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Issue 25

1st March 2010

Slightly Foxed Issue 25: From the Editors

Now the Christmas rush is over and spring is in the air, it’s all paint charts and carpet samples at Slightly Foxed. The bookshop facelift is under way, and after dealing with urgent matters like leaks and cracks – it’s an old building and the storeroom and office space run under the pavement, with all that that implies – we’re on to the fun part now. We’re (slightly) changing the name to ‘Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road’ – look out for the foxy sign! In corporate-speak it would probably be called ‘rebranding’, but as you know, we’re anything but corporate, and in any case we don’t want to change the shop’s essential welcoming character, which its regulars value so much.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Lost Horizon

Lost Horizon

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had her first glimpse of Florida in March 1928, aboard a steamer at the mouth of the St Johns River. It was love at first sight, which really can happen with people and places. I’ve had a similar rush of amazed delight about particular landscapes myself: it feels like the surprise of connection, or perhaps of recognition. Whatever you want to call it, it exists. Florida still charms many people, of course, including me, although what tourists now enjoy in Miami, Orlando or Key West bears no relation to the wonders that entranced Mrs Rawlings eighty years ago. She saw an alien, tropical, untamed land lit by an impossibly clear wide sky and knew that she could find what she needed there; knew that she could write there, as she passionately wanted to do. It was, as they say, a defining moment.
SF magazine subscribers only
Two Men in a Pontiac

Two Men in a Pontiac

Anyone who has given the British Museum’s Sainsbury Gallery of African Art anything more than a very brief visit (in and out to gawk at the Benin bronzes) will surely have admired the extent to which the curators have attempted, through a series of short films on loop, to show how some of the artefacts on display have been used – and the lives they continue, in many cases, to lead in West and Central Africa in particular. Viewers can learn about pottery, bronze casting, the rivalries between asafo banner-bearing Fante youth companies in Ghana and, most memorably for me, about the extraordinary masquerades performed by secret societies.
SF magazine subscribers only

Aunty May’s Footsteps

My Aunty May was one of that legion of women constrained to spinsterhood by the slaughter of the First World War. She devoted herself to good works, commanding half of Kent for the St John Ambulance Brigade, and being a lifelong carer of old folk. Her private consolation was reading, and her book collection, which never ceased to grow, ran riot through every room of her various successive small houses in Hythe. One of her strong suits was poetry, and she was a disciplined reader, noting in the margins every occasion on which she consulted a particular passage. She read through Robert Bridges’ anthology The Spirit of Man ten times, taking one quotation a day, from 1942 (when she received a copy of the 23rd impression as a Christmas present) to 1973. Her last notation, on 16 January 1973, was two-thirds of the way through her eleventh trawl, at a quotation from Paradise Lost . . .
SF magazine subscribers only
A Splendid Attitude to Death

A Splendid Attitude to Death

‘Eccentricity’, wrote Edith Sitwell, ‘exists particularly in the English, and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.’ Ah, those were the days. And just in case this unfashionable declaration of tribal perfection fails to establish Dame Edith’s unabashed élitism, she adds: ‘Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.’
SF magazine subscribers only
By Folly Brook

By Folly Brook

Time is linear. One thing happens, then another, then another. But while time itself may be linear, our memory of it is not. Of course we can order our memories in a linear, sort-by-date, fashion, but we can also sort by importance, by emotion and even (speaking as someone who grew up in the 1970s) by dodgy haircut. And since you are reading a literary magazine you, like me, can probably sort your memories by books – you can pick a book from your bookshelves, start to browse, and be magically transported not only to the world within the book, but also to the world you were living in when you first read it.
SF magazine subscribers only
In Italy’s Dark Heart

In Italy’s Dark Heart

On a motorbike ride across southern Italy in the Sixties, I stopped at an outdoor café in a hilltop village somewhere in the middle of Basilicata. A group of men and boys gathered a few yards away and, with that unnerving look of blank curiosity and suppressed hostility which you sometimes encounter in peasant areas, watched in silence while I drank my coffee. My discomfort ended only when they turned to inspect the much more interesting English motorcycle, a big old 350cc BSA. One of the boys mumbled a comment, and the ice was broken.
SF magazine subscribers only
Beginning in Gladness

Beginning in Gladness

Though I’ve long been familiar with Ted Walker’s poems, until recently I had not read The High Path, his wonderful memoir of childhood. I came to it not only with the curiosity of a fellow poet, but also as one having newly completed a memoir of my own. For a writer, the recall of childhood runs an assortment of risks – the editing effected by forgetfulness or by self-censorship; the distortions brought about by nostalgia or over-simplification; the assumption that the particulars of family history will axiomatically be of interest to the reader. Yet the best memoirs – and Ted Walker’s is surely among them – carry a potent charge, not only conveying the sensuous quick of childhood, but avoiding pure solipsism by acting as triggers for the reader’s own memories.
SF magazine subscribers only

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