short stories

I have just finished reading 'No one belongs here more than you.' by Miranda July (a strikingly multi-talented person). I am not sure what to write about these stories. Most are written in the first person and the characters in them are mostly slightly dysfunctional, with very strange relationships with the people and the world around them. They are often people unable to acknowledge or articulate the thoughts and feelings that they have. They are stories in which nothing happens but are really about the strange places that people go in their imagination. The style comes across almost a little stream-of-consciousness. What is intriguing is that she looks at the world in quite a unique way and sees things that most other people have not even thought of. I liked the one about the woman who has a port wine stain removed from her face, but finds that it continues to dominate her thoughts and how she feels about herself, the lack of it tainting her relationships, until it strangely reappears. I think my favourite is 'How to tell stories to children', about a woman who develops a very strong bond with her friend's child, becoming an alternate parent, a refuge from the real parents who's relationship is fraught and self-indulgent. You get the definite feeling that the adult needs and gets as much out of the relationship as the child does, and when it turns sour it is she that loses most. The stories are all quite emotionally intense, people needing something from the others in their lives, or even from total strangers. They are the kind of stories that make you feel very normal and ordinary, and grateful for it.

Here is another baby picture, just because babies are lovely.

Baby Blanket

The baby has more hats than she needs so I decided to make something with a little more long lasting. This is the part felted blanket. It is nuno felted on a piece of muslin. We (that's Tish and me) layered un-dyed merino on one side, which I rolled for a while so it was safe to turn over. Then I made a design on the other side with some blended red/orange/yellow/pink edging and some plain dark red in the centre. Tish and I then rolled it back and forth to each other across the living room for most of X-Factor on Saturday night.

This is the finished article after it has been soaped and shrunk.

Just for the record it shrank from 150 x 90cm to about 100 x 60cm.
And I think i might want to keep it now as it is really wonderfully cuddly and soft. Maybe I can just hold it for a few days until we go back to see the baby again:-)

Strikes and all that

Ok, I've been avoiding commenting on the strike but what the hell.

It is very frustrating to read journalists writing about Royal Mail, because mostly they have very little knowledge of how the system works. Many people still think that being a postie is some kind of gentle stroll round the streets chatting to people as you go and stopping off for numerous cups of tea and getting home for lunch. For a start, the time you get your post is not an indicator of how efficient Royal Mail are. If a postman does (as we do here) an average round of 4 1/2 hours, then some people will always get their post by 9.30am and some people will always, especially if they live in a little village in the middle of nowhere, get theirs at 2pm. Our start times have been pushed back to such an extent that there is *no such thing* as post arriving at 7.30am any more.

When I first started here I found it amazing that you could go home early if you finished all your work. My shortest working day ever has been 4 hours. There is no other job where this happens. But the times when you are early has got less and less as the workload has increased, and since the last dispute we now have 'swings and roundabouts', where time you save one day is balanced against any time you go into overtime on another day.

The management view is now that we are a 'business' with all that that entails. My opinion is, and remains, that Royal Mail is a public service. It should not be even part-privatised. No other company could possibly set up a comprehensive delivery network. Royal Mail has what is called the 'Universal Service Obligation', which means every household has a right to a daily postal delivery. It is not fair that any company coming into the market should not have to fulfil the same obligations, but of course this is not the case and companies can come in and cherry pick the easy bits of the service, collecting and processing bulk mailings and then getting Royal Mail to deliver them for a pittance. Pay really isn't the primary issue this time, we are fighting now to keep a decent service for the public and to have a say in how the company changes.

I am not sure I want to get into the 'all we get now is junk mail' and 'the internet is taking over' kind of arguments, because for many people the postal service remains a vital part of their life. I think that there will be many changes over the next 20 years. I personally hope junk mail will be taxed out of existence, even though it keeps me in a job. My environmental sensibilities clash frequently with my job when I have to drive a mile to deliver a letter I know will go straight in the bin. Though on the other hand shopping by post is much more environmentally friendly; people stay home and wait for stuff to be bought to them.

So I have been on holiday the last few days and was saved the problem of deciding whether to strike. I did last time, mounting a lonely picket line outside my office which the others all crossed, though it earned me the respect of people down in Gloucester Mail Centre. This time lost income is something more of an issue and I feel that the issues are more wooly and that the union should have tried harder to avoid this confrontation (you wonder if some of them like all the media attention). It makes us look if we want to preserve some kind of 'nostalgic' image of what we do, and press stories about ruining Christmas really don't help get public support. All in all, it's a big mess and talking is the only way out of it.

Anyway, I am not sure I always like Spiked's attitude (argumentative for the sake of it) but I did read this excellent article about the postal dispute. It counters very well the way the dispute has been presenting in the media.

Back to knitting now, working on more socks:-)

baby days

Welcome to Althea, born on Saturday morning to my wonderful friends Julie and Al. We dashed up to pick them up from the hospital, and do a little bit of looking after and quite a bit of cuddling the baby (though there was quite a long queue for the cuddles). The reams of advice they have to give these days makes having a new baby such a complicated business. The midwife was most insistent that she should not wear hats in the house, so she is going to have to take a daily trip up and down the street to ensure that the whole collection of home made hats gets used.

We are all looking forward to being part of her life.

A felt of two halves

The dark days are certainly with us now. Come the end of September I get a bit depressed at the prospect of six months of walking to work in the dark, but the darker evenings don't bother me so much and it was a lovely sky last night so I went out and photographed.

Anyhow we have done no dyeing nor felting for ages (working days off too much at the moment) so I was determined to do something on Sunday. Tish needed another ball of wool to finish off the cardi she is doing for Julie's baby. She had dyed some several months ago and then found she has not quite enough to finish. Fortunately we did keep a record of the colours we blended and were able to recreate something close enough. And I wanted to do some more felt and dye some more roving.

So this is what you end up with when you are not particularly inspired to anything and just plonk down any available colour.
In one half I used some left over batts of blended roving that I made ages ago, and I really like the mottled patchwork effect. And on the other half I used some pastel coloured corriedale roving for the background and scattered scraps of embroidery silk and other random bits of thread and held them in place with a fine layer of merino. I liked this part too, but they are really two separate projects on one piece of felt. So the whole things is distinctly unsatisfactory and may have to be cut up and used for something else.

The dyeing on the other hand came out beautifully and I am so pleased with them. I am thinking more felt rather than spinning. Although I have mostly bought professionally dyed roving I much prefer the softer more muted colours I get doing my own dyeing. These pieces are done very random and I think I will try and do something more planned next time. I bought a set of very expensive silicone measuring spoons (it's all the rage in cookshops these days apparently)(they go down to 1/8 of a teaspoon) so that we can mix the dyes more accurately and with more subtle variations, and reproduce colours more closely.
M and I took all my library books back, including the ones that were honestly not going to be read any time soon. I really enjoyed Felting Fashion by Lizzie Houghton, which was a lovely inspiring book, but I am getting the feeling as I read more that books will not help and I need to go to a workshop to learn and progress beyond my basic skills. I found a copy of 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell' by Susanna Clarke, which I have been wanting to read ever since reading 'The Ladies of Grace Adieu' back in March. We also bought 'A Clockwork Orange' for M to read as her 'banned book' (having unsuccessfully searched for a copy of Lady Chatterley) and a copy of Anna Karenina, which she found and decided it would be a challenge.

Lady Chatterley et al.

This week is apparently 'Banned Books Week' in the US. Their little banner shows a tiny selection of the books that have been banned at some time or another somewhere in America. There is something essentially very frightening about any government that wants to ban books. I know that sometimes you come across writing that contains ideas or opinions that you would not want to see advocated ... but as an unerring principle, freedom of expression goes along unquestionably with freedom of thought. The minute a government says that it will not allow people to think or write about a certain thing it is a bad day for all of us. The American Library Association website has quite an extensive list of books that have been banned or 'challenged', including many well loved and widely read classics, and also an online form that you can use if you find some piece of writing so objectionable that you would like to prevent others from reading it:-)

Of course the first thing that springs to mind in the UK when discussing the banning of books is the notorious 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' trial, when in 1960 an attempt was made to ban the book under 1959 The Obscene Publications Act. As with most such events it was a case of all publicity is good publicity, and the book was probably far more widely read as a result. Similarly the autobiography 'Spycatcher' by Peter Wright, about his work for MI5, was banned in England between 1985 and 1988, until the courts finally acknowledged that it's widespread availability in other countries made the ban meaningless.

On occasion the suggestion has been circulated that books should be 'rated' in the way films or computer games are, but I would never be in favour of such a move. I even have an instinctive dislike of labels that give a 'suitable' reading age range for a book. I think that once a child is an independent reader their choice of reading material should be up to them. I know that I have seen quite a few films/television programmes that I have regretted watching because of content that frightened or upset me, graphic images can be in your head before you realise they are happening, but I have not had such a reaction to any book. Books are different because of the part that your own imagination plays in your participation in the story. I think that people's fear of children reading something unsuitable is about protecting their perceived 'innocence'. It's as if life must be all 'everyone made it home safely for tea and buns' at the end like bloody Enid Blyton, and nothing bad ever really happens. I for one am really glad to see young people's fiction moving away from this and showing life in all it's rich variety, both positive and negative. Mind you, having said that, I do think J.K. copped out of killing off Harry which seemed to me to be the necessary finale of the series, she just couldn't resist the happy ending:-)

"The bright day is done and we are for the dark."

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer.

I bought this book for my sister for her birthday, and pinched it back after she said that she enjoyed it. I have read it in a couple of days this week. Probably a good one to move on to as it was quite a nice quick read, but thoroughly enjoyable and engaging. Written as a series of letters and set in the immediate post -war period it tells the story of the occupation of Guernsey during the Second World War. Juliet is a writer and journalist, touring to promote a collection of her wartime writings, and she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams, who found her name and address in a second hand book, and in a literary deprived environment is seeking out some writing by Charles Lamb. So begins Juliet's friendship with the literary society, formed on a whim by the inimitable Elizabeth to avoid punishment for a curfew breach, but which becomes their saviour in the dark times ahead.

Even though all you are getting is tiny snippets of the life that they lead during the occupation, told piecemeal by different characters, you end up with quite a complete picture of what life was like for the islanders. It must have been strange because the war was right there on their doorstep, in the form of the German soldiers, and yet they were totally isolated from the rest of the world. The only assistance they received was when the British government sent a ship to evacuate the children immediately before the invasion, and then towards the end of the war the Red Cross were finally allowed to bring some food parcels.

So Juliet then starts receiving letters from all sorts of people on the island, keen to share their experiences with her and she begins to get totally caught up in their story. Most of the progress of the book however is told through her letters to her editor Sidney and to Sophie, her best friend and Sidney's sister. To elude the attentions of a rather brash and presumptuous American, Markham V Reynolds Junior, she decides to visit Guernsey to meet her new found friends and learn more about their lives. I think the book captures very well the optimism of the post war period. The harsh deprivations of the war are all too apparent and, though not dwelt upon, the terrible sufferings inflicted by the Nazis are there as a background and something that plainly touched and impacted on every life. The literary society developed into something far more than just sharing books, it gave the people a sense of new connection with their neighbours and bonded them firmly together. When Elizabeth is sent to a prisoner of war camp for harbouring an escaped slave labourer the group rallies round to care for and raise her young daughter.

I won't spoil the story by saying any more, but here is a lovely book, full of genuine atmosphere and very real characters and you feel that the author had a close affinity for them and their experience.