Waking up to contrast

I woke to another glorious sunny day behind the blind

And the first pictures that caught my eye on Twitter were these..

1/  Moonrise from the International Space Station

 

2/  My family leaving their home in San Francisco to live in Boulder, Colorado

 

3/  A family fleeing their home in Gaza to escape Israeli bombing:

And my immediate reaction is despair that there is nothing I can do to stop the suffering, here and everywhere.

But I don’t think the answer is not to enjoy the sunny day I have been given. I came across a poem by Jack Gilbert lately called A Brief for the Defence. Here is an extract:

So I have been out picking strawberries in my pyjamas, cut back some seeding Lady’s Mantle with my sharp new pruning sheers (Oh joy! – I love those sheers that a Twitter friend recommended to me) and I’ve worked out where I’m going to store the huge heap of kindling that Dave has piled high in the wheelbarrow. He is always commandeering the wheelbarrow when I need it for gardening (bless his little cotton socks.) Now I shall take my morning shower.

I hope you enjoy your day, too.

How to make novelists love you

I have just read a newish novel by a respected author and although I thought the central premise of the novel was good, and the narrative drive was strong, and there was other good stuff going on, I could only give it three stars out of five, because I thought the writing had serious shortcomings. I didn’t post a review on Amazon: knowing how hard to is to write a successful novel, as well as how subjective is a reader’s reaction to it, I am squeamish these days about criticising other novelists’ babies.

Do you ever read reviews of novels on Amazon?

Do you know how powerful the reviews and the overall average rating is in persuading other readers to buy a book, or not to buy a book?

And did you know that some people rate the service from Amazon, and not the book?

I just read a two star review of a modern classic that says

“actual second hand book description did not come up to expectations
TATTY would be my description of this book, dog eared and yellowing pages
I will not be buying used again.”

Some people actually do give their opinion of the book itself in a two star review, but along the lines of

“I know this author is well-respected, but I just couldn't continue with this book. It was all the swearing which put me off, not that I never swear, it just didn't seem right that squaddies would use such language in front of their officers in 1914.”

And here is a one star review of another book

“I found the characters and narrative of this book highly irritating and at points I struggled to read on. Aspects of the book were also ridiculously unrealistic. A big dissapoinment [sic] after such amazing reviews!!”

All three of the above “reviews” pertain to intelligent novels – two of which were listed for major literary prizes. The other is a modern classic.

I am not suggesting that the reactions of the last two readers are not valid, but I am saying that they are not helpful. But isn’t it also the case that sometimes, one is just not in the right mood to enjoy a particular book? Sometimes, I have picked up a book, and then put it down unread, thinking it dull or unrewarding, only to pick it up at another time, and ravish it.

These days, I follow the advice from Thumper in Bambi - “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

I would translate this into Amazon book review protocol as never giving anything lower than a three star rating. and if I can’t do that, I don’t post a review.

Why?

Because one’s reaction to a book is so personal and subjective, it is a shame to damn a book (and its author) on a forum so public that it will alter the ratings of that book and possibly put other readers off who might enjoy the book – and thus damage sales for the author. When a book is a runaway bestseller, a couple of dodgy “reviews” will be neither here nor there. But when a book is by a new or a little known author, and only five people have rated it on Amazon, a single one star review can bring the average rating down in a powerful and heartsinking way.

So next time you want to blast a book on Amazon – please, think on.

Friday picture show

If I go on too much about the countryside where I live, the Monsal Trail, or my garden, I’ll be in danger of turning into a pensioner version of Fotherington-Thomas from How to be Topp.  But in high summer, being outside is what I like best. All the long days. I like waking up to sunshine on the lime trees in the field across the road,

but it feels sacrilegous to be going to bed while the setting sun is still playing on the blossom outside the side window in the bedroom.

Here are some pictures - sans warbling - from my week of summer.

Breakfast

The rose at the garden wall

a morning ride up the Trail

Waiting for Liz and tea  (aka supper/dinner)  on the terrace at Hassop Station

Walking home after tea down the Trail

And home up the lane

Different strokes

I was listening to a Getz/Gilberto CD yesterday while I was making lemon curd

(and by the way – why is it that half a pound of butter, five lemons and five eggs and an unhealthy amount of sugar will only make four jars of lemon curd?)

when Dave came in the kitchen, and questioned my choice of music (poor benighted guitarist that he is.) I believe the word “wallpaper” featured somewhere in our conversation and it wasn’t me who uttered it.

I explained that the sax playing is not only mellow and very skilled, but it makes me feel happy. Just like the backing on the Billie Holiday CD I listen to all the time in the car. The sax, trumpet, trombone and piano of the jazz backing lifts me. Yes, I can listen to Leonard Cohen and Natalie Merchant along with the rest of the misery gutses, but right now, I want uplifting music, music that feeds me.

Did you see that film Quartet, with Maggie Smith and Billy Connolly and a rather yummy version of Tom Courtenay? It was set in a home for retired musicians. There was a lot of classical music and singing, but what made my spirits soar was the muted trumpet backing of the number “Are you having any fun?”

I may think a lot, but I am still a deeply shallow person.

And while I am at it, I can’t stand opera, or that middle-class dark, dark 70% cocoa mass chocolate. Give me Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, or please don’t bother.

And now I am off to play Corcovado on my sax.

Shame and longing

A host of brave gardeners in our village opened their gardens to the public at the weekend.  It was fascinating, inspiring and depressing. Even bearing in mind the fact that if you are opening your garden to the public, it is probably looking sharper and tidier than it would otherwise, it was obvious that most of these gardens ALWAYS look weedless and tidy. But how do people get their lawn edges looking so sharp? That is what I long for – sharp lawn edges.

I asked one woman with immaculate borders and a vegetable plot that looked as if it had been lifted from a horticultural textbook how much time she spends in the garden every week, and she said 5 or 6 hours A DAY.

That made me feel better. I could write for five or six hours, but not garden. I would feel I was wasting my life.

But your passion is your passion, and as Joseph Campbell said, you have to follow your bliss. The trouble is I have so many blisses I don’t have the time to follow them all – writing, gardening, cycling on the Trail, playing my sax, seeing friends, sitting in the sun, walking here and in Wensleydale, playing with my grandchildren, laughing.…

Whatever. My brother said I need to have lots of photos on the blog and not just ones of my grandchildren. So here is one of my favourite plants flowering in my garden at the moment – an elderflower -

and here it is in situ

Notice how the grass needs mowing and the edge needs trimming?

Here’s my rag-taggle strawberry patch which is currently yielding a kilo of fruit a day – picked by me and eaten (mostly) by Dave -

See how untidy it is?

And do you remember the compost bins that Dave made for me last year?

This year I harvested some fabulous compost heaving with worms, and spread it on the sweet pea plot, but did a lousy job of digging it in so that the healthy, green sweet peas, which I planted five weeks ago, have become sickly and yellow, and are only just beginning to grow and have new green tips on them -

Maybe now you see why this post is called “Shame and longing.”

I had an iffy day yesterday, but at teatime the sun came out and I rode on my bike up the Monsal Trail to my favourite spot.

Here it is in April -

Here it is today -

I climbed over the fence and sat amongst the coltsfoot and clover and quaking grass that now cover the grass, and I drunk in the view. It’s magic there. And it made me think that when I am too old even to pick strawberries, I shall turn the garden into a meadow.

Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?

Not writing.

When I signed off for a rest from the blog, I thought I’d be using my blog time to write. But I haven’t been writing at all – apart from my journal.

I’ve been getting the garden fettled, which for the last few years has had seasons of neglect, due to writing, publishing and swanning overseas to see people like this:

and this:

I’ve just been looking for photos of the garden to show you and got really depressed. Before I started publishing, it was beautiful. Still…my new blog header shows it still looks OK from certain angles.

I’ve been doing others things too. I don’t seem to be able to read fiction when I am writing fiction, so I’ve been making the most of my time without writing to catch up.

You’ve no idea all the things I’ve missed (through lack of time/energy) in the last few years when I’ve been publishing – simple things like going to local art exhibitions, and even the village open gardens event – which is today.

Then there’s the patchwork that I half sewed up last year, and then unpicked because it wasn’t working. I’ve finally had time for that. I saw a local artist’s abstract landscapes last month and was inspired to do a different kind of patchwork i.e. not the usual classic geometric type like this one I made for Isaac and Wendy

I’ve been designing an abstract sunset (double bed size), which has got thus far:

Dave doesn’t “get it” but certain key people do (Zoe, Wendy, and the artist who inspired me – oh yes, and Roopa on Twitter) and that’s all the encouragement I need.

And the blog? What’s happening with the blog?

I don’t know. We shall have to see. I’m back today because I have been missing it, and other people have been missing it too. So we’ll see what happens.

Goodbye to the blog

I had a wonderful holiday in San Francisco. This is Lux and me sunbathing at Dolores Park in San Francisco last week:

And Cecilia and me reading We’re all Going on a Bear Hunt:

And here I am with the Aging Hippie at the beach in the Big Sur:

But now I have some news. Just as Tony Benn left the House of Commons after 50 years “to spend more time on politics” I am going to take a break from the blog to spend more time on writing.

Maybe I should start from somewhere else. A quote from Joan Didion will help me explain:

“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

This is true of me. But I find that I can’t do this on the blog, because there are things I want to write about that I can’t share with you, dear readers, often (but not always) because they concern other people.

This means that the things that I can and do share with you are what could be described as ‘first world problems.’ And I feel less and less comfortable in doing this.

When nine million people in Syria have had to flee their homes, it feels beyond inappropriate for me to be wailing about my car being taken for scrap. When every week Palestinians are having their homes demolished by the Israeli authorities, and when children in Gaza are seriously malnourished because of the Israeli blockade, and only ten percent of the drinking water meets WHO sanitation standards, it feels wrong to be complaining about my kidney infection. And when asylum seekers are being torn from their families and deported every week, it feels petted to complain that my grandchildren live so far away, because, after all, I am lucky enough to be able to see them for a month every year.

I want to be clear: I’m not saying that personal blogs are not valid or not valuable. I am just saying that I no longer feel comfortable writing mine. I may feel differently in a couple of months.

In the meantime I am going to spend my blogging time on writing a personal journal. I’ll continue with the screenplay. I might try to write a radio sitcom. And having just discovered a new (to me) and wonderful novelist in Anna Quindlen, I am newly inspired to write another novel (which I had sworn not to do.)

There’s also the garden crying out for attention, my patchwork quilt is still unfinished, and my new bike is calling to me from the shed. This week I am trying to design some striking posters to use in peace vigils this year, in the context of the World War 1 commemoration. I’m hoping that Dave will help with the captions – he’s so good at that kind of thing. I like this poster, but I can’t find where to buy a copy:

If you’re a newcomer here, and have only just found my blog, there is an awful lot to read about my daily life in the archives. 

Thank you for dropping by. It’s been great to have your company. I might be back in the future. Who knows?

Ooh, nearly forgot. I will still be on Twitter @suehepworth

Last post

This will be my last post for a while, dear readers.

I shan’t be blogging again until I get back from my land of maragaritas in the sunshine:

pedicures:

 

road trips with bona fide Aging Hippies who hung out in Haight Ashbury in the sixties (specifically ones with fabulous hair):

handsome sons:

fun-loving daughters-in-law:

and enchanting grand daughters:

Goodbye….

Done in

Jane asked me the other day if I was excited about going to California and I said, “Not excited, no. I’m on the other side of desperation.”

And I’m at the end of my tether with the blog, which is why I’ve been throwing poems at you.

I’m at the end of everything. I want to be away.

The current anti-biotics (or the tail end of the kidney infection itself) is making me not only washed-out, but a bit depressed. Chrissie drove me the mile to Hassop Station for a nice lunch on Friday, and I was so exhausted afterwards I had to go to bed.

Today there was a blue sky and a warm sun and I have spent the day in the garden, pottering and sitting. I just have to make it to Thursday morning, when I am flying away to to see these little beauties…

…and maybe get my mojo back.

Wet evening in April

The birds sang in the wet trees

And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now

And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.

But I was glad I had recorded for him the melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh

In a station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

William Carlos Williams

My life as a cliché

The GP has given me a new antibiotic, as the last one didn’t do what it said on the tin. The new one has a list of possible side effects as long as your arm.

Some of these are life threatening, so I went to sleep last night, chewing my finger nails, a nervous wreck. But this morning I am alive and kicking: I slept like a baby, and I’m bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (ish), hoping in the next couple of days to draw a line under my kidney infection and move on with my life.

For the time being, however, I am staying in bed.

The best medicine

I had another bad night, after I thought I was better from whatever it is that ails me. Off to the doctor later.

In the meantime I found a quote I like from Kurt Vonnegut, about laughter. If they ever put me in Who’s Who I will list laughter as one of my hobbies/interests/pastimes. Maybe that’s why I can’t keep jokes out of my novels, even the serious ones. So this is what the great man said -

This is why when I am tired and discouraged, I watch comedy.

Different worlds

The children and young people are a vital part of our Quaker Meeting in Bakewell. I hope if the day ever comes when we have no kids, I’ll be dead.

On Saturday night they had a sleepover in the meeting house and watched the film The Help, and on Sunday morning before Meeting for Worship, they cooked and served a “Big Banana Bakewell Fairtrade breakfast” for the rest of us. This is a bunch of them -

The breakfast was fab, a very friendly, happy time, and I know the kids enjoyed themselves as well.

Meanwhile, last Thursday in occupied Palestine, some Bedouin children were excited to see playground equipment – donated by Italy -arrive at their encampment. But before it could be unloaded from the trucks, the Israeli authorities confiscated it.They have already issued demolition orders against dozens of structures in the encampment, including the local school. And yet two kilometres away, there is a Jewish settlement, built on occupied land in defiance of international law.

And somewhere else in Palestine, the Israeli authorities have destroyed this little girl’s home. Demolitions like this are an everyday occurrence.

Would you consider joining the growing movement that is boycotting Israel until they abide by international law?

Two things to celebrate

I slept through the night.

When I woke up, February had gone.