I’m going to be really busy with family, house, garden and travelling now that summer is on the horizon, so I’ve decided to take a break from blogging for a while.
Have fun, I intend to!
Blog Sabbatical
12
Bowness-on-Windermere, The Jetty Museum. The Lake District
Way back in September last year we visited the Lake District in northern England, one of the places we went to is Bowness-on-Windermere. It was incredibly busy when we were there, in fact I think the locals have been complaining about the number of visitors that arrive there, some of them are a bit rowdy apparently.
We went there to see Windermere Jetty Museum which I think is fairly new. To be honest I wasn’t sure if it would be all that interesting, but we got in for half price with our Art Card so we decided to take a look. It turned out to be an interesting place to visit. These old wooden steam boats must have been the lap of luxury back in Edwardian times.
Unfortunately it was nigh on impossible to get photos with no random people also in the picture!
These old wooden boats are lovely to look at but must have been horrible to maintain.
Not all of the boats are high and dry though as you can see from the photo below there’s also a boat shed with various vessels on the lake.
There’s also this rather snazzy looking speed boat which neverthless must be quite old.
The boats below are record breaking speed boats.
One unexpected exhibit is Beatrix Potter’s boat, it’s quite primitive and basic but no doubt she enjoyed herself messing about in lakes or rivers.
Lake Windermere is quite picturesque. The Lake District is like a very miniature version of a tame Scotland. But don’t tell anyone that I said that!
https://flic.kr/p/2qUs69H
Out of Bounds by Val McDermid
Out of Bounds by Val McDermid was first published in 2016 and it’s the fourth book in the Karen Pirie series. I can’t say too much about the book as I know that some blogpals have begun to read the series and I don’t want to spoil anything for them.
Briefly, Karen Pirie is of course head of the Cold Cases at Police Scotland. When a young joy rider crashes a car and ends up in a coma his DNA is routinely taken and tested, with the result that a close family connection of his had commited a murder 22 years earlier, but had never been tracked down.
In theory it should be an easy job to find the murderer – but of course nothing is as simple as Karen hopes.
The setting is mainly Edinburgh, but it does move to London for a short time. I’ll continue with this series although I enjoyed the first two books of the series most, that might be because the settings were so close to what is now home for me, that’s very parochial of me I know but it’s always a plus if you can literally see the streets that you’re reading about.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
The Women by Kristin Hannah was first published in the UK in 2024.
The book begins in California’s Coronado Island where Frances (Frankie) McGrath and her brother Finley have had an idyllic sheltered childhood. Their father hadn’t been able to take part in WW2 and had always felt bad about it, it made him ultra patriotic, he even has a ‘wall of heroes’ in his home office. After Finley graduates from the Naval Academy he’s sent to Vietnam, Frankie is determined to follow him, but neither the Navy nor the Air Force will accept her as a nurse, but the Army does. Before she even gets to Vietnam they get the news that Finley is dead, but it’s too late for Frankie to back out. She’s thrown into a hell on earth with just three months training.
The first half of the book is her experiences in Vietnam and the two women Barb and Ethel who get her through it all. But they’re all damaged souls.
Frances had signed up for another year in Vietnam. When she does get back home it’s to a very different society from the one she had left. She is spat on by people when they see her in her army uniform. The people have turned completely against the war, no heroes’ welcome for any combatants or nurses, in fact when Frankie goes looking for help about her mental state she’s informed that there were no women in Vietnam! Obviously nurses didn’t count.
Frankie’s father is even worse than everyone else, his daughter had defied him to go to Vietnam and train as a nurse, instead of staying home and being an obedient daughter, just as her mother had been an obedient wife.
It’s Barb and Ethel who come to Frankie’s aid when she falls apart, time and again, although they’ve each had struggles of their own.
The Women is the opposite of a comfort read really, but it’s important that the truth about the Vietnam war is told, however uncomfortable and harrowing it might be. I vaguely remember it being on the UK news, but it ended when I was a youngster so I did learn quite a bit about it and the aftermath. It seems strange that something I remember being on TV as it happened, albeit I was young – is now tagged as historical fiction.
The Resurrectionist by A. Rae Dunlap
The Resurrectionist by A. Rae Dunlap was published in 2025 and it’s the author’s debut novel. I borrowed it from the library. The setting is Edinburgh 1828 where the professors at Edinburgh University, and various others were busy conducting experiments and research on cadavers – dead human bodies. The demonstrations were open to the public and so halls were packed with onlookers, many of whom were men just wanting to view the spectacle, amongst the medical students who had a legitimate reason for being there. It was theatre for some really and they were willing to pay handsomely for the experience.
James Willoughby, a young Englishman had been determined to go to Edinburgh to study to be a doctor, he wanted to be part of The Enlightenment, it was all going on there. Even when his father died and it turned out that he had gambled away most of the family wealth James was still determined to stick to his plan. He just had to find a way of financing himself.
As you would expect the notorious body snatchers feature in what I suppose could be described as a gothic horror novel. I enjoyed this one although I had to suspend my disbelief quite often as I can’t imagine nobody noticing some of the antics involved in obtaining fresh corpses. As you would expect Burke and Hare feature too.
The book is well written but I didn’t really get any sense of the atmosphere of old Edinburgh. It’s a place which for me seems quite dangerous and threatening even on a sunny summer evening on my own there, something to do with the narrow wynds and tall old buildings I think – and just not knowing the place all that well. The stones ooze atmosphere. It must have been even scarier in the early 19th century.
Anyway, I enjoyed the book but it’s definitely not for the squeamish.
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple was first published in 1943, but my copy dates from 1946 and was published by John Murray. In recent years it has been reprinted by Persephone Books, their blurb is very succinct: Three sisters marry very different men and the choices they make determine whether they will flourish, be tamed or be repressed.
I really enjoyed this one the setting is just after the First World War, up until around 20 years after that. I was thinking that it would make a great TV series/family saga, but apparently the book was made into a film starring Phyllis Calvert and James Mason in 1945, I’m presuming that James Mason played the cruel and domineering husband of Charlotte.
The three sisters are very different characters. Lucy is married to William and they are childless, William her husband is very laid back and calm and they have a happy marriage.
Vera is the supposed beauty of the family, but it seems to have made her completely self-centred and promiscuous. Her husband is deeply unhappy, not that she would care.
Charlotte marries the ‘life and soul of the party’ type, but behind his own closed doors he’s a monster with towering rages for no reason. Charlotte has no standing in her own home and even her children (and servants) have no respect for her, she’s entirely miserable.
I like to think that this book might have saved some impulsive or immature women from making a huge mistake with their choice of spouse, but I have a couple of friends in my background who married men because they were always ‘exciting’ – a disaster waiting not very long to happen! Anyway this was a great read.
The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris
The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane won the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2019.
The Lost Words is a beautiful book with really sumptuous illustrations by Jackie Morris. It’s described as being a spellbook to conjure back the lost words of childhood, words that have been lost like acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker. Words that just don’t appear in the vocabulary of many children because their lives have become so urbanised and constricted.
The book begins with acorn and ends with wren, with each letter of the alphabet being accompanied by a lovely descriptive acrostic poem. I have no idea why X and Y were left out.
It’s difficult to say which age group this book is aimed at. It’s very large at 15 inches by 11 (38cm by 28) and as it is printed in very high quality therefore thick heavy paper, it’s quite unwieldy even for an adult to hold. I borrowed it from the library and I was the first person to borrow it as because of its size it had been put into the nursery age boxes, but it’s not really the sort of book that very young children would choose. I think it should really be catalogued under Literature or even Art.
I believe that Robert Macfarlane was inspired to write this book because of the news that words that named natural things such as acorns, bramble, conker and wren were being removed from a children’s dictionary as they were no longer used by most children who nowadays wouldn’t know what they are apparently. I suppose it very much depends where the children live but I know that children’s nurseries in Edinburgh have forest lessons, probably the most popular time of the week for the kids. In any case, surely dictionaries are for looking up the words that you don’t know the meaning of, there’s no way of doing that if the words aren’t in the dictionary! I suppose now people just google everything.
This book costs £20 but it’s a work of art. Some of the profits from the book go to a charity called Action for Conservation.
There’s a flip through of the book on You Tube, it gives you an idea of what is in it but the illustrations are so detailed, you really want to look at them much more closely. The magpies are particularly majestic.
https://youtu.be/uOi1e4ORPQw?si=Aez67e6QQY62K1an
A walk in the woods – in Fife
Dust off your virtual walking boots if you fancy coming with me on a wee walk. It was cold this afternoon but the sun was shining so we decided to take a walk in the afternoon, it has been months and months since we did this walk.
We managed the very steep grassy hill much more easily than we thought we would, and that eventually leads to the snowdrops, they were a bit disappointing as that area seemed to have shrunk since last year, either some of the bulbs have rotted in boggy ground due to all the rain we’ve been having, or the local badgers have been scoffing them!
Sadly quite a few huge trees had been blown over in the recent storms and we had to divert from the path to avoid them. Trees are blown down at every storm nowadays, always the biggest and oldest of course, but there never seems to be any tree planting going on. I see young trees being thrown into the ground and heeled in on TV but what about the old woodlands? They need to be rejuvenated.
Anyway, it was really good to be able to stretch our legs among the trees for a change – and it didn’t rain!
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson was published in 2024 by Penguin Randow House. I borrowed it from the library. It’s the latest in the Jackson Brodie series.
Ex-police detective Jackson Brodie has been hired to investigate the theft of a painting. Dorothy Padgett had died recently and it’s her pension age twin son and daughter who have hired him. The setting is Ilkley in Yorkshire, which boasts a Betty’s Tea Room and it’s the thought of a visit there which is interesting Brodie, he hasn’t been to that one before!
The painting of a woman holding a small mammal in her lap had been in their mother’s bedroom for years, and it’s reputed to be by Turner, but it disappeared at the same time as the woman who had been caring for Dorothy. It seems like a no-brainer, but all is not as it seems of course.
I have to say that I’m not so enamoured of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series but I did quite enjoy this one. The author is an Agatha Christie fan and had wanted to write a sort of homage to her for years apparently. This book is definitely that. It features a large house with servants, a terrible snowstorm with people being stranded, murders of course, plus a group of people who have paid to become part of a murder mystery weekend, oh and I almost forgot the escaped prisoner!
I struggled a bit with this one at the beginning but as it became more amusing I began to enjoy it more.
On page 126 Kate Atkinson has one of her characters claiming that Keighley in Yorkshire was the first place to get a Carnegie Library. I knew that that was nonsense as the Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s first library was commissioned in 1880 and opened in 1883 in his birthplace Dunfermline – as you would expect. It’s still there and is a great library. I did a wee bit of research and discovered that the Carnegie library at Keighley didn’t open until 1924, so there were many others before that one.
If you are interested in Carnegie you can see my post on his birthplace here.
Candy Floss by Rumer Godden
I bought a copy of Candy Floss by Rumer Godden when I went to the book fair at Tynemouth in Northumberland back in the Autumn. The book was published in 1959.
I have most of Rumor Godden’s books so I would have bought this one anyway as I didn’t have it already, but I was really attracted by the illustrations, which were done by Adrienne Adams.
Candy Floss was probably aimed at seven or eight year old girls, but it’s good for ‘children’ of all ages!
Candy Floss is a special doll, she’s made from china but isn’t particularly fancy, in fact her clothes don’t even come off as they’re glued to her body. She’s owned by Jack who has a cocoanut* shy at a fair and he believes that she brings him luck. Many people have tried to buy Candy Floss from him as she has such a sweet face, but she’s not for sale.
Clementina is a spoiled rotten little girl and when she says she wants Candy Floss her father asks to buy her from Jack, with no luck. Clementina can hardly believe it, she ALWAYS gets what she wants. But apparently not this time, so Clementina decides to steal Candy Floss. When they get home Clementina puts Candy Floss into her dolls’ house, a place that Candy Floss has never been and she doesn’t like it. Of course the spoiled Clementina doesn’t take care of Candy Floss and in no time she has a big crack in her body, loose eyes and her dress is torn. Candy Floss just wants to get back to Jack and the cocoanut shy.
After more adventures and jeopardy she gets back to the fair and Clementina learns an important lesson of course!
You can see some Adrienns Adams illustrations for different books here.
*This is how coconut was spelled in the book.