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A Countryman’s Winter Notebook | In Search of Christmas

A Countryman’s Winter Notebook | In Search of Christmas

About a fortnight ago I was made aware that Christmas was near. Bits of nature seemed to have got into the shop windows; boughs with frost on them and rustic-work fences. Whenever I opened a newspaper or magazine I was told what I should give to her or she to me. Whole pages were devoted to advocating that I should put on a red robe and a white beard and present my wife with some large piece of domestic machinery.

Not Just for Christmas

Not Just for Christmas

I’ve always found deciding on a Christmas Book the most difficult task of my literary year. I read enthusiastically all the time, but it’s only in late November or early December that I start to get twitchy about this year’s special pick, and I always worry that I may have left the decision too late.

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Extract from Diary of a Provincial Lady | November

Extract from Diary of a Provincial Lady | November

November 7th Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfully, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down while I just finish the bulbs. Lady B makes determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoal, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa.

Extract from Pig Ignorant | Chapter 2

Extract from Pig Ignorant | Chapter 2

Gainful Employment Nick’s mother says, ‘I hope you have been thinking about getting a job.’ ‘Yes, of course, I’ve been working at it –’ ‘I can’t have you under my feet all day. You are no longer a…

To Read or Not to Read

To Read or Not to Read

One morning in the summer of 2009, my obliging postman carried indoors for me the box of books I’d been waiting for. Here, together with their source texts, were that year’s ten last-standing contenders for the Scott Moncrieff Prize, awarded to the best French book in English translation, which I and two colleagues were to judge.

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Glimpses of Paradise

Glimpses of Paradise

In the early 1970s, as a young man new to London, I visited the Tate Gallery for the first time. The gallery wasn’t very full on a spring weekday morning, but one middle-aged couple came into the room where I was standing in front of a picture. Obviously, they were intent on doing the whole gallery at a brisk pace as they moved diagonally across the floor, glancing from side to side, like pigeons looking for food. Near the doorway, the woman halted to looked at a painting. She read the label out loud, ‘A Hilly Scene. Samuel Palmer,’ then stood back, and said, ‘My goodness, but it’s so small.’ And then they hurried off into the next room, perhaps to comfort themselves with some huge Victorian landscape.

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Faith, Hope and Decency

Faith, Hope and Decency

Rosamunde Pilcher had already enjoyed several decades of consistent if modest success as a novelist when, in 1987, her family saga The Shell Seekers propelled her on to the bestseller lists. By then in her early sixties, she followed it three years later with September. A sequel of sorts, it proved to be a worthy companion to the book that had made its author a household name.

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Flying High

Flying High

I have a friend with bipolar disorder. She self-medicates with books, reading widely, constantly. Highbrow, lowbrow; fiction, non-fiction. They flow in and out of our local library and charity shops. Recently, she held one back for me.

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The Smell of the Greasepaint

The Smell of the Greasepaint

When the great actor-turned-director Michael Blakemore died in December last year, aged 95, his obituarist on the BBC reminded listeners that, as well as being the collaborator of choice for the play wrights Michael Frayn and Peter Nichols, the guiding hand behind A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Noises Off, a double Tony-award winner for Kiss Me Kate and Copenhagen, the almost-head of the National and the actual and much-fêted head of both Glasgow Citizens and the Lyric Hammersmith, he was a gifted and iconoclastic author. Personally, the commentator said, his favourite book about theatre was Blakemore’s Stage Blood (2013), a coruscating, vengeful memoir of the author’s five years as an associate director at the then nascent National Theatre.

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Have What Is Beautiful

Have What Is Beautiful

The last time I saw Elisabeth Russell Taylor, I’d emerged from the tube to find myself transported to Jerusalem. Shabby streets were filled with Hasidic men in drape coats and high-crowned black hoiche hats with long side-curls; women were wearing a variety of wig styles. Over the phone a nurse advised me that if I wanted to bring Elisabeth anything edible I should purchase it on Golders Green Road in a supermarket called Kosher Kingdom.

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Alice in the Margins

Alice in the Margins

The first school play I took part in was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice was played by a small boy who went on in adulthood to be a judge: evidence if you like for the determinism of early experience, for Alice is the only character, at the climax of the story, to stick up for due pro cess in the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Like most children she has sharply twitching antennae when it comes to injustice or unfairness, both of which she meets on every side. In his Annotated Alice, the editor Martin Gardner draws parallels with Kafka, and there is much in that. Neither author depicts a world with out rules: it is just that the rules are incomprehensible.

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A Man on a Journey

A Man on a Journey

‘In the great days that are gone I was walking the Journey upon its easy smiling roads and came one morning of windy spring to the side of a wood.’ That first sentence of the first story in A. E. Coppard’s first collection, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921), has always drawn me on.

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Marriage Guidance

Marriage Guidance

I first came across Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives (1983) a decade after it was published, thanks to a mention in a footnote of a now-forgotten book. I liked the sound of a study of five Victorian marriages and promptly ordered a copy. I have that (paperback) copy still, though later I ordered another (hardback), on the principle that when you find something really good – a perfect pair of jeans for example – it’s often worth buying two.

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How Sweet the Music

How Sweet the Music

Something rather magical happened to me last summer when, walking along the river path by the Great Ouse in Huntingdonshire, I came across an old iron gate set into a stone wall. A small sign said ‘Visitors welcome’ so I pushed the gate open and found myself in a lovely English garden with some curious details. Ahead of me lay a velvety swath of lawn, edged with a row of dark green yews trimmed neatly into coronation orbs and crowns. Walking further, I discovered more topiary in the shape of giant chess pieces, and rare irises standing tall. Old roses carelessly cast their petals at my feet as I looked up to see a mysterious old house.

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Christmas Holidays

Christmas Holidays

We three children were looking forward to Mother’s birthday, which was December 18th. December was ‘our’ birthday month, Cyril’s on the 20th, mine on the 10th: but the 18th was by far the most important. With a view to deciding what was to be done, we gathered round the schoolroom table, each armed with a statement of his or her financial resources. My assets were contained in an old purse that I kept hidden in a corner of the writing desk. This I emptied on the table. The contents were: one silver sixpence, one silver threepenny bit, and an assortment of coppers – total one shilling and tenpence halfpenny. Cyril was not in a much stronger position, and it remained for Ethel to retrieve the situation, which, I have to admit, she did most nobly. Lucky enough to have a godmother who sent her postal orders she was able to produce nearly ten shillings. Most magnanimously, she suggested that we pool our resources and give Mother one really nice present rather than three inferior ones. Cyril and I volunteered to draw and paint a birthday card between us, and we left it to Ethel to decide on the nature of the present.

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There was one day that fell in early December, more exciting than Christmas itself . . .

There was one day that fell in early December, more exciting than Christmas itself . . .

Always on this occasion my father’s firm provided sandwiches and drinks for all comers: dealers, smallholders, cowmen, shepherds, drovers. (The more substantial farmers were entertained to luncheon at the Swan.) Great were the preparations on the day before the market. Enormous joints sizzled in Old Cookie’s oven; baskets of loaves lay everywhere about the kitchen, huge pats of yellow butter, tongues, sausages, pasties. Maids were busy all day cutting sandwiches, which were piled on dishes and covered with napkins. There was an air of bustle and festivity all over the house . . .

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