After several weeks of extensive investigative surgery, and a final bypass operation yesterday, I am overjoyed to announce that my daily task of draining the washing machine manually via that little door (bottom left), are well and truly over.

The beast is still dragged out from under the work-surface, and operating on bypass, but we are confident that his circulation will be back to normal when we put him and his hoses back where he belongs.

I love mod cons!

I thought that was quite an amusing blogpost title. White tigers are RARE and I said WELL DONE. No, oh well never mind. Back to congratulating author Aravind Adiga  his book “White Tiger” being the winner of the Booker Prize 2008.

I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of the book by DoveGreyReader and even luckier that it arrived some while before a week’s holiday in a comfy cottage in Cornwall. Have you ever been so fired up about something that you thought about writing a letter to your Member of Parliament or a newspaper or just anyone so that you get get your feelings about something off your chest? Maybe you have a blog and that is where you let off steam.

The main protagonist in Adiga’s book IS the White Tiger and

I just had an email from one. Her name is Dindga McCannon and she is an author, illustrator and talented textile artist from New York.

She materialised in front of my eyes almost a year ago to this day at the Knitting and Stitching Show at Ally Pally when I was looking for someone I had never even seen a photograph of but knew was a black artist. I had been stalking anyone who looked as they they might be my “target”. When I walked up to Dindga and said for the umpteenth time, “excuse me, are you …..?” she smiled and replied, “no but she’s a good friend of mine.” How weird was that? We spent a day together last October (pic above is of Dindga outside the Geffrye Museum on that day) and we have kept in spasmodic contact since. Weeks ago she told me she would probably pop over for the show again this year but we haven’t emailed recently and I decided not to go this year. Last year I bought some Habo stainless steel yarn and I haven’t knitted it up yet because I didn’t ever allow myself enough time to get to grips with the Japanese knitting diagrams. Feeling guilty about that particular part of my stash I thought it best to stay at home with my debit card out of harm’s way.

So suddenly, up popped an email from this textile angel asking me to meet her at a set time “by the giant knitting needles”.  I emailed back saying I wasn’t going this year but she took the trouble to phone me straight away and persuaded me to get out of the house for the day.

Giant knitting needles here I come!

I came across this notebookon the website of Culture Vulture Direct

It is described as “Books to Check Out Journal”: Handy notebook for any bookworm, with sections for making notes of Booksto read, listing Booksborrowed and cataloguing favourite reads. Hardback, 17cm (6 3/4″) x 110 cm (4 1/2″), 2 pockets.

I can think of several people I know who wouldn’t mind finding this in their Christmas stocking.

This book has been on the giant toppling TBR pile by my bed so large that I had to start reading it before it toppled off the heap and killed me. I don’t think that I will give anything away by saying that the narrator of the book is is a woman who “had begun enquiring about domestic help the momemt we finished moving our library-sized collection of books and our rickety old furniture”. Literary and film experience has shown that likely candidates for such a position can range from Jane Eyre, Mrs Harris and Mary Poppins by way of Mrs Doubtfire and Nanny McPhee up to The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. In this case the successful applicant is a cross between Mrs Harris and Mrs Doubtfire, without the drag or the haute-couture aspirations. A couple of decades ago I came across a similar individual. She “did” for most of the big houses near our small flat and an arrangement was only entered into if SHE decided to take you on and not the other way around. The penultimate sentence of the third page states, “I killed Emerence” so a chill that is not just generated by summer swiftly turning to autumn here is definitely hovering around. This book is definitely accompanying me on a weeks’s holiday starting tomorrow.

What a title! What on earth can the book be about? If I’m honest I don’t really care. With a title like that I know that sooner or later I will will have to read it. The book is published by Gallic Books a publisher I have never heard of but already i am tempted to see what else has been put out into the world by them. So far, and before I have even seen it or held it in my hands, this book has gained two points, Firstly it has a title that intrigues, secondly it has a cover that is more than acceptable and probably as elegant as the spiny one that it contains, I think that before long I will have to get my hands on this volume and I have a feeling that it will jump towardds the top of the TBR pile. If you are as intrigued by the title as I was then you can read the beginning of the book on Gallic’s website.

Life, work, quilting, everything seems to have come before reading this book which I have been carrying backwards and forwards to work on the train for what seems like long enough for me to have harvested my owngarlic crop.

The book is not an easy read. For one thing everyone seems to be called Gao or Fourth Uncle/Aunt or Elder Brother. On this naming problem alone the book is more complicated to navigate than any Russian tome. I think that if I started to read this book again I would note down a new major character as they appeared. My problem was mainly with the Gaos. One Gao was all set to elope with 4th, or was it 8th Uncle’s daughter, and she confusingly referred to her prospective joint-elopee as “Elder Brother” as a mark of respect rather than any indication that they were siblings. Another Gao was flung into jail but then so were so many others, including xth Aunt and goodness knows who else. I should have understood, before I started that in China John Smith would be known as Smith John, his brother would be Smith Michael and probably at least half the population would also be Smith something or other. If each chapter hadn’t started with a few words from a ballad written to commemorate something in e.g 1987 I would have forgotten that this book is set in the 1980s. Life is so primitive and the treatment of people both by their families and by the authorities and police is barbaric. We’re not like that are we? Have things moved on so much in 20 or 30 years? Last night I saw a few minutes of a programme about police shows on TV. The part that I saw was talking about “The Sweeney” made in the mid to late 1970s and co-starring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman. The programme mentioned the fantasy police series “LIfe on Mars” in which a present day policeman finds himself transported back in time and working with a detective who is close to being a clone of Reegan, the character played by John Thaw in “The Sweeney”. With hindsight the attitude and behaviour of the police in those programmes is unacceptable but at the time it was just how things were. We in the west are not so lily-white and without fault as we get on our high-horses and look down on how things are done in China. We are a very small nation and we still haven’t cleaned up our act completely so we shouldn’t be too quick to criticise others.

Reading “The Garlic Ballads” helped me to understand how rural and primitive China is, or at least still was at the end of the 1980s. Think how things have changed for us in that same space of time. Did you have a computer, an internet connection, a mobile phone in the 1980s? Now think how much of your daily life is influenced by those three things today. Because of the Olympics China has opened up. Let’s hope that that enormous country can learn from some of our mistakes.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, I still haven’t finished the book.

Surprise all around. Seven promising candidates banished from any chance of appearing in this production!

One entrant proved to be more suitable for a part than was immediately obvious and as you can see Mustard Indigo Tie-Dye is on stage for the duration of the performance. My initial thought was that he would make an ideal backstage team (back of the quilt) but his personality was uncrushable. My original favourite was an off-cut with a white background and crisp orange flowers and green leaves but in reality he couldn’t hold the note long enough and was sent home to the scrap bag with his tail between his legs.

Now the problem with Mr Mustard Indigo is that he can’t quite make it to the end of the run and I am frantically preparing some additional pieces to complete the season. This weekend I shall be dyeing and hope that I can create a piece of cloth that will fit in with what has already been sewn together.

Mr Mustard Indigo’s parentage is uncertain. I bought him at a jumble sale and he has lurked in my stash for almost a year. I wonder if he is the result of a union between an indigo vat and a session of rust-dyeing? I suppose I will never know. I am not so adventurous and so this Bank Holiday weekend I will be dunking some unsuspecting mousey bit of fabric in a couple of packets of Dylon.

Make sure you sit facing the door

and try not to hear the clippity-clop of your colleague’s shoes as they walk across the floor.

L I S T EN

one day a woman bought a book

she thought it was slim and contained almost nothing

but as she read she was entranced and couldn’t put it down

she was transported to another land and the magic took such a hold of her that she nearly forgot

to get off her train

“Strange Words” by Patrick Chamoiseau,

and in my edition published by Granta, is a charming little book of Creole stories.

I love the way the shape of the words on the page help to tell the story and draw you in.

The themes are as old as the hills.

A stranger who turns out to be something more than they first appear.

A young beautiful girl moves away from her family and is shown round her new home

but told not to enter some rooms….

I picked up this book with the intention of sending it to my baby sister who is currently writing her first novel which could loosely be classified as “magical realism”. But the book has cast its spell on me and every time I reach for an envelope the book whispers its transfixing incantation,

Keep me, keep me

I am  yours

F  O  R  E  V  E  R

Yes, I do know that the Beijing Olympics are in full swing but it is purely coincidental that this book was at the top of my TBR pile. Where did it come from and why did I buy it. Please don’t expect any erudite answer.

Some of you may remember that Simon of Stuck-in-a-Book posted some sort of question about an A-Z of favourite authors. Of course, now that I’ve gone looking for the original post, I can’t find it. Anyway, on a lunchtime jaunt to the newly re-arranged Kingston Oxfam bookshop I decided to find a few authors from the less populated letters of the alphababet. One lucky find was “Kitchen” by Banana Yoshimoto, described as “what it means to be young and frustrated in modern Japan”.

Although written by an author, also beginning with a “Y”, “The Garlic Ballads” by Mo Yan feels as if it is written about another time, rather than just another country. I knew that the book was set in almost contemporary times by references to items such as cars etc and, later on in the book, someone’s father had done something in 1949 but the feeling was of long ago. I was quite shocked to find that the time-frame is 1988 as so many of the behaviours and attitudes are archaic. It may be illegal to beat your young adult daughter but it still appears to be common practice. The chapters are headed with verses from ballads written by a musician about the garlic troubles. Garlic is a very profitable crop and the farmers are encouraged by the government to give much land over to its production but sadly there is a glut and intertwined with more personal stories we learn more about this agricultural situation.

I work for a picture library and over the past few months many images of the amazing Chinese Olympic buildings, the “Bird’s Nest, the water Cube”, have passed before my eyes. The images conjured up by Mo Yan in “The Garlic Ballads” provide a thought-provoking contrast.

The academic year is over and it’s time for Harry Potter (alias The Loom Monkey) to return south.

But first he has to show Hermione (alias My Little Darling) around Durham

From Prebends Bridge that iconic view of the towers of Durham Cathedral

The sanctuary knocker

and those summer daisies that always add a magical touch to a graveyard

Readers in over 90 countries now log on to the daily blog of self-confessed bookworm Dovegreyreader, alias Lynne Hatwell.
At dovegreyreader.com book reviews, suggested “reading trails”, visits to literary events, stately homes and wonderful scenery rub shoulders with insights into the family life of this blogger who has the distinction of being archived for posterity by the British Library. Readers feel like members of an extended family as they share in events such as the publication of her drummer-boy father’s biography and the rescuing of a family of ducklings. As well as inspiring avid and lapsed readers alike, DGR is a health visitor in a scattered rural area. For years she has been advocating books as therapy and always has a shelf of books ready to “prescribe” to those in her care.

The blog has grown from many years of keeping a “book of books”, a list of all the books read by Dovegreyreader complete with her thoughts and comments. As happy in the 21st century as in any of the centuries about which she reads, Dovegreyreader has kept up with technology first of all moderating an online book group of like-minded individuals and then seizing the newfound joy of blogging. Along with her excellent suggestions for reading comes the chance to win books in periodic book draws. Publishers have realised the power of this blog and eagerly send DGR, as she is affectionately known, books to share with her coterie. All draws for these goodies are undertaken by Rocky, the cat, master of the aga. Anyone who finds themselves in need of reading suggestions, with the added advantage of the occasional chance to win a free book, should take themselves to www.dovegreyreader.com If a virtual taste of DGR is not enough, then tickets to hear her speak at Dartington’s Way with Words literary festival at 1130 on Sunday, 13th July 2008 are available for £5 from the festival website at www.wayswithwords.co.uk

I now have 2 rows of 5 blocks all sewn together, another 5 rows of 5 to go. By the time i get to the end my suturing of the wadding will be so practiced that I will be able to moonlight as a surgeon.

Yesterday was my birthday and so I have no guilty conscience about having a bog-free day. Here are two of my cards: on the left, cowparsely from my baby sister, Anne and on the right a textile design by Jacqueline Groag from my work colleagues. Isn’t it wonderful when you receive just the cards that you would have chosen for yourself.

I am still reading, and loving, Eucalpytus by Murray Bail. The chapters have become shorter and are an ideal length for my four stops on the train from home to work and back again. I have to confess that I have almost consciously taken to catching trains that my “train friends” WON’T be on because of course you can’t really stick your head in a book when someone you know is sitting next to you and eager to chat about what an awful day / amazing holiday they have just had. Sometimes I even have to speak French, or to be more accurate, listen at French because a lovely woman from Paris travels in my direction every now and then. She speaks at breakneck speed and with a heavy accent so I have to maintain close eye contact, as well as watching the movements of her lips, in a vain attempt to use all my senses to take in the information so that my poor brain can compute the data into something that makes sense. I resort to smiles and nods and once every few paragraphs of her stream of consciousness I interject a v e r y s l o w attempt at a sentence which she corrects charmingly for me and then speeds off again in her narrative. So by leaving for work later than the train gang and leaving for home after they have travelled, I am able to breathe in the Eucalyptus fumes for a few moments.

Yesterday I went to the second part of a two-part workshop on how to do “Quilting-as-you-go” tutored by Carolyn Forster.

On the first day, six weeks ago, she showed us masses of her quilts made using this method.

Then we had the tough job of deciding which block design we would make and we began cutting up fabric and piecing our blocks.

She showed us how each block was sandwiched together and quilted as an individual block, just leaving a couple of inches of the “frames” unquilted so that they could be joined together later.

Each of the completed blocks measures 16″ x 16″ and I have 35 of them all quilted up and ready to join together in rows. Each row will consist of 5 blocks and will have 7 rows, so it will be quite a big quilt. As they say in the US “you do the math(s)”.

On the left you can see one completed block, made up of a sandwich of: a pieced top, wadding, backing fabric. On the right is a bag containing the remaining 30 blocks waiting to be joined together in another 6 rows.

Not content with having been immersed in sewing all day I was so inspired by seeing Carolyn’s sweet little drawstring, circular needlework bag that I had to cut out and try to make one myself. Inside it had six pockets for reels of thread etc. i also made a matching needlecase. I can’t show it to you because I have packed it all up to send to a friend of mine. She has moved several times in the last few years and when I visited her in her latest home I was horrified that serial clearouts had left her without a sewing bag/box. She confessed to me that she had no needle and thread in the whole house. She has been on my mind since I discovered this distressing situation and now I hope that my late-night sewing session will ensure that her new home is complete.

On the reading front I forgot to tell you about the recently completed “An Artist of the Floating World” by
Kazuo Ishiguro. This lets us into the world of an artist in post-war Japan. Those who have read “The Remains of the Day” will be familiar with the author’s gentle measured style of writing which suits this story in which a widowed artist is faced with arranging a marriage for his second daughter. We experience with him the difficulties of adapting to social and political changes which have a direct effect on his immediate family.

i have moved on to “Eucalyptus” by Murray Bail which coincidentally also deals with how to ensure that a suitable partner is found for a daughter. We may laugh at Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennett and Emma with their matchmaking preoccupations but both books that I mentioned above emphasise that the problem is still uppermost in the minds of many a parent and friend. The quilt I am making is for my only daughter. She should really be making it herself as part of her bottom drawer and I should be making use of the ladies at my quilting bee to search out a spouse for her.

Today both Dovegrey Reader and Stuck in a Book write about similar subjects: the stories behind people at the end of their lives. It makes me wonder about the lives of those I see all around me. None of them appear to be “ordinary” but maybe that is the whole point of life or lives, each of them extraordinary in their own way.

The photo above is of the house where my father and his siblings were born. As I grew up I thought that my father was one of three children. After his death I learnt that he was one of four; he had a half-brother who he knew as his cousin until a day in the the early 1970s when his sister and half-brother came to visit us. After my mother’s death I discovered that in fact he and his siblings were the second family of his father.

Researching family history I asked my aunt to fill in some gaps for me. Little did I expect the thirteen page letter that arrived , spilling its contents into my head like a Catherine Cookson saga. The letter and my own research caused episode after episode to unfold until truth became as unbelievable as fiction. In 1850, in Oxfordshire a twenty-nine year old spinster named Charity gave birth to my grandfather Charles, a name he would convieniently share with his second family’s other grandfather. For several years they lived with her parents and siblings but by 1861 her father was dead, her brother was head of the household and she and her child disappeared from view. We can only imagine the dramatic scene in Episode x of this saga. “Father is dead, I am head of the family now and you can get out and take that bastard with you.” My aunt’s sanitised version of her father’s early life was that he grew up in an orphanage. The harsher reality was that he spent his growing and early adult years in the workhouse. Merely seeing the word on paper, or reading it in your head conjures up awful images. Superficially it doesn’t appear to have harmed Charles. It seems to have at least instilled the work ethic into him. He stayed on once he was an adult to become first a “porter” and later “Assistant Labour Master”. I suppose that the workhouse and Poor Law was the forerunner of the Social Security system and indeed my grandfather took advantage of the system as much as anyone sitting for their Civil Service exams in later years. By the beginning of the twentieth century he had risen to being Registrar and Relieving Officer for an area stretching from Henley to Ascot. In other words people came to him to register births and deaths and he doled out Poor Relief. When he died he left a house (see above), a field and a cow. Nor bad for a boy from the workhouse.

If you want to see next week’s episode now, the tune into Channel X !

Well here’s my contribution to that genre: Love is ….. a TWODALOO !!

I’m frankly speechless. If you really want to read more then please do.

I’ve almost finished reading NOAH’S ARK by Barbara Trapido but I have been annoyed and distracted by a couple of errors which should I think have been picked up by an editor. Quite early on there was a reference to the books of Beatrice Potter. That niggled away at me and, although a little self-doubt crept in, I was in danger of being stared at on the train for chuntering out loud, “I know I’m right, I can’t have been wrong all these years.”

It upset me so much that when the train stopped at my station I left my bookmark in the offending page rather than the page I was reading. Of course I did nothing and next day on the train I reassigned the bookmark to its more usual function. Dear old B Potter popped up later in the book, this time with her name spelt correctly as BeatriX. I was pleased that someone in publishing knew the woman’s name enough to spell it correctly. However, I was still astounded with the inconsistency of things.

All this would have been forgotten but this morning, when I can’t be more than 12 pages from the end of the book I see that the editor has been slacking again:
Hattie at first was not to be coaxed from the darkness of her bedroom where she sobbed under a Hollie Hobbet quilt.

Now anyone who was around in the late 1970s will know that Hattie’s quilt was Hollie Hobby NOT Hobbet. I could forgive an alternative spelling of Holly because quite frankly I don’t know which is correct. We had an enormous real child-sized HH rag doll and I have a feeling that her removeable prairie-style dress might still be lurking in my house now. The location of the corpse of poor HH is something about which I have no idea.

Am I talking about the Heals curtain fabric in the background, COTTAGE GARDEN that originally sold for £10 9s a yard or the talented textile designer Mary White pictured here with her design?  Well if I look as good at 58 as Mary does at 78 then I’ll be happy and if I could ever create something as fresh and exciting as COTTAGE GARDEN , let alone something that still looks modern over 50 years later, the I would be ecstatic.

It’s no wonder that Mary’s daughter-in-law, Sarah Dening couldn’t bear to leave the unused designs gathering dust in the loft. Sarah is married to one of Mary’s sons and his penchant for wearing distinctive shirts must surely have been Sarah’s inspiration for bringing Mary’s “lost” designs to light as exclusive men’s shirts.

Mary never gave her designs names, she left that fanciful part of affairs to the manufacturers who snapped up her designs. Her clients read like a textbook of  textile design history: Heals, Liberty, David Whitehead, Turnbull & Stockdale, Gayonne …. I could go on because Mary was indefatigable in the way she traipsed around with her portfolio putting each new batch of her designs in front of  the textile buyers in Manchester and London.

It seems that this determination has rubbed off on Sarah Dening with her business Pigletchops that is producing Mary’s original designs for a whole new generation. In the 1950s Mary benefited from a good life style thanks to her designs being produced by British companies. In view of this Sarah has vowed that these British designs will be printed in the UK and the products will be totally made in the UK. That sounds easy enough but as we know most of what we wear has not originated in the UK. It took a lot of hard work for Sarah to stick to her principles but she has done it and the shirts now available at Pigletchops have labels that proudly celebrate this feat.

A short while ago I wrote about my ignorance of the genre MAGICAL REALISM. I decided that something should be done to fill this gap in my literary knowledge and went a-clicking  on those book sites  that we all know so well. I’m off to Cornwall for a week at the end of June and so I have decided that that will be an ideal way to begin my foray into magical realms.

I’ve selected three books, the two you can see here; “The Medusa Frequency” by Russell Hoban and “Nights at The Circus” by Angela Carter. I am waiting for “Threshold” by Ursula Le Guin to arrive.

With a bit of luck The Medusa Frequency may prove to be a crossover book, meaning that it can crossover from my reading pile to that of mu husband. This doesn’t happen often, the most successful crossover author so far being Brian Moore. I love Brian Moore’s works for the Roman Catholicity of them. If you were educated in a convent books like Brian’s seem to exert a certain hold. The other half reads them because they tell an exciting story and you can’t really argue with that.

Different people  see  different thing don’t they?  I just saw a  Dutch  painting photograph but of course when I looke later I could see that it was young girl with a carrier bag on her head! Artist/Photographer Hendrik Kerstens has documenting his daughter as she grows up. I don’t think that my own daughter would be so obliging.

http://www.witzenhausengallery.nl/artist.php?idxArtist=12&offset=0

Every morning I get out of bed, put a load of washing on, make my breakfast and retire with it for my daily dose of blogland. My favourites are saved on tabs in my web browser and are abbreviated to: DGR, HD, RJ, SiaB, AH and LWD. Two of those are little-known private interests but I’m sure that you can all guess the identities of the first four. It was over on Stuck-in-a-Book that I came across reference to a Roman writer, Quintilian. Recently, in blogland, there has been a smattering of alphabetic lists of favourite authors. This was started by SiaB as an Alphabet Meme and then picked up by other bloggers. SiaB provides us with a handy list of those who picked up the meme.

This morning Siab wrote about a book he has just finished. It is non-fiction and references other writings, including those of Quintilian. What a prize for someone doing the alpha meme and who only has Arthur Quiller-Couch so far for the Q entry. Quintilian is writing about education, more precisely about the education of an orator but he does seem to exude an amazing amount of common sense. He begins in Book One by talking about those who have a hand in the education of an individual, beginning with the nurse and the parents. He moves on to write of learning the alphabet, and of writing:

The accomplishment of writing well and expeditiously, which is commonly disregarded by people of quality, is by no means an indifferent matter. Writing itself is the principal thing in our studies, and by it alone sure proficiency, resting on the deepest roots, is secured. A too slow way of writing retards thought, and a rude and confused hand cannot be read; and hence follows another task, that of reading off what is to be copied from the writing. 29. At all times, therefore, and in all places, and especially in writing private and familiar letters, it will be a source of pleasure to us not to have neglected even this acquirement.

This is all very pertinent to the moment for me. I have just been encouraged to start writing real letters to a friend again. This is something that I haven’t done for quite a while and most people I need to correspond with have an email address and as long as your communication is welcome you are usually guaranteed a speedy response that doesn’t involve relying on the uncertain services of the Royal Mail. Please don’t get me started on that topic or I will join Elaine, of Random Jottings, in what she calls GOW (Grumpy Old Woman) mode. So far I have received the first epistle from my friend and after having to reply to her using my daughter’s chewed old school fountain pen I dragged myself away from desk in my lunch break and bought myself an ink converter for my lovely black and gold Waterman’s pen and a bottle of Havana Brown. She should have received my letter by now but I am not quite sure how many days it will take her to decipher my squiggles. Perhaps if I had been given ivory letters to play with as a toddler, as Quintilian advises in his Institutes of Oratory, so that I could learn their shapes as I learnt their sounds then my writing would now be more legible?

I know you all think I’m an incredibly slow reader but that’s not really the case. I’m not as fast as some people I know like supersonic Random Jottings, or as prolific as Dove Grey Reader, as learned as Harriet Devine, or as amusing as Stuck-in-a-Book. I’m just what I call a “lapsed reader” because I don’t make time to read any more. I rely on the 13 mins of travel time on the train from home to work and back again but unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, I have amassed a posse of what we call “train friends” or “the train gang”. It works rather like velcro. I started talking to one woman on the platform one morning and we progressed from nodding and saying hello to having deep meaningful discussions about the virtues of different types of bag (yesterday’s conversation). Another friend has a penchant for colourful hats and stripey socks so it was natural that I should make her acquantance. She knew someone else etc etc . Now we really need to reserve a carriage just for the gang. About half of this merry brood get on at a previous station so we have to stand in the right place and look out for them in the carriage and invade any empty seats around them. If we were brave enough we would evict the intruders that were sitting on what should be our seats. Shamefully we have become such a rabble that some people DO offer to move when we board the train and they scuttle away to a quieter part of the carriage.

So with a large morning and smaller evening party of friends to join I rarely get as far as opening my book. If I do you can guarantee that within one paragraph a fellow velcro-pal appears and all chance of literature disappears.

I don’t know what I expected when I picked up Fugitive Pieces, certainly nothing like the book I found. I was drawn to the cover and the title. I think I expected memories of a woman, not realising that the head on the cover is probably that of a young boy. A clever title. It took a while for it to dawn on me that both the traces of music and geological references are “fugitive pieces”. I’m on the final stretch of the book. I was momentarily confused when the main protagonist changed and I’m not really sure why that was done as I’m not out of my confusion yet.

Anne Michaels is a poet and if she wasn’t considered as such before the publication of this book then she surely would have been recognised as such after this book made its way out into the world.