On local history

Now I am a great believer in keeping busy, but you can have too much of a good thing.

It was the Castle Park Stories project that blew my schedule, but what an adventure it has been! I'm no historian, but as an experience of bringing history to life it was remarkable. Understanding the involvement of one individual in the transatlantic slave trade and their legacy has made history immediate and compelling in a way that I didn't think possible. I've been inspired by the enthusiasm of other researchers too and I can't wait to see what they've come up with when the exhibition opens next week.

There seems to be a huge amount of interest in local history. I've joined a fantastic Facebook group called Lancaster Past and Present where people share their photos, memories and stories of the local area. It's a great way to preserve the history of ordinary people and a great source of story ideas. The challenges of my Castle Park research have made me realise the importance of recording our history. What might seem mundane now could well be fascinating fifty or a hundred years hence.

That's enough on history for now, I have a Shakespeare assignment to do. But more on that next time.

Castle Park Stories

The streets of Lancaster are full of stories. From the first Roman settlement, the founding of the castle in the eleventh century, the city's brief boom as a trading port to the vibrant community today, if walls could speak they'd have so much to tell.

Castle Park, the small area surrounding the castle and Priory, is one of my favourite parts of town. With its steep cobbled streets, fine houses and a quayside lined with converted warehouses, all in the shadow of the castle itself, it doesn't take a giant leap to imagine the folk living there two hundred or even five hundred years ago. So when Litfest put out a call for local residents interested in history, photography or writing to participate in a lottery funded writing project, I didn't take much persuading.

You can find out more about the project here, but essentially we have six weeks to put together an exhibition about the area.

There's so much scope in such a small area that it's hard to know where to start. Around fifty people want to be involved with interests as diverse as slavery, the Quakers, maritime and family history. Already we've heard some marvellous stories such as the banter between the prisoners held in the castle and the factory girls passing by. So the story goes, the young women would take great delight in giving the male prisoners a glimpse of the delights they were missing. Brazen hussies! We heard too of the grammar school boys who were allowed to go on the roof of the church before prayers to get a better view of the castle hangings. Let that be a lesson to you all boys!

I have my first Open University tutor to thank for the particular piece of history I'm hoping to explore. She's an expert in Lancaster's connections with the slave trade, back in Georgian times when Lancaster was one of England's major ports. She took us on a walking tour of the city and in passing pointed out a rather fine house just next to the castle. Built in 1720, it was once home to a successful merchant involved in the slave trade. He had a black female servant, brought to England from the West Indies. I've always wondered how this woman came to be in Lancaster and how it must have felt to live under grey Lancashire skies so far from home.

I've only just started my research, but already I've uncovered the most macabre tale. Truly, truth is stranger than fiction.

I wonder what other stories this fine house has to tell?

20 Castle Park, Lancaster

Coffee shop post

We are becoming creatures of habit. There was a bite in the air on our canal walk this morning but no sign of snow yet. On the hill opposite a flock of geese were resting. I wish I knew more about where they'd come from or where they're heading.

The reward was great - a window seat in our favourite cafe. It's market day so there's plenty to see and so many photo opportunities Lancaster's a relatively small place so it doesn't take long to spot people you know wandering past.

The Mathematician is rereading Camus' The Outsider for Monday's book group and I'm mulling over my many projects for this year. More on those another time.

For now I'll spend a little longer people watching.

Wise words from Rilke

Weekends are taking on a familiar pattern. They begin with a briskish walk along the canal side, through Fairfield community orchard and home again via a hot chocolate and a book in Caffe Nero.

Since Les Miserables is rather bulky to carry, I'm taking Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet' instead. It's a slim book with ten letters from Rilke to an aspiring young poet. The writing strikes a chord, and I expect it's a book to which I'll return many times. Rilke advises

'be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.'

Wise words, I think.

2012 in first lines

Thank you to Simon at Stuck in a Book for this idea, summing up last year in a selection of blog post first lines. So here goes...

January

"What will you do now
with the gift
of your left life?"

February

It's minus two outside and the Lakeland hills are dusted with snow.

March

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?

April

'Only six more years,' my son tells me with great authority, 'and you will be an old person.'

May

In 1953 Henry Molaison had part of his brain removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy.  

June

With two days to go to my exam, my head is more tightly packed than a teenage girl's suitcase.

July

Should really be enjoying this...

August

After a week of prevaricating, I was starting to feel like a character in a Nick Hornby novel. So here, at last, is my list of classic books.

September

'The North is the dark place...

October

The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. Three hundred and forty one graduands. And Brian Cox.

November

Dickens visited Lancaster in 1857 on his way back from a walking holiday in the Lake District with his friend Wilkie Collins.

December

With the reading room nearing completion, the thought of settling down with a book on a winter's evening has never been so appealing.

I've enjoyed trawling back through my posts and reminding myself of some of the highs and lows of the year. I have one more retrospective in mind and then it's time to say goodbye to 2012 for once and for all.

After all, there are many more books on the shelf...
 

Intimidating books

My plans to start the new year with a flurry of exercise and administrative efficiency have been hampered somewhat by a stinking cold. I thought I'd done well to avoid it as my family fell one by one but, just as I was congratulating myself on my immunity, I too have succumbed.

But it could be worse. I have a huge stock of reading material to keep me occupied. You might remember that I was hankering after a fine cloth bound edition of Les Miserables. Well, I was not disappointed on that or many other counts. My intention was to read it before watching the film that is to released mid January. Now I have the book in my hands I realise the flaw in my thinking. With 1232 pages of tiny print it is, quite frankly, massive.

Now I'm not easily intimidated by a book, but weighty tomes like this do fill me with a certain sense of dread. Yet with the inclement weather and another week off work, I have girded my loins and taken the plunge. And what a treat it is too! Clearly my year of studying the nineteenth century novel has paid dividends. What does it matter that it has taken the first seventy pages to establish that the Bishop of Digne is both generous and open minded? And then, just when I thought we had an inciting incident in the arrival of the ex-convict Jean Valjean, we have another diversion into his backstory and the injustices of French society. Perhaps it's just the luxury of sustained spells of reading, but I am really having a ball.

It might even be the time to tackle my other bête noire - Mary Warnock's Existentialism. I find this combination of big ideas and academic writing quite intimidating. My husband's gift of 'The Existentialist's Guide to Death, the Universe and Nothingness' might be more accessible. Certainly it started well over a hot chocolate in Caffe Nero, but then I started scratching my head over the distinction between 'being-for-itself' and 'being-of-itself'. Perhaps that's one to pursue another day.

Best of 2012

It's been a good year for reading and the first one where I've kept a record of all my books.

2012 saw the completion of my English Lit degree. It was the year I learnt to love Middlemarch and think that anything less than 600 pages constituted a short book. I began my A Level studies with Heart of Darkness more than twenty years ago and finished my degree with the same, perhaps a little wiser but certainly better read.

This year I also signed up for the Classics Challenge, selecting fifty classic books to read over the next three years. My favourite so far has been Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, partly for its pace but mainly for its characterisation of Pinkie, the teenage gang leader. Villains are so much more interesting than the good guys, don't you think?

I have fellow book bloggers to thank for my next two choices. Firstly there's the discovery of Elizabeth Taylor, in particular Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which impressed me with its sensitive portrayal of old age, both sad and humorous. Taylor is, I think, a fabulous example of a writer who shows rather than tells and I very much admire her understated style. Secondly, I learnt that I can enjoy nature writing, at least in the company of Robert Macfarlane and his book The Wild Places. I'll certainly be dusting off my walking boots but, lacking his astonishing hardiness, I will be waiting for better weather.

A Dickens Day at Lancaster Library persuaded me to try Tomalin's biography of Dickens. I have it on audiobook and I dip into it every time I want to be inspired by his remarkable energy.

Contemporary fiction hasn't had much of a look-in this year, but I must mention The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. It's a moving and magical tale of an elderly childless couple build a snow child that comes to life. It would make a very good read for the chilly winter months.

So that was 2012. With a shelf-load of new books and the perfect reading room, there's a lot to look forward to in 2013.

Here's wishing you and yours all the very best for the year ahead.

Season's greetings

Merry Christmas from Lancashire! Here's wishing you all a very happy day.

The Wild Places - Robert Macfarlane

'I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child, whenever I read the word, it conjured images of wide spaces, remote and figureless. Isolated islands off Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw-prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.'

In The Wild Places Macfarlane takes the reader on a series of journeys into some of the most remote parts of Britain and Ireland. Beginning his journey on the Llyn peninsula in Wales, he travels the length and breadth of the British Isles, from Rannoch Moor in the Highlands of Scotland to the Essex mudflats, from Croagh Patrick in Ireland to the hills and valleys of Cumbria. Each chapter is devoted to a different setting - island, valley, summit, forest, salt marsh to name but a few.

This book is a celebration of the wild, the elements and the natural world. Sleeping out in remote places and inhospitable weathers, Macfarlane experiences moments of joy but also of fear.  This book is a natural history lesson, but with literature, art and geology thrown in. The author pays tribute to those who've made a lifetime's work of studying hares, peregrine falcons, the formation of sand dunes or the movement of waves. He tells the history of the people too, from the Highland Clearances to the Irish Potato Famine. His writing is wonderfully descriptive, almost poetic, with both the eye to see and appreciate the wild places and the skill to bring them to life on the page, as here on the banks of Loch Coruisk:

'Along the north shore, we traversed acres of soaked marsh, pocked with deep sink-holes. The steep ground to our left was a mosaic of brown rock, grouted with grass and streaked vertically with water from the previous night's storm. The angle of tilt of the mountain's face and the angle of fall of the light were such that every wet face of rock was set glinting - thousands of them at once, all on the same alignment.

The sink-holes in the marsh brimmed with water. The mild ferosity of the rocks meant that the water in the holes was stained red around the edges: they shone like pools of drowned blood. Only faint deer paths showed us a safe way through.

The air was moist and smelt swampish, oozy. The ground was dense with plant-life: mare's tails, among the oldest plants in existence, and the dark green leaves of a plant whose name I did not know. I reached out and scooped one of the leaves up from beneath. It felt heavy and limp as an old vellum map, drooping loosely over my palm.'



Loch Coruisk by Marc Roberts

 

I'd always thought of myself as more of a city girl, and only really picked this up on the recommendation of another blogger. I'm very pleased I did.

'I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.' John Muir
 

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

'Which is the most difficult problem in mathematics, Professor?' he asked Caratheodory at their next meeting, trying to feign mere academic curiosity.

'I'll give you the three main contenders,' the sage replied after a moment's hesitation. 'The Riemann Hypothesis, Fermat's Last Theorem and, last but not least, Goldbach's Conjecture, the proof of the observation about every even number being the sum of two primes - one of the great unsolved problems of Number Theory.'

Although by no means yet a firm decision, the first seed of the dream that some day he would prove the Conjecture was apparently planted in his heart by this short exchange...Its formulation had attracted him from the very first. The combination of external simplicity and notorious difficulty pointed of necessity to a profound truth.'

Goldbach proposed his Conjecture back in 1742 and it has exercised mathematicians ever since. Petros makes the problem his life's work. In the course of his mathematical quest, he rubs shoulders with some of the greatest minds of his time - Godel, Hardy, Littlewood and Alan Turing. The story is narrated by his nephew, curious to know why the rest of his family deems his uncle to be such an abject failure. 

Yes, this is a book about maths but it’s also about the goals we set ourselves in life, about how high we aim and how we respond to setbacks and failure.  It’s also about the nature of obsession and the perils of staking a lifetime's work on a single goal.  The author, himself a mathematician, gives the lay reader an insight into the great mathematical minds, highlighting the link between mathematical genius and mental instability. He points to the great mathematicians who’ve committed suicide and those who’ve finished their days as broken men.

'Sammy expounded his theory: 'I think Godel's insanity - for unquestionably he is in a certain sense insane - is the price he paid for coming too close to Truth in its absolute form. In some poem it says that "people cannot bear very much reality", or something like that. Think of the biblical Tree of Knowledge or the Prometheus of your mythology. People like him have surpassed the common measure; they've come to know more than is necessary to man, and for this hubris they have to pay.'

The young narrator, initially drawn to maths himself, ultimately decides it’s not a route he’s prepared to take.

There's very little in the way of characterisation or scene-setting, but this is a compelling and convincing story. Even as a non-mathematician I could appreciate the devastating blow dealt by Petros' encounter with Godel. We see flashes of genius and descent into madness. The end of the novel is particularly dramatic as the nephew finally succeeds in reawakening his uncle’s interest, with unintended consequences.

When the book was published in 2000, the publishers offered a $1million prize to anyone who proved the Conjecture within two years of publication. The prize went unclaimed.

December reading - Parisian nights and mathematical obsessions

With the reading room nearing completion, the thought of settling down with a book on a winter's evening has never been so appealing.

It's hardly surprising that Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is so popular as a high school set text. Its central characters, George and Lennie, are migrant American labourers during the Great Depression. George, intelligent but uneducated, has to look out for his companion Lennie, a kindly but simple-minded giant of a man who doesn't know his own strength. From the start, Steinbeck makes us fear the worst for the unlikely duo. The pitfalls are many and we wonder how, rather than when, the two men will be undone. At a mere one hundred pages it's a quick and satisfying read. The dialogue and pace are excellent and the ending is very moving. It thoroughly deserves its place on my Classics Club list.

Inspired perhaps by Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris, my two recent purchases have a definite Parisian flavour. My first purchase was The Ladies' Paradise which was recently televised by BBC TV. I'm intrigued to see if Zola, who wrote so convincingly about the appalling conditions of the miners in Germinal, can be equally at home in a Parisian department store. Rumour has it that there will be a Zola readalong in the new year, so this will be a good starting point.  The second was The Parisian Wife by Paula McLain. This tells the story of the troubled marriage of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson. It promises 'nights awash with absinthe in the giddy company of F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.' What's not to like? Incidentally, if you haven't seen Midnight in Paris, I would recommend it.  Entirely self-indulgent, but also great fun.

My husband, The Mathematician, is often to be found with his head in a book. Generally speaking it's a maths textbook or 'How to Play Poker', but he's branched out a little recently and joined an all-male book group. Their first two choices, The Psychopath Test and Casino Royale, haven't impressed him greatly. He's been rather more taken with books on a mathematical theme. Firstly The Newtonian Casino, a true story of a group of talented physicists and mathematicians who developed an early computer to predict the results of roulette and smuggled it into Vegas casinos in the sole of their shoe. The second, Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, tells of one of the most notorious mathematical problems and the man who thought he'd solved it.  Both books have gripped TM, but on closer examination I've found them far too mathematical for my tastes. Still wanting to share in TM's enthusiasm, I chose instead Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis. This novel describes one man's obsession with a simple but dastardly challenge - to prove that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes. It's proving to be an interesting insight into mathematical obsession, but not at all intimidating for a non-mathematician like me.

Last, but not least, I have our own book group choice - Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. I read this many years ago and I'm looking forward to revisiting it.

All in all, an excellent month.

What's on your reading list?