Storyteller’s World

Here’s an interesting site I just found, when I googled “novels set in Venice” when replying to Kathryn’s comment:

Fictional Cities - Florence Venice London

Now, you could compile quite a list of novels set in Oxford, couldn’t you?

Anne Fadiman has a lovely essay in her book Ex Libris, called You Are There, which describes the special pleasure of “what I call You-Are-There Reading, the practice of reading books in the places they describe”. Reading Yeats in Sligo, Isak Dinesen in Kenya, John Muir on the Sierras, and her favourite of all, reading the journals of John Wesley Powell while camped at Granite Rapids in the Grand Canyon.

I wondered today if there is a similar feeling to reading books at the time they describe. Alison’s crime novel that she was reading suddenly included the sentence, “It was the day before the last day of January.”

A strange way of putting it, perhaps, but it brought it alive, in a way, that she was reading it on that very day.

Anyone got any other examples of You-Are-Then Reading?

(Reminds me: Anne Fadiman must be due for another re-read.)

That question about my favourite childhood rhyme or story has opened a kind of can of worms.

I simply don’t remember my parents telling me rhymes, or reading me stories. I’m sure they must have done, but I don’t remember. And perhaps that’s no great surprise; when do one’s earliest memories date from? Which is all a bit discouraging to a parent: all those stories I read our children, and songs I sang to them - and they probably don’t remember them either. Not that that’s why you do it - it’s supposed to help them learn to speak and read, not remember you as the Greatest Dad Ever.

And I did learn to read, as soon as ever I could; and for most of my childhood I was notorious for having my nose in any kind of book. Since we possessed so few, that was pretty difficult: it not uncommonly involved reading the telephone directory.

From a later time, the only book I remember Dad reading to me, was a children’s edition of Hiawatha, which included sections of Longfellow’s poem. When I was reading for myself, there was some ghastly and execrable volume about a creature called Pooky (a pink animal with wings?), that someone had given me. I don’t think I ever did read that one, it was just too horrible and twee. The kind of book some dreadful adult thought would appeal to children. In the days before Roald Dahl provided what they really like.

The fact is, I think of the home I was a child in, as a home almost without books. (People who know me will readily assume this is what I have been trying to compensate for ever since.) There was a 5-volume set of picture encyclopaedias from the 1930s, a couple of other reference books, two or three school prizes won by my parents, a couple of volumes of Penguin classics, and three novels by Dumas, that I didn’t read till my teens. As for the children’s books people are supposed to have grown up with: Winnie the Pooh, the Narnia books, Beatrix Potter - I didn’t read any of these until I was an adult, in some cases not until I read them to my own children.

The first book I ever bought with my own money was Enid Blyton’s The Boy Next Door. It cost me most of my holiday spending money, on the first or second day of the holiday, and my parents were not best pleased: they had given me that money to spend on serious stuff like sweets, ice creams, buckets and spades and the like. Since I read the book in less than a day, there was a lot of the holiday left to endure in penury.

Later books I was given included the Odham’s Encyclopaedia for Children and a children’s atlas that I pored over for hours and hours on end, tracing imaginary journeys and voyages.

One highlight of my childhood was joining the local library as soon as I was old enough - which in those unenlightened days, was not till you were 7. I loved visiting the library, even though most of their stock was quite unattractively bound in uniform 1950s library bindings. But again, I remember little of what (if anything) I actually read. A story of pirates that I loved and tried to imitate by writing one myself. Books about exploration, from which I first learned about Magellan, Vasco Da Gama, Drake. Eric Linklater’s The Wind on the Moon, and The Pirates of the Deep Green Sea. Hugh Lofting’s Story of Dr Dolittle. You ended up reading not what would perhaps have been best for you, but what the library chose to stock.

When I started winning school prizes myself, the practice was you got to choose a title up to a certain value, and if the book you wanted cost more than that, pay the difference. Since my local “bookshop” was W. H. Smith in Palmers Green, there was never much of a selection to choose from: in retrospect, it would probably have been better if the school had chosen some improving title (or better, a classic of literature), or at least given a choice of one from among a number of suitable titles. I might have had a better library, earlier.

So this True Confession may begin to explain why I am so un-well-read. I just have never grown out of the cultural starvation of my first ten years.

As to favourite childhood rhyme and story: I’ll have to think about that a bit longer.

Who says the Anglican Communion doesn’t have an official process of canonisation? See this from Salt:

Bush is a Saint

I am reading Nicholas Wollaston’s intriguing short memoir of his father, entitled My Father, Sandy.

Alexander Frederick Richmond Wollaston (1875-1930) was one of the last great English travellers and explorers in the last great age of discovery. He survived the trials and dangers of Africa, New Guinea, the Great War, and Mallory’s expedition to Everest. Then, as a don at King’s College, Cambridge, he was murdered one summer’s afternoon by an undergraduate, leaving a widow and three children aged under five.

In the chapter I’ve just read, Sandy is trekking across Africa from east to west, together with a companion called - I kid you not - Carruthers.

Now, I have never, in all my life, met anyone called Carruthers. In the whole Oxford area, where you might expect to find surviving examples, there are only five listed in the phone book. Yet it is an indisputable fact (known to all) that there was no single exploration, campaign, or regiment at any place or any time in the great days of the British Empire, that didn’t include a man called Carruthers.

Where have all the members of this vast intrepid family, nay dynasty, disappeared to? Is it that they roamed the planet with such invincible wanderlust, that most of them died without issue and they became practically extinct? Is it that they went forth from the shores of this sceptred isle, and never returned, so that the Sydney phone book, for example, lists several hundred of them? Is it merely that I don’t move in the right circles?

Is this just another of those unfathomable mysteries, to which I will never find the key?

Today. The second anniversary of my first attempt at blogging an Online Journal, without benefit of Blogger or WordPress. Each day I added a new entry to the beginning of my journal file, and uploaded the whole amended file by FTP. It was hard work, but it was the only way we knew how…

Somewhere in amongst our various pots of money, there is a little account whose name I won’t mention in case there are any identity fraudsters out there with too little to do. Let’s call it the NEP. (Nearly Empty Pot) We opened this account some years back because it seemed like a good idea at the time, used it for a while, then took all the money out because there was something better on offer, so now it is, well, nearly empty.

Today I had a letter from the NEP Bank outlining their new interest rates. Instead of the princely (note: Irony Warning) 3.8% gross rate of interest, they are now introducing a tiered series of interest rates on balances:
£1 - £24,999, 3.45%
£25,000 - £99,999, 3.55%
Over £100,000 - only these balances will now qualify for the 3.8% rate of interest.

On my clergy stipend, need I mention that we won’t be qualifying for the top rate of interest? (Unless, that is, I put all my income into the NEP and have no outgoings of any description for the next 6 and a half years.)

I laughed so much that it really brightened my morning. Though I have to say, it wasn’t quite as good a brightening as Kathryn’s lovely experience.

They say that senses can evoke strong memories, though biscuits (madeleines or otherwise) have never done it for me.

I was having a moan to myself this afternoon about how cold it was, when suddenly I was back in Durham. When I was studying theology there as an ordinand, I used to walk in to college every morning, in time for chapel. Some winter days I was so cold when I got there - in spite of hat, scarf, gloves and the brisk walk - that I would have to run a basin of warm water and plunge my hands in it for several minutes until the feeling returned.

Meanwhile, today’s meeting of the Deanery Clergy Chapter felt somewhat chilly too. There was a general sense of distress about the bad publicity surrounding the Church Commissioners’ purchase of a £2.5 million house for the next Bishop of Oxford. (What do people think houses in Oxford City are likely to cost? We don’t want the Bishop to have to live in Bicester or Witney, for heaven’s sake.) And part of it is just “interregnum shock”. It’s bad enough for a parish when their beloved vicar is leaving, and the very thought of any possible successor terrifies. (One positive advantage of being the vicar is that you start being on the giving, rather than the receiving, end of that shock.) When the Bishop goes, that trauma extends to the whole diocese.

Among the Chapter, there seemed none to high a set of opinions about likely candidates. The best suggestion of an actual name was Jeffrey John; but I think that was a wind-up.

Favourite childhood rhyme or story.

Good grief, Sun - it was such a long time ago; I can’t even remember if I had a childhood.

Anyone else feels like chipping in some suggestions - especially those who spent their own childhoods with me, and may remember the kind of things I liked - please do so.

So it’s official: Monday of this week is the Worst Day Of The Year.

BBC NEWS | UK | ‘I don’t like Monday 24 January’

Frankly, it does seem a bit hard. It’s bad enough that they get the date wrong: Monday was, after all, only the 23rd; so maybe it was Tuesday that should have got the palm. But even apart from that, yesterday and today have been pretty crappy too. So cold, grey, miserable. It’s enough to drive you (even further) to drink.

On a freezing evening I venture out to Blackwells to the launch reception of Public Life and the Place of the Church, a festschrift in honour of Bishop Richard Harries who is retiring this spring. It includes essays by Julia Neuberger, Eric James, Christopher Rowland, Melvyn Bragg, Keith Ward, Roger Wagner, Douglas Hurd, Claire Foster, Shirley Williams, Anthony Howard, Rowan Williams, and more.

I am delighted that the wine provided by Ashgate, the publishers, is a Casillero del Diablo merlot. “Devil’s Cellar” seems an appropriate kind of wine to serve at theological functions.

Out of the Journalling Jar:

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention …

Actually, regret isn’t a fruitful way of feeling and I try to avoid it. In any case, most of the things that go through me that feel like regrets, are not about what I have done, but what I have been. And my genetic make-up and upbringing are things I don’t reckon to change much this late in the day.

But, giving the question proper attention: The one thing I’ve sometimes thought I would like to have done differently, was study Classics at university, instead of Modern Languages.

There, I’ve said it.

Yesterday evening we took part in one of those special events that make living in Oxford such a privilege.

It was the Kellogg College Gaudy, which I was able to attend in my capacity as spouse of the successful DPhil graduate Dr Alison. Excellent food, wine, and company. Grace said in an ancient (not dead!) and foreign tongue, viz. Welsh.

And a well-attended lecture beforehand by Baroness James of Holland Park, AKA P. D. James, on The Dangerous Edge of Things: The Craft of the Detective Story.

P. D. James is brilliant: a lively, witty octogenarian with a twinkle in her eye, and enormous erudition and enthusiasm for her chosen genre. She is passionate about the idea that the modern detective novel has to be much closer to the mainstream novel, than was the case in the Golden Age. It is more violent, more sexually explicit, and much more doubtful about older certainties regarding law and justice. All’s not right with the world, and it is the task of the good detective novel to tell the truth about the world, not some gilded lie. She has a memorable turn of phrase, as when describing the frequent criticism of those Golden Age writers as “purveyors of a popular pabulum of snobbery with violence.”

I don’t make a habit of buttonholing the famous speaker, but I did talk to her afterwards and asked about the peculiarly “Anglican” ethos of her fiction. She is, of course, a practising Anglican, not very optimistic about the state of the Church today.

She also doesn’t have a lot of time for courses on “creative writing”! When asked about her advice for aspiring novelists, she listed:

1. Increase your vocabulary!
2. Read well, read the best, to find out how the best writers produce the effects they do.
3. Practise. Write, write, write.
4. Live with all your senses open to experience; engage with life, else you won’t be able to describe it.
5. If you’re writing detective fiction, you need to attend carefully to structure and plot, and do your research especially well.

Oh, help. This is probably why we don’t do dinner parties: it’s just so hard to decide on the guest list.

I reckoned to try and balance it right, you’d need to have equal numbers of living, dead and fictional guests, and of men and women. I’m having trouble thinking of any living men I want to invite. So this is probably a first attempt only. Ask me again next week. Here’s this week’s guest list:

Living:
Sigourney Weaver
Kate Bush
Linus Torvalds
Griff Rhys Jones

Dead:
Robertson Davies
John Wesley
Hildegard of Bingen
Jan Struther

Fictional:
Stephen Maturin
Yuri Zhivago
Fanny Price
Harriet Vane

Surely you don’t need to ask Why? to any of these? And yes, I know I’ve got (at least) two doctors there. But no list is perfect.

Here’s a mathematical one, for them as likes that kind of thing.

If I go to Homebase to replace the contents of the garage that were destroyed last June, and have a 20% discount voucher, and the discount comes to £161.60; how much did I actually put on my Visa bill, and how much would I have had to, without the voucher?

This is the first time I’ve had one of these vouchers that I’ve been able to use and has really been worth having. Am I glad I didn’t go to Homebase a week earlier!

A sad little milestone. My last published work for which I received any payment at all, is now officially out of print.

This unique work, a Grove Booklet on the Rosary (yes, your eyes do not deceive you) is now only available online. Except that I have a few copies left which I’m prepared to sell to genuine inquirers.

Who would you invite (living, dead or fictional) to a dinner party?

(Feel free to join in anyone, and trackback to this entry so anyone else can find your contribution.)

Kindness
intelligence
truthfulness
curiosity
wonder
faithfulness
imagination
creativity
sympathy
passion
wisdom
laughter
capacity to enjoy life
inner peace
humility
patience
fairness
tolerance
determination
courage
trust
discernment

I wonder if the qualities you most admire in other people are

• the qualities you most like about yourself?
• the qualities you don’t necessarily possess, but most aspire to?
• the qualities you lack, that you look for in someone else so as to complement you?

Probably, something of all of these. But I find (think I find?) I don’t at all admire some qualities that aren’t present in me at all. Like

ambition
complete self-confidence
certainty

Jo suggests I tag any and all readers with the next topic out of the Journalling Jar, to invite them to write about them in their own blogs.

OK, but I’m only going to do one at a time. The next one won’t come out until I’ve either blogged about it myself, or journalled it secretly if it’s one of those embarrassing topics, or decided to keep an inscrutable silence.

So, the next slip out of the Jar is:

Qualities you most admire in other people

Happy blogging, all them as wants it!

[From the Journalling Jar]

This is a question that goes right to the heart of how you feel about yourself and your life. What have I achieved? What have I done with my life? Has it been of any value at all? - Ask me on a Sunday, after a service that has gone really well, or after a pastoral encounter where I really feel I’ve made a difference, and you’ll get quite a different answer from on a Monday morning. - Have I just wasted my life? (By the time Mozart was my age, he’d been dead 19 years …)

I wanted to say, I’m most proud of being so extravagantly and undeservedly loved. But being proud of something means it ought to be an achievement, not sheer grace.

So the things I’m proud of would have to include:

Being an Oxford graduate. Even getting to Oxford at all, as a grammar school boy, and the first of the family to go to any kind of university.

Being vicar of the best parish in Oxford. That’s pretty good, too.

Having been married to Alison for nearly 32 years (and counting!), and all that we’ve helped one another to achieve during those years. My theology training and ordination; Alison’s career change after motherhood, and doctorate, and now her vocation.

Our children, who in spite of all our efforts really seem to have turned out very well. (”So far”, you always add, mentally.) They are, in fact, excellent people of great worth and potential, and I really hope that some day they’ll be the parents of my grandchildren. ‘Cause if they aren’t, I don’t know who else is gonna be.

So, like Milan, it’s the people in my life I’m most proud of, even though, strictly speaking, they aren’t any more achievements than being loved. They, too, are sheer undeserved gifts.

At long last I’ve arranged a couple of dates to go into the local primary school and tell stories in assembly. (Why at long last, and after such a long time, is another long story, which I won’t get started on.) So the first of these is coming up next Monday.

The head tells me the theme for this month - not altogether unexpectedly - is New Year.

I had originally hoped that I would be able to find biblical stories to tell at these assemblies. But the only “New Year” story I can think of, is the Passover: where the Lord tells Moses: “This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.” (Exodus 12.2) This is a story about God wanting his people to be free, and bringing them out from the land where they have been oppressed and exploited as slaves, to lead them to a land of their own. So far, so good.

But it also tells how Pharaoh doesn’t want to let his profitable slaves go. Only when God sends plague after plague on the land, culminating in the slaughter of every first-born male, does he consent to Moses and his people leaving. Uh uh. Not so good.

How can I tell a story that could give the impression that God is a bloodthirsty Omnipotence, who secures favours to the people he chooses, by massacring the rest? What if I get charged with inciting racial or religious hatred, by preaching that God approves of the killing of Egyptians?

It seems that more and more of the stories in the Tradition, that are hard enough to tell even in church, are completely out of the question when talking to an audience outside, especially an audience of children.

I’m torn about how to think of this dilemma. When I was a lad, no one batted an eyelid about these bloody stories. Is even having this sensitivity about them a kind of progress in understanding? Or is it just the worst kind of spineless, liberal capitulation to secular sensibilities?

While I await comments and further light on these questions, I am working on the story of Jack’s Magic Diary.

Footnote:
Alison tells me of a colleague who used to hate the story of God calling Samuel (1 Samuel 3) - another of the Sunday School stories we grew up with. He dreaded the possibility that God might call him in the middle of the night.

Which just goes to show, you can never tell what’s going to terrify a sensitive child. And who knows? They may be much more willing to accept the massacre of the evil slave-owning oppressors, whether or not they are Egyptians, than we are.

One of my nice Christmas presents - from Sun - was Dad’s Journalling Jar. It’s a glass kitchen jar, full of multi-coloured hand-made and -decorated slips of card, each printed with an idea for a topic to journal about.

There are also lots of seed ideas for blog postings, there. I was really excited about this gift, but strangely I feel an almost superstitious reluctance to reach into the jar and take out a card and try to write about it, either in journal or blog.

I’m imagining subjects like “Describe your first kiss”, or, “Write a letter that you’d like to send to the most annoying person you’ve ever met, if they would never be able to get back at you for it.”

I just don’t know if I, or the world, are ready for this naked self-exposure. And somehow vetting the topics in the jar feels like cheating. It’s got to be a random draw, and then honestly write about that subject. For real.

So we’ll have to see what happens. Will I summon up the courage? or the brass cheek? or the wild recklessness, to do it? Will I find myself reaching into that jar one night, when I’m in my cups, forgetting Sharon’s wise rule Never To Blog When Drunk?

Watch this space …

P. D. James is one of the few writers whose books we buy in hardback as soon as they appear. For various reasons: we trust the consistency of her writing and know that we’ll enjoy the new book; there’s the Oxford connection; and the fact that she’s not so prolific that we’ll end up having to buy too many. (Though she’s nowhere near as impressive in this respect as the admirable Donna Tartt.)

Her latest novel, The Lighthouse, is another good read. It’s always like meeting up with an old friend you haven’t met for years, but you take up with them just where you left off and it’s as if you were never parted. There’s the feeling of catching up with people you know and like: Adam Dalgliesh and Kate Miskin, and their infuriating amours that struggle with ridiculous timidity - why not just get on with it, for heaven’s sake? There’s a fascination with place: often the City of London, or the River Thames. There are interesting and complicated characters.

Here the setting is a small island off the coast of Cornwall, used as a private retreat by a selected few of the great and the good, where Dalgliesh and his team are summoned to investigate a suspicious death. They immediately assume it is murder, but are unable to solve it before a second crime is committed.

Both murders were copybook killings: a small closed society, no access from outside, a limited number of suspects, even more limited now that A had an alibi for B’s death. [No spoilers here!]

I reflect that I don’t read genre fiction, because there just aren’t any genres I enjoy indiscriminately. I don’t read detective novels - only P. D. James. I don’t read fantasy, only Tolkien; or sci-fi, only Ursula Le Guin. I don’t read Napoleonic sea stories, only Patrick O’Brian. In consequence, I probably don’t have any way of knowing how good these authors really are: except that whenever I’ve tried other books in the genre, by other writers, I’ve been disappointed.

I suppose my real favourites are the books that are one-of-a-kind, and unclassifiable, or which would define or re-define a genre. Like, ummm