Bees

Weekends bring many pleasures, not least a long soak in the bath with a good book.  Since most of my current reading is either study- or Kindle-based, I opt instead for Sarah Hall's collection of short stories The Beautiful Indifference.


'Bees' opens with a middle-aged woman finding her house-mate's garden littered with dead bees.  At first, I'm not sure why this story should work so well.  It's written in the tricky second person and has no dialogue at all, but then the prose is beautiful, compact but richly descriptive.  The bees are 'black-capped, like aristocrats at a funeral, their antennae folded, with mortuary formality, across their eyes'.  The woman reflects on her move to London after her failed marriage to a Cumbrian farmer.  I can't help thinking I've met this farmer, or someone just like him, in a village pub on the fells.  Until, at the end, she discovers the reason for the bees' demise.  And like the best short stories, it makes an impression, and then lingers.

I like the way good writing seems to sharpen your senses.  I close the book and listen.  Across the city, church bells ring and the starlings nesting in our gutter clamour for food.  From my son's bedroom, the incessant whistle of a police siren car chase.  The peace lily on the sill trembles in the draught of the barely open window.

I think of the bees that swarmed in our garden.  The clichéd cloud and drone, the hasty evacuation of young children.  Once swarmed, they gathered benignly on the stone wall, barely visible until you were an arm's length away.  The council did tell us what type they were, but I've forgotten now. Certainly, not comic-book bees; they were thinner and paler coloured.

I could add bee-keeping to my list of pipe-dreams, along with bountiful allotment keeping and hosting gregarious outdoor dinners as seen in the better lifestyle magazines.

In the meantime, I return to more mundane affairs - post-Freudian analysis of Dracula and a fun-run in the local park.

Bookgroup

At a playgroup eight years ago, I overheard one new mother telling another, 'I'm starting a bookgroup.  Would you like to come?'  To be sure, it was rather rude of me to gatecrash, but I do owe a great deal to that enterprising woman.  There are the fifty or more books that I wouldn't have read otherwise, for one thing.  Then there's the wine, the friendship and the wine.

Some people have come and gone, but most are in it for the long haul. We've fussed pregnant women, jiggled babies and now compare notes on how to motivate teenage daughters. In short, this is much more than a bookgroup.

The books we've read have inspired debate, theatre trips and a tear or two.  This week we discussed The Shipping News and ate Swedish pickled herring, washed down with a gin and tonic.  So much of the book seems to revolve around meals of some kind.  Can we tempt you with a squid burger or shark fin soup?  And as the sun set over Lancaster castle, we talked of icebergs and Newfoundland skies.

Book groups come in all shapes and sizes.  Mine is a perfect fit.

A whistle-stop tour

Do you ever take time off and then go back to work for a rest?

Twelve days disappeared in a flash.  A life-affirming combination of fresh air and books.  We walked  in the Yorkshire Dales in sun, wind, rain and snow, ate Masham and Malham steak pie and supped real ales. Well, a half of Landlord on my part, before returning to the reassuring blandness of a cold lager.

Serious study of The Portrait of a Lady was interspersed with more easy going reading.  On a friend's recommendation, I read my first Dorothy Sayers mystery, Whose Body?  Murder mysteries aren't usually my bag, but the combination of great characters and effective writing style kept my interest throughout. I'll know where to turn now for an entertaining read and some respite from the arduousness of the Nineteenth Century Novel.

If I thought it was cold in Malham, that was nothing to a bitter Newfoundland winter.  Although I was never quite comfortable with the disjointed style and incomplete sentences of The Shipping News, I did feel I was there, eating shark fin soup with the motley staff of the Gammy Bird newspaper.  I'll look forward to hearing the views of the Lancashire Ladies at our book group meet next week.

I took my kids to see The Hunger Games which has reached the lofty position of 'second best film ever' (behind Star Wars III) in my son's eyes.  For my part, I was glad to see a heroine with a bit of spark after the wishywashyness of Twilight's Bella Swan.

So now we've reached the last lap of the academic year.  There's light at the end of the degree tunnel, and a whole season of under tens cricket to look forward to.  Let the good times roll.

Headroom of one's own

I'm a big fan of Mslexia, and find it a thoughtful and thought-provoking read.  I'm always intrigued by the pen profiles of their contributors.  I can't help thinking that if men had a writing magazine of their own, they wouldn't all feel the need describe how they fit their writing into their busy week.

When my children were much younger, a postcard above my desk read: 'I would take over the world if only I could get a babysitter.'  I finally had to admit that this was a little disingenuous.  Now I don't need a babysitter, am I more creative and productive?  No, I don't think so.  It's true that as children grow older, a parent's role does change.  Football matches replace playgroups, but teenagers still consume a remarkable amount of emotional energy.  Like Pavlov's dog, I can't help jumping out of my chair to respond to my children's needs.  Even when our children were toddlers, my husband could look after them and still watch a whole day's test match. I, on the other hand, could barely get through a whole page of a novel without having to do something.

I wonder if mothers have to grow out of this extreme state of readiness.  I can mull over a poem whilst I'm chopping vegetables.  Conversations overheard in the playground can hold the germ of a character sketch or short story.  Sometimes, however, I do just need some headroom of my own for the proper, big thinking.

So today I shall ignore the washing, ironing, gardening and those missing buttons.  I shall enjoy some thinking time, at least until the school bell rings.

London bound

Five hours of uninterrupted reading, a constantly changing panorama and the gentle lull of the Pendolino - I love travelling by train.  Tomorrow I have a conference in London and, as much as I hope it will be worthwhile, it's the journey I'm really looking forward to.

As the end of term approaches, the pace of everyday life quickens.  There seems to be some kind of conspiracy to cram as many parents evenings, football matches and social events as possible into the final four days of term. There's book group, tag rugby and hockey tournaments and Don't Knock's annual airing.  Then I have the stress of packing for my daughter's CCF camp.  I wonder if all mothers displace their anxieties into a desire to constantly feed their children and pack for every possible contingency 'just in case'.

So you can see why five hours of calm appeal so much.  But even this oasis has a to-do-list. Two hundred pages of The Shipping News to read before Wednesday evening, The Portrait of a Lady on audiobook and my OU textbook.  The first of these won't be a chore.  I can't understand why I've put off reading The Shipping News for so long.  I'm only four chapters in, but now I've got used to the choppy style, it's shaping up very nicely.

There will still be time to watch the world go by, spotting pheasant and herons in the countryside. You see things differently from a train. The backs of houses for instance.  House fronts are prim and proper, outward looking.  It's the backs that show the real lives behind.  The abandoned tricycles and trampolines, the lines of washing and the neatly trimmed stamps of green.  Just a fleeting glimpse of so many lives and then all the time in the world to invent their stories.

On Oxford Road

While many might long for a view of rolling fields, give me a cityscape any day.  From my window I can watch the sun set over Morecambe Bay yet, perversely, it's the mundane and man-made that capture my attention.  The sun sets behind the power station, you can (just) see and hear the London trains and watch the long queues of cars snake over the Greyhound bridge.

That's why those few hundred yards of Oxford Road fascinate me so much.  There's always something new to see. For the first time I notice the café bar sign with the customer comment 'the food actually blew us away'. Then there's the shop that's taxi firm, snack bar, barber and tattooist all in one.  Johnny Roadhouse Music displays a row of instruments - trombone, French horn, guitar - above the shop front sign.  I don't know how long they've been there, but they seem to be weathering well.

I take out my ipod and snap away.

Taxi, café, barber, tattooist - a true 'one stop shop'

Some choice watering holes

The Salisbury

Walking down Oxford Road

Johnny Roadhouse Music 

Country mouse goes to the city

Tomorrow I'm off to Manchester for an Italian tutorial.  I was a city girl once, but having lived in Lancaster for more than a decade, I'm not used to the bright-lights-big-city any more.  After an early start and two hours massacring la bella lingua, I'm always keen to get home again. Usually my visit is limited to the few hundred yards between Oxford Road station and the university.  It's an interesting walk though.  I like the seediness of the street, the mix of people and the city grime.  Rather that than the fool's gold of the department stores and cocktail bars.

I find myself staring like a country mouse at all the hustle and bustle.  I forget the city protocol, make eye contact and try to strike up a conversation in the newsagents.  Do they make allowances for country folk?

© Copyright Carol Winder and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence 

Madame Bovary - a very modern heroine

Have you ever read the same book, years apart, and reacted to it in very different ways?  Are some books better read in the innocence of youth?  Do others need age and experience to be appreciated?

As a young teen I adored Anya Seton's Catherine.  The combination of history and romance was perfect escapism for a dreamy teenager.  At seventeen, I was interested in existentialism, inspired by Camus' The Outsider.  I have never reread either book.  Perhaps, like revisiting favourite childhood haunts, rereading should be avoided.  Can you recapture those teenage enthusiasms?  Is it worth risking the disappointment?

I read Madame Bovary ten or fifteen years ago.  I did not enjoy it at all. Monsieur Bovary irritated me,with his dull provincial ways. Madame Bovary was shallow and self-centred.  This was no grand amour, just destructive delusion.

Rereading Madame Bovary has been a revelation. M. Bovary is still uncultured and unsophisticated.  Emma Bovary is just as self-centred, but somehow this time it doesn't matter.  I don't have to like the characters to enjoy the book.  I can admire Flaubert's depiction of the ennui of provincial bourgeois life and his particular attention to finding le mot juste. He creates such a convincing world through the minutiae of the everyday where his characters speak and live in clichés.

In many ways Emma Bovary is a very modern heroine.  Imagine her suburban world, reading celebrity magazines and Ideal Home. She fantasises about London parties and Manolo Blahnik shoes.  Imagine the multiple credit cards and the loan sharks, the bailiffs at the door. Still the adultery and rampant consumerism would not satisfy.

Definitely worth rereading.

An existential moment

Do you ever have an existential moment when you wonder what it all means?  I did at work last week as I played with my pivot tables. I compared one bit of data with another until, quite frankly, I had no idea at all what I was doing or why. And did it really matter anyway?

Well, today that's just how I feel about this blog.  I've been mentally composing a post about Billy Liar and another about Madame Bovary, but I'm not in the mood for either.

So just who am I writing this blog for? If you write or blog, do you know who your readers are?  If you say that you're only writing it for yourself can I really believe you?  Surely, by writing a blog, or writing for publication, you want to be read. Do you have an audience in mind, or is it pure narcissism?

Far from the Madding Crowd

Through the summer I ticked the books off my reading list until only two remained.  The first, Dombey and Son, daunted by its size.  The second was Far from the Madding Crowd.  At seventeen I read Tess of the d'Urbervilles and hated every word.  Dull, dull, dull.  At forty-two, I pushed Hardy further down the pile until I couldn't ignore it any more.

Far from the Madding Crowd, first published in 1874, is the story of Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, Gabriel Oak, Farmer Boldwood and the dashing Sergeant Troy. Set in Hardy's fictitious Wessex, we follow Bathsheba's progress towards self-knowledge and emotional maturity.  The book has an episodic quality, with key events closely linked to the shepherd's calendar.  Hardy describes key scenes with an artist's eye, as in this scene where Gabriel Oak fights a fire on Bathsheba's farm:

'This before Gabriel's eyes was a rick of straw, loosely put together, and the flames darted into it with lightning swiftness.  It glowed on the windward side, rising and falling in intensity like the coal of a cigar.  Then a superincumbent bundle rolled down, with a whisking noise, flames elongated and bent themselves about with a quiet roar, but no crackle.  Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity.  Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms, and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips, glaring eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks flew in clusters like birds from a nest.'


I won't give the story away, but there are other dramas too: the coffin scene and Troy's reappearance to name but two.  And then there's sex.  Or at least, as close as you could get in a Victorian novel intended for the general public.  In a chapter suggestively entitled 'The Hollow amid the Ferns', Troy seduces Bathsheba with his sword skills:

'He flourished the sword by way of introduction number two, and the next thing of which she was conscious was that the point and blade of the sword were darting with a gleam towards her left side just above her hip; then of their reappearance on her right side, emerging as it were from between her ribs, having apparently passed through her body...
   'Oh!' she cried out in affright, pressing her hand to her side. 'Have you run me through? - no, you have not! Whatever have you done!'
    'I have not touched you,' said Troy. 'It was mere sleight of hand.  The sword passed behind you.  Now you are not afraid, are you?  Because if you are I can't perform.  I give my word that I will not only not hurt you, but not once touch you.'
   'I don't think I am afraid.  You are quite sure that you will not hurt me?'
   'Quite sure-'
   'Is the sword very sharp?'


Steamy stuff indeed.

A successful day

Good news today.  My friend Vee's poem, 'Father', is to be published.  William Thirsk-Gaskill reminded us of the launch of the 2012 'Grist' poetry anthology, in which three of his poems are included.  It's too easy to put poets and writers on a pedestal, so it's good to see ordinary people, with hard work and talent, making a success of their writing.

Although not on the same scale, I'll consider my day successful too.  The Zola/Hardy essay is taking shape which is no bad thing since the deadline is tomorrow.

We're finally replacing our sixteen-year old cathode ray TV with a flat screen one.  Trying to watch 'Zookeeper' with a view the size of a letterbox was the final straw.  So, on Saturday we'll be able to watch Sky Sports in glorious 40 inch LED technicolour.  I can hardly wait.

Finally, a poem by another one of my Open University friends inspired me to write a poem of my own about my grandmother.

So, all in all, I'll call this a day well spent.