Now What?

Bill On The Fylde1 Comment

Oh look, I’m back.  No dishes to report on today, no concerts or films viewed on TV or at the cinema.  No live music events or dates; restaurants or pubs to review.  There could have been loads, literally, over the past couple of years but no.  Nothing, nothing at all.

The Kibosh was firmly put on this blog 2 or 3 years ago when its contents caused a constable to pay me a visit; not once but twice.  Over the content of what was contained here and some other stuff, on social media.  The reason.  Harrasement of my estranged wife, or, that’s what they told me.  The first copper was quite pleasant and understanding; the 2nd, with her sidekick, less so.  But she was on first name terms with my estranged wife so there was little doubt where her allegiance lay.  I guessed they’d carried out a raid or something together in the line of their respective roles so no sympathy for the man amongst us.

The alleged harassment began with a litany of sarcastic, hostile and abrasive social media posts aimed at her and the man I discovered her having an affair with in 2014 whom she eventually moved in with. It was suggested  to me that to overcome the very severe grief I felt over the discovery and estrangement was to write it all down, in a blog.  Get it off my chest, so to speak.  So I did, writing a root and branch exposé of my relationship and marriage with my…spoiler alert…my (now) ex wife.  She clearly found it, read it and so the police came round, had a chat, told me to remove it and stop the social media stuff.  So I largely did.  The stuff about us, our relationship, our marriage, our separation went and so, largely, did the Twitter and Facebook output.  I say largely because there were lapses.  Mostly caused after I discovered my ex and her new partner had a baby almost and exactly 9 months after she left my house.  And about 12 months after that, I discovered her new partner, the person I discovered her having an affair with was none other than the son of my next door neighbour.

Now, this freaked me out and caused a bit more social media hostility, especially at weekends when I’d had a bit to drink.  The effect it seemed to have on my ex was to decide that, now the whole thing she had previously worked so hard to conceal was in the open, there was no need to be discreet about it in future?  So I would often arrive home with her car parked outside next door’s house, the screams of some child emanating or running past a window within the house culminating, one Saturday afternoon, in them all coming round for a party.  I arrived home from a day at Chester Races.  There was her car, there was her new family.  What happened was a level of confrontation without any violence but I did hear the weasley voice of her new partner screaming platitudes down the phone, supposedly at the police.  Long story short, everyone went home.  I was quite pleased about that.  Another notch in my mental health.

The bottom line is, any marriage can break up and many do.  Including, regrettably, mine.  I cannot speak for others but ours hurt like hell.  And like the discovery of her affair, the  pain was enhanced and revisited as new revelations about her, her new family, the who, the where and the why-for were revealed like the daily punishment inflicted upon Prometheus.  It was 3 years of horrible, painful, torture; I kid you not.  I explained this to the 2 PCs at the 2nd visit but the advice I was given was, get counselling or get arrested.  The ex was entitled to go where she liked and I, well I had to simply put up with it or lose my liberty.  Cunts.

And so it went on but there was great relief when the next door neighbour moved out.  I would like to think it would be through a sense of shame, in the old fashioned way when people used to say, ‘don’t shit on your own door step’, but every day I saw her was a reminder that my wife, while we had been together, was sleeping with her son; was now living with him and she’s had his baby.  Nice.  I threw a fist pump in the air when I saw the ‘For Sale’ sign go up outside her house and rejoiced when she finally left.  She was a nice lady but I was seriously glad to see the back of her and yes, good riddance I thought.   And it helped.

So after all that – and this is a somewhat abridged version so as not to incur the wrath of our guardians and protectors – I gave up on this.  Blogging served a purpose but I got told off for it and lost the will to continue.  The line these days between free speech and harassment is a thin one and easily blurred.  I could have written a book and inserted the same words, sentences and stories.  It was all true, it still is.  And the words still exist but ‘in private’ only.  I don’t look at them and I won’t reveal it but its testimony to something.  To what?  I don’t know; to my feelings, my pain, my life, our marriage and our divorce.  To her credit, she arranged for the divorce and made no claim.  Nor I against her.  She sent me a nice message after my dad died, which I thanked her for but she sent yet another which I bridled her for.  She replied by saying she would never contact me again.  I didn’t quite understand why she thought I would want her to contact me again but thankfully she has kept true to her word.

It is coming up to 5 years after we separated and there are still times when I think about her, when I miss her, when I dream about her!  Or is it missing someone?  The company, the physical contact.  When, in 2015, I was seeing the sublime MF-M my feelings for my ex disappeared for I felt MF-M was by far a more suitable, more intelligent, more experienced person to her, in my eyes.  A few months later I succumbed to temptation and much to my enduring regret, ended that relationship with MF-M.

I’ve finally got round to getting the counselling suggested by the WPC those years ago.  I’ve talked about all of this and about my first wife too, who died from cancer in 2004.  Amongst other things I’ve talked about life, my life I suppose.  I’m going to be 56 in a few weeks time, I’m getting old.  I live in an area which no longer offers anything for me.  The legacy of everything that has happened and much discussed in counselling has left me largely relationship phobic and I feel a bit lonely.  I go on trips, go to live gigs, visit London for football and literary events but always, or nearly always, on my own.  The dates come and go.  Last year I met some lovely women but there was always a reason to end it.

I shall have to move.  London ideally but more realistically Nottingham or Manchester.  Where there is a city, where there is life and culture.  I have a responsibility, of course, to my 19 year old son.  We’re both getting older and we both need our independence. I’m not sure when but I see a new horizon and I have to get closer to it.

A man can lose himself in London

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I have always loved London.  Although born and brought up in Nottinghamshire, from an early age I have always felt engaged with our capital.  As a boy my parents regularly took my brother and me on day trips to London, sometimes to site-see and other times to visit shops.  A treat for me was being dropped off at Hamley’s toy shop on Regent Street where I would happily spend hours exploring its seven floors of fun.  As I grew older my taste in toys would develop with me as Action Man was pushed aside in favour of Subbuteo Football and all its many accessories.  A highlight was in 1975 when my brother won a drawing competition and the prize was £60.00 worth of Hamley’s vouchers.  In 1975, £60.00 was a lot of money even split 50/50 between us.

In the late 1980s old school friends would move to London which gave my more grown- up self opportunities to savour the city’s pubs and clubs as well as attending the odd party.  I once went on a football coach run by Nott’s County FC to see them play Millwall and recall the excitement in me just from seeing that change in architecture so unique to London; the brown bricks and white window frames, buildings piled on top of buildings and that instantly recognisable character, the Londoner.

I support a London football team – Tottenham Hotspur and my favourite band, Saint Etienne, are from London too.  London never lets you down, it is loyal, it is faithful, it always has something to offer.  And so, on Wednesday June 13th, I set off on the train from Preston to arrive in London Euston at 12:33.

First stop, The London Review Cafe.

I have three favourite shops in the UK; Rough Trade in Nottingham, Oi Polloi in Manchester and The London Review Bookshop set in Bloomsbury in London.  I cannot  visit London without paying a visit to the LRB bookshop and its cafe which is the only place I know selling palatable vegan food.

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The book shop is on the right, the cafe is on the left.  The menu is small and light, the food is reliably excellent, the selection of teas perfect.  There is an opening between the cafe and bookshop so you can easily walk between the two.  From the book shop I bought a couple  – Transit by Rachel Cusk and Yalo by Elias Khoury.

Next, a short walk to The British Museum for The Rodin and the art of Ancient Greece exhibition.  I have memories of visiting the Tutenkhamoun exhibition here in 1972 only to arrive with my family without booking a ticket and turning back on seeing the queue snake all around the forecourt, through the gate and around the iron railings surrounding the museum.  No such problems this time, just a short wait to have my ruck-sack scanned and I was on my way in.  Inside the museum I was surrounded by Japanese and Chinese tourists who seemed more interested in taking photos of themselves on stair cases and cafes rather than taking an interest in the exhibits  Which was fortunate because there was no great line to buy tickets for Rodin.  £17.00 lighter I made my way into the exhibition.

My knowledge of art and sculpture is scant but I had read some rave reviews about this exhibition beforehand and I was determined to see it and appreciate it.  I wasn’t disappointed.  I walked in and was confronted by The Kiss.

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I was surprised at first to learn that this amazing feature is carved out of plaster but standing beside it I really fancied having a snog with someone (ahem).  Composing myself I moved on to something equally as familiar, the mighty Thinker.

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To be close to a great sculpture is to recognise the delicacy of the work of the artist and how something so subtle and so sublime can emerge at his or hands, from what is, essentially a lump of rock.  As well as Rodin’s work, the exhibition had several items of sculpture from the works of Ancient Greeks including relics and fragments from The Parthenon.  It was all amazing to see and it was so tempting to reach out a hand to touch a work of art forged by hands over two and a half thousand years ago.  I didn’t but these works which convey such movement and such delicacy almost look as if they possess like itself.

I had a bit of time to kill after the museum so I had a walk down to Soho and a mooch round the shops there.  Aware that an Oi Polloi exists somewhere in the area I managed to locate it and buy a light knit jumper and bum bag.  The shop isn’t quite on the scale of it’s Mancunian big brother but it still sells a great array of clobber which I could easily have thrown too much money at.

Then it was off to my final port of call, The Institut Francais de Royaume Uni in South Kensington, practically opposite that other architecturally fine building, The Natural History Museum.

I had come to London today specifically to attend an event to promote the new book by Anglophile, Parisian author Agnès Poirier, Left Bank.  I first came across Agnès Porier on the BBC News Channel programme, Dateline London.  Thown together with a host of other British and foreign news correspondents, a panel of 4 debate and discuss the national and international news of the day.  I always found Mme Poirier interesting for her Gallic charm, wit and general wry take on the news of the week.  I often feel she is not as sharp or as on point as many of her more serious news colleagues but I find she excels in the written word such as her Guardian Newspaper article on the reaction to the #MeToo campaign in France and of course her new book, Left Bank .

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I’m about two thirds of the way through Left Bank and it’s an excellent book.  It tells the story of Paris between 1940 and 1950, under German occupation followed by the rise of the existentialist movement through the formidable figures of Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and a host of other artists, intellectuals and writers who made the city such a fascinating place to live in during that time.  Mme Poirier was interviewed for the event by Professor A C Grayling who had recently come to my attention through his outspoken comments against Brexit.  The thirty minute interview was genteel and followed by a further half hour of questions from the audience.  Mme Poirier appeared a little nervous, not making eye contact with the audience but speaking passionately nonetheless about her subject which had occupied her over the past 10 years.  I had intended to sit on the edge of the second row but was muscled out of it by an elderly lady and ended up right in the middle of the front row.  I felt a little awkward and wondered if AP recognised me from our occasional exchanges on Twitter.  The very fine room we were in was full of books and even had a mezzanine floor which no library should be without and a high domed wall will of obscured glass panes to let in more light, no doubt.

After the talk we made our way down to the foyer where Mme Poirier signed copies of her book.  I had taken my own copy along with me and was quite delighted when Mme Poirier recognised me as ‘Fish’ from Twitter and signed my book accordingly.  She invited me, amongst others to the bar for a glass of wine and we convened round a table with comfortable chairs.  I ended up sitting next to Professor Grayling who appeared at first a little perturbed that I had plonked myself next to him; I felt it a little like that awkward first encounter between Mr D’Arcy and the clergyman William Collins in Pride and Prejudice.  No matter, the delightful hostess busied herself around us and the conversation began to flow.  I regaled people with my northern background and lamented the lack of events like this in my home town area near Blackpool but spoke positively about the Home arts complex in Manchester, even though we all agreed it has an atrocious name.  I threw in the question of ‘what exactly is existentialism’ which A C Grayling, Professor of Philosophy was only too happy to answer.  I then entered into a debate about existentialism with the good professor who appeared to warm to me after I mentioned the loss of my first wife.  We then had a discussion about sorrow and mourning and I showed him the very excellent article I read that very morning on the same subject written by Matthew Parris in this week’s Spectator magazine.

With one eye on my watch I had to leave earlier than I would have liked to catch the 21:10 train back to Preston.  So, just time for a photo with Mme Poirier…here it is, taken by Professor Grayling, no less.IMG_1158.JPG

And with one of those double kisses on the cheeks the French are famous for, I bid my adieus and left.  The train was 20 minutes late but no matter, it was a good day in London; a city I love.

 

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Holidays

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scenic view of beach
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

2000 – Calla D’Or, Majorca

2001 – Cala ‘n Forcat< Menorca

2002 (Cancer got in the way)

2003 – Cala ‘n Forcat, Menorca

2004 – Son Bou, Menorca

2005 – Alcudia, Majorca

2006 – Centre Parcs, Penrith, UK

2007 – Vilamoura, Portugal

2008 – Lagos, Portugal

2009 – Venice, Italy and Lagos, Portugal

2010 – Albufeira, Portugal

2011 – Cala D’Or , Majorca

2012 – Bacelona, Spain and Santa Susannah, Spain

2013 – Benalmadena, Spain.  This was a good one.

Books 2018 – Slow Horses by Mick Herron

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I’ve missed a couple or so of books out since my last review; a Susan Sontag, a couple of John Bergers.  Good books in themselves but the Sontag on Photography was heavier than a Box Brownie on a tripod and John Berger writes like an Olympian.  But a week or two ago, looking for a holiday read for a short trip to Spain I picked up on the author Mick Herron during an interview on the BBC TV show, Meet The Author.  A bit of research led me to the author’s series of novels about British spy Jackson Lamb and the Slough House stories.  So I bought the first and second in the series, Slow Horses and Dead Lions.  I just finished Slow Horses.

I usually steer clear of the Crime and Thriller shelves in book shops but the last time I read a spy novel was the conclusion of the George Smiley series by John Le Carre in Benalmadena, Spain 4 years ago.  And I enjoyed the lot of them.  A skim of the cover suggested these novels would be good so Slow Horses became my holiday reading of choice.  And what a book!  A great read, a real page turner (I know, I know), unputdownable.

Jackson Lamb is a blown up, washed out British spy, long beyond his Bond days but like the footballer Teddy Sheringham, his brain is worth an extra yard of pace.  Exiled to the attic office of the run down building that is Slough House, Lamb presides over a motley assortment of has beens, never have beens and nor never will be’s.  And yet when a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to behead him, it’s Lamb’s Slow Horses who are dragged into the fray for a final sprint round the track.

The language, the characters, the story all contribute to a dynamic, rewarding read.  I’ve finished the first and the fifth, London Rules has just been published.  I aim to read the lot and I wouldn’t blame you if you did either.

Books 2018 – All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski

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I discovered Walter Kempowski’s novel, All For Nothing, during a trip to the London Review Bookshop where I spotted it on the LRB Recommends shelf.  I hadn’t previously heard of the author but I was attracted to the story as it was described on the outside back cover which begins,

“It is January 1945.  The German army is retreating from the Russian advance and refugees are fleeing the occupied territories in their thousands, in cars and carts and on foot”.

I still harbour a deep interest in the war, developed during childhood through playing with Airfix models and Airfix toy soldiers and this was a story I was familiar with through the books of, amongst others, Anthony Beevor.

Walter Kempwski, I learned, was a chronicler of German history throughout the war and All For Nothing was his last book before he died in 2007.  It is translated which caused me to baulk slightly due to the last German book I read which was poorly translated from the German, Alone In Berlin by Hans Fallada.  I noticed the translator of AFN was Anita Bell who, through the power of the internet, I learned is the brother of Martin Bell, the former BBC war correspondent known as the Man In The White Suit during the time he successfully campaigned to become MP for the Tatton constituency as an Independent MP in 1997.  Ms Bell’s credentials are impeccable and I seem to recall reading she has received an OBE or was it an MBE?  I can’t remember but she provides an excellent translation.

What a story.  By 1945 the tide of the second world war in the East had turned decisively with The Red Army standing at the border of the German Frontier waiting for the order to launch a counter invasion and bring the war to an end.  Scores of refugees are already passing through the little town of Mitkau in Eastern Prussia, fleeing from the occupied territories in the face of the Russian onslaught.  The story centres on The Georgenhof, a once grand country estate now in semi-ruin where the beautiful but unworldly Katharina von Globig lives with her son Peter while her husband Eberhard has a comfortable desk job in Northern Italy supervising the sequestration of Italian produce to feed the Third Reich.  Along with the von Globigs lives a sinewy old spinster, the indomitable housekeeper ‘Auntie’ who keeps everything running, a pair of squabbling Ukrainian women and a former Polish army private.  The house is visited upon by a succession of characters who help make up the ensemble cast of the book and whose own stories intertwine with those of the refugees in their great trek west.

The pessimism contained in the book’s title provides an inkling of where the story goes as defeat for Nazi Germany looms and the family face the prospect of joining the refugees or staying to face the Russians.  Refugees are temporarily billeted in the house and each have their own stories to tell which pepper the book with interest and intrigue We often meet up with these characters somewhere else as the story progresses as we learn their fate, often seen through the eyes of a child.  It’s a story of epic movement and touches on the plight of refugees in the modern world and the human story of those millions of people who give up everything to flee in the face of something cataclysmically worse.

Here’s a great book, written around an extraordinary story from recent history by an author we really deserve to read more of in the English speaking world.

Books 2018 – Ways of Seeing

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Phew, what a read;  I think I read each paragraph, on average, three times or as many times as it took for me to comprehend what was on the page.  You see, when it comes to art, I don’t know my stuff.  The book is attributed to John Berger as author but inside its making is credited to five individuals, none of whom I have heard of, except for John Berger.

John Berger, I know, was an intellectual.  I have watched a couple of videos of him including one of him in conversation with American intellectual giant Susan Sontag and I recently finished another of his books, Confabulations (see previous review).

Published in 1972, Ways of Seeing is written by an intellectual in an intellectual style.  But at a time when there were only 2 or 3 TV channels and AJP Tayor could command a huge prime-time TV audience just by standing infant of a camera and speaking, off the cuff, about history for half an hour.  Our population at that time had not yet been subject to the dumbed-down, celebrity led culture which began in earnest in the 1980s.  Before then, when miners formed their own poetry groups, people could read this kind of stuff and understand it.  I often struggled but even though I feel like I read this book three or more times in one go, I kind of got it.  In fact, part way through I visited Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery and the knowledge I gained from both this book and the recently read Keeping an Eye Open by Julia Barnes helped me enjoy a much more tangible experience with art.

John Berger was a committed Marxist and saw art as the province of the ruling classes.  He makes many references to capitalism, ownership, class and the objectivity of women in art.  Many of his political points are supported by the inclusion of a gallery of paintings depicted in black and white thought the book.  Published in 1971 it is the earliest example in a book I know of which covers the subject of sexism by the objectification of women in culture and art in the centuries of patriarchal society.  Berger describes a painting of a nude woman by Memling (1435-1494).  An attractive woman painted in full frontal nudity, is holding a mirror and thus the painting is called Vanity.  The mirror is a device simply used to disparage the woman and detract from the real intention of the commissioner or buyer of the painting to provide sexual titillation, a  form of 15th century pornography.

The final chapter brings art up to date (or as up to date as it could have been in 1971) by both focussing on publicity and drawing on the parallels between painting in oil and advertising.  I took from this chapter the line, “Publicity is the culture of the consumer society.”   Where art was once commissioned by men of property to project their status, now, publicity is used to fill the space caused by the deficit in democracy in our age of consumerism by projecting the image of our future selves which, as much as we envy it, is never attainable always deferred.

If, like me, you’ve been to a gallery and felt intimidated by the sheer volume of art on display without having a real understanding of whether it’s any good or not, you will gain a great deal of insight from this book and books like it.  I read it through over three days but feel like I read it three or four times it was that much of a challenge.  It was first published in 1972 at a time when miners formed poetry groups at colliery meetings and austere historian AJP Taylor could command an enormous prime-time TV audience just from standing before a camera and speaking, unscripted, for thirty minutes on a topic from history.  It’s a reminder of just how dumbed-down our culture has become over the past three decades but this book remains accessible if challenging and the reward for reading it is immense.  Read it and then visit a gallery.  I was pleased to note that some of the art on display at The Whitworth was crap but other was sublime – that will be Francis N Souza.

Books 2018 – Confabulations

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What would you like to know about this book?  That I couldn’t put it down?  That I read it over two days?  That I can’t remember much of the content?  That it is utterly brilliant?

When a friend mentioned the name John Berger to me recently it lightly tinkled a bell in my subconscious but nothing Quasimodo would be interested in peeling.  But on being told his book Ways Of Seeing is a must read insight into understanding art, I was more intrigued by the content of the back cover of Confabulations which begins, “Language is a body, a living creature…”  I bought it.

John Berger is a story-teller; or rather was.  I learned he died in 2017 and, prompted to look at some videos he produced, I recognised that familiar, rugged face.  There is an episode of a 60 minute programme he made for Chanel 4 television back in 1984 called About Time in which he explores the concept of time, punctuating his own thinking with fables and stories of old in a style reminiscent of Aesop and a book of his fables I read as a small boy.  Another video sees him in an hour long tête-à-tête with Susan Sontag.  They discuss story-telling but lofty as the conversation is, it felt contrived.

Confabulations is a book of stories from Berger’s own experience which he relates to the subject of language.  Language in all things, song, in art, in objects, even in flowers all born of the mother tongue.  I was reminded of a line in Maggie Nelson’s book, Argonauts, my first reading of 2018 in which she asked, are words good enough?  John Berger is certain they are not:

“A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic.  And this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.”

John Berger’s stories are wonderfully entertaining and the great thing about reviewing a book is it provides an opportunity to revisit them.  I did and they contain more and offer more the more they are read.  They are mainly about lives, lives different to our own but appealing lives, lives we would perhaps like to live ourselves if only we weren’t so tied to the lives we live.

Please read this book.  It has helped me understand where language exists and where to find it.  It is a book of discoveries and to discover it is to enrich.

 

Books 2018 – Keeping an Eye Open

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julian-barnes-art-essaysI first came across this book in a review on another blog.  It would be a struggle for me to find it again but it was complementary and struck me as a book which could teach me a thing or two about art and how to enjoy it.  Last year I visited The Manchester Art Gallery and The Walker Gallery in Liverpool.  I saw some paintings I liked and many I didn’t or couldn’t really be bothered to give more than a five second glance to.  To be honest I didn’t ‘get’ many of them and didn’t know how to.  In fact, I felt quite disappointed while walking around The Walker; pictures you had to walk backwards and backwards from due to the position of a light throwing an almighty blob of luminescence right across the canvass at the optimum viewing angle.

But then, a few years ago, lazing by a swimming pool in Spain I read Jeremy Paxman’s The Victorians which shed its own light on paintings from the Victorian era. The book described how many works of art from the period reflected the growing technological advances of the era and the developing sense of women’s sexual awakening.  Paxman spent a good few pages on Ford Madox Brown’s, Work which I confronted me during my walk around The Manchester Art Gallery.  The whole canvass was a revelation because I got it, I really did get it because, thanks to Paxman I knew how to read it and solve it.  It was a revelatory moment during which I genuinely enjoyed regarding a painting.  And when the Arts Officer at the local council told me what a wonderful gallery The Walker is, I realised I was missing something, largely through ignorance.

So on another visit to the wonderful London Review Bookshop I bought Keeping an Eye Open.  I began it in mid January but my reading was curtailed for two weeks when I was struck down with flu and I had neither the energy or inclination to do anything as remotely active as holding up a book.  But on making a full recovery I returned to this very readable book which contains a collection of essays by the author primarily known for writing novels including Booker winner The Sense Of An Ending.  This work of non-fiction focuses on the art and lives of, in mostly chronological order, a succession of artists rom Géricault to Hodgkin, many of whom I hadn’t even heard of.   It’s by thanks to the wonder of the internet as well as some handy prints on the pages I realised I had seen many of the paintings described but had done nothing more than assign their image to my subconscious.

Each essay offers a compact biography of each artist highlighting their friends, their contemporaries, their lovers and their beligerancies.  It helped me understand that a painting is not some two dimensional drawing on canvas but an expression of the thought and attitude of the artist which contains more within it than the latest box-set available to download from Netflix.  As the title tells us, it’s all about keeping an eye open and not being a “window-shopping gallery-goer”, who will give a painting, “a five second glance”.

Keeping an Eye Open is a great introduction to artists and art.  It doesn’t talk down to the reader but invites them to see art for what it is and how to enjoy it.  Now I’ve completed it, I can’t wait to re-visit The Walker!

Books 2018 – Pond

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Here’s the second book I completed in 2018.  I bought Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett in 2017 and started and finished it in January 2018.

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There’s an old saying and you’re familiar with it.  Never judge a book by its cover it goes.  The cover you see above is the cover on the book I bought.  I was book browsing in Rough Trade East in London and was attracted by the cover.  It’s a sort of azure blue.  I’ve looked the book up and spotted alternative covers but I judged this book worthy of buying because of its cover;  and the post-amble on the back cover.  Pond was for sale in a vinyl record shop but because I don’t have a record player I browse the books section instead.  Blue is the colour and this book had done its turn in high street book shops and was now on sale to savvy readers wary of quirky covers designed to lure unsuspecting readers.  Rough Trade is cool so Pond’s got a cool cover.

Claire-Louise is, I read, from Wiltshire.  A  rural county and at an early age she moved to Ireland.  Pond is about a woman living alone in a cottage by the sea in what seems like Ireland.  I’ve seen Pond described as a collection of short stories, a stream of consciousness or elsewhere as a collection of vignettes.  In an interview further afield the author deliberately avoids describing it as much at all giving the reader license to decide for themselves, if they want to.  I tried but couldn’t.

Each chapter of the book is named; the first is Voyage In The Dark, others are A Little Before Seven; Stir-Fry; Morning, 1908 and The Gloves Are Off, for example.  You’re not going to get much of a story out of this book but what you will get is great language, atmosphere and irritated at times.  The chapter Morning, Noon & Night begins; “Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice.  It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk; and if there isn’t, forget about it.”  And so it goes on, a faithful record of one woman’s process of thinking, capturing those internal narratives and conflicts inside our brains.    In Finishing Touch Claire-Louise is in full-on neurotic narrative declaring, “I’m determined you see, quite determined to host a low-key, but impeccably conceived, soirée.”  You can almost hear the the voice of Hyacinth Bucket warbling against  itself offering self-assurance that everything must be just-so conflicted against the fear of guests ruining things simply by, by turning up and getting the party protocol all wrong.

Claire-Louise Bennet superbly captures the ebb and flow, the straightness and digression  of those vexing conversations that take place nowhere other than inside our heads.  A lone walk disturbed by the appearance of a hooded youth evokes fear one moment excitement in another.  This is what living alone is like; introversion coupled with introspection when you’ve got time on your hands.

Books 2018 – The Argonauts

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Must.Find.A.Purpose.

And what better purpose than to make a list; a list of books I read this year?  I kept a list of the books I read last year which was 2017 in a Moleskin notebook with was like a blog without the digital transformation.  It was on paper.  So to get in the digital swing with my analogous reading I’m going to keep a list of books read in 2018 here.  It may be of interest to me it may be of interest to others who knows?  I’m also cutting down my use of the comma you may have noticed in that last paragraph I did.

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Maggie Nelson – The Argonauts

So here we go.  Book 1 of 2018.  I started reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts in 2017  inspired to read it after watching a 70 minute interview with the author by Olivia Laing at the London Review Bookshop on You Tube.  I didn’t keep too well up with the interview because Maggie Nelson seemed a bit coy and evasive, a bit shy I thought.  Read the book, watch the video, you’ll realise why (commas ffs!).

OK, the author is lesbian and she tells the story of the relationship with her partner the all round artisan, Harry Dodge.  Harry Dodge is gender fluid and the story starts with interests surrounding the son he gave birth to and their desire to give further birth which pans out at the end of the book.  The book is bookended by children but in between is an examination of what is is  like to embark on a queer relationship in the 21st Century – and here I imagine a venn diagram of hetero-normative relationships against homo-normative relations.  Ms Nelson uses challenging adjectives such as sodomite mothers (I know ‘mothers’ is a noun) and examines the progress or otherwise of Joe Public to accept relationships outside of the not-so-long-ago established norm.  It’s no wonder she appears coy in her interview with Olivia Laing, these are very personal issues easier committed to the blank page than to a stranger in front of a paying audience in a cosy Bloomsbury book shop.

I read this book and it made me think a lot.  Maggie Nelson is very happy in her relationship in which she notes both her own and Harry Dodge’s perversions align perfectly.  They sound like a great couple and I’m confident those kids will grow up confident, healthy, tolerant and wise.