February 24th, 2011
Report from the (wrong side of the) road
The most amazing thing that ever happened to me happened on our trip to the UK in 2007 when I predicted that our car rental would be upgraded to a Saab convertible, and it was, and so we drove with the top down from North Yorkshire over the dales, across the Pennines until it started to rain– it was perfect. Similar fortune wouldn’t have worked as well this time, as the carseat would have been a tight squeeze in the Saab, and there would be no room for our enormous suitcases. Besides, the Saab was far too wide for maneuvering down English roads, I kept scraping the alloy wheels against curbs, and got charged 200 pounds (which brought our total up to the cost of a Saab in the first place, and so it goes).
No, this time I predicted that we’d get upgraded to first class on the flight over, and I’m not sure if I’m psychic, or merely good at conjuring realities, but it worked again, and our flight was a dream. We were not so first class that we got to sleep in pods and actual silverware, but we got comfortable seats and foot-rests, and a kit with earplugs and an eye-mask. We actually slept! Arriving in London on Sunday morning, feeling much better than we’d ever imagined we would.
Since then, we have seen old friends, Harriet has played with scores of children, we have driven 
from Berkwhire to Lancashire, I have mastered round-abouts, I avoided hitting a pheasant on a very scary journey along a two lane road with brick walls built up on either side, many twists and turns, a 100km speed limit, and some points at which the two lanes were narrowed to one. I am reading The Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker, which is the best possible book I could be reading at this time. Tomorrow we are driving to Scotland to see friends from our Japan days who we haven’t seen since our wedding five and a half years ago. Today we walked along the sea front, and Harriet watched the tide come in, and the sun shone, and it was lovely. When the sun shines here, people like to tell you that we’ll pay for it later. We have been eating copious amounts of cake and tea and scones. On Monday, Stuart and I are taking a trip for afternoon tea in at Bettys in Ilkley, because Ilkley is the constabulary serving Burley Cross. We’re looking forward to a day in London near the end of next week, and another day exploring Windsor.
And most of all we’re looking forward to the fact that we’ve been away for nearly a week, and our vacation isn’t even half over.
February 19th, 2011
If you need me…
…I will be beside the seaside. In February, no less! And with my computer, so you’ll be hearing from me from time to time.
February 16th, 2011
Light at the end of the tunnel
On Saturday, we are going to England, baggage handler strike notwithstanding, and don’t worry, I have a new spring coat (the Christine trench, in geranium) because the weather is calling for rain. We are going for two weeks! I have never gone on a two week vacation in adulthood– this is a monumental occasion. I am exited about numerous things, and terrified about others (round-abouts!). But mostly at the moment, I am excited about books. I had a bunch of books to read for various reasons in the last two weeks, and then all my Toronto Library holds came in at once, so that reading is about all I’ve been doing this last while. But as soon as I’m finished with my final library book, I am going to read magazines until our departure, because, of course, I have to start every journey with a fresh book. It’s a superstition of mine.
I am going to take Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs with me to read, and on a six hour flight with a toddler, my goal is to read at least five pages. Once we’re settled and Harriet is in the care of her grandparents, however, there will be reading time aplenty (fit in around trips out for cream teas). I am also going to read my final Canada Reads Independently book, Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind, and I am bringing an ARC of Timothy Taylor’s new book The Blue Light Project.
Whilst in England, I plan on buying Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker, a novel by Rachel Cusk (but which. Any suggestions? I’ve only read Arlington Park and A Life’s Work), and a very odd book called Felicity and Barbara Pym by Harrison Solow, which isn’t actually British, but oh well. I will probably buy many other books too, especially since we are going to visit the London Review Bookshop (which is also a cake shop).
Once I’m home again, there’s a packed shelf of books I’m looking forward to bringing in the spring with, books that are too big for travel: Allison Pearson’s I Think I Love You, the new PEN Anthology Finding the Words, and Zsuzsi Gartner’s story collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. Among others, oh yes. Many, many others.
November 16th, 2010
The Royal Wedding: My Hunger For Good News and Happy Endings
I don’t believe in fairy tales, except for the “happily ever after”, and I think that’s meant to be the part that’s suspect. Even so, it’s totally baffling why I started crying this morning upon hearing on the radio that Prince William and Kate Middleton had become engaged. I don’t really care about celebrity weddings, I think any country in this century would be better off without a royal family (unless, of course, I was the queen), princess fetishization makes me sick, and back when Prince William was everybody’s favourite pin-up, he was never ever mine– so why am I so overjoyed? Why am I fully prepared to set a clock for whatever o’ clock in the morning one day next summer, and all set to run out right away to buy a commemorative plate, or cup and saucer?
I was only two when Diana married Charles in 1981, though I do remember the excitement of Prince Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson a few years later. What I remember most about the first royal wedding, however, is that my Nana had their commemorative plates displayed in a rack in her dining room, and that we totally loved Diana. To be so unjaded– I long for that. I learned the expression “on the rocks” from the headline of a supermarket tabloid a few years later, and I remember my mom reassuring me that Chuck and Di were not so– the newspaper was a rag, she said. It hadn’t occured to me that Prince Charles might want to be somebody’s tampon, never not even once.
This evening in a nostalgic mood, I referred to the authoritative text on the 1981 Royal Wedding, which was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4. How he felt it was his “patriotic duty” to hang bunting in the street, and his disappointment in his father whose celebration consisted in hanging a Charles and Diana tea towel on the door. “ROYAL WEDDING DAY!!!!!/ How proud I am to be English!/ Foreigners must be sick as pigs.”
Anyway, I do believe in “happily ever after”, though the world keeps conspiring to prove me wrong. Not always, however– miracles happen. Remember the time my next door neighbour rose from the dead? And now Tabatha Southey has gone and been returned to the Globe and Mail, because they were clearly nothing without her. So maybe William and Kate will stay as happy as they look, and I’ll never have to explain what “on the rocks” means to Harriet, or if I do it will only be in the context of Jordan or some Kardashian.
March 11th, 2010
Bunk
I haven’t seen An Education yet, but I read the book a few months ago. Which is really a different thing entirely– the movie is much fictionalized and based on just a chapter of Lynn Barber’s book, but the people in the movie are really beautiful and the book is absolutely fascinating, so I think all is as it should be. In particular, I’d recommend the book for its history of journalism– Barber got her start writing for Penthouse, then The Sunday Express, and has ended up quite renowned for her interviews in The Observer in particular. And yes, previous to that had had an affair with a conman (the movie using this as a springboard), which made for a good chapter, but the rest of the book is as worth reading.
But the book is also worthwhile for its history of a time, which I’m thinking about now that I’m all wrapped in Jenny Diski’s The Sixties (which is so good, by the way). How the two books are fine companions, two stories about the same thing as told by observers standing on different parts of the very same street.
I’m reading the Diski book having just finished reading The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan, who probably wouldn’t love The Sixties, because although she acknowledges that, “it is instructive, informative, and indeed fun to study such subjects…, we ought not to forget the aspect of history which the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke summed up as “what really happened.”" And I presume she means what really happened in addition to the fact that Jenny Diski had sex a lot.
In fact, there aren’t a lot of connections between MacMillan’s book and Diski’s, and they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Though Diski is neither using nor abusing history, which MacMillan would probably find heartening, and also that Diski has never used The Munich Agreement to justify invasion of a foreign nation. Further, Diski has learned from the past, though perhaps too much, “What the young don’t get is that they are young; the old are right, young is a phase that the old go through. It’s just as well, I suppose, that the young don’t see it that clearly. Best to leave the disappointment for later.”
The point of all this being that these three books are banging around in my head at the moment, because two of them relate and because I just happened to read the other two one after the other. Though all three of them are written with such fierce, formidable intelligence. So that if you really must read something that isn’t a novel, you’d be all right checking out any of these.
March 7th, 2010
Feeding the inward eye
“I suppose that an American’s approach to English literature must always be oblique. We share a language but not a landscape. In order to understand the English classics as adults, we must build up a sort of visual vocabulary from the books we read as children. Children’s literature is, in some ways, more important to us than it is to the English child. I contend that a child brought up on nursery rhymes and Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales can be better understand Shakespeare; that a child who has pored over Beatrix Potter can better respond to Wordsworth. Of course it is best if one can find himself a bank where the wild thyme grows, or discover daffodils growing wild. Failing that, the American child must feed the “inward eye” with the images in the books he reads when young, so that he can enter a larger realm when he is older. I am sure I enjoyed the Bronte novels more for having read The Secret Garden first. As I stood on those moors, looking out over that wind-swept landscape I realized that it was Mrs. Burnett who taught me what “wuthering” meant long before I ever got around to reading Wuthering Heights. Epiphany comes at the moment of recognition.” –Joan Bodger, How the Heather Looks
December 16th, 2009
The Post
If I had to pick just one thing about the English novel, I don’t think I could, but if pressed to pick five things, one of them would have to be the post. Much in the same way that cell phones are pivotal to contemporary plotting, the British postal system is essential to the 20th century Englist novel. As are teacups, spinsters, knitting, seaside B&Bs, and the vicar, or maybe I’ve just been reading too much Barbara Pym, but the mail is always coming and going– have you noticed that? Someone is always going out to post a letter, or writing a letter that never gets posted, or a posted letter goes unreceived, or remains unopened on the hall table.
My day is divided into two: Before Post and After Post. BP is the morning full of expectation, anticipation, and (dare I?) even hope. AP is either a satisfying pile on the kitchen table, or acute disappointment with fingers crossed for better luck tomorrow. In my old house I was in love with the mailman, but that love remained unrequited because I was in grad school then and he only ever saw me wearing track pants. When we lived in Japan, I once received a parcel addressed to me with only my name and the name of the city where we lived (and humiliated myself and was given a sponge, but that’s another story.) When we lived in England, the post arrived two times a day and even Saturday, but the only bad thing was that when I missed a package, I had to take a bus out to a depot in another town.
All of which is to say that I love mail as an institution, as much as I love sending or receiving it. I once met a woman who told me that her husband was a mailman (though she called him a “letter-carrier”, I’m not sure if there’s most dignity in that), and I think she was taken aback when I almost jumped into her arms.
So when I read this piece in the LRB by a Royal Mail employee regarding the recent British mail strike, I had mixed feelings. I was troubled by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Royal Mail of late, the compromise that comes from profit as the bottom line, the explanation of how Royal Mail is part-privatized already, their focus on the corporate customer. “Granny Smith doesn’t matter anymore,” this piece ends with, and they’re not talking about apples, but instead their Regular Joseph(ine) customers. Those of us whose ears perk up at the sound of mail through the letterbox, at the very sound of the postman’s footfall on the steps.
I took some heart, however, from the article’s point that it is a falsehood that “figures are down”. “Figures are down” appears to be corporate shorthand to justify laying off workers, increasing workloads, eliminating full time contracts, pensions etc. Apparently the Royal Mail brass has no experience on the floor, they’re career-managers (and they’ve probably got consultants) who come up with ingenious ways to show that “figures are down”. Mail volume, for example, used to be measured by weight, but now it’s done by averages. And during the past year, Royal Mail has “arbitrarily, and without consultation” been reducing the number of letters in the average figures. According to the writer, “This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10 per cent reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide.”
So yes, none of this good news about the state of labour or capitalism, but what I like is this part: “People don’t send so many letters any more, it’s true. But, then again, the average person never did send all that many letters. They sent Christmas cards and birthday cards and postcards. They still do. And bills and bank statements and official letters from the council or the Inland Revenue still arrive by post; plus there’s all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs from Amazon, packages from eBay, DVDs and games from LoveFilm, clothes and gifts and other items purchased at any one of the countless online stores which clutter the internet, bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card.”
This is hope! I do love letters, namely reading collections of them in books (and particularly if they’re written by Mitfords), but I’ll admit to not writing many of them. My love of post is not so much about epistles, but about the postal system itself. A crazy little system to get the most incidental objects from here to there. I like that I can lick an envelope, and it can land on a Japanese doorstep within the week. I like receiving magazines, and thank you notes, and party invitations, and books I’ve ordered, and Christmas presents, and postcards. I like that in the summer, Harriet received a piece of mail nearly every single day.
And I really love Christmas cards. Leah McLaren doesn’t though, because she gets them from her carpet cleaner and then feels bad because she doesn’t send any herself. I manage to free myself from such compunction by sending them out every single year, and in volumes that could break a tiny man’s back. Spending enough on stamps to bring on bankruptcy, but I look upon this as I look upon book-buying– doing my part to keep an industry I love thriving (or less dying). Yesterday, I posted sixty (60!) Christmas cards, though I regret I can no longer say to every continent except Africa. Because my friend Kate no longer lives in Chile, but my friend Laura is still working at the very bottom of the world so we’ve still got Antarctica, which is remarkable at any rate.
I love Christmas cards. I send them because I’ve got aunts and uncles and extended family that I never see, but I want them to know that they mean something to me anyway. And it does mean something, however small that gesture. These connections matter, these people thinking of us all over the world. Having lived abroad for a few years, I’ve also got friends in far-flung places, and without small moments of contact like this, it would be difficult to keep them. It’s impossible to maintain regular contact with everybody we know and love, but these little missives get sent out into the world, like a nudge to say, “I’m here if you need me.”
I also send them because I’ve got these people in my life that I’m crazy about, and I want to let them know as much. Particularly in a year like this when friends and family have so rallied ’round– let it be written that it all meant the world to me, then stuck in an envelope and sealed with a stamp.
But mostly (and here I confess), I write Christmas cards because people send them back to me. I’ve never once received as many as I send, but the incomings are pretty respectable nonetheless. I love that most December days BP, I’ve got a good chance of red envelopes arriving stacked thick as a doorstop. And if not today, there will be at least one card tomorrow. I love receiving photos of my friends’ babies, and updates on friends and family we don’t hear from otherwise, and the good news and the hopeful news, and just to know that so many people were thinking of us. We display them over our fireplace hanging on a string. It is a bit like Valentines in elementary school, a bit like a popularity contest, but if you were as unpopular as I was in elementary school, you’d understand why strings and strings of cards are really quite appealing.
I love it all. That there are people in places all over the world, and they’re sticking stuff in mailboxes pillared or squared, and that stuff will get to us. That at least one system in the universe sort of almost works, and that I’ve even got friends. And then– this is most important– what would the modern English novel be without it?
November 10th, 2009
Dick Bruna and Miffy
I’ve been a fan of Dick Bruna ever since a trip home from England in 2003, where I was up early mornings due to time change and watched Miffy and Friends on Treehouse. As Miffy is quite popular in England, upon my return I was able to indulge in what has since become a pasttime: purchasing Miffy-branded commercial goods of all kinds. This hobby became very well-practised after I moved to Japan, and consequently, my house is full of glimpses of “that fucking rabbit” (as a friend of a friend once referred to Our Miff). Our recent trip to England yielded more opportunities to Miffy-shop, as we had a layover in Amsterdam (the Land of Miffy). Certainly, I voted with my Euros, and Miffy-Chan won. My friend Paul just sent me a link to this “Dutch Profiles: Dick Bruna” video, presuming I’d like it, and he was correct. And indeed, there is more to Miffy than the shopping, and I think this video makes that quite clear.
November 9th, 2009
Do we really need a cup of tea?
“Perhaps there can be too much making cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. We had all had our supper, or were supposed to have had it, and were met together to discuss the arrangements for the Christmas bazaar. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look. ‘Do we need tea?’ she echoed. ‘But Miss Lathbury…’ She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realize that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.” –from Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
I am so glad to have finally read Barbara Pym, having been thinking about doing so since I read this piece on the Barbara Pym Society way back in 2007. Though when the book began, I wasn’t sure– it seemed dated, a little too concerned with high and low churches (between which I can’t distinguish) and the sexual life of curates and vicars, and then perhaps about two chapters in, it became clear that Pym had a wicked sense of humour. And yes, her Englishness is quite delightful, for those of us who delight in English novels as we do, and that someone is putting the kettle on to boil every other page, and when the tea is too weak or too strong– the agony of it all! Throughout the book, I adored her acuity and her awareness, even when her narrator had less of the same (or did she?).
And how wonderful to know that now I’ve got a wealth of unread Pym novels before me. Better still– she is unfashionable and therefore the books will be readily available used (and I’ll purchase them as such without compunction, for as Barbara Pym is dead, she’s doesn’t need the royalties).
