Monthly Archives: August 2010

Tidying Up

Posted on by

The school holidays have gone in a flash as usual and I can really hardly believe that this is the last week of them. This is the week when we always realise that we haven’t got around to doing half of the things that we had planned to do. We still have lots of house maintenance things to do but of course the bad weather has held us back again.

Yesterday we tackled one of the attics. The worst thing about having plenty of storage space in a house is that you tend just to hoard things. The more space you have the more rubbish you accumulate, I find.

But we got right down to the end of the attic and came up with bags of baby clothes and all sorts of stuff that we couldn’t think why we wanted to hold on to. The baby clothes were stored away just in case we decided to have a third child. In the end we decided that we couldn’t face all the sleepless nights and nappy washing again. Yes, I was the last person in the western world still to use terry towelling nappies/diapers, but I hear that they are beginning to be used again.
The old nappies were sent off to Rumania years ago.

So we’ve been busy being astonished by how tiny the clothes are and sorting stuff out for recycling and taking to charity shops. There are still some books which I was sure were in there but they haven’t surfaced, which is annoying.

The other attic has a cot, pram and high chair in it. Time has gone so quickly that I’m tempted to hold on to them just in case we ever do have grandchildren at some point in the future.

So one attic is almost empty now, it only has an ancient BBC computer in it, and that is the way that it is going to stay. Don’t ask me why they want to hold on to the computer. I would chuck it out but all the blokes in my family said NO!

Charles Dickens in Berwick upon Tweed

Posted on by

On the way back home from Northumberland we stopped off at Berwick upon Tweed. It’s a border town which is famous for being fought over by the English and Scottish. It has been in English hands for quite some time now but it continues to have the feel of a Scottish place. Architecturally it’s completely Scottish.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing because there’s nothing worse than grey stone for making a place look and feel really depressing. It was especially noticeable after visiting Newcastle and Durham which are both really vibrant towns and seem to be thriving despite the horrendous recession. I think possibly Berwick is just too close to those cities and everybody high tails it to the brighter lights for their shopping. There were lots of empty and very dilapidated looking shops.

But, in its glory days Charles Dickens did a reading at a hotel there. I’m wondering if there is a large town anywhere which he missed out!

The hotel looks very run down now. Painting grey stonework cream doesn’t really help, especially if it’s flaking off, but I’m sure it was a different matter in 1861.

The Best of Saki/Hector Hugh Munro

Posted on by

This is the book which I should have taken with me on our recent jaunt in the north-east of England.

It’s a book of 49 short stories by Saki and I know that a lot of people just don’t like reading short stories but after the disappointment of The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton, this was just what I needed.

The cover has this comment by Graham Greene: “They dazzle and delight” – and I agree with him. Saki had a great talent for writing entertaining and funny stories which are sometimes only two and a half pages long but it’s amazing what he was able to do with so few words.

It’s a shame that even although he had suffered from ill health his whole life and he was 44 years old, he still felt the need to join up during World War 1 to “do his bit” and of course, he didn’t survive.

He was born in Burma as his father was in the Burma Police, but as you can imagine, with his real name being Hector Hugh Munro there is obviously a lot of Scottish blood there – another Celtic storyteller!

Book Blog Hop

Posted on by

I decided to join a book blog hop for the first time ever.

Book Blogger Hop

This week’s question is: Do you listen to music while you read? If so, what are your favourite reading tunes?

I never listen to music while I read because I would find it too distracting and wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the book.

It’s a bit strange really because I suffer from tinnitus which is allergy related and whenever I’m doing anything else in the house – cooking or housework or whatever, I like to have the radio or music on so that the white noise in my ears doesn’t bother me so much.

When I’m immersed in a book the tinnitus doesn’t annoy me at all.

Durham Cathedral, Harry Potter

Posted on by

We moved on from Newcastle to Durham which is just a hop and a skip away. It’s a vibrant, small city and it was noticeable that they didn’t seem to have any empty shops or even charity shops in the town, which is such a nice change from most towns at the moment.

Obviously the place to visit is the cathedral and although I haven’t been keen on places like that in the past, I have to say that Durham Cathedral has a much nicer atmosphere than any other such places which I have visited.

I’ve been to Canterbury, York and Inverness cathedrals before and to me they all had quite a scary ambience about them, as if they had been built by people who had a real fear of God and they worked that feeling into the fabric of the building.

Durham on the other hand felt really comfortable and friendly. I think part of it may be that the attendants were all very welcoming and helpful. They also have a memorial to coal miners which I thought was a really nice down to earth touch. Usually such places are really snooty and elitist, but not Durham.

Obviously they don’t allow you to take photographs of the inside, it is still a working church and while we were there worshipers were actually using the place and lighting candles and such which is all very foreign to me but no doubt they get comfort from it. I think it must be quite difficult for them to have troops of tourists going around while they are trying to have their private moments.

It’s so big I couldn’t get it in the one picture as you can see. Apparently it costs a shocking £60,000 a WEEK to keep the place going. They don’t have an admittance charge, which is good but on the other hand, donate whatever you can afford.

I hadn’t realised that Durham was used to film scenes in the Harry Potter films until I got there, they must have been paid more than a bob or two for that, which must have helped.

The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton

Posted on by

I took this book with me to read while we were away for a few days last week. It was first published in 1908 and has written on the front: “The most thrilling book I have ever read” Kingsley Amis.

Poor Kingsley, he led a dull reading life, going by this book. Of course, it could be that Chesterton and I just don’t get on, I remember being unimpressed by a Father Brown book of his which I read years ago.

I’ll leave it a while before trying another one of his, if it isn’t third time lucky then I’ll never darken his pages again. I can’t help thinking that Kingsley Amis must have been on the sauce when he wrote his comment!

Barter Books, Alnwick, Northumberland

Posted on by

We decided to visit Alnwick (pronounced Annick) because it said in my AA Guide Book of Britain that it was worth a visit and as we weren’t far from it we decided to go. As we were driving in we noticed a sign for Barter Books and we did swither a bit before deciding to visit it because as my husband said – I’m not supposed to be buying any books because I have so many unread ones at the moment, and he isn’t any better.

In the end, we couldn’t resist it, especially when we saw that the shop is actually what was the Alnwick railway station building. I love these old buildings, in fact I’d like to live in one. Sadly the station was closed in 1968 – a victim of the scandalous rape of our once great railway system – by Dr Beeching.

The building is really big inside and does have an enormous amount of books so I thought it was going to be really difficult to not buy a load of books. That was before I saw the price tags on them. This is without doubt the most expensive bookshop that I have ever been in. According to their pricing policy, we aren’t only rich in literature but also monetarily. We have lots of the exact editions which they were selling for often eye-watering prices.

They didn’t mind us taking some photographs though and it is just as well that this is a back view of me, so you can’t see the incredulous look on my face.

Who would pay £16 for a Penguin vintage crime REPRINT ? The starting price for most books was £9.60. Remember The Chalet School series by Elinor M Brent-Dyer? Tatty hardback copies of them were priced at £26. I came home from school one day to discover that my mum had decided that I had grown out of my books and she had given them all away, so I don’t have any of them now, grrr.

Anyway it’s the first time in ages that we’ve managed to get out of a bookshop sans books.

As you can see, they have stuck with the railway theme with trains travelling around the shop above the top shelves, which is a nice touch. It also seems to be the place where they discovered that wartime poster ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ which is being reproduced all over the place now.

The trouble with me is that I think it’s quite obscene that books have a value other than their contents. I don’t know why really because I’m quite happy for other things to have a collectors value.

We recently discovered, quite by chance that one of our books has quite a high re-sale value and now I just worry about it getting damaged as it is pristine, so I won’t read it now, unless I buy a cheap new edition. It’s crazy.

Baltic Contemporary Art Gallery, Gateshead

Posted on by

The Baltic was the first place which we visited on our recent jaunt to the north-east of England. I think it’s great that they’ve been able to convert what was an old flour mill into great gallery space and they’ve made a really good job of revamping the space.

I was quite disappointed by the exhibitions which they have on at the moment. I must admit that I’m not that struck on a lot of contemporary art but I’ve visited the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh a good few times now and it strikes me that Edinburgh has better contents.

At the moment the Baltic is showing a John Cage art exhibition and there is also a wee room where you can hear some of his music – or maybe not!

I have to say that John Cage was an absolute genius because he managed to ‘take the piss’ in the fields of both music and art, which is quite a feat.

The majority of his paintings seemed to feature circles of paint which were obviously just the outlines of glasses or mugs. I heard one girl commenting that they were just coffee mug stains – and she was correct.

Going by this exhibition I’ve wiped up an awful lot of art work in my time.

I thought that the best exhibition was the one by Cornelia Parker featuring musical instruments which she had flattened. With careful lighting and hanging the result is a circle of instruments and their shadows, and it looks really effective.

It’s worth a visit if you are at all interested in contemporary art.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Posted on by

It has only taken me about 30 odd years but at last I got around to reading Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. The 506 closely printed pages had put me off all those years, but I must say that I really did enjoy it. I suppose most people will have already read it or at least seen the fab film, starring the gorgeous Omar Sharif as Doctor Zhivago.

Having read Liza/A Nest of Nobles by Turgenev recently I have to say that I think Doctor Zhivago is far better than Liza. I know there is about 100 years in between the publication of the two books, so it maybe isn’t fair to compare them, but there is just so much more in Doctor Zhivago to get your teeth into.

The Zhivago family had been wealthy, and Yura could remember a time when he was a child when there were Zhivago factories and a Zhivago bank. But his father lost all of their money and committed suicide. Yura’s mother was already dead.

When Yura (Yurii) grows up he becomes a doctor and marries his childhood sweetheart, Tonya. They have a son and when Tonya is pregnant for the second time Yura starts an affair with Lara. Lara had was married to her childhood sweetheart, Pasha, but she believed him to be dead. Using the name of Strelnikov, he was now high up in the Red Army. Was he modelled on Trotsky?

Whilst on one of his journey’s to Lara’s house Yura is abducted at gunpoint by some soldiers who are in search of him to replace their dead doctor but eventually he escapes from the army and ends up back with Lara.

It’s years since I saw the film but I seem to remember that the whole thing concentrates on the love affair between Yura and Lara and I thought that Tonya (his wife) was portrayed as a sort of feckless pain in the neck. Presumably the director David Lean thought he had to do that because people would not be keen on the truth, which was that Yura started screwing around when he realised that his wife was pregnant. I could be completely mis-remembering it. Anyway Pasternak wrote Tonya as being very resourceful and strong, coping with her child, her elderly father and a nursemaid who was still a child herself.

On the other hand Lara hadn’t even managed to seal up the rat holes in her apartment, with the result that the rats were everywhere. I think if I had been in that situation I would have played ‘splat the rat’ until they got the idea and skedaddled.

Yes, as ever, I’m on the side of the wife!

If you are into history, then you will definitely get a lot out of the book which it just isn’t possible to put in a film and as Russia/the Soviet Union has always fascinated me, the book was right up my street.

I was brought up during ‘the Cold War’ when the U.S.S.R. threat was always in the background – especially as my dad worked in the nearby nuclear submarine base at Coulport on the River Clyde. I was still in primary school when I realised that there was a Soviet nuclear missile pointing straight at us, so there wasn’t any point in worrying about it as we would be blasted into oblivion very quickly.

Happy days.

Newcastle upon Tyne

Posted on by

At last, we managed to get away for a few days and we did actually do what we had planned to do for ages, which was to visit the north-east of England starting with Newcastle.

We each had one grandparent who was born in Newcastle, there has always been a lot of toing and froing between that area and Scotland. Men always had to go wherever the work was in the coal mining and shipbuilding industries. The men in our families were the shipbuilding type and ended up settling by the River Clyde near Glasgow and leaving the River Tyne behind.

There are actually four bridges in this photograph.