Other Stories

To Do List

The last few weeks seem to have gone incredibly quickly. I also seem to have had lots more social events than usual. Not that I wish that to make me sound like a misanthropic cavegirl, but sometimes I really like just being at home, not really talking to anyone. And reading, which is something I don't seem to have had much time to do recently.

So, in a bid to give myself a bit of a kick up the bum, here is the list of books I intend to read over the summer, not including academic reading:

• Finish The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Not exactly a chore.
• Finish Grace Paley's Collected Stories, which I've had on the go for a few months. Loving them, but getting through the collection very slowly.
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, for book group. Friends who have read this have been enthusiastic, and I have had it on my shelf for three years since picking it up in a 3 for 2, so I needed the prod to actually read it.
• My Victorian feminist novels, recently bought: Red Pottage, The Daughters of Danaus, The Beth Book, The Heavenly Twins
• Crusaders by Richard T Kelly - bought it with birthday book tokens after reading DGR's review
• Recently received (and very much appreciated) review copies: The Resurrectionist by James Bradley, Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, The Loudest Sound and Nothing by Clare Wigfall, Man in the Dark by Paul Auster, and Attention. Deficit. Disorder. by Brad Listi.
• A Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter
• Nights at the Circus, and Wise Children by Angela Carter
• The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

So, by posting these on the internet I hope that you'll all pull me up when I appear to be slacking. I will read these books by the time I go back to uni in October. I WILL!! And hopefully more besides.

***

This is just an aside, and nothing to do with the above. Isn't it weird how songs can remind you of the most unremarkable moments? I recently put a load of old CDs onto my iPhone, and this morning I was doing my three minute walk to work with my headphones in (I can usually fit in a song before I get to my desk, it peps me up in the morning) and it shuffled onto The Power in On by The Go! Team, which I hadn't heard in ages.

Instantly I remembered that one time I was listening to that song through headphones was when I was still in Glasgow - not long before I moved to Oxford - and I was walking back to my flat after having voted in the 2005 general election. Why do I remember that? Weird. *shrugs*

Like, so cool.

I just figured out how to make my bloglines account public. I'm really chuffed about that. Now you can all see what blogs I keep up with! I realise this is possibly more exciting for me than it is for you, but if you think I'm missing any, do make suggestions!

Quoting George Eliot

"Maggie hated blame; she had been blamed all her life, and nothing had come of it but evil tempers."

*nods sagely*

I really, really love The Mill on the Floss. When I'm finished reading it I have more extensive things to say, especially about the way it ties in with some things I've been reading in an excellent book of essays called Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900. But before I get to that, I will wallow in George Eliot's mastery some more.

Reasons to be cheerful

Without wishing to put a downer on things, I am very tired today. I didn't sleep terribly well last night, and a back problem is flaring up badly at the moment, making movement generally quite painful and extremely uncomfortable. It'll probably ease during the day, though, it generally does. In the meantime, I shall sit and silently grumble to myself.

So, in a bid to buck myself up a bit, here are things which have been making me happy:

• The wedding we were at on Saturday, as previously stated.
• The hat I wore to the wedding, which I am itching to give another outing too. Thank god it's the year of the weddings.
• The Mill on the Floss. I had the house to myself last night as Boyfriend was in London at a blues thing (I couldn't face the trek) so I indulged myself with some quality duvet time with George Eliot. I'm about half way through, and goodness what a book. Maggie Tulliver is a representation of Eliot herself as a child - so says the introduction - and she has been written with great sympathy and detail. Frankly, I can see a little of myself in her. All the characters just spring to life with some crackling dialogue, interspersed with descriptive passages to make the heart skip with glee. George Eliot was a lady with something to say, and she never shirks from saying it. I love her. Why have I never read this book before? WHY?
• As an addendum to this, I had no idea that the phrase "as cool as a cucumber" was around in Eliot's day.
• I have been doing a bit of second hand book buying and have purchased myself a trio of classic Victorian novels with a feministy bent: The Beth Book by Sarah Grand, Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley, and Daughters of Danaus by Mona Caird. I also got Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins out of the university library. That's my reading lined up for the next few weeks!
• Did anyone else hear Nick Robinson on the Today Programme this morning consistently say "prostrate" cancer instead of "prostate" cancer? Was it just me?

This isn't quite the "proper post" that I promised yesterday, for which I apologie profusely. To come: a write up of my thoughts on The Thirty Nine Steps (dashed decent book, what!). Also to come: Kirsty shakes herself out of her odd fug of hazy incomprehension today and does something useful.

Beauty

*sigh*

The wedding was beautiful. The scenery was beautiful. The B&B was beautiful. The bride was beautiful. My fascinator was certainly beautiful. The champagne was beautiful until I drank a bit too much and fell over getting out of the minibus back at the B&B and skinned my knee.

I was so busy being overwhelmed by the beauty (and yes I did cry at the wedding) that not much reading was done until yesterday afternoon once I was back in Oxford. Making serious inroads into The Mill on the Floss and wondering why I've never read it before.

I'll be back with a proper post tomorrow, so until then, everyone go and think about beautiful things. :D

Meow the Third

...and by the time you watch this, I'll be halfway up the M6. Hopefully. See you on Monday!

Meow again

More from Simon's Cat. By the time you read this, I will be delicately packing my fascinator and hoping the feathers don't get crushed. I'm not even joking. I'm obsessed with the thing.

Time for some campaignin'

Hell, it's on every other website in the world.

Can't we get these guys to make one of these for our next General Election, whenever that ends up being?

Meow

Forgive me, I'm going to go quiet for a couple of days. Tonight is a big launch party so it's all hands on decks, then tomorrow Boyfriend and I are going up to the Lake District for a friend's wedding. In the meantime, here is Simon's Cat, my latest YouTube obsession. Another one tomorrow.

Frost in May - Antonia White

In the flurry of publicity over the anniversary of Virago Modern Classics, I was suddenly reading a great deal about the very first book in the series, Frost in May by Antonia White. It had been personally selected by VMC founder Carmen Calill as a perfect example of the kinds of books they wanted to bring back into the world from the dark curtain of obscurity. In the Guardian earlier this year Ms Calill said of the book:

"This novel, about a nine-year-old girl closeted in an English convent, is a classic - funny, wonderfully written, its heroine a young Everywoman up against an authoritarian and frightening body of adults who insist on subduing her spirit in the name of God. Rosamond Lehmann used to tell me how often her readers wrote to her exclaiming of one of her novels: "This is my story." Frost in May was mine. I had to republish it."

Carmen Calill had had a similar experience to young Nanda Gray in the novel: she had been at a semi-enclosed convent school in Australia that should, she said, “have been in deepest Ireland”. It was tough, and strict. It’s no surprise that she was able to painfully relate to Frost in May. Our protagonist, Nanda, is the young daughter of a recent Catholic convert who wants her to be well-schooled in the teachings and rituals of his new faith. At the school Nanda suddenly finds herself subject to many new rules and regulations, some of which seem more than a little draconian, such as the rule prohibiting the girls from socialising in pairs, or the rule declaring that all letters to parents must be left open and read by the nuns. When Nanda writes adoringly of a new friend at the convent and said that her friend had beautiful eyes (“I’ve never seen anyone with such bright eyes, either; they’re brown, but if you look very closely they have little green rays like chips of emerald in them.”), she is called to see Mother Radcliffe and severely reprimanded:

“You know quite well that the school rule does not approve of particular friendships. They are against charity, to begin with, and they lead moreover, to dangerous and unhealthy indulgence of feeling.”

To recognise and empathise with such an extreme experience in literature is a moving thing indeed, but my problem was that I never went to a convent school. I couldn’t relate. And while the characters themselves were superbly drawn – Antonia White writes about and describes feelings very well indeed – the background atmosphere didn’t touch me. She was drawing on personal experience in writing about the convent itself, as far as I can work out from her later writings when she talks about re-discovering her Catholic faith, and so I think perhaps she spent slightly less time in making that part of the book pop out in the way that her characters do. It seemed to me a case of 3D characters on a 2D background.

I’m not completely clueless about Catholicism or religious upbringing, I should point out. My father’s side of the family is Catholic and so I occasionally went to Mass as a child in between going more regularly to the Methodist church with my mum. I did have a religious upbringing – church on a Sunday, Girls’ Brigade (don’t laugh), church youth group twice a week – until I had my reverse Road to Damascus moment in my mid-teenage years. I was in London with my church youth group at this massive gathering of Methodist youth groups, and were at the Albert Hall hearing all these inspirational religious speakers, testimonials, songs, plays, the whole nine yards. In the midst of all the religious fervour, I was struck like a lightning bolt: I didn’t believe in any of it. Religion made no sense to me, and really it never had. I cried on the bus back to Glasgow, but the relief...

Anyway, I digress. I wanted to love this novel. I wanted to desperately. I had heard so much praise for it. But I didn’t love it. I admired her skill at painting believable characters, I sympathised with Nanda, but I just couldn’t get a grasp on the setting itself. I didn’t know enough. I don’t know all the Latin, and there was no explanation for a lot of it.

I quite liked this book. To truly love this book, I fear you just had to be there.

Pearls Before Swine

Honestly, I promise that the Frost in May post is on its way. But first, a cartoon:

Pearls Before Swine (thanks Sarah)

Happy Birthday Emmeline Pankhurst!

OK, so I said that today I would post my thoughts on Frost in May, but that's before it came to my attention that today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragette extraordinaire. I couldn't let the occasion go by unmarked. Today MSN Encarta have posted a list of 10 heroines we should all be thankful for. I have posted the list below - the original page is here.

Emmeline Pankhurst, 1858-1928

Regarded by many as a dangerous subversive, Emmeline Pankhurst was the charismatic leader of the Women's Social and Political Union. Both she and her two daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, fought for the rights of women, engaging in low-level crime to gain coverage for the suffragette cause. Imprisoned 13 times between 1908 and 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst used hunger, thirst and sleep strikes to endanger her health so that she would be released. She died while campaigning in June 1928, less than a month before a bill giving women equal voting rights with men became law.

Elizabeth Fry, 1780-1845

On a visit to Newgate prison in 1813, Elizabeth Fry was appalled by the overcrowded and inhumane conditions, where offenders were confined within the same room regardless of offence, age or sex. Declaring that "Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal," Fry's campaigns for changes to the prison system—including the classification of felons, segregation of the sexes, and provision for education—led to the passing of new penal legislation, which remains the foundation of the prison system today.

Irena Sendler, 1910-2008

Working secretly against the Nazis in occupied Poland, social worker Irena Sendler succeeded in smuggling thousands of Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto and placing them with non-Jewish families. She laboriously recorded and buried the names of the children in jars, in the hope that they would be dug up at the end of the war and reunited with their families. She was eventually caught by the Nazis, tortured, and sentenced to death. However, she managed to escape and, undeterred by her time in captivity, continued to work tirelessly to help the Jews. It is thought that the lives of around 2,500 children were saved by her efforts during the Holocaust.

Aphra Behn, c. 1614-1689

Aphra Behn was a highly successful professional writer at a time when women's voices were rarely recognized in the literary world. Despite suffering accusations of plagiarism, her most important work, Oroonoko (c. 1688), had a substantial impact on the development of the English novel. Virginia Woolf, some 300 years later, would say of her, "All women together should let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

Helen Suzman, 1917-

Fundamentally opposed to apartheid, South African politician Helen Suzman made outspoken attacks upon the oppressive racial policies of the Nationalist Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Often the sole voice opposing racial segregation amid the all-white Parliament, she gradually gained support. When Nelson Mandela came to power, he thanked her for her years of tireless campaigning against the cruelty of the race laws.

Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958

Watson and Crick are the names most famously associated with the discovery of the structure of DNA. However, it was Rosalind Franklin's pioneering work on the X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA crystals that first indicated that DNA takes the form of a double helix, and it was to this contribution that the famous duo's discovery was indebted. Franklin's part in the revelation of DNA's composition went largely unrecognized at the time, and she died before she could be rewarded for her achievements.

Harriet Tubman, 1820-1913

Born into a life of slavery in the American South, Harriet Tubman escaped to Pennsylvania at the age of 29. Over the next 10 years, she made 19 expeditions back to the South, secretly escorting over 300 black slaves to freedom through a route known as the Underground Railroad. Despite large rewards being offered for her capture, neither she nor any of her charges were ever caught. After the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Harriet Tubman remained an outspoken supporter and activist for the rights of black women.

Octavia Hill, 1838-1912

In 1864 Octavia Hill bought a number of properties in London with the intention of renting them out at a cheap rate to the poor of the parish. Her scheme was highly successful and led to great housing reforms throughout London which benefitted the less wealthy. Another of Octavia Hill's great achievements was co-founding the National Trust. She set up this organization due to a strong belief that access to the countryside should be made available to all.

Mary Seacole, 1805-1881

Born to a Scottish father and Jamaican mother, Mary Seacole trained as a nurse in Jamaica before moving to England. On hearing of the terrible conditions for the soldiers in the Crimean War, she funded her own trip to Turkey where she set up a hospital, and even ventured on to the battlefield to tend to the wounded. Her achievements are widely considered to have been equal to those of Florence Nightingale and she returned a national heroine, having overcome prejudices against her race and sex, but has sadly been much forgotten since.

Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi, 1945-

Myanmar (Burma) politician Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi co-founded the National League for Democracy in 1988, basing her campaign on non-violence. Her party won a landslide victory, yet the military government refused to give up power and put Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi under house arrest. After much international dissent, she was released in 1995, but her continued resistance of the military regime has seen her spend 13 of the past 18 years in custody. Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi remains under house arrest today.

A pretty inspiring list, I hope you agree. A list to which I would add Frances Power Cobbe, for her pioneering writing on feminism; George Eliot, for taking on the male novelists and garnering a huge amount of praise while they thought she was a man, then being criticised when they found out she was a woman; Mary Wollstonecraft for writing The Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Millicent Fawcett for being a suffragist extraodinaire; and two more incredible Victorian feminists, Emily Davies - who co-founded Girton College Cambridge - and Barbara Bodichon (pictured left) - who wrote so eloquently on the rights of married women, and who co-founded Girton with Emily Davies. Oh and Caroline Norton who I mentioned the other day.

Victorian heavy, I know, but that's my bag after all. Incredible women, all of them.

Stop Press!

Stop press! I have just found out that I've been awarded this very lovely 'E for Excellent' award from the also lovely chartroose. Hooray! Not only did she say that she trusted my book recommendations, but that I was a true feminist, which is a compliment indeed. Thank you chartroose.

Once I figure out how to get it into my sidebar I'll move it over there. As for who I shall pass the mantle onto, I need to have a think. I'll let you know!

 

Excuses, excuses

I have basically done no novel-reading all weekend. It has been a social whirlwind and in amongst being quite ludicrously busy all I managed were twenty pages of The Mill on the Floss. Twenty very, very good pages, but only twenty nonetheless.

In the past few days Boyfriend and I have been:

• celebrating Academic Friend's successful DPhil viva - she is now Dr Lauren unofficially, though she has to graduate before she can change her bankcards :)
• supporting the musical/megaphone endeavours of one of my very oldest friends in Winchester and getting to hang out with him and his lovely wife (not to mention her very advanced baby bump!)
• going to London Town so that Boyfriend can do his music thang, and I can do my geeky library thang during the day, followed by amazing Italian food in Bloomsbury. We also saw and appreciated an anti-Scientology protest on Tottenham Court Road.
• Sunday lunch in the pub followed by Friends from Scotland who were in the area stopping by for a few pints
• and tonight... my father will actually be in the UK for once so we're all having dinner tonight in Oxford. Haven't seen him for months, so it'll be nice to catch up a bit.

So you see, the only reading I've done has been academic geek reading. It's brilliant academic geekery (Victorian feminists doing their progressive thang and writing about it in a plethora of ways) but I'm not sure y'all want to hear about my library-based table thumping. I wasn't actually thumping tables - I'd probably get chucked out for that - but mentally I was.

Tomorrow: my thoughts on the disappointing (for me) Frost in May by Antonia White.

God bless Brian Blessed

Have I Got News For You with Brian Blessed as the guest presenter. Not since the original appearances of Boris J have we seen anything quite so surreal. Here's the first 10 minutes of the episode Brian presented.

Oh, and there's some strong language if you're sensitive to that sort of thing.

Overrated Classics

I moved to Oxford three years ago today. I was unsure about the place at first, beautiful though it is, but now I'm fully part of the furniture. One of the side-effects, though, is developing a powerful hatred for tourists, especially on Broad Street. Last night on my way to the Bod I think I may have been in at least six photographs.

Anyway, that's not the point of today's post. Today I am bringing you another bookish meme, courtesy of CB James. Overrated classics! Without further ado...

What was the best classic you were "forced" to read at school, and why?

This question seems ill-fitting with the "overrated" theme but still. Without a doubt Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Why? Because it's an amazing book, and firmly retains a place in my top 5 all-time favourite books. Not sure this falls under the classic umbrella but we also read Romeo and Juliet the same year, and as obvious a Shakespeare choice as it is, it's one of my favourites of his plays. Doesn't quite pip The Tempest or Hamlet for me, but it's close.

What was the worst classic you were forced to endure, and why?

There wasn't really a classic that I hated - I was pretty lucky in that regard. I remember not exactly loving Julius Caesar but it wasn't life-threateningly awful. Early on in high school we did read a book called Joby by Stan Barstow, which was written in the 70s so not exactly a classic. I hated  it. I just looked it up on Amazon to check the author's name, and saw this reader review:

We recently read this book at school, and I can honestly say it hurt. No-one got past the first chapter, let alone the first page. People were falling asleep as it was read, and one nutter even tried to use it as a weapon. Do not make pupils read this at school, please, for the sake of their sanity.

I have to say I agree.

Which classic should every student be made to read?

Well, this is tough, because I can't exactly be objective. Just because my favourite books are things like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Bleak House doesn't mean they are right for school. Jane Eyre should probably get a look in. I think it's better to get a spread of books, drama, and poetry that cover lots of genres and issues. Also there needs to be books from different eras - some classic, some Shakespeare, some contemporary stuff.

Which classic should be put to rest immediately?

If they're classics, they're probably classics for a reason, so I'm not sure that putting them to rest is the right thing to do. However, I can say that I think that The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most hideously overrated books I've ever read, so I wouldn't cry if my future imaginary children never do that at school. Also, get rid of Joby for the reasons stated above. :)

Tag! Dovergrey Reader, Simon, Chartroose, and A Devoted Reader!

The Victorians - AN Wilson

It’s hard knowing to begin when talking about The Victorians by AN Wilson. The sheer scale of it is enormous… and it’s a big book in more ways than one.

It took me an equally mammoth seven weeks to read it. Not because it was difficult – it wasn’t; Wilson writes wonderfully – but because there was just so much information to take in and digest. I can’t even begin to imagine how much research and work went into this book because he really knows his stuff. The range of topics covered, from Parnell and Ireland to war in the Balkans via the Great Exhibition, Gordon of Khartoum, Benjamin ‘Dizzy’ Disraeli and Gladstone’s political wranglings, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Wagner’s antisemitism. Literature, culture, art, war, and politics are all examined and nothing is found wanting: every topic is equally meticulously researched.

The joy of this book too is the fact that in amongst all the historical information he manages to tease out human stories that make it all the more compelling. For example, Caroline Norton who became a campaigner for married women’s rights after she left her husband and he took the children as revenge. Then women had no rights to anything after marriage – any money or property a woman may have had before the marriage automatically became the husband’s as soon as they married. Women also had no rights over their children. Primarily because of Norton’s political activity, the government passed the 1839 Infant Custody Bill – which gave women a certain amount of rights over their children until they were seven (I think it was seven, if not, it’s something close to it), and the 1857 Divorce Act, which meant that women could now file for divorce, though the grounds on which they could do so was very limited.

I admit I struggled more with the military history chapters, but they are incredibly important to understand Britain’s place at the heart of the Empire, and it’s interesting to see that some of the complaints that were made at the time of the Crimean War about the army being ill-equipped are incredibly similar to stories that pop up in the papers today about the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan not having the right gear, or enough of it. Do we never learn?

This isn’t a completely objective history – Wilson makes it clear who he likes and dislikes from Victorian history (he’s especially keen on Wagner without the antisemitism – though this much could be told from his recent novel Winnie and Wolf – and he clearly thinks that Parnell got a raw deal), but this is forgivable and his writing is at its most exuberant when he discusses these figures.

The covers of my (signed!) paperback edition are littered with plaudits both inside and out, with many people selecting it as one of their “books of the year”. It has even been called the best single volume history of the period and I couldn't agree more. If any of you have a passing interest in finding out a bit more about the Victorians then you could do a lot worse than picking up a copy of this book.

Also, there's now an illustrated edition of the book availble. Me want.

Intellectual Interlude

On this day in 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley met his watery end. I wish I could tell you that I knew this off the top of my head, but I didn't. I read it on the interweb. It could all be lies, but then, why would the interweb lie about something as arcane as the death of Shelley?

Anyway. I'm took this as my cue to search out a poem of his that I remember really liking when I was at uni. I still like it! Here it is:

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us, -- visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower, --
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening, --
Like clouds in starlight widely spread, --
Like memory of music fled, --
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, -- where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, -- why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given --
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells -- whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone -- like mist oe'er the mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messgenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes --
Thou -- that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!
Depart not as thy shadow came,
Depart not -- lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard -- I saw them not --
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming, --
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine -- have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night --
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery,
That thou - O awful Loveliness,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past -- there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm -- to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind

Cornbury Festival 2008

I never thought I'd go to another festival. The last one I went to was Leeds in 2001, and it was then that I realised that I absolutely detest camping, tents, and all that malarkey. I love my bed. I love music, but I love my bed more. I'm not giving up bed for muddy field. We'd pitched our tent on a hill and I keep waking up at the other end of the bloody thing. Never again, I thought. Never again.

Until this weekend. The word "festival" had both Boyfriend and I grimacing slightly, but this one was in Oxfordshire so we didn't have to camp. This one had Paul Simon and The Bangles and KT Tunstall. This one was nicknamed "PoshStock". This one had potential to be, y'know, fun. So, on Saturday, Boyfriend, Guitarist Friend, and I rocked up in a field to hear some music.

It started well. The sun was out(ish) or at any rate it was dry. There wasn't a dodgy burger van in sight, but instead a host of quality, organic food, with plenty of interesting and tasty options for the vegetarian in our midst. I had the most incredible smoked cheese and parma ham bagel I think I have ever tasted. Boyfriend has similar ecstasies over the roasted pepper option. The Bangles played and we got right down the front, and they were fantastic. I should also point out that I was with two men in their 40s, both of whom had enjoyed The Bangles the first time round, and not necessarily just for their music. :) Me, I was singing along happily to 'Walk Like an Egyptian' and all the rest, and covetting the bass player's dress.

We saw some blues on the second stage. We ate some more. We had some beer. (A festival serving real ale! And local cider!) Then the rain started. Oh god, how the rain came down. But we survived. We saw Beverley Knight and Paul Simon. We came back on the Sunday, and caught the end of 10CC before I danced like a mad thing in the rain to KT Tunstall. She was amazing. Meanwhile, it was raining harder than ever, so I left the menfolk to sit in camping chairs and complain about the weather. Truly, it was tipping it down. My jeans absorbed so much water, I think they must have more than doubled their weight.

But at least I got to take this photo, which somewhat sums up the Cornbury Experience:

Here's Boyfriend (on the left) and Guitarist Friend Nigel "enjoying themselves". Somehow, this photo doesn't quite convey the utter wetness that was Cornbury. Nigel's broken umbrella adds a certain something too.

Boyfriend has assured me that he's never going to another music festival again as long as he lives. At least my precious literary festivals generally take place indoors.

And Then There Were None

When I was in my late teens/very early twenties a girls' night out usually included copious amounts of alcohol, dancing till the wee small hours, and a cheeseburger from Mr Chips on Sauchiehall Street on the way home. Last night, we went on a girls' night out... to the Oxford Playhouse to see And Then There Were None. It was fantastic.

I have somehow managed to reach the age of 26 without ever having read an Agatha Christie novel, never seen a play based on her writing, or even sat through the entirety of an episode of Poirot. I have no idea why, it's not been on purpose. It was a bonus, though, last night because going into the theatre my only piece of knowledge of the play was that it originally had a rather less PC title. This meant that not only did I know nothing about the story, but that watching the the murder mystery unfold before was unhampered by vague recollections of whodunnit.

I'm probably the only person in the world who didn't know the basic story, but for those of you who need reminding, a group of 8 guests are invited by a Mr and Mrs Owen to Soldier Island for their summer holidays. When they arrive, they discover from the two recently-employed servants that the Owens will not be arriving until the next day. All is well and dandy, and they're all standing around having a drink when a mysterious voice strikes up, adresses them all by name, and makes very serious accusations against them. It seems that these people are all there for a reason... Going into anymore detail would be folly, because the joy of a good whodunnit like this is being completely open and innocent going in.

The production itself was a corker. The very slight tinge of ham at the beginning was quite obviously tongue-in-cheek, and contrasted nicely with a much more serious and understated finale. Stars of the show were Alex Ferns as Captain Lombard (evil Trevor from Eastenders!), Chloe Newsome as Vera Claythorne, and Denis Lill (Cassandra's dad in Only Fools) as William Blore. The show itself was wonderfully staged, with a wonderful set and bursts of creepy incidental music that made me jump in my seat more than once. In fact there were several jumpy moments.

Sarah, if you're reading this, I'm really sorry for grabbing you when there was that gunshot. Oooh, me 'eart.

Any quibbles with the night? Only the people in the row behind me who WOULDN'T SHUT UP. Some of us haven't read the book and don't know who the next person to die is. Hmph. Anyway, it was a fantastic night's entertainment - wizard!