Resolution No. 4

There is still one day left in the month so I can make another resolution:

Tomorrow I will stop procrastinating.

The pics posted have nothing to do with this, except that I did intend to post them on flickr and now think I will just leave them here. I was just messing around with textures.

Resolutions, no. 3

Stick to the diet

Resolutions, no. 2

Don't disturb the dust

Resolutions, no. 1

Believe in myself

The burning leg

Walking Scenes from Classic Fiction
Hesperus Press
ISBN 978-1-84391-715-1

A delicious little hardback, bound in blue cloth, with dust jacket, sent to me kindly by Hesperus Press.

Compilations are strange things – rather like buffet meals. I never know whether I should just plunge in and help myself to a little of whatever I fancy, or start at the beginning and work my way to the end of the table, tasting a bit of everything. Either way, I always eat too much.

Considering that I promised to review it, I read this book from beginning to end, starting with the appetizer (a foreword by Will Self), the hors-d’oeuvre (introduction by the editor Duncan Minshull) and all the main courses, dessert and the petit-fours of the last pages (a quotation, the acknowledgements, and a biographical note).

On the very first page I had one of those “light-bulb flashing above the head” moments when Will Self mentions Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“It was Rousseau, a great walker, who observed that we think at walking pace; and while I went on to have a perfectly troubled relationship with my father, in the decade since his death I have come to prize his legacy, which was this: all those thoughts divulged at walking pace; the steady 4/4 beat of his metre as he read the landscape then interpreted it for me.” Of course! that's why I prefer to walk down to the railway station every morning, rather than catch the bus: these 20 minutes of regular footfalls are indeed the best moment for me to think, to imagine, to compose wonderful sentences in my head, which I try to jot down when I get into the train or they disappear for ever.

The extracts are irregular, ranging from Milton and Paradise Lost to Kipling and Kim. I very much enjoyed Mark Twain’s account of climbing the Rigi-Kulm, Edith Wharton’s walk through the streets of Paris, “like the unrolling of a vast tapestry from which countless stored fragrances were shaken out”, the scene of The Return of the Native where Mrs Yeobright walks over the heath in the heat to visit Clem and Eustacia, and the exquisite moment in Anna Karenina, when Koznyshev is all keyed up to propose to Varenka, then suddenly blurts out “What difference is there between the white boleti and the birch-tree variety?”

Probably each reader will find his or her own favourite passages. However, I was a little disappointed by the choice. Although the words "walk", "foot", "leg" are probably mentioned in all of them, I rarely found that the extracts illustrated the concept of walking, the burning leg. Perhaps I should have just dipped in here and there.

Fighting France: from Dunkerque to Belfort

By Edith Wharton, hesperus press, ISBN 978-1-84391-451-8
Foreword by Colm Toibin
Librarything Early Reviews
Reading this intelligent and informative book at a time when France is simmering and often revelling in its governmental ineptitude and the déconfiture of its national football team is at once surreal and sobering. Surreal, because the courageous and unsentimentally patriotic nature of the people so acutely observed by Edith Wharton seems light years away from that of the irascible and excitable French nation today. Sobering, when I realised that almost 100 years have passed since World War I, and even though my parents were not born until 1917, it stills feels like part of my own history.
In 1914 Wharton, living in Paris, was in a position to make a motor tour as far as the Front in Northern France and Belgium, in order to inspect the conditions of the hospitals and assess the needs of the medical services. Visiting the trenches, she saw first-hand the wounded and the dying, the deserted or destroyed villages and towns. Her descriptions (apart from the more analytical first and last chapters, The Look of Paris and The Tone of France, respectively) are written in the form of a travel journal, and are so precise and detailed that they could be used today as settings for films. But what I found most moving were her compassionate encounters with the troops; it is as if she can see into their souls.
To quote: "It is not too much to say that war has given beauty to faces that were interesting, humorous, acute, malicious, a hundred vivid and expressive things, but last and least of all beautiful. Almost all the faces about these crowded tables - young or old, plain or handsome, distinguished or average - have the same look of quiet authority; it is as though all the nervosity, fussiness, little personal oddities, meannesses and vulgarities, had been burnt away in a great flame of self-dedication. It is a wonderful example of the rapidity with which purpose models the human countenance."
As often happens: a coincidence. Yesterday I was researching a botanical garden in the south of France for a guide book; the text mentioned that the house had been built by the man who discovered the Venus de Milo. Looking up his name, I discovered that the same house had been bought by Edith Wharton in 1927, and it was she who planted the exotic garden. I am glad she spent her last years in a country she so appreciated, surrounded by peace and beauty.
This is the first work I have read by Edith Wharton; thanks to Hesperus Press for letting me review it - I shall certainly look for more of her books. This edition is small and light, easy to read, well produced with cover flaps that I always find useful to mark my page. I would have liked a map to follow her journeys; it would be interesting to travel the same routes today. And oops, a little typo, p.4 line 17, form instead of from.

On the art of making up one's mind

A very pleasing book in its weight and feel, comprising, maybe not a banquet, but five tasty snacks to dig into between meals:
On the art of making up one's mind
On the disadvantage of not getting what one wants
On the exceptional merit attaching to the things we meant to do
On the time wasted in looking before one leaps
On the inadvisability of following advice.
There is also a foreword, which after reading I realise I must not say that this is by the author of Three Men in a Boat, a biographical note at the end, and one page devoted, rather wastefully, to two small notes which would have been easier to find had they been footnotes, and which are not referenced to the relevant pages, so that although I know the second one explains the meaning of unco guid, because it says so, I can no longer remember the Latin term referred to in note 1 and will have to search through the text to find it.
Oh I really didn't mean to write such a long sentence.
JKJ writes in an erudite and amusing style, and I found his conclusions comforting and reassuring. I will remember the phrase "Your fireworks won't go off while the crowd is around. Our brilliant repartees do not occur to us till the door is closed upon us and we are alone in the street..." etc., and I will kick myself less often.

Thank you to hesperus press for sending me this book to review. I will put it on the shelf between My Life and Times and Three Men... and take it down now and then when I'm feeling peckish for a little wit.

The paraphernalia of life

This morning I was dusting the bookcase when I lifted the lid of a small ceramic pot that sits on there and noticed a lot of spare metal "taquets", the little things you stick into the holes in the bookcase sides to support the shelves. It suddenly occurred to me that I could use these to mend the broken shelf in the hall cupboard, which has been supported by a wooden box for the past few years when one of the plastic taquets snapped. So I removed everything from the cupboard, cleared out a load of cobwebs and muck, and fixed up the bottom shelf again. Then put everything back, in reasonable tidy order. I found:

- a small elephant tin containing an unidentifiable substance which my husband reckons is incense but could well be Greek barbecue herbs (it no longer smells of anything)
- my Harrogate toffee tin containing my mother's army stripes and ATS badges, as well as a mysterious Australia Commonwealth troops badge (just wondering where I put her medals)




- my circular knitting needles (have been looking all over for them)
- an empty wooden box that once contained a bottle of wine (have kept it, will be useful for putting things in)
- two wooden shelves for shoes without the side supports, plus two small blue bathroom shelves and a plastic CD rack complete with screws (with reluctance, I decided to throw these out)
- a carrier bag from La Maison in Lausanne; can't remember what I can possibly have bought in that over-priced shop where the owner used to watch me suspiciously and hover around whenever I went to look around downstairs
- my chocolate fondue set (used once)
- a small round tin that once held herbal sweets


- three different kinds of cat shampoo (all tried once)
- a putty gun for sealing round the bathtub
- a daffodil-patterned gift box for an Easter egg
- a tiny pair of underpants and socks (spares from when my grandson was little)
- a ceiling lamp and a wall lamp from our previous apartment
- the missing glass plate from my antique cheese cover
Somehow, I feel a lot lighter!
The ceramic pot with spiral pattern on the lid came from Windermere; my German penfriend Marga bought it for my mother when we spent a damp week there in the 1960s. It's one of the things I salvaged from the house when my mother died.