note saying that it was for the best. It’s only relatively late in his life that he finally marries his friend and long-time on/off girlfriend Daphne, though Daphne dies of cancer not long afterwards. It is implied that he is sexually over-demanding, though the exact nature of his issue is never made explicit; there’s a reference to “his problem, the old one. He couldn’t help himself. [Daphne] had said in a tight voice that he could and must.”

Roland writes poems, and seems to have had aspirations to be a serious poet, though he never achieves the literary success he would have liked – he has the occasional poem published, writes articles for in-flight magazines, writes verse for a friend’s greetings card business. (Ironically, his ex-wife Alissa does become a successful novelist, and her writing talent seems to enable him to forgive her.) In his middle years he makes his living playing the piano in a hotel bar. Roland agonises a lot, and is plagued by worry that he hasn’t achieved anything (“Nothing achieved”), though he is clearly a talented man, musically gifted (while at school, he was lauded as an extremely promising young pianist, though this early promise went the same way as the rest of his school career) and apparently a good enough tennis player to be able to coach the game. This is also dismissing his success as a father to his son Lawrence and stepfather to Daphne’s children and, towards the end of the novel, as a grandfather. Like his own father, Roland is a better father than he is a husband/boyfriend.

This was the first McEwan I’ve read, but I will probably read more. Mum and Dave have both read several of his novels. Mum isn’t a big fan of them, finding his protagonists frustrating; certainly I was sometimes frustrated at some of the decisions Roland makes, but I found him on the whole a sympathetic character. Themes that run through the book are decisions and their consequences, and the range of possibilities depending on choices made and not made; at one point, Roland ruminates over “single starting errors that multiplied through time into a fan-shaped array”. Later in his life he seems to make peace with his choices – as is, perhaps, the way of things.

Trek26 Cotswolds

Saturday 6 July

I think it was Hai who found out about the Alzheimer’s Society’s ‘Trek26’ walks – since we did the walk for the British Heart Foundation in 2017 she has been keen to do another similar event, but we have both been slightly put off by most charity walking challenges now setting a minimum fundraising target. As indeed this one did, though if you didn’t raise the fundraising target it didn’t mean that you couldn’t participate (though it did mean that you weren’t entitled to a trek T-shirt, which I thought was slightly mean – on the BHF walk they had been given out to everyone who took part).

I did manage to raise £130 thanks to a handful of generous people, plus a donation I made myself. But I’m not really comfortable with fundraising and didn’t push it particularly hard beyond posting the JustGiving link on my Facebook page. As it happens, my worries about feeling a bit conspicuous if we were among the few not wearing trek T-shirts were groundless because the weather on the day was so awful everyone was wearing waterproofs.

I can't now remember why we chose Trek26 Cotswolds over the other Trek26 events - I think it was a combination of Hai wanting a country route and me not wanting to travel too far to do it. Trek26 offers two walk lengths, a 26-mile route (hence the name) and a 13-mile route. We signed up for the 26 mile route back in October, in that glow of optimism that happens when something seems a good way off. In late May, we both downgraded ourselves to the 13-mile route, less for fitness reasons than because after having actually thought about the logistics of getting to the rural start point a few miles outside Cheltenham by 06:30 in the morning AND having to pick Hai up first, the whole thing started to seem impossible; I also wouldn’t have wanted to do the two-hour drive home after that length of walk so would have had to stump up for an extra night in a hotel. Selecting the 13-miler enabled us to select a more relaxed 08:30am start. As it happens, the 13-miler was amply strenuous enough thanks to the hilly terrain and the poor ground conditions.

I stayed the previous night at the Premier Inn Cheltenham North West, which I’d selected as it was half the price of the town centre Premier Inn and had a free car park.¹ It’s a somewhat dejected building of I’d guess 80s-era vintage, attached to a Beefeater and located by the side of a dual carriageway opposite a retail park. As you’d expect in an older building, it does not have air con, which I’d infer they’ve had some complaints about judging by the note in the room below. Thankfully on the night I stayed it hadn’t been an excessively hot day and I didn’t feel the need to bathe in a jug of ice. The room was fine and it did at least have a window that opened (a bit). Here I am showing the fan provided, and also showing off the haircut I’d had done earlier that day (courtesy of Oksana of TJ's Hair Designs) that was then battered by the weather on the Saturday.

The ”event hub” – where the walk started and finished – was at Postlip Farm, about seven miles NE of Cheltenham. On the morning, I got up early and snaffled a couple of cheeky pastries from a conveniently-placed Greggs at the Gallagher Retail Park across the road (how wondrous is Greggs, opening at 6:30am on a Saturday) and made coffee in my trusty mini-cafetière, as waiting for the Beefeater to open for breakfast would have been too late (also, judging by recent TripAdvisor reviews of this hotel, it’s not clear whether it would in fact have opened at all). I picked Hai up from her Travelodge and we arrived at the event hub just after 8am. Hai hadn’t received her walker number so we had to make for the information desk, which didn’t leave us much time to spare before gathering at the start so it was just as well we’d both had our breakfast as we had to pass up the hot baps on offer.

Wet people waiting to start the walk

Me attempting some high spirits as we started off

Brief summary of the walk: good points: pleasant and supportive atmosphere – people patiently waiting their turn at stiles, pulling you up if you fell over etc. I did, in fact, fall over twice, and witnessed plenty of other people also sliding on their arses. Which leads on to the bad points: due to a lot of rain over the previous few days, including the previous night, the route was a mudbath, made worse by hundreds of people having tramped over the route before our start wave got to it. There were also quite a lot of stiles on the route, not all in very good condition, though again, they would have been getting much heavier use than usual, and consequently were muddy and slippery in addition to being wobbly in some cases.  

Walking through one of several very muddy fields

At the lunch stop at Gotherington, about 8 miles in

A pleasant viewpoint

Us approaching the finish

The route: on a nicer day I’m sure the countryside would have been quite scenic, but it was difficult to appreciate it given the necessity of spending much of the time looking where we were putting our feet in order to avoid falling over. We passed under two tunnels carrying the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway and did see a couple of steam trains chugging through the landscape. The weather improved in the second half of the walk and we did get some good views, including one across to a distant church that might well have been Gloucester Cathedral as per the note below. If we’d done the 26 mile route we’d apparently have passed through the grounds of Sudeley Castle. 

According to the website, there were 1184 walkers on the day and the event raised over £400,000.

¹ Not for much longer, according to this note that's currently on their website. You expect parking charges at city centre hotels; as the free parking was part of the reason for my booking this somewhat bleak edge-of-town establishment, I'm not sure how thrilled I'd have been at this.

Some more books I have read

'You Can Heal Your Life' by Louise L. Hay

A re-reading of one of the self-help books I found useful in my twenties, along with Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway and one or two others. Hay’s book is wackier than Susan Jeffers’ (the gist of FtFaDIA is essentially "stop dithering and get on with it”) but I still think it has some merits.

You Can Heal Your Life was first published in 1984, and in the UK in 1988. It was an extension of an earlier self-published pamphlet called Heal Your Body. Hay’s philosophy is that we are each responsible for all of our experiences, and that our thoughts create our future. She takes this to rather an extreme IMO. But I still think there’s some value in this view if you don’t go overboard. Evidently, Hay was influenced by “New Thought”, as clearly were a number of other self-help authors that I read in the nineties (haven’t read many since then). Hay was a member of the Church of Religious Science – no idea what that is/was but it sounds suitably Californian.

The book is about the mental patterns that, Hay claims, cause disease (which she hyphenates as dis-ease). “We create every so-called “illness” in our body.” The most controversial thing, undoubtedly, is Hay’s claim that your own thoughts cause any disease you get, and that you equally can “think” yourself cured of any disease. More generally and usefully, Hay encourages readers to look at each of the problems in their lives and consider what kinds of thoughts they’re having that would create them.

A lot of it’s good. I do believe that we have choices about the thoughts we think, and it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me to accept that our subconscious mind might be affected by what we habitually think. Ideas that I have found useful include the notion that it’s counter-productive to criticise yourself, and the idea that it’s true if you believe it to be true: this can work both ways, in retaining negative beliefs that we’ve internalized ("Usually, what we believe is only someone else's opinion we have incorporated into our belief systems") and in implanting new, positive beliefs. I have found that there’s some value in positive affirmations, however cheesy they may appear.

I have found the ‘How to Change’ and ‘Daily Work’ chapters useful to refer back to (albeit that I don’t think I’m going to be singing affirmations any time soon). There’s some good stuff in the What Do We Do Now? Chapter about being willing to change. All the chapters in Part 2 ‘A Session with Louise’ contain exercises to work through, mainly in the form of questions to ask yourself; I didn’t bother working through these on this occasion but I think I did the first time I read the book.

Ideas I’m not so sure about, to put it mildly: the idea that we ‘decide’ to incarnate on this planet at a particular point in time and space in order to learn particular lessons. A less fringe idea, but one I also wasn’t totally sure about, is Hay's claim that any problem her clients come to her with can be reduced to needing to work on loving the self. I can imagine that as a client I might struggle a bit to get on board with that – though that’s not to say that she’s wrong. She repeats this idea a lot: “As I have said before, no matter what the problem, the main issue to work on is LOVING THE SELF.” “From the way I look at life, if there is any problem, then this [a lack of self-love] has to be true”. It’s rather difficult to reduce all of life’s problems to this. I dunno. Maybe. She seems to be acknowledging in the second statement that her conclusion that every problem is due to a lack of self-love is a fallout of the way she looks at life.

One chapter of the book, headed 'The List', is a list of conditions with what Hay claims are probable mental causes, plus new thought patterns that can be adopted to cure these conditions. This list apparently first appeared in Heal Your Body. This, and the preceding chapter 'The Body', seems the most “out there” section of the book – most of You Can Heal Your Life is focused on positive thinking to improve your life generally, rather than specifically on curing diseases; as such I assume it was a broadening of the scope of Heal Your Body. Such controversy as surrounded Louise Hay seems to have resulted from her message being interpreted as saying that sick people have brought it on themselves – victim-blaming, if you will – which I agree is a possible, but somewhat over-literal, interpretation. I’d see her approach as more about enabling people to take and feel some control over their circumstances. (Also, judging by her short bio at the end of the book, might her strategy have served to help her cope with what must have been the powerlessness of her early life and the abuse she suffered?)

If you don’t take 'The List' too seriously, it’s quite amusing. Baldness as due to a tense scalp? It also seems quite a claim that female baldness has increased since women entered the business world. Influenza due to a belief in statistics? If you suffer with the unpleasant-sounding Mucus Colon, it could be due to "wallowing in the gummed mire of the past". And here’s a tip to bear in mind during an attack of rabies: affirm “I am surrounded and indwelled with peace”. Worth a try, I guess.

To finish on a quote from Louise:

The anus is as beautiful as the ear.

That quote's not relevant to anything, but it always makes me snigger childishly.

'84K' by Claire North

Dystopian novel. Helen’s choice for our April Book Group read. It’s set in England and uses lots of familiar place names, notably place names along the Grand Union Canal. But it’s not the England we know. Society has broken down a bit. Actually a lot. Human rights have been abolished. People can be sent to the ‘patty line’, which is not a good place.

The central character is a man called Theo Miller, who works at the Criminal Audit Office working out the cost of crimes. People who’ve committed crimes have to pay an indemnity. Something called the Company is in charge – well, the government is still notionally in charge, but it’s become inextricably bound up with the Company.

Theo Miller’s name is not really Theo Miller. I think his real name is mentioned once in the book, but I’ve forgotten what it was and have no hope of finding the page again. The real Theo Miller was a fellow student at Oxford, who was killed in a ridiculous shootout with one Phillip Arnslade, now the government minister for fiscal efficiency. Arnslade’s best friend Simon Fardell seems to be de facto CEO of the Company.

Theo encounters an old flame, Dani Cumali, who asks him to trace a Lucy Cumali, now possibly known as Lucy Rainbow Princess, through his job at the Ministry. Later, Dani tells him that Lucy is his daughter. Later again, Dani is murdered, apparently a hit job, ordered because of something that Dani discovered while working at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. Theo becomes focused on avenging Dani’s murder and finding Lucy. He travels to his hometown of Shawford, which has fallen into decay since its sponsor Budgetfood pulled out. A young woman who knew Dani meets him there and gives him a memory stick contain incriminating information. He is beaten up by various people (this is a recurring theme throughout the book).

Theo suspects Arnslade of ordering mass murder and ruining the country. He travels to Arnslade’s family home and rescues his mother Helen, who has been drugged and kept captive after Phillip discovered she was secretly filming him and Fardell talking about wrong stuff they were doing. They go on the run, and reach Newton Bridge, where they meet Bess, the “queen of the patties” and various other outlaws. They publish the contents of the memory stick online, and broadcast video of Helen reading out the names of the believed victims of state murder.

A recurring theme throughout the book is a woman, Neila, who lives on a narrowboat called Hector and travels the canals. She takes Theo onto her boat after discovering him lying injured by the canal. This incident is never later returned to and it’s impossible to know at what point in the action it happened. A significant annoyance with 84K was the difficulty of keeping track of the order things happened in. It jumps about a lot – which isn’t so much a problem if it’s jumping about between different characters’ perspectives, or from e.g. a character in the present day to the same character’s childhood, but this jumps about between events that are presumably not all that far apart in time and that all centre the Theo Miller character. By two-thirds of the way through the book I’d given up on trying to keep track. At the beginning I had expected the Neila and narrowboat thread to anchor the book and be a constant through all the other events, but it didn’t end up doing this. These selected notes from my reading give a flavour of my general confusion over the order of events.

• p.264 I have no idea whether this is before or after he’s met Neila. 
• p.303 So annoying. Which city is burning FFS? 
• p.305 What was Newton Bridge? 
• p.306 Who is this man? 
• p.309 She better not have dropped his gun in the water.

There are some interesting ideas, but the whole thing is depressingly awful (dystopia is admittedly not my favourite) and there isn’t much of a ray of hope even at the end. The ending was a big disappointment, for me at least, as I had hoped that it would end with Neila and Theo going off on the narrowboat together. And I was sick of Lucy by the end. It was impossible to care about whether Theo found her or not. Theo betrays Bess, Bea, Corn and everyone at Newton Bridge – people who helped him and took risks for him – just for a girl he’s never met. Not even a girl, but the idea of a girl, as he doesn’t even know whether she’s still alive.

The rear of the cover drips with adjectives: “extraordinary”, “breathtaking”, absorbing and timely”, “captivating”. Hmm. Go figure. Ruth and I shared one copy of the book and found ourselves pushing the book onto each other in faux-selfless fashion "No, it's YOUR turn to read 84K", etc...

I was relieved to finish it and felt in the mood for a pleasurable palate-cleanser. Which leads me on to:

'The Notorious Lord' and 'One Night of Scandal' by Nicola Cornick

These are the first and second books in Nicola Cornick’s 'Bluestocking Brides' trilogy. I read and reviewed the last one, The Rake’s Mistress, here, not having realized it was the last part of a trilogy when I bought it. All three books are set in the early nineteenth century amid the threat of French invasion. The first two are set in the fictional ‘Midwinter’ villages of coastal Suffolk; the third is set partly in London and then back in Midwinter.

'The Notorious Lord'

Rachel Odell is 22 and has just moved to the Suffolk village of Midwinter Royal with her parents Sir Arthur and Lady Odell, a pair of renowned antiquarians. The Odells have taken a house there in order to spend the summer excavating an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. Also in Suffolk for the summer is Cory, Lord Newlyn, another antiquarian and a protégé of the Odells. Cory is ostensibly there to assist the Odells with the dig, but he has another motive, which is to help his friends the Kestrel brothers uncover the identity of a French spy who is believed to be working on the Suffolk coast.

The men’s attempt to discover the identity of a spy believed to be passing intelligence to the French forms a thread that runs through all three books. Justin Kestrel, the Duke, has been commissioned by the Foreign Office to uncover the spy. Evidence suggests that the Midwinter spy may be a woman, whose sex has helped her evade capture thus far. Given this, Lady Sally Saltire’s reading group, of which Rachel is a member, falls under their suspicion. Someone fires a shot at Cory as he is walking home one night; Cory fires back and injures his attacker. He and Richard Kestrel put in an appearance at the ladies’ reading group the following day – but two of the ladies have their arms bandaged. Who can it be?

The story of  The Notorious Lord centres on Cory and Rachel and their growing attraction to each other. They are both likeable young people with no obvious irritating qualities – a romance novel where both parties are quite likeable and reasonable people is pretty unusual so I quite appreciated this one. Rachel eventually realizes that she does like Cory as more than simply a friend, but doesn’t see how she can marry him when they want such different lifestyles: Cory is an explorer who is always off travelling in search of finds; Rachel, after a lifetime spent travelling abroad with her parents, wants nothing more than a quiet settled family life at home in England. Rachel is quite an appealing young woman and her reservations about marriage to Cory seem reasonable enough. After the usual declaration-of-passion-followed-by-declaration-that-it-can-never-work, the story ends with them both deciding that they can probably each compromise a bit for the other.

In all three books in the trilogy there’s an illicit night of passion between the two protagonists prior to marriage. Cory and Rachel’s occurs as a result of their both being stranded alone at her parents' house in a torrential rainstorm – both have gone down to the excavation site, worried about the site being flooded and the Odells’ work lost – and Rachel falls into a flooded barrow and is rescued by Cory. They make their way back to the house, get out of their wet clothes, and the inevitable happens.

By the end of the book, things aren’t much further on vis a vis identifying the French spy, beyond its being established that it’s not Rachel. But then this is only part 1 of 3.

 

Postscript: Lady Odell’s pregnancy? We already know that Sir Arthur Odell is in his fifties. Lavinia Odell is presented as a middle-aged woman, but presumably she must be a number of years younger than her husband – though presumably in her 40s given that she has a 20-something daughter. The pregnancy is clearly a device to explain the nomadic Odells’ otherwise surprising decision to stay on at Midwinter Royal. But still.

Postpostscript: The titles of these books are a bit random, and I’m guessing probably just assigned by the publisher. Cory is an affable chap and there’s nothing to suggest he’s particularly notorious. In a similar vein, Rebecca Raleigh is at no point Lucas Kestrel's mistress. Which leads us on to the middle book:

'One Night of Scandal'

Book 2 of the trilogy. It kicks off in September 1803, only three months after the start of the action in The Notorious Lord.

ONoS focuses on Deborah Stratton, a young widow who lives in the Midwinter villages with an older female companion. Deborah is the younger daughter of a Lord Walton of Bath. Deborah’s sister Olivia and her husband Ross, Viscount Marney, live at the nearby Midwinter Marney Hall. Deborah eloped with a Neil Stratton when she was 19, spent an unhappy five weeks with him before he went off on military duty and promptly died of a fever. We learn that the marriage was in fact bigamous, though Deborah was (obviously) not aware of this. Deborah’s father is putting pressure on her to return home to Bath; Deborah isn’t keen on this idea and is keen to stay living in Suffolk near her sister and well out of her father’s clutches. She comes up with the idea of advertising for a “biddable” gentleman to act as her temporary fiancé during a visit to her home in Bath for her brother’s upcoming wedding, with the idea that this will quieten her father’s attempts to pair her off.

In the meantime, she keeps running into Richard Kestrel, the second of the Kestrel brothers of nearby Kestrel Court. Richard and Deborah had fallen out some time previously when he asked her to be his mistress. When Deborah puts a vaguely-worded ad in the Suffolk Chronicle for a gentleman’s “assistance”, Richard, predictably, responds to it, having guessed it was her and having, highly presumptuously, got the innkeeper to bin the other applications. Stuff happens, involving the two having spirited conversations and, intermittently, passionately kissing.

Richard and Deborah are less likeable than Cory and Rachel of The Notorious Lord. Richard is an arrogant and seemingly somewhat embittered man; Deborah is ditsy and irritatingly oblivious to (or careless of) the reputational trouble her behaviour could land her in. The 'night of scandal' of the title is a night that Richard and Deborah spend at a hunting lodge on the Kestrel estate. (And I realise romance novels tend to expect heroines to be “an untried innocent in the ways of love” but as DS has been married it’s not quite plausible that she is one such.)

Richard and Deborah’s bantering/bickering with each other is frankly tedious; their conversation on the beach where Richard tells her the detail around his naval discharge, and Deborah tells him about her marriage to Neil, was the first readable bit. The background conversations are more interesting: those between Deb and her companion Mrs Aintree, Deb and her sister Olivia, Richard and Ross, Richard and Justin, Ross and Olivia Marney. The Marneys are a more appealing couple than Richard and Deborah and the lotion mix up towards the end of the book, which results in them clearing the air and reconciling, is genuinely amusing.

Spy-related events in this book involve: Richard gives Deborah, as a gift, a book of seventeenth-century poetry. At Lady Sally’s reading group, where the same volume is being discussed, Deborah’s copy is accidentally switched for someone else’s. The switched copy is found to contain a sheet of paper with a coded message written on it. Richard initially angrily questions Deborah, but swiftly concludes that she is telling the truth when she says she has never seen it before (the cattier reader might be mildly surprised that Deborah is able to find the way out of her own house, never mind operate as an undercover agent). Examining the piece of paper later, the Kestrel brothers conclude that the spy is using a pictorial code. Later, at the Custom House auction in Woodbridge, Deborah accidentally bids for some engraved glasses, resulting in the long-suffering Ross Marney having to purchase them, to the annoyance of Sir John Norton, another local gentleman who was also bidding on them and seems particularly keen to acquire them. The glasses are engraved with the same symbols as were on the piece of paper in Deborah’s book. Shortly afterwards, Marney Hall is ransacked and the engraved glass vases are stolen. The book's absurd climax features the spies knocking Richard and Deborah over the head and tying them up, which gives Richard an opportunity to propose to Deborah.

Richard Kestrel’s history is quite interesting; he is a darker character than either Cory Newlyn or his younger brother Lucas, the heroes of the other two books in the trilogy. Richard’s father had him down for the priesthood; Richard didn’t like that idea and joined the Navy instead. He was injured and discharged from active naval service. During Richard’s invalided-out period his father had his naval commission cancelled and Richard fell into a dissolute life of drinking and women, until his elder brother Justin inherited the dukedom and threatened to cut Richard off unless he started leading a productive life. This led to Richard getting his naval commission back and taking up work for the Admiralty. This story thread led me to ponder more generally the limited work options open to younger brothers of the gentleman class: not having estates to manage, some light research suggests that the only career options open to them were to join either the armed forces or the priesthood, as by some sleight of hand these were not counted as regular employment. If you either didn’t fancy them or managed to mess them up, it’s not clear what you would have done – did you officially lose your status as a gentleman?

   

For a trilogy of romance novels these are remarkably engaging little books, probably because in addition to the standard romance stuff there’s the spy storyline that straddles all three, and quite a number of the characters appear in more than one of the trilogy. All three end with an Epilogue involving a conversation between the Duke of Kestrel and Lady Sally Saltire, old flames who have kept up a flirtatious friendship since the death of Sally’s husband. At the end of The Notorious Lord, Sally bets the Duke that Richard Kestrel and Deborah Stratton will be married within three months. This does happen, and at the close of One Night of Scandal Sally collects on her debt by asking Justin to attend a ball in honour of a watercolour calendar she is auctioning – which he was intending to do anyway. They enter another wager, that Justin’s other brother Lucas will be next to fall in love – which leads in to the action of The Rake’s Mistress. In the Epilogue to the final book, the two finally stop playing around and declare their feelings for each other.

Nespresso dabblings

As previously mentioned, Premier Inn’s enhanced ‘Premier Plus’ rooms come with, among other things, a Nespresso machine plus a selection of three or four coffee pods. Pod coffee machines have never been things I've particularly coveted, though I can certainly see their usefulness in a household where one person likes black and hot, someone else favours cappuccino etc. They must also be a lot less messy than more purist methods of coffee-making. Partly also because my kitchen has next to no spare counter space, I’ve stuck for years now with making coffee in a cafetière (aka ‘French press’ in the States, I believe) and have developed a preference for the full-bodied coffee that they produce.

A percolator

In conversation with Mum and Dad the other day about coffee-drinking in their young day, Mum remembered her mother favouring the instant coffee brand Maxwell House. I think we had various brands at home when I was a teenager; I can't remember whether Mum had a favoured brand but I think I remember Gold Blend featuring. Mum also tells me that years ago people used to make coffee from ‘Camp’ coffee, which I have only ever used for cooking and in iced coffee. I asked Mum and Dad about coffee percolators, as I’ve come across these in books (references to "getting the perk going"), but they didn’t remember either of their mums using them. The Wikipedia page note that percolators lost popularity to what it calls “drip-brew” coffeemakers – this might be either an obsolete and/or an American term but it seems to include coffee made with filter papers, which I remember Mum switching over to from instant, probably in the second half of the 80s. I think it took me a short while to get used to the taste of ground coffee after being used to drinking mugs of Nescafé or similar, and I remember thinking initially that it tasted like you would imagine iron filings taste, but I did develop a taste for it reasonably rapidly and nowadays can barely tolerate the taste of instant coffee.

Anyway, back to Premier Inn’s Nespresso machines. PI have recently put up the costs of their breakfasts, from £9.99 to £10.99, and as with all “all you can eat” pricing, they’re only decent value if you put away a large amount of food, and while I don’t consider I exactly eat like a bird, I’m not going to pile my plate high with all the options on the hot buffet. Given this, the last few times I’ve stayed in MK I’ve dabbled in Greggs breakfast rolls. I’ve never been much of a customer of Greggs, though I realise they’re very popular, and I can’t imagine myself ever ordering takeaway breakfast at home, but in a hotel room they certainly have their uses. At the Willen Lake hotel I have to get delivery, which reduces, though doesn’t obliterate, the price saving, but at the city centre hotels I can walk to Greggs and pick up, making the whole thing total £2.50-£3. Bargain.

Flakey (flaky?) goodness

Flakey goodness via JustEat

So given this, on my last few 'Premier Plus' bookings in MK I’ve been attempting to work out how to get a cup of coffee out of the Nespresso machines. This isn’t essential, as I always take my mini-cafetière and a supply of coffee with me, but I thought I should get with the modern way and know how to use them. They seem to be mainly Nespresso Essenza Mini machines – I have no idea where these sit in Nespresso’s range or indeed how may different types of machine they make. Anyway, it hasn’t entirely gone well. On the first occasion, the machine was blocked with used pods, which I did manage to empty out, but then couldn’t slot the bits back together.

Deconstructed Nespresso machine

Return to the trusty cafetière

On the second, things advanced slightly as I did manage to get the machine to dispense a tiny amount of coffee. It was quite decent coffee, but the machine staunchly refused to dispense more than a couple of centimetres worth.

The jar labelled 'Goose Fat' in the picture above contains coffee. I used to keep a cunning little plastic tub for this purpose, but Ruth ruined it by putting some sort of homemade Cajun spice blend in it.

On my stay last week, I had a bit more success and got a full mug of coffee, but then pushed my luck and tried to get a second; something clearly went wrong with the placing of the pod, as it disappeared into the bowels of the machine and the machine dispensed me a mug of frothy hot water. Admittedly I am not the handiest person out there but the placing of the pods does seem to me to be a lot more hit and miss than it ought to be – it surely can’t depend on inserting and placing them at precisely the right angle or the machine throws a strop.

The more successful cup last week

So although I can see the appeal, based on experience so far I’m not sure I’m going to be buying one – I’m probably safer sticking to my jug and plunger.

My cafetières

Postscript: I seem to have bookmarked this 10-year-old BBC article titled ‘Why do Britons drink so much instant coffee?’. I’m a bit staggered that instant coffee still accounted for 77% of the coffee bought in the UK for home drinking. Having said that, I have met a number of work colleagues who say they drink instant because it’s easier and quicker – given the availability and ease of use of cafetières, that never seems convincing to me. About all you can say for instant is that it’s less messy. According to the BBC piece, we've got the Americans to blame for it.

Thenford Gardens

Saturday 27 April

No idea how Ruth found out about this garden but she booked tickets at the beginning of April for one of its Open Days. It’s a 70-acre garden and arboretum privately owned by Michael Heseltine and his wife, but open to the public on selected dates throughout the year.

At the time she booked, I just heard ‘Oxfordshire’, assumed it wouldn’t be too long a drive and resolved to check the location later. In fact it was over an hour’s drive as it’s up near Banbury, off junction 11 of the M40 and a turning off the A422 near Farthinghoe. We did manage to take the route they recommend into Thenford, through Middleton Cheney, and not the one that Google Maps tried to take me, up a single track road (the horror).

The Heseltines have owned the house and garden since the mid-1970s and have evidently overseen an orgy of restoration and new planting and landscaping. We had a pleasant walk around over a couple of hours, with a stop for tea and cake in the middle. Posting photos on the internet is apparently discouraged, so I’ve restricted myself to a few views of things already shown on their website.

Me with the Minotaur

The walled garden

The Rill

One of the medieval fish ponds

We returned to the visitor area at the end of our visit, me to use the toilets and Ruth to ask a question of the book/postcard lady about the medieval fish ponds. As we came back through the tea room, Lord H was standing in the tea area speaking to punters. We feebly chickened out of speaking to him, though we had been a bit intrigued to ask about the massive bust of Lenin in his sculpture garden.

The massive Lenin

By one of the medieval fish ponds we saw a darling little baby moorhen (or poss coot) running down the bank into the water after its mother. This made me think that I've missed out on seeing many adorably tiny baby waterfowl this year. Have I just missed them? There are generally loads of goslings near the Thames at Christchurch Meadows. Hopefully it's just that I've been unobservant or not there at the right time rather than there having been a gosling drought this year.