Wine, women and mince pies

I'm looking forward to meeting the Lancashire ladies this evening for our final book group meeting of the year.  I'm rather hoping for a mince pie with my glass of red wine, but as we're not quite in December I'll not be too presumptuous.  The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is our book for discussion. The signs are promising.  I do believe this is the first book in a long time that the whole group has actually read. J reached the end and then went straight back to the start to read it all over again.  That's not something that happens very often.

In the meantime, I'm wondering what book to suggest for this month's read.  Something festive would be good, but what? A Christmas Carol is too obvious, but a ghost story might do the trick.  Something to snuggle in bed with as the wind howls round the house and the rain rattles at the windows.

We shall have to see what the ladies come up with.

1st December update

Sadly, mince pies were not on the agenda but the ladies were in fine form and I was consoled by an interesting discussion on the nature of memory.  Our Christmas reading is the Selected Tales of Edgar Allen Poe.  Be very afraid.

What I've learnt so far

Sixteen months ago I decided to sign up for a creative writing course with the Open University.  I completed the course successfully and one of my stories was shortlisted for the Ilkley Literature Festival.

This is what I've learnt so far:

1. To keep a notebook.  I don't do this religiously, but I've done it enough to appreciate the value of recording passing thoughts and observations.  A five minute freewrite became the opening paragraph of one short story. The way a woman ate a cake in Café Nero showed character in another.  Even if I don't have time to write complete stories right now, filling my notebooks is building up my resources for a later date.
2. To read widely and with a more critical eye.  I've branched out into new genres and new authors.
3. To demystify the art of writing.  Even if great writing cannot be taught, I think that good writing can be.  Just as I learn to play a musical instrument, I can learn to play a language.  First, learn some basics and then practise. This leads me to...
4. I am not my writing.  If am going to develop as a writer I have to objectify my work.  The ones who learnt most from the course were those who had the confidence to share their writing and learn from negative feedback.

I once taught English to an eminent French doctor.  He was seventy five and not in the best of health, but he was a determined student with a penchant for young English girls.

'If there's only one thing you do,' he told me, 'you must learn something new every day.'

And that's exactly what I try to do.

Give a book this Christmas

The clocks are ticking.  Clandestine telephone calls take place while children are sleeping.  The staff in Boots are being driven slowly insane by Christmas muzak.  I can't put it off any longer; it's time to start my Christmas shopping.

If I had my way, I'd give everyone a book.  Amidst the commotion of numerous dogs, children and aunties on Christmas Day, my husband sits, an island of calm, with his nose in a physics book. My daughter shares her father's ability to block out all extraneous stimuli.  I've given her a 'box of books' for Christmas ever since she could read.  In the olden days, I could fill her box with my favourites such as The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, and What Katy Did. Nowadays she likes to make her own choices, but I may slip a few of my own in too.

My husband's family are practical present givers.  Wishlists are exchanged or, even more practically, we buy our own gifts and pass them back to the giver to be wrapped.  This approach does have its advantages, but it seems too clinical to me.  Hence my book giving.  This gives an element of surprise to the occasion, but it is not without risk.   My husband's family have that admirable trait of finishing every book they start and I do feel a certain sense of guilt if they are still labouring through one of my choices at Easter. However, Room was a great success and The Secret Life of Bees found its way round half the family.

My own wishlist this year is made up entirely of books.  I already have a year's worth of reading on my shelves and another six months on my Kindle,  but as books and food are the only things I can buy without feeling guilty, books it is.  I cannot settle to a novel on Christmas Day so I usually have a picture book at the top of my list.  Often this will be art history, travel or photography. 1001 books you must read before you die kept me entertained with my train spotter urge to tick off all the ones I'd read and swot up on those I'll never get round to. This year I've requested Where to go when: Italy so that I can dream of sunsets on the Amalfi coast as I snuggle down with my sherry and mince pie.  My next choice is Carol Ann Duffy's new collection 'The Bees'.  Last but no means least, is Outside the Asylum, a collection of short stories including one by my Open University colleague William Thirsk-Gaskell.

Happy reading.

La bella lingua?

The passion, my tutor tells me, is in the vowels.  I contort my face to sound the various 'ays', 'ees' and 'oos', but I can't help feeling a bit of a fool.  And so my initiation into the Italian language begins.

It's not a language for the faint-hearted.  I won't get away with a mumbled word ending; Italian's a language to be spoken with conviction and a gesture or two. For me, the pronunciation is the hardest part, particularly with distance learning.  I tried to learn Japanese many years ago.  My teacher, a Japanese lady, spoke English  with a Japanese accent peppered with the occasional word of broadest Lancashire.  Very strange.  I remember trying out my new language skills on a Japanese friend.  She did try so hard to be polite and understand me. Sadly, my 'hello, how are you?' was just a step too far.

It's lucky I've got La bella lingua to inspire me as I make my baby steps.  If I tire of Colloquial Italian, I can enjoy some colourful Italian idioms. Florentines, apparently, call a blowsy woman an 'unmade bed' and an aging cavalier 'a tired horse.'  Boccaccio was a buona forchetta, a big eater or literally a' good fork.' I can read about the tre corone, Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, before returning to my grammar book.

Una birra...due birre...

Well, everyone has to start somewhere.

The collector

I'm watching you.  On the train, in the coffee bar, even when you're in the park with your children.  I see everything: where you go, what you read and what you eat. The way your eyes narrow when you don't believe what someone's telling you.  I see it all and I take notes.  I never know when I might need them.

Which one are you?

People say you're either a Wuthering Heights fan or a Jane Eyre fan.  Not both.  My husband prefers Wuthering Heights, but for me, it's Jane Eyre all the way.  I can't help wanting to tell Cathy and Heathcliff to 'pull themselves together.'  Harsh I know, but honestly!  Don't get me wrong, I like a good love story as much as anyone, but it's all so overwrought.

Jane Eyre, on the other hand, just gets better and better.  There's always a danger when you study a favourite book, that you'll analyse it to death and it will lose all its appeal. Not so this time; even the litcrit is interesting - the madwoman in the attic and all that.  There's nothing like a touch of Gothic horror for a dark and stormy winter's night.

Guess what?

Some parents complain that their children ask too many questions.  It's 'why this?' and 'why that?'  No sooner have you answered one, then along comes another.  I know that we're supposed to encourage inquisitive minds, but there is the occasional temptation to say 'because it just is, okay?'

I have a different complaint.  It's about the guessing game my son plays.  'Guess what I did today?' he says.  And  you have to guess. Not once, not twice, but three times.  Not all guessing games are so easy.  'Guess how many runs Bell got today?' he asks.  Not having even cottoned on to the fact that there was a test match, it was always going to be a struggle.

But now and then, we strike lucky.  Like the time some enterprising kids from down the street knocked on the door holding a jar of sweets.

 'Guess how many sweets are in the jar?'

 'One hundred and twenty seven,' my husband replied.

The boys walked back down the path, shaking their heads in disbelief.  Don't they know that teachers have psychic powers?

Teenage kicks

How times have changed.  When I was a teenager, despite access to the school and town libraries, I never had enough to read.  I read anything I could find, from Mills and Boon to George Orwell.  Often in the same week.  For a while my dad subscribed to Readers' Digest and I looked forward to the arrival of the next dark red volume.  I still remember Call of the Wild and The Citadel, but I'm sure there were many more.  I never managed to get my hands on anything very subversive though.  I 'borrowed' my mum's copy of Lace, but I never found the smutty bits and it was too bad to read from cover to cover.  I thought that A wife's guide to pleasing her husband might be more informative, but apart from a useful reminder to remove one's apron and warm one's husband's slippers before he arrived home from work, there was little to interest an eighties teenager.

Nowadays there is a plethora of teen fiction to choose from.  I've never banned my daughter from reading anything.  I'd like to say this is out of liberal-mindedness, but in fact it's more due to apathy.  She'd read most of Jacqueline Wilson's books 'for older readers' before I ever noticed that they weren't all about sleepovers. On principle, I couldn't ban anything I hadn't read myself and I just never got round to it.  Now I come to think of it, there was one book that achieved 'banned' status in our house:  Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses. Of course, being banned gave the book special appeal.  When I finally read it, I thought it was an excellent book. But then all the glamour had gone, in my daughter's eyes.

Speaking of glamour, half term ended with a trip to see Katy Perry at the MEN.  Never have I seen so many wigs, flashing headbands and mini skirts no wider than belts.  And that was just the audience.  Yes, I know I'm showing my age but it was truly a sight to behold.  The show was spectacular too: fireworks, dancers, pink fluffy clouds and more dress changes than you could possibly imagine.  Fabulous.