Bass Rock

 

I love Evie Wyld (and have reviewed her other books here and here) so 'Bass Rock' jumped onto the library list as soon as I read about it. It follows several different story lines, and while I liked all the individual strands of the story, the more historical one seemed to lack a connection to the rest of the story. There were also several passages, apparently unconnected, describing horrible violence against unnamed women that simply left me disturbed and horrified. The main thread of the story in the 1950s follows Ruth, a newly married and step-mothering young woman, moved to Scotland to a big old house to care for her husband's two boys. The main other strand turns out to be her granddaughter Viv, coming to 'sort out' the house as it is being sold. The story of Sarah, the suspected witch, and the family who rescue her seems entirely separate. They trek aimlessly through the woods away from their village, until the group gradually dwindles, and the young boy, once fascinated, begins to see her as a threat. It is a sad book, the women in it lead small lives, lacking in connection and love. Both their relationships and society in general seems to conspire to keep it that way. 

Here Ruth is at her sister's wedding:

"Ludwig performed a small dance at the base of the fence, his ear turning themselves pink-way out. The clamour rose again and Ruth looked at the wagtail. 'Hello, Anthony,' she said to it, and then wondered what had gone wrong to produce that kind of nonsense, that her dead brother had come to the wedding reception disguised as a small bird. Aunt Josephine had been stood not too far away, and had given her a look of great compassion, Ruth had thought, but later it turned out that Aunt Josephine had reported it back to her mother and, combined with her behaviour later that year, it had been used to install Ruth for a fortnight in a sanatorium in Deal, which had been humiliating and alarming, and where she had learned a thing or two about pretending." (p.25)

This one I liked because of the memory it evoked, and then I thought, surely the author is too young to remember vinyl covered chairs, they were a 1970s thing, so she must have read or heard it somewhere, but the detail is lovely:

"The kitchen table remains, its yellow-vinyl-cushioned chairs, a split on each seat that pinched the backs of your thighs if you sat on them with shorts. Funny, that memory - so strong and yet I could count on one hand the number of warm days we spent at North Berwick. The shorts would have been worn along with a thick scratchy fisherman's jumper and hat. The estate agent requests the broken seats are kept hidden underneath the table." (p.54-5)

I like Viv because of how much she lives in the past. She spends a lot of time thinking over her childhood, not in a nostalgic way, but just dwelling on it, and often feeling herself to be the same:

"I turn the radio off. It is near to midnight. I imagine a wolf man running alongside the car. I used to do this on the drive to Scotland when I was a kid. When you look into the scrub at the side of the road, when you peer into the dark, it's easy to see them, waiting to race you, willing you to break down. London is warm and comfortable, street lights and rain-wet pavements. Everyone is sleeping, the wolves have turned into foxes." (p.640

And back to Ruth, who sinks into alcohol with the isolation (both physical and metaphorical), and the gaslighting by her husband after she tells him she has seen him with his mistress. Just love the last sentence here:

"Ruth pushed herself back from the desk, hands in lap. She rose from the seat and looked out of the window at the water, the same gunmetal grey as the dead shark. The whole landscape was a giant monster, the sky indifferent, the golf course a wasteland. She knelt and then lay on the floor, folded her hands over her chest. The ceiling dipped in and out of focus. She felt her heart rapping on the wood off the floor, through the back of her ribcage. One, two, three, four, five, six. It seemed that, instead of calming her, her heart's thud was becoming stronger and louder, knocking a tide of blood into her head, banging against the drums of her ears, and she closed her eyes and felt the floor slope under her. Her body danced with prickles." (p.209-10)

Not a 'lovely' book but very emotionally intense and engaging. Nicely drawn minor characters too, like Betty the housekeeper and Maggie, a homeless woman who befriends Viv. It's all about the women, so what's not to like.

Stay safe. Be kind. Finish that baby blanket. 

Flowers for day 4

 

This is an ajuga, loves damp and dappled shade. It was hidden under the huge fern and only just noticed it had come into flower.

These irises were bought last year and poked randomly into the bed. I had forgotten about them. They have been long leafy stalks for several weeks but the sunshine finally opened them up:

This pink (red?) campion (not sure, they are very similar) must have been in the wild flower bee bombs that were planted last year. There was a disappointing show with a few poppies but not much else, but several other things have popped up in pots this spring that have been lovely:

The viola were also grown from seed last year but had remained scrawny little plants that overwintered in a small pot looking mostly dead. I potted them up this spring and they have come on a storm, lots of flowers in several different shades of purple:

Have been pottering and rearranging things over the last week. Found a sixth even tinier oakling among the new ones. Potted some up that were in too small pots, and have made them into a tiny forest:

Stay safe. Be kind. Love the flowers.

Day two - 30 days wild

 

Yesterday was the start of 30 Days Wild and I was too busy in the garden to post anything.

Lovely bees buzzed excitedly, and noisily, in the dog rose.

And then Tish spotted a dreaded Rosemary beetle. If you find any the RHS have a survey page where the spread of the beetle is being studied. They are so pretty we didn't want to squash it so she took it to the park. (I mean slugs are pretty ugly but I don't want to squash them either, I'm not prejudiced).

Things are progressing in the garden but we had some nasty orange rust mildew on the lovely pink flowers that the bees like so much, and I had to just chop down two big patches of it. I hope it will come back as it seems to come from multitudinous rhizomes all along the side bed. I am waiting for everything to look lush and flowerful to make a little video.

Stay safe. Be kind. Do something Wild.

Four Books

I don't read graphic novels much, hardly ever. I kind of bought Michael Deforge's 'Familiar Face' for Monkey, but I do that quite a bit, buy things I think might interest someone else, but utterly fail at it. It was just a weird book, set in a dystopian society where the government controls everything, including the configuration of your body, and can make random changes to any aspect of your life without warning. Our hero joins some kind of protest movement in the face of the absurdity of existence but, as you might imagine, that's not going to make any difference. In some ways such satire serves to highlight the chaotic and random nature of life that is underneath the thin layer of civilization that we all pretend to participate in.

I chose 'In Five Years' by Rebecca Serle, and probably wouldn't have bothered if I'd looked at her website first. It was shallow and cutesie, and I only stuck with it because of 'What Alice Forgot' which I read a decade ago. It was another book about memory and someone trying to change their life, and that one evoked a strong emotional response, so, having said this to Monkey, we agreed that I should give this one a chance. But I did not like the woman in this book, or even feel much sympathy for her rich friend dying of whatever-she-died-of. She did not learn or grow much from her experience and was just self-obsessed. I mean anyone who intends to marry someone because they fit in with some image they have of their future life is just the stuff of the reality TV that I despise. Whatever. No quote, nothing worth quoting.

'Luster' by Raven Leilani on the other hand was a fascinating look at two women's relationship. You start with Edie, this young woman with meaningless promiscuous behaviour who starts a relationship with middle-aged Eric. It's written in first person so all you have is the inside of her head, detailing her thoughts and feelings about the progress of their relationship. You think the book is going to be about them, but Eric is sidelined and it slowly morphs into a book about the relationship between Edie and Rebecca, Eric's wife, and also about her relationship, a beautifully low key one, with their adopted daughter Akila. I found her observations of her situation very engaging, as she tries to make sense of them. Here Rebecca has taken her back to her house after Edie finds herself homeless:

"I'm aware that the room is owned, each square foot considered and likely free of mice. In this room that no one sleeps in, there is still evidence of life. Department store stills of wet cobblestone and pitted fruit, moody Helmut Newtons of smoking women, drapes the same shade of mauve my mom used to paint the kitchen the day she killed herself, furniture with the too-balanced stretch marks of the deliberately distressed, this willingness to pay for degradation something I want to hate but actually relate to, the ficus, wicker, and ornamental glass all cherries on top, a cohesive domesticity that I find weird and a little threatening, but that fills me with the yearning to retrieve my toaster oven from storage and find a place to plug it in." (p.100-101)

Later Edie finds herself an unintentional observer of family life, but when she makes an unwelcome intervention she finds herself put back in her place:

" 'I am her mother,' she says firmly, though there is a hitch in her voice and her face colours. 'You are a guest,' she says before she sweeps out of the room, and I find it very rich, to have been invited here partly on the absurd presumption that I would know what to do with Akila simply because we are both black, and now be rebuffed when I have not performed the role of the Trusty Black Spirit Guide to her taste. I go back up to the guest room and pack my things. I wait for her to put me out. I lie in the dark with my shoes on, wondering if I was wrong to say anything. I compile everything I could have said if I were faster, smarter. By midnight, I have a carefully footnoted Spike Lee joint, an entire treatise on the conspiracy of oppression, though at one o'clock when I have rehearsed my supporting data and reimagined the conversation as one in which I don't let Dr King down, I suddenly feel that she can go fuck herself, that my intellectual labor should be subsidised and the onus is not on the oppressed to consider the oppressor, though in the morning after I take a shower, I look out of the window and see her lugging a bag of mulch across the yard and I feel guilty all over again. Her chunky, tragic sneakers and freaky competence. The way the windows around the cup-de-sac are dark and she is the only person outside, already engaged enough in her task to be making a lot of supremely unsexy noise. It becomes clear to me, how keenly she is alone." (p.120-121)

(I love her long complex sentences.) I am contrite. I give you this last quote because as a white woman it was a whole world of stuff that I know nothing about. I like the fact that although, as in the above quote, Edie feels like things are expected of her regarding Akila that she resents, she also sees value in being able to teach her something important that her mother couldn't:

"Over the last couple of months, we have updated her hair care through careful trial and error, even as we were waylaid by suburban convenience stores stocked exclusively with Caucasian shampoos. Once, in Hoboken, we discovered a single bottom shelf with old pomade and congealed Cantu. There were a few trips to Brooklyn, one for oils and one for butters, the home-made and saran-wrapped, the saditty and petroleum-free, Akila's sopping twist-outs transformed by a half percentage point of fall humidity until we forwent the apple cider vinegar and just cracked a few eggs over her head. Now we have a routine: coconut oil, manuka honey, and two firm Bantu knots before bed. As I go through her hair with a hot comb, I imagine its future iterations - the five-dollar ponies and mangled yaki and rainbow Kanekalon and the certainty of a post-breakup big chop, and I wonder where inside this spectrum she will ultimately land. As we are finishing up, Eric comes down the stairs and comments on the smell, but when he sees the source, he seems to gather that it is Something Black, and he is contrite." (p.196)

So it was a real mixed bag from the post-lockdown library haul. 'The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue' by V.E. Schwab was just pure self-indulgent story telling, and I loved it. In 1714 Adeline is due to get married, sucked into a life that will suck all the life out of her, so she runs to the forest, and against all sage advice prays to the gods of the dark. Her pleas are answered and she makes a deal, as much life as she wants, in exchange for her soul, but no one will remember her. In the present day Addie lives in New York and still lives from hand to mouth, but slightly more comfortably than in the 1700s. She cannot keep anything or leave any mark of her own, but over the years she inveigles herself into numerous works of art as a model and muse. She educates herself and travels, but each time she encounters someone, even a long time lover, she must introduce herself and start afresh. To me it sounded exhausting, never being secure, being lonely, but Addie is resourceful and as the years go by has less struggle and more comfort. Luc, as she names her shadowy 'benefactor', appears and disappears from her life, watching, sometimes helping, but sometimes hindering.  Then, after 300 years, she meets Henry. And he remembers her. The question then becomes, can they outwit the darkness and have a life together. I don't read much fantasy but I love a bit of magical realism. There are always inconsistencies, but to be honest I just let them slide because I enjoyed the adventure. Just a quote to give you a taster; here, ten years into her new life, Addie encounters a young man, and finds someone who is just fascinated by her instead of her anticipated threat, a real conversation for her that highlights how much she craves human connection:

"The man comes out of nowhere.

A shoulder knocks into her arm, and the precious jar slips from her hand and shatters on the cobbled street, and for an instant Addie thinks she is being attacked, or robbed, but the stranger is already stammering out his apologies.

'You fool,' she hisses, attention flickering from the golden syrup, now glittering with glass, to the man who caused her loss. He is young, and fair, and lovely, with high cheeks and hair the colour of her ruined honey.

And he is not alone.

His companions hang back, whooping and cheering at his mistake - they have the happy air of those who began their evening revels back at midday - but the errant youth blushes fiercely, clearly embarrassed.

'My apologies, truly,' he begins, but then a transformation sweeps across his face. First surprise, and then amusement, and she realises, too late, how close they are, how clearly the light has fallen on her face. Realises, too late, that he has seen through her illusion, that his hand is still there, on her sleeve, and for a moment she is afraid he will expose her.

But when his companions call for him to hurry on, he tells them to go ahead, and now they are alone on the cobbled street, and Addie is ready to pull free, to run, but there is no shadow in the young man's face, no menace, only a strange delight.

'Let's go,' she says, lowering her voice a measure when she speaks, which only seems to please him more, even as he frees her arm with all the speed of someone grazing fire.

'Sorry,' he says again, 'I forgot myself.' And then, a mischievous grin. 'It seems you have, too.'

'Not at all,' she says, fingers drifting towards the short blade she's kept inside her basket. 'I have misplaced myself on purpose.' " (p.198-199)

Stay safe; remember hands, face and space as you go about your newly opened life. Enjoy the sunshine.

Not polystyrene

Much stuff going on in the garden, in spite of the endless, endless rain. So much rain. Everything I pot up is utterly waterlogged, but things seem to be surviving. I say surviving, not thriving, because I hope that once the sun begins to shine all the little sproutlings will start to shoot up. I went outside on Saturday and sorted out the Julians, getting a lovely bucket of worm compost for my efforts. There are thousands of them.

I kept finding clumps of baby Julians and putting them back in the worm bin, but so many were mixed up with the compost it was impossible to sort them out

The heucheras arrived, from Heucheraholics:

packed with what, at first glance, I was horrified to think was polystyrene packaging. However on closer inspection I found they are starch based and as such it has since been fed to the Julians:

Back in early May last year I had my first Tree Joy, and this year I thought again that nothing had sprouted, only to find a week later that I have five new oaklings. 

This afternoon, after a morning of chatting about plants in Julie's garden, I put the sweet peas in a big pot with something to climb up, and gave them a prime sunny spot:

The sunflowers have a trough against the back wall, with part of an old cot that I can use to tie them up when they start to get tall:

I am impatient for everything to bloom; we are promised a heat wave next month. I have been a bit disappointed by the plug plants that arrived from Marshalls, they were rather scrawny and have not come on at all since I potted them up, but we will reserve judgement until June comes. 

I got my second jab a couple of weeks ago, and Monkey went to a drop-on vaccination session at the MRI on Sunday and got her first, so we are feeling well protected now.

Stay safe. Be kind. Plant a flower. Get vaccinated.

What's wrong with the world

 

Prize for the most utterly meaningless headline today goes to:

"Bitcoin lowest since February as Musk tweets trigger whipsaw trading"

Man with more money than he knows what to do with sends digital message to the planet and caused the price of something that doesn't actually exist to fall.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, we see the pathetic and ineffectual response of the world's governments to the slaughter of Palestinian people by the Israeli army . If you have any inclination to offer support to the Palestinians, who are kept systematically deprived of clean water, food supplies and medicines then you can donate to Medical Aid for Palestine here.

Stay safe. Hug your family. Give what you can to people in need.

Messy life

 

Apparently it is Mental Health Awareness Week and while I try to be very honest on this blog the temptation is to write about the nice things so that life seems good to anyone looking in. I know that social media generally is guilty of people presenting a glossy image of themselves, which mostly serves to make others feel inadequate. Life is messy. Here is my messy life. Monkey is stressed about her Japanese oral exam this morning so we were sitting watching the cat catch fungus gnats (more on that later) and just looking at the dumping ground that is our front room, now dominated by a Lollipop that Tish bought recently, but also full of volleyball nets and random floor cushions that we never sit on.

The back living room is just a tip too, but you know what, I don't beat myself up about the fact that it needs a good tidy and a hoover. I feel bad that I threw out the cat castle this morning, but she had lost interest in it and it was just taking up space.

My joys are small these days and this gave me joy today. While we were sitting I looked up and found this rainbow cast in the ceiling by the window screens that refract the light:

So, anyway, back to the fungus gnats. They had become endemic in the kitchen, and it was time to tackle them. All the babies have been potted up and the old compost put in the compost bin. All the new compost has had the diatomaceous earth added, and I put more in all the other plants around (mainly the avocado trees), this kills the grubs as they hatch apparently:

The drosera capensis was so well fed that we swapped it with the one upstairs (look close you can see how smothered in gnat corpses it is):

and we added new and extra gnat traps (which I would recommend, they have been very effective and cheap):

This morning there was nary a one flying in the kitchen, so I call that a job well done.

Monkey just came down the stairs and said 'your friend Nick is on the news', and so he is. Here is one of his videos that he makes about sea kayaking, including a recent magical encounter with dolphins:

Stay safe. Be kind. Find small joys (and share them).