Category: Books

#1509 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn blogging, Books, history, Serendipity2 Comments

Something is up in blogland. Inexplicably my reader stats for this year have jumped. Not quite half way through the year my blogs have already been read by the same  number of people who read my blogs in all of 2025.

A red letter day of sorts. It seems appropriate to share the blogs of past June the 15th’s.

Pandemic Pondering # 89

Pandemic Pondering #447

#239 theoldmortuary ponders

#632 theoldmortuary ponders.

#948 theoldmortuary ponders.

#1321 theoldmortuary ponders.

Some time hopping for you all. Which is a really crafty way of throwing in a book review. This morning I was awake early finishing a book that I have loved. I just couldn’t quite finish it last night.

Time hopping in books is either to your taste or not. No spoilers here but the time hopping element in this book is as near perfect as any that I have read.

And if that were not enough the book stops almost exactly where my blogs for June 15th start. In a shop just after restrictions were lifted post Covid

Picture from June 15th 2020

In another quirky little coincidence the bakery, where I bought this doughnut, has been in business for 5 centuries. The exact time span of Tracy Chevalier’s book. Life is every bit as strange as fiction.

My 5 year effort seems pretty tame compared to 5 centuries.

#1508 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books1 Comment
Our Yard store in the style of Derek Jarman

Black timber and a bright yellow door is a small homage to the garden/yarden style of Derek Jarman, who created an other worldly garden at his home, Prospect Cottage on Dungeness Beach, off the Kent Coast.

I am not certain how I stumbled into the world of Derek Jarman it would have been in the early 1980s in Brighton.I love the way he writes and his aesthetic style.

Prospect Cottage

Modern Nature, his book about HIV and creating a garden is one of my favourite books to dip into, until I loaned it and it has failed to be returned. Or has simply been misplaced or left somewhere.

There are so many nuggets of wisdom  to take from his musings but this little quote always makes me happy.

How luxurious and fortunate is it, to wander aimlessly either mentally or physically within our own lives.

 

Yellow door. 2.0

Last year I painted this door yellow. Only at dawn did it look even close to the perfect egg yolk yellow. Any later sunlight and the bright white walls bleached the yellow to a horrible acidic shade that was very much not to our taste. Traffic Light by Zinzer is perfect.

#1392 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books1 Comment
Bluebells and a reed bed at Exton.

Bluebells this morning just because. Today is post book club. 2026 has been a year for challenging book club reading. Not that reading always has to be easy, but grey winter months need some light and book club reading has not provided that this year. However challenging books create great book club conversations, which is exactly what we had yesterday. But this morning just the first chapter of the new book makes me feel very optimistic that I am in for a really enjoyable read in April. Which is fabulous because all my ordered library books are on a waiting list and my Christmas book pile has just been exhausted.

First world problems in a problematic world. But books are where I escape. Bluebells are good for that too.

#1394 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books, Film, Yardening1 Comment
Crepuscule in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’

Crepuscule is a bare root rose that I planted last year. I thought the name was clunky and ugly until I learned that Crepuscule was a French word for sunset. 

While I was away in December my bare root rose decided to put out her first ever flower.

I was both thrilled and concerned. What is beautifully acceptable in the early summer in Sydney is not the norm in a wintery Stonehouse. She also has a very high standard set by her Australian Cousin.

A new found love of growing roses brings with it some tough decisions. My bare root rose should be concentrating on growing roots not blooms. The secateurs were deployed to Crepuscules first efforts at budding and blooming. A Tragedy, some might say.

Which leads me tortuously to last nights outing to see the film Hamnet. On the day that awards and accolades have started tumbling in from the Red Carpet Film and T.V Awards Season.

I don’t often go to films of books that I have read that don’t seem to naturally lend themselves to a Screenplay. Hamnet was just such a book. Deeply enjoyable and dense but a bit of a tricksy read in parts. I couldn’t quite see how a screenplay could replicate my reading experience.

I shouldn’t have worried, Chloe Zhao the screenwriter and Maggie O’Farrell the original author and now co-screen writer did a brilliant job . Pruning and distilling the original text into something that worked brilliantly for me on screen.

Most times I put books and films of books into different filing systems.

Hamnet joins Perfume by Patrick Suskind as a film that I regard as accomplished as the original Novel. I imagine it works just as well for those who have not read the book.

Pruning and distilling at its best.

#1388 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books1 Comment

The two weeks after my birthday were pretty well mapped out with appointments, normal life and creative periods. I am half way through this two week period and it has not panned out at all as I expected. Normal life and creative periods are the soft tissues that are formed around the skeleton of life which is formed by meetings, appointments and essential admin. This two week period would have pottered along  quite nicely. A virus slightly knocked me off the tracks until yesterday and then I was all set to get things done. Almost as the virus  walked out and shut the door a series of phone calls cancelled four appointments that I had scheduled over the next few days. Some will not see the light of day until 2026. With diary gaps I planned other things.  This morning I decided to go for a pedicure and some foot care. My normal place is always buzzing  and I never need an appointment. Except today I did, so it was a very brief visit and I have booked for Saturday.

So instead of pampered feet I decided to move a book case ready for the hallway to be painted.

I knew it was a mammoth task. This bookcase is both a transit hub and a dead end.

There was never a before picture and the picture above is certainly a temporary set up.

A load of random paperwork has gone into recycling and I have a small bag of books for a charity shop.

But what of the bookshelf. So many books I will never read again, some I have never read. 

My mums text books from her sexual health clinic. More than 50 years old they are an amusing and at times uncomfortable read. My dad’s books that carried him through brutal and ineffective chemotherapy . My childhood books and the books belonging to my children. Maybe 20 or so books that will be read again.

So is this a bookshelf or a repository of mine and other peoples memories? I think it is both, and before it moves back to the newly painted hallway I will empty it again to move and paint it so it isn’t quite so shabby. I bet I won’t be able to get rid of any more of these books to a charity shop, but they will be tidier after the next move.

#1378 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books, Serendipity1 Comment

Inexplicably a pile of books revealed themselves in a clothes cupboard this morning. Revealing books I have hunted high and low for in recent years, not just in this house.They have been missing in action for a very long time. Despite being a woman with several book piles this pile is significant because it holds some books that I would never have given away. I have offered to loan them only to be foiled because they were not where I expected them to be. One of them I wanted to talk about at my book club last week. We had been reading a rather patchy novel about women’s experience in India.

I knew I had owned something better.

Found in the pile only a week too late.

The pile is really inconsistent I cannot begin to understand how they have gathered in a cupboard meant for clothes.

1299 pages a book lost for almost 30 years, I had only read to page 209

London by Edward Rutherfurd has been lost forever. I had always planned to buy another copy and just haven’t got round to it. Put down some time in 1997 when I was a very busy woman. When I opened it at the turned down corner I had exactly remembered how far I had got. No need to read those 209 pages again with just 1090 more pages to read. But as a holiday read it is going to have to be a Kindle.

The other five, all mourned because they were lost.

One last one, more fragile and precious than the others.

The very first book I read, that told me how to draw buildings. An odd choice for a small child but I suspect I was an odd child in a house that was not really child friendly. I also read their encyclopaedias avidly!

Published in 1946 , it belonged to my uncle who lived abroad, I found it at my grandparents house during their once weekly child care. I practiced perspective often, just doodling really. Filling in time usefully and being good was considered a very good thing.

Quite how these books gathered together in a cupboard I have no idea. I am very glad to have them back and sitting comfortably in a bookcase , where they belong

#1365 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Books, Van Life2 Comments
©Anne Bobber

Mythical creatures on a mystical night. We camped overnight under a full moon and read books about mythical creatures.

As luck would have it the mythical creature in the book was a Leviathan which we had visited earlier in the day.

Overlooking Plymouth Sound for overnight camping we were not troubled by the low sad songs of unhappy Leviathans. Instead they jumped and frolicked in the bright moonlight which was untroubled by clouds or any other weather predicament.

The Leviathan and a full moon at Stonehouse
The Leviathan and Plymouth Hoe

It helps, of course, that Nana drew a Leviathan a few years ago.

#1354 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books1 Comment
A beach on the South West Coastal Path

The sun sets on a Book Group Day that should have been a humdinger given the weekend news,that all was not quite as Salty as it should have been on the Saltpath written by Raynor Winn. Or as we now know her to be, plain old Sally Walker*

https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-real-salt-path-how-the-couple-behind-a-bestseller-left-a-trail-of-debt-and-deceit

Even the name change is a bit of a hint,who would conceivably give up on the surname Walker for a book featuring walking. Someone who couldn’t let her real name be known.

But no Salt Path discussions for the Bookworms today. Just 5 of us rocked up and out of respect for the other 7 we just discussed politics, the trials and tribulations of the ‘ burner’ phone for activists over 70 and a book of short stories by Ali Smith.

August’s meeting will be fascinating. A whole month for the Salt Path to unravel.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I was never comfortable with the writer and narrator of the Salt Path. I even gave up an interest in a local folk band, Gigspanner when they invited her to join them.

It is ironic that this revelation has come just as I have ended my Raynor Winn  reading session. People helpfully suggested I read her second and third book to educate myself into liking and understanding her and her story more. The attempt to scrub my cynicism and replace it with some compassion had already failed when the news broke this weekend.

It gave me no pleasure at all to be proved right, because whatever I think of the author and her book, a lot of people have been inspired by her to walk the South West Coastal Path or to attempt seemingly impossible tasks when illness strikes.

I always hoped I was wrong about her, I excused myself from my dislike by thinking that I was misreading what I was reading, while reading ‘ between the lines’.

But to write one untruthful memoir could be considered an accident.

Two might be a coincidence.

Three is a pattern of deceit.

And to allow a Movie* to be made is asking for trouble.

And that appears to be exactly the tipping point. Although the film is less awful than the books because it can easily be viewed as a work of fiction. But now I feel some discomfort for the Actors, Gillian Anderson and Jason Issacs who gave excellent performances as people who were not who, or what they thought they were.

Books and bookclubs! They make you think.

Mount Batten Bay, slightly embellished. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story. The Saltpath.

#1251 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books1 Comment
Not this one, 3 times is quite enough.

What book could you read over and over again?

I am not much of a repeat reader. If I reread a book it is often circumstantial rather than a choice. Book Club is a good source of a re-read but with the added benefits of being able to talk with a group of fascinating people about the book. This last month I read the book club book twice and I had also read it a few years ago. 3 times for a book I consider to be not worth reading. I probably didn’t finish it the first time. I didn’t plan to give it such diligence this month but after the first read I researched the reviews from when it was first published and gave it a skim-read second/third go.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/22/beryl-bainbridge-polka-dot-dress?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I am an ardent reader for pleasure. The more I read this book the more I took from it, but pleasure was not something extracted on any one of my three adventures between its covers.

I feel I have failed by not thinking that this book is an insightful and fitting final novel by a great writer. But in truth this is not her final novel. She didn’t finish it and her hastily written manuscripts fueled by end-of-life medications were assembled by her much respected editor. Would she have sent it out in that form to her adoring public?

Could it ever be accurately judged as it was published after her death. Once one critic, from an unreliable cohort,  mostly white men, had said it was her masterpiece ( mistresspiece) could anyone have disagreed?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jul/02/beryl-bainbridge-favourite-book?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Much better to read this article and the books mentioned. Written a day after her death the  article mentions my personal favourite The Birthday Boys about Scott , a local Plymouth hero. But read by me long before I lived here.

I am going to read it again now. I suppose despite what I said earlier I am a re-reader. Just not over and over again. Life is too short!

#1097 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Books, Serendipity2 Comments

I had read an enormous amount of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle before I was twenty.My book club has directed me, this month, to read the first novel to feature Sherlock Holmes. I am loving it, particularly because the life I have lived beyond twenty has exposed me to many of  Conan Doyles real life locations. Where his fictitious detective operated.  I used to regularly catch my bus home from work opposite 221B Baker Street and a different bus home took me on the Brixton Road. The first crime scene where Homes and Watson work together. When I was training at Barts Hospital I was familiar with the laboratories where Holmes and Watson first met in A Study in Scarlet. Wimpole and Harley Street were neighbouring streets to my workplace in Westmoreland Street. Holmes and Watson are frequently in these streets.

So I find myself in a strange place reading a book where, once upon a time, I was free to build my own imaginary locations as a twenty year old with little life experience. Re-reading it I have none of that freedom but with that understood I find the reading of the novel even richer in detail than I did before. Places I love are brought back to life, 150 years before I ever knew them.

In another curious coincidence I currently live very very close to the location of Arthur Conan Doyles G.P practice in Durnford Street in 1882. I know where the actual Baskervilles are buried. They were Conan Doyles patients, he used their name. Who knows if they even had a hound. My house was being built while he worked here. Funny to think that our quirky old lady was just a building site or ‘ New Build Home’ when Conan Doyle was wandering these streets.

Without a Book Club I doubt I would have re-entered the world of Sherlock Holmes, I am finding the experience rather interesting.