Poetry season

The perfect antidote to the current obsession with MPs' tax evasion and fiddling of expenses, is the BBC Poetry Season. Last night, actress Sheila Hancock presented her choice of poetry in the moving and inspiring launch of the series My life in verse. Poetry has played an important part in her coping with grief and finding a way to move on after the death of her husband, John Thaw and in this programme (available on iPlayer for a few weeks), she maps her progression from despair to light through the poems that comforted or inspired her along the way.

Some of her choices were familiar pieces and I simply enjoyed the beautiful delivery of the verse and the wonderful settings including the Fens, Provence. Tennyson is not a favourite of mine, but Sheila's setting of Break, Break, Break into her own childhood experience of friendship, followed by the exploration of its origin in Tennyson's grief over the death of his friend, gave a new insight into the poet and I am encouraged to look at his work again.

The focus of this programme was human relationships and I heard this poem by Primo Levi for the first time. It brings all of our human associations into the compass of friendship and wishes for all the kindest hope of a long and mild autumn.

TO MY FRIENDS

Dear friends, I say friends here

In the larger sense of the word:

Wife, sister, associates, relatives,

Schoolmates, men and women,

Persons seen only once

Or frequented all my life:

Provided that between us, for at least a moment,

Was drawn a segment,

A well-defined chord.

I speak for you, companions on a journey

Dense, not devoid of effort,

And have also for you who have lost

The soul, the spirit, the wish to live.

Or nobody or somebody, or perhaps only one, or you

Who are reading me: remember the time

Before the wax hardened,

When each of us was like a seal.

Each of us carries the imprint

Of the friend met along the way;

In the trace of each.

For good or evil

In wisdom or in folly

Each stamped by each.

Now that time presses urgently,

And the tasks are finished,

To all of you the modest wish

That the autumn may be long and mild.

Painted ladies come to call

It has been a gloriously sunny day today so I have spent a lot of time in the garden. Even mother-in-law, who generally complains of the short walk from her room to the dining room, was persuaded to join us for lunch al fresco.

We noticed that we had a few uninvited but most welcome guests; at first just two Painted Ladies who were joined by a few more. At the last count there were fifteen.

I had heard that there are lots of painted lady butterflies in England this year but it was a lovely surprise to see so many in my garden.



If you spot Painted Ladies in your area, you can help Butterfly Conservation to map their migration by recording your sightings here.

War on the Margins update

In September 2008, I wrote about Libby Cone's self-published novel War on the Margins, an excellent novel based on real events during the wartime occupation of the Channel Islands. I am delighted to say that the book will be appearing in the bookshops in July, published by Duckworth.

The new cover is more evocative of the book's content than the original was and there is a surprise for bloggers on the back cover: the teaser is a quotation from Dovegreyreader's review. (Click on picture to enlarge)
Much has been said in the media about bloggers reviewing books, mostly suggesting that it is a Bad Thing and that reviewing should be left to The Professionals. Earlier this year, in a debate on radio, Cornflower made an excellent case for the two to co-exist. The major newspapers and magazines would not have promoted War on the Margins but bloggers saw it, loved it and recommended it to one another. Well done Duckworth Publishers for acknowledging the significance of the personal recommendation.

The road that leads home

I have been in Lancashire for a few days, attending my niece's wedding and catching up with family and friends. It was really good to be there for such a joyous occasion since my visits in the last few years have been more solemn, visiting sick relations or attending funerals.

We set out after lunch on Thursday on what should have been a four to five hour journey. The first two hours went well, with very little traffic on the motorway but then the traffic announcements started: a lorry had shed its load, a pothole had opened in the road, a caravan had overturned and so on. The predicted long delay became a tailback of 7 miles, then 27 miles then between three,four then five, motorway junctions and growing longer. We had to choose between sitting in a queue of traffic for many hours or leaving the motorway and driving in the real world. This was one of the occasions when I was very glad that I had married a professional navigator!

We drove through parts of Shropshire and Cheshire on the wonderfully straight and wide Roman roads. We could see for miles across fields, rivers and canals, such a different experience from driving through narrow Devon lanes with their high banks and hedgerows.

Here are just a few of the sights we would have missed if we had stayed on the motorway:Stapeley Water Gardens
Churche's Mansion House, Nantwich

River Weaver, Nantwich

Aqueduct, Nantwich

Sankey Canal

Driving through the beautiful northern countryside, I was reminded of the pre-motorway and seatbelt days of my youth, when we would squeeze six or eight people into a car and head for the country pubs or picnic spots. I suddenly had an almost physical longing to be back there and thought of Mole, in The Wind in the Willows, being overwhelmed by the sense of his Dulce Domum:
He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him.......... Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!........ his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again... he had hardly given it a thought, so absorbed had he been in his new life, in all its pleasures, its surprises, its fresh and captivating experiences. Now with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him in the darkness.

Mole goes back to his old home and enjoys all the "familiar and friendly things" again but he realises that he doesn't really want to give up his new life above ground, "But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome." Like Mole, I thoroughly enjoyed my brief time in my old haunts, but I suppose one can never really go back. I do recommend leaving the motorway and driving through your childhood memories, though.

Shoe stories

Like most women, I love shoes. I have more pairs than I care to admit and yet always seem to need more.

This morning's Woman's Hour on Radio 4 featured artist Alice Instone talking about her latest exhibition Interview with a Shoe. The shoes in question are described as belonging to some of the most influential individuals in London and each pair tells a story, revealing something about the owner.

If you are lucky enough to be in the Bethnal Green area of London in the next two weeks, there are lots of reasons to visit the exhibition: love of contemporary art, curiosity about celebrities, interest in the role of shoes in literature or the history of fashion or in the ethics of the present day fashion industry. The charity Dress for Success, which helps promote the independence of disadvantaged women, will benefit from the proceeds of the exhibition.

The interview with Alice Instone reminded me of the significance of shoes in our lives. What woman can forget her first pair of high heels or the first pair of shoes she bought for her baby? Who can escape the impact of the image of the thousands of shoes confiscated from the victims of the Holocaust?
While out walking last week, I met an elderly lady from my church; she looked distressed so I stopped while she poured out her shoe story, a memory triggered by something she had just overheard. Maria is eighty years old, Austrian by birth but having lived in England since 1947. She was not quite fifteen when the Russian army invaded her village in Austria in April 1945. Already on the point of starvation, they had the added terror of stories of rape and violence as the soldiers advanced. Maria and her two older sisters fled with nothing but the clothes they were wearing and a little food. Maria was wearing an old pair of boots, passed down from her sisters.

The girls spent many weeks on the road, sleeping under hedges and eating whatever they could get. They eventually reached Bavaria, where they hoped to find the family of a German soldier they had met. By this time it was summer and Maria's feet were really suffering from the long journey and the heavy boots. The sisters found the family they were looking for and were taken in, although the lack of food and clothes was as bad as in their own village. There were no shoes to spare but the grandfather took his knife and cut Maria's boots to make her a pair of rough sandals: "The most beautiful shoes I have ever owned."

My own shoe story is far less noble but it taught me a salutary lesson.

I had an unfashionably happy childhood. We were not at all well-off but my mother contrived to dress us well and always took us to have our feet measured for our sturdy leather brogues and sandals, polished every night before we were allowed our cocoa. How she managed to keep four of us in the required outdoor shoes, indoor shoes, gym shoes, hockey or soccer boots, as well as wellingtons, slippers and play shoes I cannot imagine. But, when you are a stroppy teenager, such thoughts do not enter your selfish head.

I wanted a pair of fashionable slip-on shoes instead of the Clark's indoor shoes I was supposed to have for school. I was thirteen and "all my friends' mothers let them have fashion shoes." I must have worn my mother out, because I got a pair of cheap and rather nasty shoes with very pointed toes. They were very uncomfortable, more slip-off than slip-on but I strutted around in them and insisted on wearing them when we went to visit my Aunt Margaret in Cheshire, where everyone looks down upon their Lancashire neighbours.

We all went out for a walk after lunch but I couldn't keep up in the wretched shoes, which were really hurting by this time, pinching my toes and rubbing my heels. We had been joined on the walk by my aunt's friend and I heard them talking about my awful footwear. My aunt said, "Poor Winnie, she does her best but I expect they were all she could afford with four children to look after." I don't think I have ever quite forgiven myself for bringing such shame on my mother. I certainly never argued with her again when we went to buy our "sensible" shoes.

I suppose I deserved to have a daughter who insisted on choosing to wear her father's shoes to a party!

The veg box

For a few years, I have had my veggie box delivered from a well-known organic farm more than 75 miles away.The produce has always been first rate but I have been becoming increasingly aware of the struggle that our local growers are having, especially since Mr Tesco opened a store at the edge of the village.
I was chatting about this with a local young farmer and discovered that he does a home delivery of freshly picked vegetables at a fraction of the cost of my usual order. Not that price is the deciding factor for me, I think that, as a nation, we pay far too little for our food. As a result, we have lost some of the best varieties of fruit and vegetables.

I placed an order and I have been delighted with the three boxes I've had to date. This week I had lots of lovely asparagus and rhubarb and a surprise gift from the farmer's son: a box of little pullets' eggs. Here they are in a bowl with a regular hen's egg, small but perfectly formed and quite delicious.
I am going to be away for a few days and won't be posting or visiting any of your blogs until next week. I will be with a group of very energetic and enthusiastic young volunteers, planning for this year's summer camps. I feel exhausted already!

Vermicomposting

I took delivery of a new toy for the garden today - a wormery. If the manufacturer is to be believed, it will be so clean and odour-free that it could be kept indoors. Mine is set up discreetly outside, next to the wheelie bins (black is for household rubbish, green is for garden waste) and the green box (for glass, cans and plastic). I suppose I could keep it in the porch next to the boots and the green recycling bag (for newspapers) but it is rather large. However, it comes with a smaller bin to collect kitchen waste to feed to the worms. This will stand next to the kitchen bin, which will now only be used for envelopes (not allowed in the green bag), plastic bottle tops (not allowed in the green box) and wire hangers from the dry cleaners (shouldn't be allowed anywhere).
The tiger worms have to be left undisturbed for a week, to settle in to their new home. That gives me time to study the handbook. Once established, I expect my wormery to take care of most of the household waste and to provide superb compost for the garden and houseplants.

Wall flowers

My morning walk takes me along some pretty lanes and through a small estate of retirement bungalows. The contrast is striking and bewildering. One of the joys of country living is the generous abundance of nature - leave the tiniest crevice in a wall or a small patch of earth and Mother Nature will fill it with plants, costing us nothing in money or effort.

This wall will never play host to the treasures that brighten my mornings.
Luckily, plants cannot read ....

.... but I'm sure that pixies can and choose these wild corners to play in .....

... rather than these pristine patches .........

I am sure that breeze block walls are cheaper than dry stone walls but they look like breeze blocks forever, while traditional walls become a part of the landscape.
This is a relatively new house and it already looks as if it belongs .....
while this will always look as if it has been transplanted from a town.
These are the walls that make my morning walk a pleasure rather than a penance:

From silence to sound

I became a Teacher of the Deaf in 1971, at a time when techniques for diagnosing deafness in babies were crude and inaccurate, when few people recognised the distinction between speech and language development, when hearing aids were cumbersome and offered little more than basic amplification and when deaf children were often separated from their families and hearing peers.

During my career, I saw real changes in every area. All babies in UK now have routine hearing screening at birth and early intervention and support offers the greatest hope of good language development, whether through speech or sign or a combination of the two. (Back in 1971 we were not allowed to use sign language.) Hearing aids have been digitised, computerised and minimised. The most common cause of deafness in babies in the 1970s was rubella in pregnancy and, thanks to the vaccination programme, that has been virtually eradicated. The smaller number of deaf children in the population, plus the improvement in hearing aid technology and teaching methods, led to the closure of many traditional residential schools for the deaf and the majority of deaf children now attend their local mainstream school or a specialist class within a mainstream school.

The most thrilling development in recent years has been the cochlear implant programme. The first of my pupils to be given an implant is now 12 years old. He was diagnosed as profoundly deaf when he was 7 months old and he was the only child I ever worked with who had absolutely no response to sound. He was a very bright toddler and quickly became proficient in the use of British Sign Language. Then, when he was 3 years old he was offered a cochlear implant: the first local child to be treated by the newly formed team at Bristol Children's Hospital. I sat with his parents, tears pouring down our cheeks, as he heard sound for the first time - it was just a beep from the computer but his expression of wonder was truly wonderful to behold.

In those early days of the technology, the switch-on process took several months but Kingsley was so eager to hear more that he refused to leave the hospital until he was too exhausted to carry on. In his case, the switch-on took only two days! Then his mother and I spent several hours every day helping him to recognise the new sounds he was hearing - his most common signed phrase, which soon became a spoken one, was, "What that noise?" At first it was the vacuum cleaner and washing machine, the doorbell and telephone but my personal favourite, privileged moment was when his mother and I were sitting chatting over a cup of coffee and Kingsley was playing near the open patio doors. He stilled, then tapped my knee and asked the usual question but I couldn't hear anything unusual. His mother and I puzzled over it then realised that he could hear a bird singing in a tree outside the window. More tears, of course.

After a year in a specialist unit, where he had intensive language therapy, Kingsley moved to his local primary school and now he is making excellent progress in the mainstream comprehensive school. His spoken and written language skills are very good, he plays in the school soccer team and is a keen member of the drama group and choir. His mother gave me permission to use his story and here is one of my monitoring clips from when he was about 7 or 8 years old, that is about four years in terms of hearing:


Most of the children that I worked with were deaf from birth, just a few had lost their hearing as a result of meningitis or trauma. Those who had already acquired language before losing their hearing were usually able to make normal progress in school, with appropriate support. Children born deaf or pre-lingually deafened have a much more difficult time because language is the key to learning as well as to communication.

Yesterday on BBC Radio 4, I heard a programme about Tim Barlow, who lost his hearing fifty years ago when he was in his early twenties. He certainly didn't let that hold him back in his chosen career as an actor and this programme, available for a while on BBC iPlayer, is worth listening to for that aspect of his story alone. What is even more amazing and uplifting, is the fact that he has just been fitted with a cochlear implant and can hear again. Isn't science marvellous?

More from Bristol

Last week's trip to Bristol and Birmingham was arranged around the concerts reported on in the last post but there were other things to see and do. We spent three days in Bristol and I took my camera along with me.There are many beautiful buildings and fascinating things to see in the city but they are so closely packed together, or overshadowed by newer buildings, that it is easy to miss them and hard to take photographs of them with my standard point-and-click digital camera.

Old markets are always interesting and Bristol boasts the beautiful St Nicholas Markets, where you can find everything from the freshest of farm produce to stunning works of art. The buildings themselves are works of art but this is the best I can offer of the stuccoed frieze and door frames. The market stalls are too closely packed to get a better view and, though I spent several hours searching the bookshops, I couldn't find a pictorial guide to the markets. If anyone knows of one that I could buy, I would love to hear about it.

One of the market halls is called the Nails Market. Outside it, on Corn Street, are four bronze pillars, or nails, which were used by local merchants when transacting business before the Exchange was built in the early eighteenth century.
Tradition has it that a bargain was struck when money was placed on the nail, thus giving rise to the saying "paying on the nail". I hope that this innocent seeming nail was only used to seal sales of corn and played no part in Bristol's more sinister trading history.
Above the entrance to the Nails Market is the Bristol Clock. If you look closely, you will see that it has two minute hands; at the time I took this photo, the clock read both 09:55 and 10:06.
The clock dates to the Victorian era and the development of the railways. Bristol, like all major cities, set its clocks according to when the sun reaches its zenith in that particular place. Bristol being 2 degrees and 36 minutes west of Greenwich, Bristol time was 11 minutes later than Greenwich time. This was not a problem when journeys were undertaken on horseback or in carriages, but the trains ran according to London time, so the Bristolians were forever arriving 11 minutes too late to catch them. The Mayor of Bristol, being a true business man, had this clock made to show both London time and Bristol time and the good people of Bristol have never been known to miss a train from that day to the present. (GMT was adopted by Bristol in 1852.)
One man who spent a great deal of time travelling was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Banned from preaching in Anglican churches, he built his first dedicated chapel in the Horsefair, in 1739. Again, I had difficulty in taking photographs as the narrow chapel and yard are overshadowed by more modern buildings.
These are just a few of the treasures that historic Bristol has to offer. I'm a country girl at heart but I always enjoy a few days in Bristol and discover something interesting on each visit.

A legend and an ego

I have done it at last: having waited for more than 40 years, I have seen Bob Dylan live in concert. Admittedly, we had to take it on trust that he was really there on that distant stage in the NIA in Birmingham, but he kindly wore a white hat so that we could pick him out from the black-hatted members of the excellent band that shared the stage.
So, we couldn't really see him, we couldn't recognise even the most familiar songs, he didn't speak to us but we were there and I wouldn't have missed it for anything. He was Dylan being Dylan and I loved every second of the performance. One absolute certainty about the Bob Dylan Concert Tour is that each performance is unique, you couldn't recognise Blowin' in the Wind in Cardiff, but you couldn't recognise it in a different way in Birmingham.

My son has written an excellent piece on the concert in particular and on Dylan in general here. He draws an important distinction between the man and his songs; the audience and the critics are divided between those who are disappointed when their old favourites sound very different and those who are there to enjoy the 'Dylan experience'.

On Tuesday evening, the MM and I went to Colston Hall in Bristol for the Gary Moore concert. The first hour was excellent; Buddy Whittington (picture from his official website) had the audience totally engaged and I think most of us would have been happy for him to fill the rest of the evening's programme.

Then he left, to make way for Gary Moore, who deigned to put in an appearance 45 minutes later. During the long wait, his sound engineer cranked up the volume way beyond the level of human comfort. The audience, who had clapped and foot-tapped through Buddy Whittington's performance, sat still and tense, enduring and not enjoying the sound. After four numbers, my husband indicated that he could stand no more and we joined a growing number of people who left the hall with aching heads and ringing ears.

We had only previously heard Gary Moore on CD; he is hugely talented as a guitarist and vocalist. Surely only mediocre musicians need to hide behind excessive loudness? And this was beyond excessive, way beyond the legal limit for noise in an enclosed area. What an oversized ego the man has to treat his audience in this manner. If you were thinking of attending one of his concerts, take ear defenders (our standard earplugs were no help), better still, stay at home and listen to him on your own sound system.

That was the only blip in an otherwise excellent week of good news, excellent company, fine food and wines, comfortable hotels and an evening with the legendary Bob Dylan.