How Do You Pronounce It?

I'm back. 


The past few months have been too fraught at times to want to record them. Bob said he would find a new job and perhaps he will soon be proven right, but until then we have a month to fill with a London Staycation. And I can't think of a better place to hustle up 31 days of activities than London, including a bit of exploration into the surrounding English countryside. Everything is set to go. The breakdown of our old computer — another forgettable episode of the past few months — has been solved with my cute new, still shiny white MacBook that doesn't need to be shared with anyone.

  

Planning elaborate trips is a favourite pastime for me. Once, when I was especially unhappy living in New Jersey, I spent months planning a road trip that was to be a US version of Heidi's Alp, a travel book by an English writer, Christina Hardyment, who loaded her children into a van and set off to find the locations of favourite children's classics in Europe. She began with Hans Christian Andersen, and ended up writing about the original Legoland. I so wanted to go to Legoland, but it was in Denmark, and I was in New Jersey. This was in the days before the internet of course, so I borrowed all the Mobil Travel Guides from the library and combed them for any references to authors or settings of my favourite books, with a heavy emphasis on Laura Ingalls Wilder, since those were among my daughters' favourites. I came up with amazing gems of discovery. I sent off postcards to dozens of small town Chambers of Commerce and Tourist Boards, and received reams of mail. The trip would have stretched into months, but instead we moved to Massachusetts. Years later, Megan's high school junior year summer visit to colleges of the Midwest was heavily influenced by that New Jersey research. While we did see Kenyon and Oberlin and Carleton and Macalester what we all really remember was The Little House in the Big Woods (reconstructed version), the real Caddie Woodlawn House, falling in love with artist Wanda Gag's hometown of New Ulm, Minnesota, and the high point for me — a lifetime high point I would say — was sitting on the Betsy-Tacy Bench in Maud Hart Lovelace's Deep Valley, (Mankato) Minnesota. Legoland has continued to elude me however. By the time I moved to London, my daughter's were too old to pass the child test for admittance, although 16 year old Susan offered to  give it a go. Megan has said she is not bringing her children on a plane until they are teenagers, but she will have to cede at least one of them to me when they are of Legoland age and height.

While we were scanning lists of Museums in London yesterday, Bob came up with today's winning choice: Little Holland House in Carshalton, and we both said, "Where on earth is Carshalton?" and then we said, "How do you pronounce it? " 

The second question was answered by the announcement of remaining station stops on the train journey: Car-sh-ahh-lton.

Carshalton is in the Borough of Sutton. One of the things I have learned in the past year is that London has 32 Boroughs. Yes that is not a mistake, I really mean 32. And if you split up Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, Barking and Dagenham, you could have even more. Bob went to a block party this evening and said everyone — natives of this country and this city — said they had never heard of Sutton. All of us in the Inner Boroughs are only vaguely aware of the existence of the Outer Boroughs, but when Boris Johnson won the mayoral election last year, the word was that his support came from the Outer Boroughs, previously unacknowledged, but residents of London nonetheless, making themselves noticed.


My love of trip planning is matched by an accompanying love of guide books. I am very particular in my choice of guidebooks, but when I see the right sort of guidebook, I can rarely walk away without a purchase. When I do manage to contain myself, I dream about the book, and find myself, the next day or week, succumbing. A book I couldn't resist 12 years ago was Village London: A Guide to London's Neighborhoods (no "u" in Neighbourhood, so I must have bought it in the States). I haven't looked at this particular book in years, but sure enough Carshalton is one of the 25 villages I could have made acquaintance with more than a decade ago. 


Our day in Carshalton was outstanding. The train from Victoria took about a half hour to reach our destination close to the bottom edge of the left hand page of the A-Z Map which is London to the inhabitants. My newly discovered old guidebook took us past lovely old wooden weatherboarded — clapboarded in the States — houses which are rare in England and very rare in London. We visited the Sutton Ecology Centre, a local nature reserve set up more than 20 years ago to educate children and adults on the environment. Like many voluntary projects, the Centre looks like it could use a new generation of volunteers to keep up the side. Of course nothing is helped this year by our drought conditions where every blade of grass in the country is dry and brown. The land was originally an orchard when first recorded in 1590. Then part of the formal gardens of one of the three great houses that dominated the village.


Next we stopped into the Honeywood Museum which began life as a 17th century residence and was eventually extended into a charming upper middle class house in the mid-19th century with an extant billiard room — the man cave of the period — and an elegant drawing room for the ladies overlooking the ponds that form the centre of the village. The exhibits were a fascinating hodge-podge of local history from the Romans through the Second World War. This is the end of Archaeology Month in Britain so the dig that is proceeding between the Honeywood and the ponds was being worked today, and we held some 16th c. (the archaeologist guessed) pottery sherds as they came out of the ground.


We also visited the Carshalton Water Tower built around 1725 to provide running water to Carshalton House with a recently restored water wheel that was used to pipe water from a rooftop reservoir of the tower to the house, way across the field. The tower also had a lovely Orangery and a remarkable Delft tiled bath or perhaps indoor pool because it looked to be at least 6 feet deep.

And none of these places even figured in our decision to begin this Staycation in Carshalton. We went to visit Little Holland House which Bob saw described on the list of London museums yesterday, as a house built by Frank Dickinson (an artist previously unknown to us) inspired by the ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris who are of course well known. The House is owned by the Borough of Sutton and open to the public on the first Sunday of the month for a few hours. Usually when these discoveries are made the random open day is just past and who ever remembers the next random open day. In this case we had the first Sunday of August staring at us waiting to be filled with something special. And we could not have found any place more special. Frank was a poor struggling artist who worked at the nearby Doulton Tile factory who dreamed of a perfect house to bring his fiancée Florence to live when they married. He began building his furniture, bought a tiny plot, borrowed what money he could, which was only half of what he needed for the house he designed. So he and his brothers dug the foundation, and got to work with  building in 1902. In 1904, he and Florence spent their honeymoon sanding window frames. 

Everything in this charming little house was made by Frank and Florence and assorted friends. There is a living room - dining room with carved beams, paneled walls with family portraits painted in the panels (and one of Ruskin). Beaten copper fire place facings as in the Mackintosh rooms in Glasgow, parchment lamp shades decorated with painted medieval illuminations. The master bedroom has a charming painted frieze of trees in a darkening blue sky with a quotation from Longfellow on sleep painted beneath. He really wasn't a very good painter — although I did like his wartime paintings of air raid shelters and Carshalton blitz damage in the Honeyman Museum — but the House is a spectacular piece of art. They raised two children and lived their entire lives in the House. Frank died in 1961, and Florence left it in 1972 when she moved to a care home. The Borough bought the House and has managed it as a museum since 1974. And I say Bravo to the obscure Borough of Sutton for saving such a treasure. Would they do it in this century? Probably not. And who else was visiting today: a large family of Italians, a Japanese family were arriving as we were leaving. So is this little house famous around the world, but unknown to us until yesterday?


A most interesting fun fact is that Bob's grandfather, a German immigrant in New York who did decorative painting for a living — spokesman of the Amalgamated Painters' Society who were united with the Brotherhood of Painters in a strike over the new wage scale in 1907 according to a New York Times archive article — was decorating his family home a block from the water in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx at much the same time as Frank Dickinson in Carshalton. The house was still in the family into the 1980s when it was sold. I wonder if it still exists. I can't imaging the Borough of the Bronx matching Sutton for the preservation of a treasure.


All photos of the Little Holland House taken by Bob with his new Android phone.

A (very belated) Happy New Year

This new year is galloping ahead, and I have not sat down to record life in London once this year.

 Christmas has gone.

 

Santa and Rudolph are exhausted and looking forward to a three season nap.

But the Welcome Bears have refused to give up their Santa hats claiming the exceptional cold weather merits exceptional measures to stay warm.

London has mostly been dominated by its weather. The coldest winter in 35 years, I believe was the determination. Certainly the coldest in the 12 winters since we moved here — although to be precise, my 11 winters, since last winter I was in Hingham doing grandmother duty, and that was a cold snowy winter by London standards too. By New England standards the amount of snow and the temperature lows in London were not remarkable, but icy sidewalks made the outside world treacherous for nearly a week.

 

The snow began at night.

 And in the morning our street looked like this.

 And the back garden was a winter wonderland.

The snow has gone, but every day we are greeted with rainy, grey winter gloom.  Although the day lengthens a minute or two every day now, so sunset is already nearly at 5:00 in the afternoon. Groundhog Day is of course an ancient holiday marking the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The pagans celebrate Imbolc, a festival of lights to honour the Celtic goddess Brid, keeper of the home fires, apparently. Conveniently, the favourite Irish female saint St Brigid (died c. 525)— or sometimes St Bride — has a feast day, smack dab at the same time as Imbolc. We have a St Brigid's cross made of Kildare reeds — she was abbess of Kildare — that has protected us for 35 years. Sadly it fell apart last year as the reeds are a bit old and dried, but I was able to push it back together into a respectable cross, so I hope it will continue to keep us in good stead. Just as conveniently, the Holy Family presented themselves in the Temple in Jerusalem at the same time, giving Christians the festival of Candlemas to celebrate — more lights, candles, etc. to help wake up the earth.  Candlemas never made it to Catholic New York City, but St Blaise did. On the day after Candlemas, my Catholic family trooped to church after school to queue up to have the priest at St Gregory the Great bless our throats by crossing two candles (unlit!) under our chins and mumbling a Latin phrase. When I say my Catholic family, I mean everyone but my Lutheran father, but I just had the worrying thought that he died of cancer of the esophagus. Perhaps I should check if any Catholic churches still perform these proto-pagan rituals.

The New Year Resolutions are going pretty well. I spent the end of 2009 organising my yarn stash, finding forgotten treasures, winding skeins into balls with my new swift, joining many too many Ravelry groups, and setting out projects for the month. I did finish several of those projects.

 

Mittens for Lavinia.

The checked pattern makes them nice and warm because the strand running behind gives them double thickness. The yarn is the lovely Wensleydale Longwool from Yorkshire.

Mittens were the theme of the month here.

A Ravelry group for Fingerless Mitts offered this free pattern for Cupcake Mittlets. The yarn is a hand dyed one I bought in Devon last summer in a lovely colour mix whose subtlety does not photograph well. And the pattern looks pretty shapeless. You can just about see the thumb on the right. My friend Martha told me the fingerless mitts are so popular these days because the majority of the population who wander the streets texting and phoning are not impeded from the steady pursuit of communication. For us incommunicados, grabbing the transit pass was made easy too.

 

The Selbuvotter Mittens are much more impressive in a photograph. I bought the book years ago at Halcyon Yarns in Maine. Teri Shea, a University of Washington Museum Studies grad student interned at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, and as a research project studied the mitten collection associated with migrants from the Selbu district of Norway. She charted dozens of mitten designs and published the book. She runs a Ravelry group to promote the book and knitting the designs; that was a good enough prod for me to join. I used a rather fine shetland yarn that I saw in the window of a haberdashery in Copenhagen and bought because it was bargain priced.

 
And finally, I finished this wonderful scarf from a truly wonderful book Knitting New Scarves by Lynne Barr. Last autumn, a quilting group member brought it to a meeting, and I immediately ordered it from Amazon. The number of projects I love in this book will keep me busy for years. This yarn bought years ago is from Wool in the Woods which I see from googling, no longer exists, except perhaps as part of Cherry Hill yarns.

The pattern is called Aria, and Lynne Barr says she was inspired by the seaweed Laminaria.
 

The frilly edge is done with short-row shaping slightly more visible in the photo below.

In the bleak midwinter

We haven't yet reached mid-winter by calendar, but bleak is certainly the word for this morning. The sun — if there was sun — would have risen less than five minutes ago at 8:06. The sky is very grey, the air itself looks grey. The time of sunrise will not reverse its course until later this week. On a positive note, sunset is now moving by the minute toward spring, and although the sun is not scheduled to appear any time today, it will set before 4:00 pm for the last time this season. So we remain in shortest day mode for this short week between Christmas and the New Year. England of course celebrates Christmas over two days, but with the 26th of December falling on a Saturday, yesterday was the public holiday, so Bob had a four day weekend — four and a half days if you count in the half day of Christmas Eve — to loaf.  And that's pretty much what Christmas is all about for us here. A very English Christmas is eating and watching lots of television. The two-part Cranford was somewhat depressing; and the first part of Dr. Who was a bit incomprehensible, but perhaps the conclusion will explain it all. David Tennant's Hamlet was also a gripper. We skipped the Walk on Boxing Day out of laziness, using the expectation of bad weather as the excuse, but of course that just confirms our un-Englishness. Later, when there were sad reports of an MP dying of a heart attack while on a Boxing Day Walk with his family, we felt vindicated in the wisdom of our laziness.

The UK — and the Continent — has had record cold and snow over the past few weeks. We did have a snowy day with a night in which cars and vans could not get up the snow packed and icy street outside our flat. London was mostly spared the deep snow and transport problems that made holiday travel a nightmare for so many people. Ironically, British Air and Eurostar voted to strike before Christmas making everyone angry until the strikes were called off — then the weather managed to shut both of them down anyway. My Luddite leanings always come out when I see the general public's anger if natural events — like snowstorms — inhibit free movement or access to services. The wonder of technology so quickly turns to entitlement and petulance. Reliance on technological fixes will be the end of civilisation eventually.

Now we must contend with another assault on the globalisation that allowed us to skip off to London without giving a thought to losing easy access to the States. Terrorism and oil prices have made the trips sometimes easier and sometimes harder, both less expensive and more expensive, over the past decade. We had been discussing whether to sacrifice some of Bob's limited vacation days (a limit he has abused a bit over the two-plus years since we became grandparents) to a trip or two that did not involve visiting our children and grandchildren in Massachusetts. We have not yet resolved the Istanbul-versus-Bibs-and-Bobs question, but now this new plane terror threat has been thrown into our faces. Knee-jerk reactions will abound: no potty trips (lets tell the children that one!); no blankies (personally, I have trouble imagining any man, even the most rabid Islamist, reading about third-degree burns in the "groin," and thinking "I could do that"!); and the indignities of the airport searches to come (a political cartoon yesterday has a line of naked passengers boarding a plane!) will make travelling to the States less than pleasant. Huge decreases in the number of passengers has cut the number of flights between Boston and London by half over the last few years. If computers are no longer allowed on board, will that cut the number of business trips? Will fewer passengers lead to even fewer flights with concomitant higher ticket costs? Oh brave new world of the Millennium, you have failed us all — actually we have failed you — but I want to whinge about a world that doesn't let me see my children and grandchildren easily and cheaply.

The children and grandchildren had a grand Christmas from the photos Megan sent through her blog. They had Christmas dinner with Barnz's father and his wife, so the grands (and the son-in-law) were able to celebrate a traditional English Christmas with a turkey and a flaming Christmas pudding. And in the way of children, I see from Megan's Facebook messages, they have all come down with winter ailments immediately following the festivities. Barnz, who is ace at whatever it is he does since he was assiduously courted and interviewed by everyone who knew of his availability after the Microsoft debacle, has a new job, starting this week perhaps, in Providence of all places. So as the world turns, we return to the Providence of our adult youth, and briefly of our children's youth, to continue this chronicle. Fortunately Hingham is on the right side of Boston to make a Providence commute (by train or by car) do-able. Interestingly, a few months ago, in our occasional conversations on where we would go if we returned to the States, Bob and I agreed that Providence would be pretty close to ideal for a life post-London. We did love both our stints in Providence and would never have left if Bob had been able to find a job back in 1983. That was such a painful move, we couldn't bear to return to Providence for the seven years we were in New Jersey, and consequently we lost contact with all our friends from those years. We felt courageous enough to visit Providence in 1991 on our way back from Boston after Bob had had a good job interview, and we believed, correctly, that we would be moving back to New England. We rarely went to Providence during the Hingham years though. I'm never comfortable because for me it is a land of exile.

I guess the idea of moving to Providence for a third time would be at root a way to capture what was lost in 1983, but nothing would match the pain of leaving London. Sometimes we joke about a future of sitting in rockers thinking about what we would be doing if only we lived in London. Yesterday was a very good London day. After a weekend of lethargy, we stirred ourselves into action because we had hot theatre tickets for the evening. After a slow start, in late afternoon we headed off to the Royal Academy to see Wild Thing, a sculpture show of Eric Gill,  Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, three young artists who came together in London in the early 20th century. Just the right size show, with a room devoted to each man. Gill's work is astoundingly beautiful, and remains astoundingly beautiful as you remember this maniacal Roman Catholic nutcase of a man sexually abused his daughters, his sister, and even his dog whilst producing exquisite religious art.  Then another excellent supper at Bentley's in Mayfair before heading off to the National Theatre to see the new Alan Bennett play The Habit of Art. The play is a play-within-a-play of an imagined meeting between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten in Oxford in 1973. Richard Griffiths plays the actor who plays Auden and Alex Jennings plays the actor who plays Britten. The play-within is possibly the worst play ever with parts written for Auden's mirror and for his easy chair, rhyming on their places in the poet's life.  Clever and satiric, the cast and crew are engaged in a shambolic rehearsal of the play-within, while moving deftly between their roles as actors and as characters played, to show us the work that goes into creating art. The strains that arise personally and professionally, the compulsion for an artist to continue to create — the habit of art — and with an emphasis on the shared experience of gay artists, closeted or not.

One of the great gifts of living in London has been the good fortune to learn that drama is an art form that can endlessly remake itself. Before I moved to London, I understood drama to be a static art form: written lines put together by an author and then spoken by actors on a stage, sometimes interesting, often not.  I know now that great drama is transcendent: an alternate world is created on the stage, and as a member of the audience, you share the physical space of that alternate world; through the magic of art, you become part of the other, the transcendent world. I vaguely remember learning something like this in a college course on theatre history when we studied the meaning of drama for the ancient Greeks. There is no one way to create the magic that draws the audience in. In His Dark Materials, it was the puppetry; in After Mrs Rochester, it was the physical action of the writhing mad woman; in The Habit of Art, it was the mutiple layers of reality.

Time to look ahead and list those resolutions which are pointless to make because no one ever keeps them according to scientists! Suggestions to help include keeping them positive, keeping them simple, telling all your friends about them, and keeping a diary. Well what's a blog for but using as a diary, so I have one out of four already — and still two days until next year.

The Fog in London

Sun-up was at 7:56 this morning according to the BBC weather site, and we are having our first foggy morning of the season. The skyscraper tower of the Royal Free Hospital two blocks away — considered a blight by Hampsteaders — is not visible from the dining room window at the moment. These foggy days are a prelude to Christmas every year. A new weather front is dropping the temperature every day, and for the next few mornings we can expect freezing fog to linger. The sidewalks — I can never remember they are called pavements here — will be wet and slick; the damp air will penetrate the woolen defenses of scarves, hats, and gloves, making the temperature seem much colder than it really is.

As the atmospheric fog drops, the fog of my eternal head cold seems to be lifting. The week after my return from the States, I never left the house except to buy some  head cold medication. I just slept and worked on breathing. Fortunately, there were no dates to remember on my calendar. This week has been a gradual entrance back into the swing of living in London.

I hosted a quilt group pot-luck lunch on Monday and attended one on Thursday. The Monday group always holds the pot-luck lunch here because we have more Christmas decorations than anyone else.  Most of the group members are ex-pats living in rented and often furnished flats who will only be here for the months or years of their husband's overseas assignment, so naturally they haven't brought the family decorations from home. I usually welcome the party to unpack our beloved Christmas decorations, but I am afraid last weekend I made a rather half-hearted effort, so I have to finish the job this weekend. Alas, we have another year in which the storage box of Christmas themed fabrics has not been touched. The old "Christmas in July" craft magazine promotions need to be revived. Speaking of magazines, Borders bookstores in the UK are closing down, so my easy access to US magazines is now closed off. Borders US expanded to the UK shortly after we moved to London, but was sold off a few years ago to a UK private equity group and then to a management buyout, but Waterstones has the high streets sewn up having bought up all the other high street chains. Borders opened up some huge US-size bookstores around the country. Those empty spaces are going to make big holes in shopping districts.

I loved seeing Megan's Sanctimommy photos of decorating Hingham. Some are ones she grew up with and requested when she and Barnz chose to have Christmas on their own. It has been nine years since we spent Christmas with Megan. I would never ever want young children to spend Christmas away from home. I still have memories of a Saturday night in a tiny hotel room in Washington, D.C. with two little girls deeply worried the Easter Bunny would not be able to find them for basket delivery room service. (He did.) As of yesterday however, I have formed a new holiday plan. In a few years, I want Megan and the children to come for a visit the week after Christmas so, as dual citizens, they can experience an important cultural component of their English nationality: the theatre. The English live and breathe theatre, unlike Americans who have very little access to theatre productions unless they live in New York with money to spare. Outside of New York, there is the one professional repertory theatre in big cities, the non-professional drama club in small cities, and the ubiquitous high school musical. I wonder if high schools even put on plays any more. My high school had the annual musical plus a Junior Class Play and a Senior Class Play where we were introduced to classics like Blithe Spirit and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Hingham High School had a vaunted drama program, but after the annual autumn musical, all I remember being invited to see was the 15 minute entry into the all-important Massachusetts High School Drama Competition, which recognises technics and techniques, but offers no appreciation of drama as art.

Yesterday, when an English friend with a three year-old granddaughter listed the number of performances they had already attended with her and how many more were coming up, I realised the national love of drama begins with the pantomime season at Christmas. Time Out magazine lists 27 productions under the Children's Theatre heading in this week's issue. They include The Cat in the Hat at the National Theatre directed by Katie Mitchell (a very hot young director), The Enchanted Pig, an opera by Jonathan Dove at the Royal Opera House, and The Forest at the Young Vic. Then there are the annual productions based on beloved story books, Raymond Brigg's The Snowman told in dance (suitable for age 2+ to start them really young), Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo, and a new production of her book Stick Man. The year-round children's theatres, the Polka, the Angel, the Unicorn, have seasonal productions too. So of course I want my grandchildren to come here to spend a week attending the theatre every day. When they outgrow the children's productions they will graduate to the adult panto productions. Fairy tales told with an edge of sexual innuendo and cross-dressing with B-list celebrities, popular stars of past decades, soap opera stars, and reality TV competition winners and losers in the special roles. We went to a few high-class pantos — Angela Carter's posthumous Cinderella — years ago, but looking through the listings, perhaps we need to book a real panto this year.

Every year in the weeks before Christmas we book so many Christmas concerts, there is no room for anything else. Looking at my calendar I see six concerts coming up over the next two weeks. Speaking of music, I am surrounded by stacks of CDs — our collection of Christmas music (minus the extensive, but outdated collections of LPs and tapes) that Bob has been using to write his review of favourite Christmas music available on Bazzfazz (11 parts) and on Scholars and Rogues, which has 14 parts. A Big Day in Hingham was the day the Atlantic Wire website picked up Part 4 from Scholars and Rogues. I can't find the actual link because my computer is not picking up links very quickly right now, but the Atlantic Wire bills itself as "tracking the most influential opinion makers," and on the night in question, everyone else on The Ticker was indeed someone notable from their 50 most important pundits list. I feel the title of Bob's post, which included the words "Medieval Babes" had something to do with its selection by an A-list political site with cultural pretensions. Megan and Barnz, who can do these things, captured a "screen shot" so we have a record of this event on Bob's laptop.

In addition to the two pot-luck lunches, I went to two book groups this week. My regular "Sevens" group read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, a book I did not like in the 1980s when I first read it, and which I found I still don't like when I reread it earlier this week, although I keep reading that I should like it as it is some sort of classic. The group was split on opinion, but those who liked it kept citing the magnificent prose, which is usually the reason given to call it a classic. One thing I don't like is the writing style which I found made up of oddly patched and overblown phrasing. Our moderator found an interview in which Robinson said she began writing and saving metaphors when she was doing a graduate degree on Shakespeare, and later she realised she had the voice of Ruth in her random collection. In other words, she did patch together the prose.

The second book group was an extra meeting of the "Literary Ladies" to meet  Ruth Waterman, the author of When Swan Lake Comes to Sarajevo. Ruth is an English violinist who studied at Julliard and lived in New York for years before returning to England. In 2002 she was invited to guest conduct the Mostar Sinfonietta in Bosnia. She returned to Bosnia to lead concerts in 2004, 2005, and 2006, when funding for the orchestra ran out. As a BBC contract presenter, the BBC gave her recording tape and suggested a radio show if she found any interesting material. She collected personal experiences of the devastating war years from her young orchestra members that were used for a Radio 4 programme, and ultimately for this book. I bought the book from her, so haven't read it yet, but she played excerpts from the voices of the musicians and discussed the sadly deteriorating situation in Bosnia at the moment. The meeting was heightened by a visiting friend of a member who told of her escape to Rio de Janiero from Bosnia with her 9 year-old daughter after, as she said, "my mother's body was found in the river and my grandmother was killed." She is also a violinist, explaining she was in Bosnia when the war began because she had returned from living in Paris when asked to represent Bosnia in an international competition, and told us of her desperation when her only chance to stay in Rio was by securing a seat in the city's symphony orchestra. The room certainly went silent as she told her story, giving us an inkling of what Ruth went through when survivors poured out their experiences.

Finally, we went to a gallery opening of a print exhibition organised by the husband of a quilting friend. David is an artist and designer, and his design has been chosen by the Royal Mail for the Olympic Sports series of stamps issued earlier this year. David's stamp is for Badminton. To celebrate he invited other stamp designers to exhibit their work as prints made by Epson photocopiers. What a great show. The link to the ROA Gallery lets you see the wonderful work on display. We chose at least a dozen. Next week we will have to hone our choice down to Christmas gift level.

At last I feel like I am back into the routine of life.  Tomorrow we get our tree, and I begin to organise what needs doing between now and the New Year. We haven't even caught up on the Advent Calendars. Christmas is only two weeks away!!

Jenni Not in London

I see it has been a full month since my last post, and that is because I was not in London for most of November. The few days I spent in London before leaving for the States and the few days now back in London have been blighted by a head cold — perhaps the same head cold since I was downing sinus decongestants off and on all month. Then the day before my return, the head cold hit full force, and as everyone knows, an airplane flight doubles the misery, so I have been mostly laid up sleeping and not feeling energetic enough to post anything coherent about my wonderful month with children and grandchildren.

Today the world is looking brighter — literally that is — the sun is shining. I have turned lights off in the daytime, something that I have not done on either side of the Atlantic in weeks. I'm sure we had a few sunny days in Hingham, but all I remember is perpetual dusk, morning, midday, and night. Partly because a very old Cape Cod style house with low ceilings, tiny windows, and surrounded by trees is never filled with light. A life lesson learned: if you like a light filled house, never buy a house in the woods. I do love the Hingham house, but the Victorian flat in London on the second (UK)/third (US) floor, with high ceilings and huge windows is a much pleasanter place to live. The weather was pretty terrible for most of the month with a continuous series of driving rain storms and blustery winds, with intermittent days of plain, dull gloom. Surprisingly warm temperatures though. No frost yet which I think may be a record since the frost date average is more than a month ago.

I flew into Boston a week before Bob. Megan picked me up at Logan, and we were back in Hingham in time for greeting Bibs when she was waking from her afternoon nap. Bibs has a world-class memory for a 2.33 year old, so she remembers me, and calls me Gam-ma — her "r's" have not quite come in yet. Eventually we will have to work out the appropriate terminology for having three grandmas, but we figure Bibs will come up with something herself. Bobs who is 9 months now is of course a completely different boy from the 4 month old we saw in June. He was a different boy by the time we left three weeks later. By then he had discovered he could grab objects and play with toys. So he is at

the wonderful age where you can sit him on the floor with a pile of toys, and he will happily pick up and manipulate and explore — with his mouth of course – everything within reach.

Here he is with his baby doll and his favourite book That's Not My Puppy on his favourite page because he can grab the puppy's long furry ears.

Bibs is a force of nature. Bright, quick, clever, verbal, beautiful, opinionated, stubborn, determined, and adorable.  Here she is having one of her regular tea parties with Dolly. The tea set is all gingham  (bought by Bob at the Country Living Fair here in London last spring, but when opened in Hingham discovered to be from Tiverton, Rhode Island), and little Lady Bibs likes nothing better than to set up and pour tea for Dolly. By the way, the furniture is second generation: table is one of two bought for Megan and Susan when Susan was Bib's age; chairs from a yard sale at our church in East Brunswick, New Jersey! Bibs has an active life. She is a Montessori student, four mornings a week, and loves going to school. On the extra weekday, she participates in a play group that has been meeting since birth. The baby boomlet of two year olds gives her lots of playmates in the neighbourhood and at local playgrounds in the afternoons. She has become enamoured with ballet since Megan showed her clips of a video of The Nutcracker. She like nothing better than putting on her dancing dress —the blue dress to the right of the chair in the photo below — and emulating the pictures in a ballet book Megan has from the library. Perhaps all little girls like ballet, but Bibs' paternal grandmother danced with the Royal Ballet here, so perhaps she has the right stuff too. One milestone passed in November when Megan took Bibs to her first theatre performance of a singing and dancing version of Alice in Wonderland by the Sixth Graders at Derby Academy. Megan said she was riveted and glared at the other two year olds who made noise.

Bob arrived a week after I did, so our baby sitting needs were met since Bob loves nothing more than getting down on the floor to play with babies or sitting reading a book with toddlers. We had a very quiet visit. The children are of an age when they are not easy to take out to many places. Shopping is boring; meals need to be quick. The daily schedule —morning school for Bibs and a nap for Bobs, afternoon naps for both, dinner at 5:30 — tends to chop the days into small segments. The generally bad weather cancelled some of the outdoor excursions we had planned. When I arrived, Megan presented me with a classy knitting project: Knit Picks Holiday Ornament Kit and said I want these for a children's Christmas tree. So I spent spare time knitting a string of lights!

Bibs chose the sweater ornament design; Megan really wanted the pickle. I am still working on the popcorn and cranberry string. This kit is a terrific bargain and loads of fun to knit although circular knitting on dp needles with 3-4-6-8 stitches is a bit tricky. I don't think the company ships to the UK, but the website lets you download some of these patterns free. And the excellent lump of coal is not in the booklet and must be downloaded. Megan—in one of those motherhood is not a blissful time moments—decided she would award the lump annually to the child who was not getting any gifts because the naughty outweighed the nice.

We visited with our Hingham friends for a delicious homemade chili dinner at the Macmillans, but everyone was heading off for Thanksgiving visits so there was not much time to knit and dish. 

We did embark on a wonderful three day road trip to New York and New Jersey.

Here I am relegated to the back of the minivan with Megan, but we didn't mind because we were on our way to Purl, the craft world's trendiest knitting and quilting shop. We had both been to Purl Knitting, but never to the newer fabric shop, both on Sullivan Street in Soho. Yes, we were taking the minivan into Manhattan. An internet search turned up the Peanut Butter & Co restaurant's website, which listed local parking garages, also conveniently on Sullivan Street (Noho, however).

Megan's prediction the restaurant would be empty since every child in Manhattan is allergic to Peanut Butter turned out to be true. Here we are enjoying our Fluffernutter sandwiches — okay, Barnz is eating the bacon and PB, since Fluff is not part of an English childhood — but for all you New Yorkers, YES, that is a Vanilla Egg Cream in the photo!! So far things were working perfectly, but the rain forecast for the evening moved in 12 hours early, so the directions for the menfolk to take the stroller —without the forgotten rain cover — to the local celebrity-filled playgrounds (everyone lives in the Village, Noho and Soho, of course) was not going to work to plan. Megan and I were so close to our goal, we decided not to care, and let the ex-NYer grandfather use his imagination for the hour we needed. (Answer: the NYU bookstore.)

The Purl Fabric store is just as tiny as Purl Knitting, but the concentration of wonderful fabric was enough to keep us happy for an hour. Megan bought Japanese prints for children's clothes. I have nearly stopped buying fabric these days, but I did buy some wool felt packs, one Japanese cotton, and small pieces of a some solids for a quilt for Bibs' bed to see if I can get the room's unusual colour right.

Then on to Highland Park, New Jersey for a visit with Frank and Deborah and some nostalgic walks down Memory Lane. We moved to Highland Park when Susan was just two years old, so this photo of Bibs could be Susan 25 years ago as we walked to the Highland Park Library, still the greatest library in the universe. The children's room has been refurbished and expanded since our day, and Bibs and Bobs loved going to the library as much as Megan and Susan once did.

We once owned a Fisher Price horse just like that one.

Then we had to walk to our old house which is keeping to the standards of creative chaos that we lived in. I still miss that wonderful front porch.

One terrific change is the Farmer's Market held weekly in the parking lot that is just to the left of our old house in the photo. The week of our visit was the last market of the season, so we helped Deborah stock up. The food was lovely, but so expensive. We bought bread and cheese and chocolate for lunch, and some honey to bring back to London. I just opened it to put some on my yogurt and fruit lunch.

In the afternoon, the children went off to Park Slope in Brooklyn to visit one of Megan's high school friends from Commonwealth. Bibs loves the big city.

Bob, Deborah and I went off to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers where we saw two great shows. Lois Lenski is one of my favourite children's book illustrators because she illustrated the early volumes of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy book series. I knew she had written books because Strawberry Girl won the Newberry in 1946, but we didn't know that it was part of an extensive series of books on the varieties of experience of childhood in regional America that pulled no punches on how difficult some of those lives were. The second exhibit was on American woodcuts from the 1890s to the present. The visit to the Zimmerli was nostalgic because Bob was greatly taken with an exhibit we saw during the New Jersey years on Japonisme, the influence of Japanese woodcuts in American and European art at the turn of the 20th century, so this show was a perfect follow-up.

We had a wonderful visit with Frank and Deborah who became grandparents this past summer. Their granddaughter is not too far away in Virginia and would be arriving in a few days for a Thanksgiving visit. Frank and Deborah's legacy project is attracting positive attention in recent days with a Kansas City Star editorial endorsing a Buffalo Commons National Park appearing a few days before our visit. When I was Frank's T.A., he was just beginning to play with the idea of overturning Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Theory — which declared a county no longer part of the frontier if population rose above 6 people per square mile — by counting the number of counties that had 6 or fewer people in the 1980 census. There were nearly 400, and when he mapped them, the grasslands of the Great Plains states appeared in living colour. The initial hostility of Plains residents has slowly morphed into acceptance of reality as communities and services disappear with continuing outmigration from these depopulated counties. 

Bibs was instantly smitten with Frank, as Susan was 25 years ago when I was his Teaching Assistant for one semester, but she wasn't sure what to call him (I doubt if it occurred to us to specify a name), so she settled on The Man. Every time he left the room she would say, "Where's The Man?"  The pile on the floor is The Man's catch-up reading.

We left New Jersey for a new adventure — at least for me. 40+ years after high school I have reconnected with some of my classmates through Facebook. We were on our way up the Hudson Valley to Poughkeepsie to visit Charlotte who I had not seen since the day before Thanksgiving in 1966 when we saw each other at Grand Central Station in New York on our way home from our respective Massachusetts colleges for the holiday. We survived the crowds on the shuttle to Penn Station and took the train home to Bellerose together. Charlotte found me on Facebook, and we have messaged each other for a year. She invited us to stop in for lunch on our way back to Massachusetts.

While I was in Hingham, I had a long phone chat with Barbara who I have known since 2nd Grade, and who taught me many of the most important things I have ever learned, such as how to dance (the Twist, the Mashed Potato), cool music to like (Del Shannon, Rolling Stones, Janis Ian), what to wear (Madras plaid, purple when it is the colour du jour, Saddle shoes), TV shows to watch (Route 66), movies to see (anything with Hayley Mills), and she had a real Davy Crockett coonskin hat. Without Barbara's aid, I would not have even risen to the level of nerd in middle and high school. Barbara was hoping to come to Charlotte's, but a trip from the eastern end of Long Island to Poughkeepsie is an undertaking, especially the weekend before Thanksgiving, so will meet up on a future trip.


We had a wonderful lunch with Charlotte and her husband John that included birthday cakes for Bob and I, from a local bakery that were superb. The visit just wasn't long enough to remember what to ask and then to ask all the questions that popped up in shaky memories working their way to the surface. We did have time for photos.

Then it was time to point the minivan back for the long drive to Hingham — this time with Bob in the backseat with me.

Next Grandparents Day arrived at Bibs' school. We all had a great time. The children were rather confused why their orderly world had been interrupted for the day, and unfortunately the rain meant we all had to stay indoors.

Stacking blocks built into two towers by Bibs.

The day after Grandparents Day was Thanksgiving. This is the first year Bibs will imprint on the cultural importance of holidays, so Megan put on the Macy's parade which is now just a running advert for terrible TV programmes and for the toys you don't want to have to buy for your children with a few intermittent bands from Kentucky and balloons from Disney. Very sad. Nevertheless, Santa came, so the holiday season can roll.

Bibs looked at her Turkey Paper Doll Book.

Bobs wore his Turkey suit and played a tune for us.

Bibs puts on patent leather.














for Buffet Dinner at the Langham Hotel in Boston.

Then we were down to our last few days in Hingham. Lots of rain. Lots of lobster. A little bit of shopping. My birthday. And then the sad part of having to leave our lovely children and grandchildren. Bibs was upset until Megan told her we had to go visit Auntie Susan, so it was okay then. I think we will be spending our lives bouncing back and forth visiting Bibs and Bobs and visiting Auntie Susan for awhile. Here is Auntie Susan greeting us. in London.  

Cooks and Books

This weekend I came down with the cold that Bob and half of London have been nursing recently. Sort of a half-hearted cold in my case that didn't progress beyond a stuffy nose, but on Sunday I wasn't feeling great so I cancelled quilting for Monday since I was hosting, and everyone I know is feeling pretty risk averse to germs these days. Last spring Hampstead was one of the first nodes of swine flu for tweens and teens in Britain. Lots of Easter holidays in Mexico for the elite travelling set of North London, I guess. Not having quilting has thrown my whole week off. And this is my last week in London until December because on Saturday I fly to Massachusetts for more than three weeks of doting on my grandchildren and on their lovely parents too.

It wasn't much of a weekend here. American-style Halloween has been adopted by England — at least in Hampstead, home to so many US children and their parents — over the course of the eleven years we have lived in London. Costumed Trick-or-Treaters rove the streets including ours, but living in a mansion-block of flats, we don't have to stock up on treats. The deli up on the High Street that has a sideline in US food — junk and otherwise — was selling bags of candy corn, so I did get to gorge on that annual American iconic treat. Back in the day, our first Halloween here, teenaged Susan was appalled to discover there was no knowledge of candy corn in this country. Every year since then, we have imported some either on an autumn trip to Hingham or by having Megan mail us some. The first year Susan was at Cambridge, she shared her stash with British friends, who refused to believe it was edible — and she said some adhered to that belief after trying a piece.

Fortunately we are going to be in the States this year for Thanksgiving because there seems to be no tinned pumpkin in England this year. Europe does not know about the joy of canned pumpkin puree. Every recipe that involves pumpkin, and there are a lot of recipes since pumpkin is a favourite vegetable, begins with the instruction to clean, bake, and puree your pumpkin. Now I have done that in my past life, and generally I ended up with a weak coloured, slightly stringy, and invariably flavourless mush that made a very poor pie. Yes, I know that sugar pumpkins are the recommended variety if one wants to be all native, back-to-the land, I-never-eat-canned-food about these things. And I have had better luck with sugar pumpkins when used for puree, but nothing gives a pie the flavour of pumpkin from a can. For several years, tins of pumpkin were only available at the American-stocked deli for a price, so that became an item to bring back on visits to the States. Finally, a few years ago supermarkets began to stock tinned pumpkin, eliminating the need for suitcase importation, but last year and now this year, the tinned pumpkin has disappeared once again. So I will have to spare some suitcase room for pumpkin to make muffins and bread and soup, and maybe even a pie, next winter.

I have been in a cooking trough for the past week. Absolutely no interest in cooking, and this week will require no dinners, so I am pleased. Although I do have a mound of pears and apples that should be sauced or something. And a sugar pumpkin delivered with the organic produce last week in time for Halloween. And a backlog of onions, cabbage, and carrots that probably won't be used, at least by me. By the time I am back here in December I will be ready to cook up a storm, I'm sure. And I will try not to find any new cookbooks to buy — although I am intrigued by Thomas Keller's new cookbook that was written up in the New York Times a few days ago.  I never buy restaurant chef cookbooks because I know they are never going to work for sloppy non-perfectionist me at home, but the references to apple butter in a slow cooker and already knowing he salts his broccoli water makes me curious about the blanching in a big pot method mentioned in the article.  Addictions are impossible to overcome. I guess I have been lucky to avoid damaging addictions like drugs and alcohol — and I gave up cigarettes (although I plan to resume smoking regularly when I am 80) — but I can't stay away from the cookbooks. There are always new ones, flaunting their flashy covers, the well-designed pages — fonts, white spaces — that I cannot resist, and of course the appealing taste sensations promised are irresistible. Sometimes when I bring them home I cook up a recipe or two, and I am rarely disappointed. After that, I mostly admire them on the shelf — on the shelves is more accurate — and the ones in the piles on the table or some in the pile under the table. Okay, you get the point. Fortunately most of the cookbooks never came to England — part of the plan for a new life in a foreign country free of cooking and cookbooks — and then I just had to have Nigella's first cookbook published the same time we arrived in England, and making a big splash because of her family and her dying husband. Now there are so many of them, I consider them to be "A Collection" so it would be wrong to de-accession, in the museum term, by weeding them out and taking the pointless ones to Oxfam. Next time, we can discuss my addiction to buying craft project supplies.

I have succeeded in halting the buying of books that are not cook or craft books. And I have been immune to Amazon messages offering books that sound really really good — those statistical algorithms at work — after the debacle of the non-delivery of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest.
Last week was Book Group Week for me, so my list of "Books I Am Reading" has been reduced by two for the group reads. Sunday's illness allowed me to curl up with Beth Gutcheon's Saying Grace which was much too depressing for me to recommend to anyone else. It was written in the mid-1990s, and Beth must have been in a right funk. Her more recent Maine novels More Than You Know, Leeway Cottage, and Good-bye and Amen were much more enjoyable reads (although not necessarily happy novels). Since I gave up Joanna Trollope and Anita Shreve,  Gutcheon has been a favourite for women's life-story novels because she is a good story-teller and a good writer with a sharp eye for social comment. I am being unfair to Saying Grace because it is a brilliant novel, set in a wealthy coastal California (think Santa Barbara) private sub-secondary school much like our Derby Academy in Hingham, with lots of sharp social commentary on education and parenting, and the fact that it depressed the hell out of me and gave me a nightmare the night I finished it, is no reason to slag it off to others. I am saving Hornets' Nest for the plane ride and donation to friends and fans who have to wait until next year for the US publication of the third volume. So I am down to the last of the Japanese mysteries from The Pile of books.

Full Moon Feast will remain on the list as I dip in and out of it over the year. At root I will always be a California coastal hippie since all the most important experiences of my adult life happened in coastal California (Northern and Southern) between 1971 and 1982 — I think of that time period as pre-Reagan America, although he had tragically been elected, his vampire friends hadn't yet thoroughly trashed America to enrich and empower themselves. Full Moon Feast is a recipe and food philosophy book on a subject that has long interested me: the seasonality of diet in a natural world. A few weeks ago, when London was having a cold spell, and we had not turned on the heat in the flat, the only thing I wanted to eat was pasta with butter and sage sauce, clearly because my bones were chilled, and I wanted carbs and fats to warm me internally. Yes, localism has become popular in the post-Michael Pollan world of sophisticated eaters, but I think of seasonality as being more world shaping than just eating what is on hand. My interest probably began with William Cronon's Changes in the Land, an ecological history of New England, which begins with a description of the American native tribes' movements through their territory over the course of a year to eat what was available in different places during different seasons for an adequate annual diet. Cronon discussed the Starving Season of late winter, early spring, when stored supplies were used up and new growth had yet to begin. (I immediately connected this starving time to the Christian season of Lent at the same time of year. The disadvantage of scarce food turned into a devotional benefit of sacrifice and grace.) Of course the European "settlers" ruined the native food year by restricting access to their "settlement" places  which disrupted the annual cycle and destroyed the culture. So I will dip into the thirteen Full Moons Feasts over the year.

Rarely do I attend both Book Groups these days since they meet the same week, and rarely am I interested in reading both of the chosen books. This month was one of the rare months. Last Wednesday I headed over to Tamara's in Kensington to discuss Stoner, written in 1965 before "stoner" meant something else, with the Seven College Conference Book Group whose members are drawn from the alumnae of what was once the Seven Sisters Colleges in the US and enhanced by a fair number of Tamara's English friends who she has enticed to join. The nearly forgotten author John Williams won the National Book Award for Augustus in 1973, but the New York Review of Books re-published Stoner in its Classics series a few years ago, and it has been doing the literary fiction rounds ever since. The book chronicles the life of Professor Stoner at the University of Missouri from his boyhood on a struggling prairie farm to his death, a life in which very little ever goes right for him, but in which he never loses his integrity or his inner self. The writing is a tour de force of spare prose and deep meaning. It was an excellent book club choice: everyone liked it, but there was lots of discussion on those deep meanings. Much of Stoner's misery is caused by his emotionally, psychologically, mentally disturbed wife who is also just plain mean to him.  By the time I was a third of the way through the book, from hinted incidents and behaviours in the text, I was convinced there was no question the horrid wife had been sexually abused by her father. From then on I interpreted the book with that point in mind, finding it remarkable because I didn't think sexual abuse existed in 1965, certainly not as a standard plotline like we have today in novels and films. What I thought was more remarkable was that when I casually dropped this interpretation into the discussion last Wednesday, I was met by stunned silence, broken by one woman saying she had assumed the same, the remainder split between "of course, now I see, that explains it all" and "no, no, she was just a nutcase and a meanie." Since there are at least a dozen passages supporting my side, there weren't many unbelievers by the end of the meeting. I think what surprised me the most was how little sympathy these women had for the wife while reading the novel. No character could be as cruel and deranged as this woman acted all through the novel without a reason, yet only one other person looked beneath the novel's cool surface to seek an explanation.

The easy manipulation of women readers was shown by the somewhat opposite reaction to the women characters in the book chosen for Friday's Book Group meeting. This is a much larger group which was once connected to the Hampstead Women's Club, when the members were almost entirely American expats most of whom had been in London for a short time — that would have been me eleven years ago — and when rotations for ex-pats were at most three years, so the group changed constantly, except for a small core of ex-pats who had lived in London for decades with English or Commonwealth husbands. The group is now made up almost entirely of long time expats or citizens. So I headed over to Nikki's beautiful house in Primrose Hill to discuss our book choice The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins. I was very excited to read this book because Elizabeth Jenkins who celebrated her 104th birthday on Halloween — yes, still alive in a local care home — spent most of her long life on Downshire Hill, and for her 100th birthday wrote a memoir titled The View From Downshire Hill. She wrote dozens and dozens of books, novels, histories, biographies, was a founder of the Jane Austen Society, a writer taken up and then dropped by Virginia Woolf. She is mostly out of print, but Virago republished The Tortoise and the Hare a few years ago, and the entire literary establishment of women love this book: Hilary Mantel in the Preface, Carmen Callil in the Afterword, Dovegrey Reader (perhaps not so much now that I re-read her post), Amanda Craig in her blog. It is well written, but it is such a period piece, from the early1950s, about a world I'm not sure we can even understand much less interpret.

Imogen, 39 years old, sweet and lovely, raised to be useless is gobsmacked when her 52 year old successful barrister husband Evelyn takes up with their 50 year old neighbour Blanche who is not physically attractive, but is a director of her late father's company and who shares Evelyn's interests in sports and other activities. Now all of these critics and half the book group women — yes, for once I wasn't the only contra opinion on a book — are as one in saying poor Imogen, who shouldn't be criticised for being useless because she simply can't help it, is being hard done by the ghastly Evelyn who is taken in by the wicked Blanche. None of this made any sense to me because Imogen is a pathetic, boring, and shallow creature who I soon wanted to strangle. I never felt Elizabeth wrote sympathetically about Imogen, yet somehow women readers instantly side with Imogen. Evelyn might be a bit cranky, but living with Imogen would drive any sane person up a wall. He is a caring father; he is devoted to his cases; he is even kind to Imogen despite her shortcomings as a wife and partner.  Blanche is an active and competent woman. In a feminist novel of the 1960s, she would be the heroine, the independent woman who knows herself and knows what she wants, and no one would laugh at her just because she wears bad hats, has a chunky body above spindly legs, and chooses heinous carpets.

This is where I think we have trouble with interpretation. In today's view, Blanche is a character on Desperate Housewives breaking up a family for her own satisfaction, the clueless husband is easily lured into her honey trap Rolls Royce, and the innocent, blameless wife unjustly suffers. Yet in the 1953 world of the book, Imogen makes clear that she was raised to accept the fact her husband would have a mistress because that is the way her world always has worked (and she herself has retired from sex in the marriage). What she is upset about is that she assumed the putative mistress would be a younger version of her own useless self, on hand for sex, but not to be an active partner in life. To complicate the interpretation further,  Carmen Callil relates in the Afterword that Elizabeth Jenkins told her in the mid-1990s, that the story is autobiographical. She was a long-time mistress to a respected doctor, and when his wife died, he did not marry Elizabeth. Instead, he married a neighbour and asked Elizabeth to pick up their former arrangement. She was furious, wrote this novel in a few weeks, sent it to him, and never spoke to him again. So this is definitely not a novel about the evils of adultery. When Callil made a remark about the ghastly Evelyn,  Elizabeth remarked, oh but you didn't know him. I found this all to be very confusing, but I think I have now found an answer that satisfies me. The critics, and the book group members, all spend time discussing the clever title in terms of who is the Tortoise? Who is the Hare? I think the cleverness in the title is that Elizabeth is telling us she has swapped the real women in the fiction version. Elizabeth is Blanche — bright, active, competent, respected — and the message of the novel to the real unnamed Evelyn is that you could have chosen me as a partner in a modern marriage of equals to share an active public life — but you chose to remain within the accepted boundaries of your class, to marry another useless child-woman who will never be your equal and who will spend her life playing with other child-like friends. Amanda Craig's blog refers to Imogen beginning a new life with the one person who loves her. Amanda does not mention this person is 12 years old!

I began this post thinking I liked one book, Stoner, and disliked the other, but now I think they are both brilliant novels. They both manipulate the reader by pretending to be straight forward tales of their character's lives, but by placing the important facts of the story out of the way, buried in the subtext where they may not be noticed while the author is distracting you with the smokescreen of an important event, another story is unfolding.So it was a good week for reading.