When The rain Stops Falling

Latest trip to the Almeida clever, clever play beautifully acted. Michel Billington puts it much more eloquently below.

It is good to be reminded that there is more to Australian theatre than Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. This superb play by Andrew Bovell has the same fiendishly ingenious cats cradle structure as his Speaking in Tongues, which was filmed as Lantana. And it tackles even richer themes: father-son relationships, the past's ability to devour the future, the cataclysmic nature of the environment.
The action switches geographically between London and Australia and, temporally, between 1959 and 2039; and the connections it weaves are so subtle as to make the story murder to describe.
The pivotal scenes take place in London in 1988, where the 28-year-old Gabriel Law confronts his reticent, alcoholic mother. We learn that Gabriel's father mysteriously decamped to Australia when the boy was seven, sent his son seven cryptic postcards from the outback and disappeared on Ayers Rock. Going back in time, we discover the reasons for the father's exile; and, as Gabriel heads down under to retrace his father's footsteps, we move forwards to see how the past shapes the future.
Henry James talked of discovering "the figure in the carpet", and the crucial figure here is the deterministic nature of time.
Across four generations of a family, people constantly console themselves about the weather by saying "still, there are people drowning in Bangladesh". Saturn is repeatedly invoked in the form of both the planet and the Roman god who consumed his own son. But, for all the play's intellectual ingenuity, what emerges is a pervasive sense of loss and loneliness as fathers disappear and mothers retreat into their own world.
The one false note comes when a character offers an erudite summary of Diderot's Enlightenment philosophy, but even this bears fruit in that Diderot's observation about man's urge to consume more than he needs relates to Bovell's vision.
This is a play for those who enjoy tightly wrought drama. Michael Attenborough's production is also the finest he has done in his Almeida tenure: the combination of Miriam Buether's design and Stephen Warbeck's elliptical piano music perfectly expresses the play's mood. There are glowing performances from Tom Mison as Gabriel, Phoebe Nicholls and Lisa Dillon as his mother's older and younger selves and Jonathan Cullen as the disappearing father.
But all nine actors are equally good and the image of them seated around a table carries an almost Biblical weight. In fact, one of the strangest features of this utterly compelling play is that, for all its rationalist instincts, it suggests that the sins of the father are always visited upon the children.

House Bound by Winifred Peck

House Bound was interesting in showing just how tough a middle class woman used to help found manging without servants. This was the better bit other than that there was a bit too much cod psychology about mothers and daughters.

Still as with all Persephone books well worth a go.

We first read House-Bound by Winifred Peck in 1985 when, in a feature in the Times Literary Supplement, the novelist and critic Penelope Fitzgerald, Winifred Peck’s niece, chose it as one of the books she would like to see reprinted. This was a repeat of the 1977 feature in which Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin both chose Barbara Pym as the novelist they thought most unjustly neglected.
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote: ‘If I could have back one of the many Winifred Peck titles I once possessed I would choose House-Bound. The story never moves out of middle-class Edinburgh; the satire on genteel living, though, is always kept in relation to the vast severance and waste of the war beyond. The book opens with a grand comic sweep as the ladies come empty-handed away from the registry office where they have learned that they can no longer be “suited” and in future will have to manage their own unmanageable homes. There are coal fires, kitchen ranges and intractable husbands; Rose is not quite sure whether you need soap to wash potatoes. Her struggle continues on several fronts, but not always in terms of comedy. To be house-bound is to be “tethered to a collection of all the extinct memories... with which they had grown up... how are we all to get out?” I remember it as a novel by a romantic who was as sharp as a needle, too sharp to deceive herself.’
Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, agreed in 1998 to write about House-Bound;however, we waited to publish the book, and her Preface, because we wanted a good length of time to elapse between its publication and that of the rather similarly titledThe Home-Maker, Persephone Book No.7. So the publication of House-Bound is acelebration not only of Winifred Peck but of Penelope Fitzgerald.
Winifred (nee Knox) was sister to The Knox Brothers, the title of a 1977 book Penelopewrote about her father Evoe Knox and her uncles Dillwyn, Wilfred and Ronald. It is a pity that Winifred hardly appears in that book and in fact it has been difficult to find out anything about her, bar the fact that she was brillliant, like her brothers, was one of the first forty pupils at the pioneering (and still outstanding) Wycombe Abbey School and went to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford to read History. She married when she was 29 and over the next forty years, as well as having three brilliant sons, wrote twenty-five books, mostly novels.
House-Bound was written during the war and the war is both in the background andforeground: one of the questions that the reader is asked throughout the book is – what is courage? This is another book, like Few Eggs and No Oranges, Persephone Book No.9 and A House in the Country, Persephone Book No.31, which gives an incredible picture of life during the war as it actually was rather than viewed with hindsight.
House-Bound also contains a more unusual theme: Rose’s daughter Flora is difficult, petulant and horrible to her mother, which is not something often written about in fiction (for obvious reasons, but perhaps Winifred Peck felt able to write about Flora because she had no daughters). Flora finally turns a corner; but it is painful to read about her until that happens.
Winifred Peck is also funny and perceptive about Rose Fairlaw’s decision to manage her house on her own. For years her family ‘had been free of nine or ten rooms in the upper earth, while three women shared the exiguous darkness of the basement.’ But, like Mollie Panter-Downes or Lettice Cooper, Winifred Peck could foresee the future and wrote informatively and amusingly, not complainingly, about the need for middleclass women to run their home without help, the title of one of our books and a key theme of many of them.

The Horrors

Electric Ballroom 5th June. Brilliant brilliant gig played the whole of Primary Colours sent shivers down the spine but grin inducing happiness as well. One of the best things I have seen for ages. Loved it loved it - listen to the album if you have not already.

A House in the Country

Another Persephone book. Not one of the best but it really did show that very little has changed within England in terms of what people have to give up. I drew the comparison between the second WW and climate change.

The Daily Mail called this 1944 novel 'an elegiac romance that describes social niceties, petty squabbles, self-restraint, all played out in a rural idyll, while abroad thousands die defending that very way of life.' The great interest of Jocelyn Playfair's book for modern readers is its complete authenticity. Set sixty years ago at the time of the fall of Tobruk in 1942, one of the low points of the war, and written only a year later when we still had no idea which way the war was going, A House in the Country has a verisimilitude denied to modern writers. Sebastian Faulks in Charlotte Gray or Ian McEwan in Atonement do their research and evoke a particular period, but ultimately are dependent on their own and historians' interpretation of events; whereas a novel like this one is an exact, unaffected portrayal of things as they were at the time. The TLS praised 'its evocation of the preoccupations of wartime England, and its mood of battered but sincere optimism'; and The Tablet remarked on its 'comic energy, compelling atmosphere and richly apt vocabulary.'

The View Forum 16th May

Fantastic gig at the forum Saturday night. Saw the View just over a year ago at The Astoria. They have come a long way since then a well received second album and a fancy and complex light show. Still the same scamps though and I had forgotten how god their songs were and how good their lyrics are.

Thoroughly good time

PS Sun night there was a Libs reunion just to think one day I might be posting here about seeing them live

The Road Home

The Road Home was my choice for book group and one that was universally liked by the group with an average score of probably 8.5. It was heartwarming, moving, optimistic beautifully crafted and people just didn't want it to finish. the food the interiors and the friendships were what did it for me. the variety of Rose Tremain's writing is also really inspiring.

Observer review Below

On his interminable bus journey across Europe, bound for London, Lev practises his English: 'Excuse me for troubling you.' 'Do you have anything you could give me?' 'I am legal.' Lev's home country has just entered the EU and now he, like so many others, is heading west. His wife, Marina, has died of leukaemia, his five-year-old daughter, Maya, is living with her grandmother and 42-year-old Lev, a former lumberyard worker, now one of Eastern Europe's long-term unemployed, is travelling to London to find work.
Grey with exhaustion, Lev arrives in a dusty, midsummer city. Hope and envy jostle within him. As he told Lydia, his companion on the journey: 'I'm going to their country now and I'm going to make them share it with me: their infernal luck.' Things, however, do not start well: his first night in the city, spent in an Earl's Court B&B, uses up almost all his savings. On his uppers after only 24 hours, he gets a 'job' delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, for which he's paid 2p a leaflet. He sleeps on the street. Desperate, lonely and grieving, he slips into poignant, wistful dreaminess.
For a writer more accustomed to the distant past of the historical novel, the story of a modern-day economic migrant is a bold move, but Rose Tremain does not disappoint. The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. As always, her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision: plants sold in a market are 'fledgling food'; winter is described as having a 'deep, purple cold'; new buds on larch trees are 'a pale dust, barely visible to the eye'.
Bit by bit, Lev gets himself on his feet and so begins a peripatetic, sometimes comic, often painful, journey through London, which Tremain uses to illustrate broader themes: how it really feels to be a foreigner and the rage that being dependent on others can induce. Lev is rescued from the streets by Lydia, who is now staying in the comparative paradise of Muswell Hill with Tom, an English psychotherapist, and Tom's girlfriend, Larissa, a yoga teacher from Lev and Lydia's country. Tremain handles this culture clash with adroitness and humour: sitting on Tom's lavatory, Lev relieves himself 'as quietly as he could. The idea that he was taking a shit in the flat of an English psychotherapist made him feel very mildly afraid'.
Through Lev's eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success. As Lev's Irish landlord Christy says, with some prescience: 'Life's a feckin' football match to the Brits now. They didn't used to be like this, but now they are. If you can't get your ball in the back of the net, you're no one.' Which is pretty much how Lev, working as a kitchen porter, is made to feel. At Lydia's invitation, he goes to a concert at the Festival Hall, but is forced to flee when his new mobile phone goes off in the expectant silence just as the conductor, for whom Lydia is working, takes the podium. On another occasion, his girlfriend takes him to the opening night of a friend's feted new play, only to shame Lev for leaving the price tag on his new suede jacket.
Despite slowly improving circumstances, and the fact that he is now able to send money home, Lev's conscience tugs at him: his daughter, who has lost her mother, is now worried that her father, too, will never return, and the reader also begins to ask why he has really gone and what he is running from. For, in trying to escape the pain of grief, Lev has, ironically, inflicted an experience of terrible loss on his small daughter. All too slowly, he becomes aware of this dilemma and, as he wrestles with it, so the novel approaches its moving and satisfying climax.

The Closed Door

Another fantastic Persephone Book completed. These just are the most fantasic collction of books. Not a big fan of the short story but these were fantastic. Favourite was rhe one abou the affair and the handbag.

The ten short stories in The Closed Door and Other Stories, Persephone Book No. 74, are a selection we have made from the three volumes of stories that Dorothy Whipple published in her lifetime: On Approval in 1935, After Tea and Other Stories in 1941 and Wednesday and Other Stories in 1961. Five of them were read on BBC Radio 4 in October 2007: ‘The Handbag’, ‘Family Crisis’, ‘Wednesday’, ‘Summer Holiday’ and ‘Cover’.
There can be few people reading this Persephone Biannually who are new to Dorothy Whipple, who is one of the stars of our list, so most will recognise the themes explored in her novels. One of the reasons we know that Avery and Ellen (in Someone at a Distance) are good parents is that they speak to their children with courtesy and interest – they would never treat them as ‘dogs’, even puppies. Indeed one of the very worst things about Geoffrey in They Were Sisters is that he is cruel to puppies.
Dorothy Whipple's key theme – it is one with which most Persephone readers will (we hope) identify profoundly – is ‘Live and Let Live’. And what she describes throughout her short stories are people, and particularly parents, who defy this maxim. For this reason her work is timeless, like all great writing. It is irrelevant that Dorothy Whipple’s novels were set in an era when middle-class women expected to have a maid; when fish knives were used for eating fish; when children did what they were told. The moral universe she creates has not changed: there are bullies in every part of society; people try their best but often fail; they would like to be unselfish but sometimes are greedy.
Like George Eliot, like Mrs Gaskell, like EM Forster, Dorothy Whipple describes men and women in their social milieu, which in her case is the inter-war period, and shows them being all-too human. But her books are not nostalgia reads either, any more than reading George Eliot or Forster is a nostalgia read, nor are they old-fashioned or simplistic. We do not read A Room with a View because we want to go to Florence when there were still hansom cabs, or come back to a Surrey where the grocer’s boy delivers. We read Forster because he tells us so much about human nature, and that does not change; and because he is funny, perceptive and writes wonderfully.
Dorothy Whipple’s prose is more straightforward. Here are a few lines from ‘The Closed Door’: ‘There was a dead silence. Even Ernest, so ready with words, was bereft of them. He gaped, with Alice, at Stella, as if she had suddenly gone mad. “Going out with a man!” Alice got it out at last. She leaned forward and thrust her face at her daughter, the better to realise the astounding creature. “You! With a man!” she repeated. Stella smiled radiantly. “Yes, Mother.” “When we thought you were with Beryl Payne, do you mean?” asked Alice. 'Yes, but it doesn't matter now, does it?”’
The prose is pure, uncluttered, straightforward, pared down to the bone; it never labours the point (the key word in these few lines is ‘radiantly’) but most writers would expend sentences telling us about Stella’s demeanour rather than the subtle, throwaway and poignant word (poignant because we know that Stella, like Babs, will be slapped down). Dorothy Whipple's subtlety is the reason why so many people – generally those who have not read her – overlook her excellence. But the TLS wrote in 1941, about After Tea and Other Stories, ‘Nobody is more shrewd than Mrs Whipple in hitting off domestic relations or the small foibles of everyday life’ and in 1961, after the publication of Wednesday and Other Stories: ‘Economy and absence of fuss – these are Mrs Whipple’s outstanding virtues as a writer.’ While Anthony Burgess, notorious for his dislike of ‘women writers’, commented in 1961 that ‘these stories of the commonplace, with their commonplace-seeming style, are illuminating and startling.’Today one of Dorothy Whipple’s most devoted admirers is Sarah Waters, who has written for the cover of the forthcoming Persephone Classics edition of Someone at a Distance that it is ‘a quiet masterpiece of a novel’. Yet ‘editors are mad for action and passion’ her publisher told Dorothy Whipple in 1953 when there were no reviews of Someone at a Distance. What chance does a quiet writer have if action and passion are what is called for?
Dorothy Whipple’s other great strength is that she is a storyteller par excellence. We have published four of her novels and each one is a page-turner; but it is a feat indeed to make a short story into a page-turner since normally a story is a photograph, an impression, an atmosphere. The plots are certainly ‘quiet’ – Ernest and Alice oppress their daughter, a woman is divorced by her husband and only allowed to see her children on Wednesday after-noons, a man puts flowers on his late wife’s grave – but the effect on our empathy for, and understanding of, her characters is profound. Dorothy Whipple is a deeply observant and compassionate - and timeless writer; at last she is being acknowledged as the superb writer we know her to be.

The Blank Wall

Latest of the Persephone books I am getting through them quite well 12 are published a year so I am just ahead of the game. Another thriller god but not as plausible as others I have read.

Persephone Review Below

A suburban matron, harassed by wartime domestic problems - her husband is overseas - finds herself implicated in the murder of her young daughter's extremely unattractive beau' (The New Yorker). An outstanding example of the psychological thriller genre, 'worthy of the great Patricia Highsmith herself,' as Lady Antonia Fraser said in the Spectator. The Blank Wall (1947) was filmed as The Reckless Moment in 1949 and as The Deep End in 2001, starring Tilda Swinton. In 1950 Raymond Chandler asked his English publisher, 'Does anybody in England publish Elisabeth Sanxay Holding? For my money she's the top suspense writer of them all. She doesn't pour it on and make you feel irritated. Her characters are wonderful; and she has a sort of inner calm which I find very attractive.'
This tense and fast-paced novel is about maternal love and about the heroine's relationship with those around her, especially her children and her maid. The Daily Telegraph said that 'the mix of the everyday and the extraordinary is deft... A most welcome return to print' and the Observer called it 'a classic of suspense fiction.'

Friendly Fires The Forum

Last Thursday 30th April the four of us went to The Forum to see Friendly Fires, Boy crisis and Hockey. We sat in the front row upstairs so had a fantastic view but were sadly unable to join the the manic dancing. Really great sound , had a brass section and loads of percussion. I thought this was not the sort of music I would expect posh boys from St Albans to produce but George told me I was wrong. Much to be recommended.

The Enemy Brixton Academy

Saw The Enemy on Sunday night at Brixton. Very good the new material seemed promising and they did focus mainly on the old favourites Lots of sing alongs and a bit football crowd ish. Easy to be cynical about The Enemy but they are relevant and great crowd pleasers and their hearts really are in the right place I think.

Extract fron recent NME Review

Tom dedicates the final ‘You’re Not Alone’ to the redundant heavy-industry workers, it’s clear that The Enemy’s message of keeping your chin up through sour times is only going to be more prescient given what’s happened since they first broke out. What’s not yet clear is whether this is what people want from rock’n’roll at this point, or whether it should – as Eagles Of Death Metal would say – make you forget your job, whether you’ve got one or not. If they’ve judged the mood right, though, The Enemy are about to have one brilliant recession.

Blood Detective Dan Waddell

Audio Book excellent listen heard it in two sittings on the train to and from Plymouth. Murder mystery with a link to the past and a family history research strangely compelling and loads of period detail and information on London.

Amazon Blurb

As dawn breaks over London, the body of a young man is discovered in a windswept Notting Hill churchyard. The killer has left Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his team a grisly, cryptic clue... However it’s not until the clue is handed to Nigel Barnes, a specialist in compiling family trees, that the full message becomes spine-chillingly clear. For it leads Barnes back more than one hundred years - to the victim of a demented Victorian serial killer… When a second body is discovered Foster needs Barnes’s skills more than ever. Because the murderer’s clues appear to run along the tangled bloodlines that lie between 1879 and now. And if Barnes is right about his blood-history, the killing spree has only just begun… From the author of the bestselling Who Do You Think You Are? comes a haunting crime novel of blood-stained family histories and gruesome secrets. . .

A brilliant book bursting with new ideas and a high-tension plot that keeps the pages turning right up until the heart-stopping climax. The story weaves seamlessly from a modern day serial killer investigation to the sinister events of more than a century ago. The writer shows a real relish for London old and new, bringing to life the dark and teeming streets of the Victorian city and the dusty but intriguing world of the various libraries, warehouses and depositaries where the past refuses to stay buried. Surprisingly, it's the headlong charge through the outwardly dull-seeming world of genealogical records that proves the most captivating element in the hunt for the killer. There are vivid, atmospheric descriptions of the labyrinthine places where these secrets can be uncovered that make you want to start hunting yourself - although it's far better to do it in the company of Detective Inspector Grant Foster and genealogist Nigel Barnes.

Parlour Song Almeida Theatre

Very enjoyable theatre trip on Tuesday to see this new play. Was really up to the Almeidas best standards. Toby Jones in particular was excellent and as ever the deign and direction were fab.

Michael Billington in his four star review fort The Guardian puts it so much better than I ever could.

Jez Butterworth's previous plays have taken us from sadistic Soho to remote Dartmoor. Now he forsakes extremes to transport us to one of those new estates, filled with trimly identical houses, on London's outer fringe. But, in the manner of American writers such as John Updike and Richard Ford, he compellingly shows us that suburbia breeds its own madness and melancholia.
His central figure, Ned, a demolition expert, constantly reruns videos of his biggest blasts. On top of this the nightmare-haunted Ned is convinced his teeming possessions, from a stuffed badger to a bust of Aldous Huxley, are being nicked. Ned's wife, Joy, views his progressive breakdown with a mockingly sardonic eye. After 11 years of stifling marriage, she also dreams of escape and comes on strong to next-door neighbour Dale, who hates his car-wash business but is terrified of abandoning his comforting suburban prison.
In a sense, there is nothing startlingly new about Butterworth's ideas. Not only American novelists but our own Alan Ayckbourn have all shown that lust and longing lurk around leafy estates. But Butterworth's play has a wild, contrapuntal humour beautifully articulated by Toby Jones's Ned in two outstanding scenes. Caught by his wife listening to a tape about oral sex techniques, Jones hilariously pretends he is absorbed in a funky Eric Clapton disc. Even better is the moment when the fitness-crazed Ned approaches a barbell with all manner of kung-fu kicks and, finally lifting it above his head, emits guttural howls worthy of King Lear. Jones's performance defines the tragi-comic nature of Butterworth's play.
Ian Rickson's beautifully precise production and Jeremy Herbert's transparent design also evoke a world in which diurnal routine is always in danger of descending into chaos.
Andrew Lincoln's Dale, in the course of inducting Ned into skipping and muscle-stretching exercises, suddenly shoots out his legs as if he were in a Bruce Lee movie. And Amanda Drew as Joy not only maintains an aura of cool disdain but shows her true sexual colours when she approaches her neighbour like one of Pinter's female sirens: A simple line such as "I'm thirsty Dale, why don't you fetch me a lemon?" becomes, in Drew's throaty rendition, an irresistible invitation.
After the more erratic The Night Heron and The Winterling, Butterworth shows that he has a compassionate understanding of the quiet desperation that stalks Britain's new estates. He exactly captures the mundane madness beneath the bland routine of affluence.

Mothers Day

In attempt to avoid feeling downhearted at Mother's Day no one marked. I suggested walk to cafe with Betty and tea and cake. Here are the children and some other photos on the way. Turned out OK no cards but some gifts

Picasso Exhibition

Saw this last Tuesday with Helen. It was good as it followed on from the exhibition we saw in Paris. It was a full retrospective of his work covering 70 years of creativity. His work changed so much in that time but it was all so vibrant and exhilarating

Princes in the Land

Just finished this on my plan to try and read every Perspehone Book. real delight the book keeps saying about how old she feels and she is 46. great insight into how we fail to understand our children. Might choose for book group. Very funny as well

Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan, our Spring 2006 novel, has the same theme as Persephone Book No 41, Hostages to Fortune, a great Persephone favourite: it too is about a woman bringing up a family who is left at the end, when the children are on the verge of adulthood, asking herself not only what it was all for but what was her own life for? Yet the questions are asked subtly and readably.
Having shown us how everything is made bearable for Patricia if her children can be at the centre of her life and, more important (because she is not a selfish woman) if they grow up to fulfil her ideals, Joanna Cannan proceeds to show us her happiness being slowly destroyed. In Princes in the Land the tragedy of the book is that not only do none of the three children live up to their mother’s expectations, she has to watch as each of them takes a path that is anathema to her. Yet of course, she can do nothing about it; nor, sensibly, does she try.
Joanna Cannan began writing early, and her first novel was published when she was 26 (by coincidence, at exactly the same age as Diana Gardner, our other March writer, was first published). From 1922 onwards she published a book a year for nearly forty years – novels; detective novels, including the very successful Death at The Dog, which is in print in America; and the first ‘pony’ book (first in the sense that the focus was on a pony-mad girl rather than a horse or pony), a genre that her daughters Josephine, Diana and Christine Pullein-Thompson were to make very much their own. Princes in the Land is about an interesting and rarely-discussed theme; it is also evocative about Oxford.
Joanna Cannan ‘lived enthusiastically’ and wrote novels that were ‘witty, satirical, even cynical. She presented clashes between idealists and materialists, with no easy solutions’ writes the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (making Joanna Cannan the twenty-sixth of our writers to have an entry in that great dictionary); this is the book of hers with a thematic bite that Persephone readers will find hard to forget.

What I Do Everyday

If this really is all these things that I have done I really ought to report on the thing which I do everyday and that's take Betty the Dog for a walk early in the morning. We walk along the Alban Way until I look across the allotments and the roof tops to get the glimpse of the Abbey which is in the photograph. It never fails to lift my spirits and it has accompanied me all through the winter. Now Spring is coming it looks even better.

Bought a Camera

Here is the first photo loaded to my blog with the new camera which I bought today. I need to get a lot better than this.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Finished this yesterday. Was such a huge gap in my reading really cannot believe I have not read it before. It is the almost perfect book. Everyone at book group last night gave it a 10. I always thought it was just about race but its about so much more, class, gender, mental health, family relationships and the law to name a few. All of the plaudits for it are totally justified and it really is one of those books everyone should read and I really am glad that I have now.

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting

Finished this last night in Birmingham. Was inspired to read it when i read a letter from Amy Rosenthal the playwright saying she cried when finishing it. Absolutely loved it. Its sad and also very funny and bitterly acerbic and made me very grateful to be born when I was. The husband is a particularly grotesque figure emphasised throughout by the physical descriptions of him. Cant recommend highly enough

Blurb from the Persephone web site below.

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, a 1958 novel by Penelope Mortimer, is about the expectations of women, about a house-bound mother reluctantly (desperately) at home all day, in contrast to her daughter who has escaped, to university and then, we can assume, to a job.
‘The book came out at a time,’ writes Valerie Grove (author of the recently published A Voyage Round John Mortimer) in the Preface, ‘when the impact of the new wave of feminism, which would change everything under the banner of women’s liberation, had not yet arrived’.
In Ruth Whiting’s commuter-belt village ‘the wives conform to a certain standard of dress, they run their houses along the same lines, bring their children up in the same way; all prefer coffee to tea, all drive cars, play bridge, own at least one valuable piece of jewellery and are moderately good-looking.’ Yet Ruth is on the verge of going mad. A ‘nervous breakdown’ would be a politer phrase, but really she is being driven mad by her life and her madness is exacerbated by everyone’s indifference to her plight.

Although Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is at times excruciatingly funny in its caustic dissection of the people among whom the Whitings live, it is also a profound study of female isolation. As the critic Judy Cooke has pointed out, Penelope Mortimer’s novels were ‘intense, imaginative explorations of an inner world. It is an enclosed world, dominated by fear, in which physical experiences such as sterilisation and abortion isolate her characters from their fellow beings and are metaphors for a deeper spiritual isolation.’

Doubt

Went to see this with Jenny on Tuesday following strong recommendations. I did not really like it very much, thought it was slow and did not really develop the themes at all it seemed very long as well. I would not recommend to anyone to see this.

Fidelity by Susan Glaspell

Just finished reading this book. It is about the impact that a young woman's affair with a married man has on a small community in Iowa in 1915. It is so modern in its attitudes to sex and adultery. At the end the heroine finally gets the Chance to marry the man she has been living with but turns her back on him and goes by herself to New York to start a new life.The main thing she wants in her life is to be "Moving On" something I should probably be doing a bit more.

Review here from the Persephone web site.

Fidelity (1915) is a classic that should be put beside books by writers such as Edith Wharton and Willa Cather; yet the novels of Susan Glaspell, who was once considered America's greatest living playwright apart from Eugène O'Neill (and who is best-known for her short play, 'Trifles') have been ignored.

Set in Iowa in 1900 and in 1913, this dramatic and deeply moral novel uses complex but subtle use of flashback to describe a girl named Ruth Holland, bored with her life at home, falling in love with a married man and running off with him; when she comes back more than a decade later we are shown how her actions have affected those around her. Ruth had taken another woman's husband and as such 'Freeport' society thinks she is 'a human being who selfishly - basely - took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it... One who defies it - deceives it - must be shut out from it.'

Peculiar Crimes Unit Series

Have just finished listening to the The Victoria Vanishes the sixth and latest in the Peculiar Crimes Unit Series. I love these books especially all the information they contain about London and its history. They are also beautifully read. The mysteries within them are really secondary to the characters, the history and the sense of place.

Here is a review

The Victoria Vanishes is the sixth in a series featuring the Peculiar Crimes Unit. The unit, as its name suggests, investigates all crime in London which does not come under the logical jurisdiction of the other branches of the Metropolitan Police. Senior Detective Arthur Bryant and his partner, Senior Detective John May having just solved a crime which took place in the country, are back in London preparing for the funeral of pathologist Oswald Finch. Finch died during this previous case and both detectives along with the rest of the Peculiar Crimes staff are mourning his loss.

In addition, Bryant is feeling his age, noticing some memory loss, which he is told is normal as a result of exposure to the elements in the just concluded case. Bryant, however, is seriously considering retirement even going so far as to write a letter of resignation which he surreptitiously delivers to his superior Raymond Land. May has problems of his own; having just received news that he has cancer and must have immediate surgery.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit itself has received another ultimatum from the Home Office. Their unit will be shut down, and their offices will be inhabited by another branch of the system. Since Brant, May and company have just been assigned a case involving the unusual deaths of several middle aged single women all in famous London pubs, they are determined to see the successful end of what may be their last case. Bryant volunteers his flat as the command post for their operation as their offices at Mornington Crescent have been reassigned to another unit.

Bryant takes extra interest in the case when he realizes he has met one of the victims near The Victoria, a quaint pub. He is rattled and concerned about his memory loss when he discovers that The Victoria no longer exists and, in fact, has not existed since 1927. He rethinks his resignation in light of getting to the bottom of this intriguing case as well as proving that the pub, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, did, indeed, exist and he had seen it.

Christopher Fowler presents a refreshing change from the usual serial murder mystery. There is an emphasis on the puzzle aspect of the crimes, a liberal dose of humor, and a decided lack of both blood and gore and steamy bedroom scenes. The pub that exists or doesn’t and Bryant’s misplacement of Finch’s ashes are reminiscent of Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder and his madcap plans. Clues are presented and mulled over, encouraging the reader to think through the evidence along with the detectives.

The utilization of London pubs as the scenes of crimes allows the author to introduce his readers to a bit of London history as well as alert them to the present day plight of these historic landmarks. It is a pity to think that these quaint places may soon give way to more sterile modern structures.

Fowler’s humor is subtle, appealing to the intellect rather than the obvious. He is a master of his craft and uses his talents wisely. From the direction the novel takes at the end of the book, it would not be surprising if this book is the last of the series. Mr. Fowler’s aptitude as a writer, however, ensures, I hope that we will see other examples of his expertise in the future.

Peter Doherty

Saw Peter's solo show at Shepherds Bush last night. Wasn't really solo as was joined by Graham Coxon, Drew and Adam. Did mainly material from the new album which all sounded fantastic. He was in strong voice and the show was very together. Began with an acoustic version of Music When the Lights Go Out which sent shivers up your spine. Finished with Time for Heroes which gave you a small glimpse of what it must have been like to see The Libertines - everyone went wild. Nightmare journey home though not in till 1.00am.

Full review and song list here http://www.nme.com/news/pete-doherty/42950

NME Tour Brixton

Saturday night saw the NME tour at Brixton Academy. Florence and the Machine, White Lies, Friendly Fires and Glasvegas. All genuinely exciting fresh, new and thrilling all in different ways. Am so glad that I can still feel like that about live music, the thrill as the lights dim and the band takes the stage there is really nothing like it. Highlight was Unfinished Business when Florence joined White Lies on stage and then dived into the crowd.

Better than last year (apart from the Cribs and Johnny Marr turning up) and the sound was far better. Only £15 as well for four such brilliant bands.

Milk

Saw this Oscar nominated film yesterday with Helen and Paul. Excellent especially the central performance from Sean Penn who was just camp enough as Harvey Milk the first publicly gay man elected to public office in the US. Although I lived through these times and considered myself aware of things this was all new to me even all the stuff about Proposition 6 which is the central battle in the film. Was heartwarming about political activism and he was murdered before the rot set in.

Really well worth the trip.

Exhibition Tate Modern

Went to collect my Angie Lewin print from Bankside today and called in at the Tate to see this exhibition. really enjoyed it though it was also very sad when you saw all that optimism about building anew world and new way of being and how it all went bad. Was also interesting to see that what gave Popova (the women artist) some of the most satisfaction was fashion and textile designs. Lots of propaganda and film posters including ones for Battleship Potemkin.

Have hung the print in the dining room like it though I imagine the rest of the family will hate it.

My First Gallery Purchase

Here is the first picture which I have bought at a Gallery. It is called Totem and its by Angie Lewin http://www.angielewin.co.uk/ I bought it at the St Judes in the City Exhibition at Bankside gallery and it was very exciting as I got to stick the red dot under the picture. I have not been able to collect it yet but will got this week as its half term.

How Do You Do That

Just trying to work out how to get links in the text to go to things that I might want to highlight like this from the last play I saw at The Almeida http://www.almeida.co.uk/production_details/production_details.aspx?code=77 there must be a way of making that snappier I will find out .

First Post

Well here goes first post. Have kept a written journal for much of my life but this is a first for me. I will try and do as I do in that medium by adding links to things I have done, seen , listened to, read or experienced with pictures instead of the tickets and cards i stick in my paper version. Its going to be a secret from family and friends.

Am inspired by some of the blogs I follow closely so I am sure it will be derivative but only I will have the unique combination of all the things that I have done.

First image is one connected with Vanessa Bell who I have been spending a lost of time reading about and looking at her work. Given her prolific output I bet she would have been a busy blogger