Tag Archives | literature

Arbitrary shoe sizes and the long awaited 'Somme Stations'

By on August 23, 2011 in Culture, Home and Family

Yesterday, we went shopping to mop up the last few things which Boy the Elder needs to start his new school in a couple of weeks.

Now explain this.  Two weeks ago, I bought him new trainers in UK size 9.  Yesterday, I bought a pair of black lace-up school shoes in size 10 and rugby boots in a monstrous size 12.  All three items of footwear fit perfectly and the trainers and school shoes came from the same shop.

Unfortunately I am unable to write any more (I am actually writing this at 01.30 on Tuesday morning) as on Monday  morning a book that I have been wanting to read for months flopped onto my doorstep and I have to read a bit before I go to bed.

The book is  called ‘The Somme Stations’ by Andrew Martin, which is the latest in his Jim Stringer railway detective series, which is set in the First World War.  It came out in hardback early this year and I was waiting for the paperback to come out, but the hardback has now dropped to the price of a paperback so I fell on it with relish and simply can’t wait another moment to read it.

I’ve read all the Jim Stringer novels and they are so brilliant in their characterisations, thrilling plots and attention to detail that I dread the day when he stops writing them.  Apparently, this last one took longer to come out because of the extensive research Martin had to do, both for the railway detail but also to get the accuracy for WW1.  Look out for a review when I’ve read it.

Comments { 10 }

Shire Book of the Month: Ice Cream by Ivan Day

By on March 24, 2011 in Culture, Slider

I chose ‘Ice Cream’ this month because, on this balmy Spring day, the images in it made me long for summer and sandals and eating ice cream outside and the remembered sorrow of dropping a Mivvi on the dusty ground.

There is something rather wonderful about ice cream.  Even though you can buy it anywhere and there are hundreds of different brands, styles and flavours available, the jingling tune of an ice cream van is a sound filled with excitement and expectation.  Even if you disapprove of eating in the street, eating a 99 dripping with syrup as you walk along on a hot day is still, somehow, a proper treat.

The Shire book of Ice Cream is a proper treat in itself.  The Introduction entices you, like a Penny Lick, into the history and manufacturing process of ice cream.  The facing photograph of a moulded ice cream swan surrounded by fruit is extraordinary, particularly when you realise that confections such as these were first seen at the end of the 17th century.  And this is where the story really begins.

Chilled sweatmeats, made by mixing snow or ice with fruit juice or dairy products, were being eaten as far back as the Romans, Persians and ancient Chinese.  The first Slush Puppies if you will.  True ices however, didn’t come about until an artificial method of freezing was discovered using chemical salts with crushed ice.  This process was first described in 1530.

Ice cream was, for a long time, only for the rich as only they had the facilities and the skilled cooks to prepare them.   It was a difficult process and very labour intensive and Ivan Day takes us through the development of the early ice cream equipment and the paraphernalia which went with it.

Ice Cream Maker 1768

As technology progressed, the book describes how manufacturing changed to bring ice cream to the masses and how ordinary people initially responded to it.  Food is so often an indicator of the prosperity and class structure of a country and something as simple as an ice cream pudding can illustrate in an instantly understandable way how society shifts and settles and how simple pleasures become available to all.

Ice Cream Maker 1930

But to understand how nothing actually changes, who do you think created  Parmesan ice cream or made ice cream to look like a cooked ham?  Did I hear you mutter ‘Heston Blumenthal’?  Wrong.  How did the invention of the wafer stop people enjoying saliva and slime with their ice cream?  Who wouldn’t want a bit of Hokey-Pokey?

Well I’m not telling you.  You’ll have to read the book.

Comments { 4 }

Sunday Poem 72

By on January 23, 2011 in Culture

Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco, California.   He is well known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.  A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

I know quite a few people at the moment, including myself, who have had to make very difficult decisions about work or their personal lives.  Sometimes we agonise about which path to take, how it will impact on ourselves and others, whether it will benefit us or distract us from a proper course of action.  Sometimes we do nothing for fear of making the wrong choice.

I tell you this.  Whichever path you take will be the right one because you have chosen it, and whatever comes of that choice, you will have learned something you need to know and grown another inch in stature.*

The Road Not Taken – by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

*You can always rely on me for a hefty dollop of hippy shit.  Doesn’t mean it’s not true…

Comments { 7 }

Sunday Poem 71

By on January 16, 2011 in Culture

Sarojini Chattopadhyay was born in Hyderabad in1879 the eldest of a large family, all of whom were taught English at an early age.

When she was 14 she fell in love with Dr. Govindurajulu Naidu who, though of an old and honourable family, was not a Brahmin. The difference of caste aroused huge opposition from both their families, and in 1895 she was sent to England, against her will. She remained in England until 1898, studying first at King’s College, London, then, till her health broke down, at Girton.  She returned to Hyderabad in September 1898, and in the December of that year, to the scandal of all India, broke through the bonds of caste, and married Dr. Naidu.

During her stay in England she met Arthur Symons, a poet and critic. They corresponded after her return to India and he persuaded her to publish some of her poems in 1905 under the title “Golden Threshold”.  Her poems had English words, but an Indian soul.

Then in 1916, she met Mahatma Gandhi, and the independence of India became the heart and soul of her work.  She directed a lot of her energies into improving the plight of Indian women, and campaigning for their rights in much the same way as was happening in England.

In 1928, she went to the USA with the message of the non-violence movement from Gandhi and when in 1930 he was arrested, she carried on his work.  She was jailed in 1942 during the “Quit India” protest.  After independence she became the first ever woman governor of Uttar Pradesh.  She died in 1949.

Song Of A Dream – by Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949)

Once in the dream of a night I stood
Lone in the light of a magical wood,
Soul-deep in visions that poppy-like sprang;
And spirits of Truth were the birds that sang,
And spirits of Love were the stars that glowed,
And spirits of Peace were the streams that flowed
In that magical wood in the land of sleep.

Lone in the light of that magical grove,
I felt the stars of the spirits of Love
Gather and gleam round my delicate youth,
And I heard the song of the spirits of Truth;
To quench my longing I bent me low
By the streams of the spirits of Peace that flow
In that magical wood in the land of sleep.

Comments { 1 }

Another one for The Gallery: Stephen Mangan

By on January 12, 2011 in Culture

Stephen Mangan.  Tall, thin, Jewish looking, brainy, a bit posh.

Ding Dong.

(Episodes, Green Wing, Adrian Mole, radio plays, theatre)

Comments { 9 }

Sunday Poem 70

By on January 9, 2011 in Culture

Derek Mahon was born the only child of Ulster Protestant working class parents. His father and grandfather worked at Harland and Wolff while his mother worked at a local flax mill.

Mahon was interested in literature from a very young age and eventually pursued third level studies at Trinity College, Dublin where he edited Icarus, and formed many friendships with writers such as Michael Longley, Eavan Boland and Brendan Kennelly. He began to mature as a poet and in 1965, he left Trinity to take up studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.  In 1967 he published his first collection of poems Night Crossing. He taught in a school in Dublin and worked in London as a freelance journalist.  In 2007 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

Mahon was well educated in literary convention, but despite the free-form nature of much of the work coming out of Northern Ireland at the time, he wrote with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice. Mahon has been cited as a major influence by a number of Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and Eamon Grennan.

Boy the Elder suggested this poem to me because he likes the words and the imagery of the mushrooms crowding at the door.  I think the meaning is much deeper and subtler than it first appears, but that is for you to discover.

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford – by Derek Mahon (b.1941)

Even now there are places where a thought might grow –
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong –
“Elbow room! Elbow room!”
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark –
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
“Save us, save us”, they seem to say,
“Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!”

Comments { 1 }

Sunday Poem 69

By on January 2, 2011 in Culture

I was given two poetry books for Christmas, ‘The Human Chain’ by Seamus Heaney which is unsurprisingly fabulous and a beautifully illustrated ‘Best Loved Poems’ which is helpfully divided into sections according to content and, rather delightfully, has two sections “To Read Aloud” and “To Read Quietly”.  I think all poetry should be read aloud – even to oneself.  I like this poem because it’s a simple, child-like reminder of how brilliant things actually are.

William Brighty Rands,  ”the laureate of the nursery,” published several volumes of children’s literature anonymously and contributed to various periodicals under various pseudonyms, especially Matthew Browne, Henry Holbeach, and T. Talker.

He received a very limited education, and derived much of what he knew from a habit of reading at the second-hand bookstalls. He had a varied career, was for some years in a warehouse, then on the stage, and then a clerk in an attorney’s office. Having taught himself stenography he was soon appointed as a reporter in the committee-rooms of the House of Commons.  He died in Dulwich, South London.

The World – by William Brighty Rands (1823-1882)

Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World,
With the wonderful water round you curled,
And the wonderful grass upon your breast -
World, you are beautifully drest.

The wondrous air is over me,
And the wonderful wind is shaking the tree,
It walks on the water, and whirls the mills,
And talks to itself on the tops of the hills.

You friendly Earth, how far do you go,
With the wheatfields that nod and the rivers that flow,
With cities and gardens, and cliffs, and isles,
And people upon you for thousands of miles?

Ah, you are so great, and I am so small,
I tremble to think of you, World, at all,
And yet, when I said my prayers today,
A whisper inside me seemed to say,
“You are more than the earth, though you are such a dot:
You can love and think, and the Earth cannot.”

Comments { 1 }

Sunday Poem 68

By on December 26, 2010 in Culture, Seasonal Fun

Mr & Mrs R and the Christmas Card List – by Connie Bensley (1929 -)

Shall I cross them off?
It’s twenty years since we last met.

Of course Mr R and I once thought
we were made for each other -

Ah, that heart stopping moment
by the kitchen sink, when he took off

his spectacles and fiercely kissed me.
But all that lasted less than a week

and what I recall more vividly
is Mrs R’s good advice:

Always plunge your lemons in hot water
before you squeeze them.

One more year perhaps.

Comments { 1 }

Sunday Poem 67

By on December 19, 2010 in Culture

The Snow – by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.

It makes an even face
Of mountains and of plain, -
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil

On stump and stack and stem, -
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.

It ruffles wrists of posts
As ankles of a queen, -
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.

I know I normally give a potted biography of any poet I haven’t featured before, but I’m writing this at 00.45 on Saturday and I still have a Christmas cake to marzipan.  To find out more about Emily Dickinson, click on this link.  Normal service will be resumed at some point.

Comments { 4 }

Sunday Poem 66

By on December 12, 2010 in Culture

Shel Silverstein was born in 1930 in Chicago, Illinois.  He was a poet, a writer of children’s books, songwriter, musician, cartoonist and screenwriter. He used the pseudonym ‘Uncle Shelby’ for his enormously popular children’s books, the most famous being ‘The Giving Tree’. His body of work is enormous and too prolific for me to do justice to it here. Look him up.

He started drawing when he was 12, copying cartoons, although he admits that he began to draw and write when he realised that he wasn’t much of a hit with girls. He went to art school but left after a year and made his living as a cartoonist.   

In 1957, he became one of the leading cartoonists in Playboy Magazine, which sent him around the world to create an illustrated travel journal with reports from far-flung locales. During the 1950s and 1960s, he produced 23 installments of his regular “Shel Silverstein Visits…” feature for Playboy. Employing a sketchbook format with typewriter-styled captions, he documented his own experiences at such locations as a New Jersey nudist colony and the Chicago White Sox training camp.

Later in life, Silverstein loved to spend time at his favorite places, such as Greenwich Village, Key West, Martha’s Vineyard and Sausalito, California. Silverstein continued to create plays, songs, poems, stories and drawings until his death in 1999. He died at his home in Key West, Florida on 9th May 1999, of a heart attack, and his body was found by two housekeepers the following Monday, 10th May. It was reported that he could have died on either day that weekend.

I love this poem because it’s simple and fun.

Bear In There – by Shel Silverstein (1930-1999)

There’s a Polar Bear
In our Frigidaire–
He likes it ’cause it’s cold in there.
With his seat in the meat
And his face in the fish
And his big hairy paws
In the buttery dish,
He’s nibbling the noodles,
He’s munching the rice,
He’s slurping the soda,
He’s licking the ice.
And he lets out a roar
If you open the door.
And it gives me a scare
To know he’s in there–
That Polary Bear
In our Fridgitydaire.

Comments { 3 }