Storyteller’s World

There’s books, and then there’s books.

While we were on holiday we went to Chester for the day (OK, if you must know, we were looking for a mother-of-the-bride’s outfit for the next wedding) and since my opinion is apparently almost useless in these transactions* I was sent off to amuse myself. In the course of these amusements I discovered Stothert Old Books, a very up-market second-hand book shop in Nicholas Street.

It has a “best” shelf behind the front window, on which I spotted a pair of early if not quite first editions of The Rhinegold and Siegfried, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. There was almost the feeling you should don white gloves to handle these gorgeous volumes. With great reverence I took them from the shelf, admired some of the illustrations, then opened the front cover and saw the asking price: £250 each volume. It didn’t take much reflection to realise they were beyond my budget, replace them in their place, and mooch off towards the back of the shop where the cheaper volumes were located. Not that the cheap volumes were all that cheap: this is a serious second-hand book shop, and the prices reflect the fact.

While I was there, I became aware that some other customers had come in, and the mobile phone of one of these then rang.

The usual “where are you?” conversation ensued, and the half I overheard went, “We’re just here in the charity book shop at the bottom of Bridge Street…”

Even from the back room of the shop I could feel the shop woman’s hackles rising.

That’s some charity, I thought to myself.

* I’m likely to say “That’s perfect” about the first thing we see** - provided the price tag is a bit less than the £490 on the outfit that was really catching Alison’s eye.

** Well, no, actually I’m most likely to say “Why do you need a new wedding outfit? You’ve only worn the last one once!”

Rose Macaulay is not much read these days; but she has a gift as good as any novelist’s for opening sentences and paragraphs.

Like this from The Towers of Trebizond:

“Take my camel, dear,” said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

Or, my current favourite, from Told By An Idiot

One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, - in brief, in the year 1879, - Mrs Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, “Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.”

The rest of the novel doesn’t disappoint.

Here are some interesting links about blogging: BBC - Radio 4 - Meet the bloggers

Can’t resist posting this, because we’re visiting Tui and Dave, and MacHuckleberry is also in the company, and as soon as I switched on it offered to connect to the wireless network in their house. Someone else’s broadband! another new experience for me.

Oh boy. I’ve only ever read about this kind of thing before, as something that happens to other people, not me. But today’s news that Apple are recalling 1.8 million batteries in their laptops - Battery Exchange Program iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 - turns out to include the serial number of my 2-year old iBook.

So I’m going to get a free new battery! (In 4-6 weeks.) And in the mean time, just be a teensy bit more afraid when I’m using it on my lap, in case the remote risk of the battery bursting into flames should happen. Ouch!

Has anyone else noticed how boring sandwiches are these days? What with the mania for low fat, and various food scares over recent years, the net result is that the sandwich shelves in most supermarkets present you with a choice that amounts to chicken with no mayonnaise, or denatured cheese and ham. (Blessed Pret are the wonderful exception, of course; and Subway also look tempting though the mechanical challenges of eating one of those things have so far put me off trying. I’ve usually been wearing clothes when tempted, rather than a full-body overall.)

In this family, one of the verbally innovative members could never remember the 3-letter name of that London megachurch from which Alpha sprang, and for many years used to call it BLT. But neither could we remember what a BLT sandwich actually contained, so we spent happy hours (during power-cuts, long journeys, etc.) imagining the grossest ingredients for a BLT that anyone could think of. I think the winner to date is probably Beetroot, Lychee and Taramasalata.

That’s without even starting on the ingredients of the classic HTB.

This is such a memorable first for Storyteller’s World - a comment on one of my postings about a book I’m reading, by the author of the book himself - that it demands further comment. (Not that I should be too surprised, I guess, that Proust, Tolstoy, Cervantes and such haven’t yet contributed comments: wherever they’ve been recently, I don’t think they have internet access.)

One of the delights of John Sutherland’s book is his sharing so many of his own likes and dislikes, which makes it all read like a bookish conversation over a friendly glass of wine. You feel you’ve got to join in.

“Greater physicality with the book is a fact of modern reading”, he says, and quotes some of the postures and physical actions readers engage in. (You can’t do that with a computer monitor!) Several times he’s mentioned licking your finger to turn the pages, and every time it’s made me shudder. I abhor this practice, didn’t like seeing it when I was a child, have never done it, wouldn’t dream of it. It’s not so much the fear of catching TB from the licked pages of a library book (which I confess I had never heard of) as the sense that a book is too sacred to lick. When I read Name of the Rose many years later, I realised how wise I had been…

Again, Sutherland has a digression about the way your book buying makes a kind of statement about yourself. Hence, in the bookshop queue, everyone is curious about what other customers are buying. Not so at the supermarket:

At the Tesco or Safeways check-out line, you do not care in the slightest whether the person in front has smart organic baked beans or the supermarket’s own cheap brand, so long as their cart is not heaped so mountainously high that you will be waiting all day for the till.

Oh no, John! You may feel like that; but I’m much more curious about what other people are buying at the supermarket than at Waterstones. Their trolley contents are an endless source of fantasy and speculation - as I would like mine to be for them. Why is that woman buying just two bottles of gin, a tin of shoe polish, and a toothbrush? What kind of party is that going to be, with the couple stocking up with a dozen loaves of white sliced bread, 2 dozen bananas and a packet of Alka-Seltzer?

If you don’t believe me, try sampling some of rajm’s checkout experiences.

John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel (interesting subject - entertainingly written - shame about the considerable number of errors) suggests that Thomas Hardy chose the title of Far From The Madding Crowd - from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard - to perhaps counter some critics’ unkind portrayal of him as a country bumpkin. (Me a bumpkin? I knows littercha, I does.)

Seeing how he messed with the syntax when he borrowed the line:

Far from the madding Crowd’s ignoble Strife,
Their sober Wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d Vale of Life
They kept the noiseless Tenor of their Way.

- makes me realise there’s another great title hidden in those lines, which I propose using for one of my books.

Yes, it’s The Noiseless Tenor. Haven’t yet decided if it’s a thriller about the quest of a well-known singer to recover his lost / stolen / kidnapped voice. Or a tense psychological drama examining what hidden traumas in his life have caused his vocal block. Or the unmasking of a terrorist plot by Soprano Fundamentalists to remove all male singers from choirs. Or a Teach Yourself Singing, by creative visualisation of your inner voice. The possibilities are - maybe not endless, but more than enough.

So many people were astonished to hear that I was planning to conduct Sun’s wedding and give her away (”How can you do that? Is it possible?) that I was beginning to wonder whether I had missed something, and whether there was a secret knack of giving the bride away that I’d been missing all these years.

No, it goes like this. After checking that everything at the church was in order, and the bridegroom was there, I walked home to the vicarage, collected the bride and attendants, and walked back to church. When we got to the front, I stepped round in front and the service began.

Actually, the walk to church was a bit emotional, and I was glad I had a daughter to lean on. Also glad that Sue captured the moment.

Just back from a fortnight in the sun. Well, in Shropshire, anyway. Where we were recovering from a hectic spring and summer and the gallivanting of Sun’s wedding.

As always, holiday reading turns out to be a bizarre blend of what you have planned and taken with you, and the serendipity of what turns up in the bookshops you visit, and cries out to be bought.

So in the end the list was:

• Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World
• John Armstrong, Life Love Goethe
• Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear
• Colin Tudge, The Secret Life of Trees
• Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

Several of these deserve some remarks of their own, when I get to it. And there were several more purchases which are now adding to the pile To Be Read.

Gill has posted some of her pictures of Martha and Paul’s wedding on Flickr.

And Sue has added some of her own.

Jo has some great pictures of Martha and Paul’s wedding yesterday. Check out the pinball wizard!

It’s surely inevitable that the Father of the Bride never gets to take the best photos: he’s supposed to be in quite a few of them. So I hope there will be better ones to see than these, later.

But here’s a small selection of views of Sun’s Wedding Day. It looked to me as if people were enjoying themselves.

(Now improved, with some better pictures taken by Tom.)

On the eve of Sun’s wedding there’s a select family gathering at the Vicarage with Tom and Annie, Sun, Li, Tui and Dave, at which we consume improbable amounts of wine and pizza, and end up watching old home movies.

These are the ones that Dad took up to 40 years ago with his cine camera (he was always a bit of a gadget freak - wonder where Tom and I get it from?) and then transferred to video by the high-tech means of projecting the film onto his dining room wall and filming it all on his video - with commentary, to make up for the lack of sound on the original. From time to time he appears in front of the camera himself to give reflections or running commentary, looking like nothing so much as a benevolent Alfred Hitchcock.

The content includes me at 16 with my sisters, our wedding day in 1974, Tom as a toddler in Durham and later scenes at the bungalow in Wales including Sun and Li. A young Mum and Dad - in some scenes younger than I am now - appear. And now at tomorrow’s wedding, Dad is no longer with us, and Mum isn’t well enough to come over from Wales. But somehow this evening’s bit of nostalgia is a way of making present the different generations: perhaps a modern version of telling the family story.

And here is a picture of all four of the younger Price women, on the last evening before one of them changes her name.

From L. to R. Sun, Annie, Tui, Li.

It’s a hard thing to keep finding jokes that I definitely can’t use in the Father of the Bride’s speech (or probably anywhere else, come to that.) Like this one from John Allen Paulos’ I Think, Therefore I Laugh.

Two clergymen were discussing the present sad state of sexual morality. “I didn’t sleep with my wife before we were married,” one clergyman stated self-righteously. “Did you?”

“I’m not sure,” said the other. “What was her maiden name?”

Details of this year’s Wallingford BunkFest.

I won’t be able to take part in the storytelling on the Saturday this year: I have a wedding to officiate at. (Not one of my own daughters’, this time. Just someone they were at school with.)

You Belong in Amsterdam

A little old fashioned, a little modern - you’re the best of both worlds. And so is Amsterdam. Whether you want to be a squatter graffiti artist or a great novelist, Amsterdam has all that you want in Europe (in one small city).

Hmm. I would have said Oxford, actually. But I did like Amsterdam. And it was where I bought my first Moleskine.

And it’s my birthday. I’m 57 today. This sounds weirdly a whole lot older than I feel. Some people are even kind enough to say it’s older than I look.

Thanks to foresight (letting my children know where to find my Amazon wishlist), I got some great presents, too.

Guess which of these two little girls is getting married this Saturday?

Well, the other one is going to be one of the bridesmaids - probably the one who will (should!) catch the bouquet.

The setting of this gem of a family memory is Royal Tunbridge Wells, 1983.

In 1967 Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria in just six days.

In 2006, with vastly improved weaponry, and all the military support of an obscenely equipped United States, it’s taken them three weeks not to manage to defeat Hezbollah.

If I were an arms buyer, I’d be asking serious questions about why all this hugely expensive kit seems less fit for purpose than it was 40 years ago.

Or could it be - how the devil can’t they see it? - that all that vastly improved capability for massacring innocent civilians, far from bringing victory an inch nearer, is actually strengthening and sowing new seeds of resistance and hatred of Israel, that will last for generations?

If it weren’t so tedious, the constant barrage of e-mails allegedly from banks all over the world, including many I haven’t even heard of, requesting me in fractured if not completely shattered English (and sometimes German) to click on the link below to verify or update my password and security details, would be amusing.

Today’s crop includes the immortal inconsistency:

It has come to our attention that your NameChanged account information needs to be updated, as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce fraudulent activities on our website.

If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into any future problems with the online service.

Once you have updated your account records, your NameChanged account service will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.

If you are not NameChanged Banking Member, Please Delete this message.

Well, do I have an account with them that’s been compromised? Or might I not have? Surely even the greenest newbie who has never seen one of these things before (could such a fabulous creature possibly exist, anywhere on this or any imaginary world?) would find this suspicious. And yet apparently this still catches some people out - though surely the returns must be seriously diminishing, hence the huge increase in them. So presumably the answer is

* Yes, some of them clearly are.