Happy Saturday! Welcome to this week’s post and welcome to new subscribers. This week is a mélange of the week plus some bookness. I hope you enjoy.
Here we are in April and it’s still wild, wet and windy. Rain and more rain here in south west England. The garden weeds are loving it. Me, usually fairly ambivalent about weather—after all, there’s nothing to be done except wear more suitable clothing—even I am getting a teeny bit fed up of it. How do we describe rain? Let me count the ways:
Soft, spitting, spotting, mizzle, drizzle, gentle, fine, in-the-wind, light, showery, persistent, relentless, heavy, soaking, driving, pouring, pelting, drenching, hammering, coming-down-in-sheets, teeming, stair-rodding, biblical, apocalyptic.
It’s quite a spectrum of the wet stuff that we have here. I’m sure there are more words, I haven’t even included the sweary ones, just tried to stick to the ‘wet’ adjectives/adverbs. Anyhow, I shall be wrapping up and gardening in it this morning, otherwise those well-watered weeds will take over completely.
Sticking with the rainy theme, this week I re-read
‘s collection of four essays on rain and the english landscape. If, like me, you’re losing the ability to appreciate the sky juice then I recommend this little book to you. Four wet walks in Shropshire, Norfolk, the Darent Valley and Dartmoor, through different seasons, give us rain with memories and imagination, nature-noticeing, wide landscape and skies, so richly descriptive that we are walking with Melissa, chatting away and not minding the soaking. In fact we are enjoying it, enlivened by it, and being educated. It’s full of rainy interest and I love it.We live very close to seaside towns and yesterday, on a walk along our favourite beach (in spitting rain and heavier showers) we stopped for coffee at our regular beach-front café. Being the Easter school holidays, instead of sharing the tiny space that’s under cover with dog-walkers and coastal path hikers plus a few familiar locals, there was a constant stream of drenched parents and grandparents with fractious children, mostly dressed for the beach and not enjoying the wet stuff from the sky as opposed to the wet stuff in the sea. We people-watched and yes, eavesdropped, for a while:
“I’m down from Surrey. The ex-wife has a second home here and the grandkids and their mother stay there. I stay in a hotel and we meet up every day.”
“Mummy, mummy, Jasper’s got my Barbie and he’s pulling off her legs.”
“Would you like a sausage bap, darling?” “Ice-cream, ice-cream, ice-cream”. “Not for breakfast, darling…” “Ice-creamicecreamicecream”. Screams.
Crikey. Soon be over and we’ll have our little enclave back to ourselves. We’re very selfish about it, I’m afraid. Out of season it is blissful. In season, less so. And yes, I understand about the benefits of tourism and the local economy, but they’re OTHER PEOPLE and I’ve never been keen.
I have been knitting on and off. On and off because this changeable weather makes my joints ache, and my thumb joints are particularly susceptible. I’m pretty sure I’m developing carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist and my left thumb has started to do that snapping trigger thing. Even though I’m wearing splints at night (which do help a lot), if I knit then I suffer the next day. I’m trying to knit a cotton, Spring cardigan which will be lovely if I ever get out of waterproof puffa jackets. It has a nice striped, slip stitch pattern which is easy to knit but looks impressive. Just the sort of knitting I like. I’ve almost finished the back so by my reckoning that’s pretty nearly half-way.
On the 4th April 1860 ‘The Mill on The Floss’ by George Eliot was published. It’s been many years since I read it, and yesterday I noticed there was a film version on TV. Made in 1936 it starred a very young and very angry James Mason as Tom Tulliver. It was pretty bad as you might expect, lightened by faux comic turns from Martita Hunt (who I can only think of as Miss Havisham in David Lean’s film version of Great Expectations) and Athene Syler as poor married-beneath-her Mrs Tulliver’s sisters. I persevered however and it stayed fairly true to Eliot’s original—belligerent and chippy Mr Tulliver, loving brother and sister but chalk and cheese Maggie and Tom Tulliver, love-struck Philip Wakem, rogue Stephen Guest and angelic Lucy etc.etc.—until for some inexplicable reason it drowned Maggie Tulliver and Philip Wakem in the flood and left Tom to feel guilty for ever on dry land and hopefully change his vengeful ways. It left me wondering if the screenwriter had bothered to read to the end, as it made a mockery of Eliot’s final line, which draws the whole book together. It was Tom and Maggie who were drowned in the flood and “In their death they were not divided.” Ah me, that I should expect a faithful adaptation—even in 1936.
Last month’s book club read was Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook”. I really struggled with it. At one point I had to resort to Wikipedia to get a quick take. Good old Wikipedia says:
‘The Golden Notebook is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she records her life, and her attempt to tie them together in a fifth, gold-coloured notebook.
The book intersperses segments of an ostensibly realistic narrative of the lives of Anna and her friend Molly Jacobs as well as their children, ex-husbands and lovers—entitled Free Women—with excerpts from Anna's four notebooks, coloured black (of Anna's experience in Southern Rhodesia, before and during World War II, which inspired her own best-selling novel), red (of her experience as a member of the Communist Party), yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna's own love affair), and blue (Anna's personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life).
Each notebook is returned to four times, interspersed with episodes from Free Women, creating non-chronological, overlapping sections that interact with one another.’
Yes, that just about sums it up. I didn’t like all the chopping and changing, the moving backwards and forwards through time, some ‘fictional’ characters being based on some ‘real’ characters left me in a spin. It nearly drove me mad in parallel with protagonist Anna’s deteriorating mental health. I skim-read great, tedious chunks of it and wished I was better suited to the style of the intellectual, literary, much fêted novel. I can see why it was nominated for the Booker prize, and yes I could appreciate its themes of societal breakdown, burgeoning feminism, disillusion with Communism, and mental ill-health. But, as a reader, it was not for me.
And lastly, we have a gardener! 🍾🎉🎊 Someone who came and looked at the garden last week has just phoned me to say he can make a start. I am delirious with joy. And on that uplifting note, I shall leave you for this week!
I’ll write soon. x
Would you recommend reading Rain?
Rain renders you thoughtful and connective, craving your ‘off-season’. Thanks, and for the reading tip too…