Author: sandiezand

1954 Bermondsey mothers’ outing

The postcard is a dying pleasure and it’s a shame. There’s something delicious about those little pieces of printed card – cheery inky sentiment squeezed into limited space in an ever-shrinking scrawl.

The Corps of Women Drivers and Grooms formed during the 1914-18 War to drive the horse-drawn mail vans

One of my favourite used bookshops in town is Simon Baynes, which has a large collection of old postards – some unused, some written on – and I can spend ages meandering through the boxes, looking at them. I never buy any and the chap behind the counter must think me a pain. But the reason I never buy any is because if I started I probably wouldn’t be able to stop. I’ve been here before.

Hackney Workhouse. ‘H’ Block, the women’s ward, 1902

In 1999, when heavily pregnant with first child, I was inexplicably struck with an obsession with feminism and found myself – that long unbearably hot summer – consuming oodles of feminist literature. There was a certain irony in reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch when I was in what most men saw as the sort of condition whereby doors must be opened, seats given up and for God’s sake she’s hormonal, don’t say anything to upset her kindly patronisation.

My dear Mr B, 
We arrived in good condition after a splendid crossing. Today has been glorious, the first summer day, so the natives tell us. We attended a suffragist meeting this morning and you will be surprised to hear that I made a few remarks, but they were to a man who kept interrupting with inane remarks. We have been down to the Port tonight and seen the women cleaning and packing fish. This is something that has been started since we were here last year. We have a fine room, overlooking bay, port and promenade. Hoping you are having better weather and all keeping fit. Yours in ….

Isn’t that wonderful?

… with images of Cinque Terre on the Italian Riviera.

I am filled with a lust that cannot be ignored and shan’t settle until I’ve been there. And I want to go by train.

Apparently it’s possible to do the journey, via that mode of transport, within a day. So, coffee in Shrewsbury, breakfast in London, lunch in Paris, afternoon tea in Turin, and dinner in Monterosso al Mare. Perfetto! 

I idle away a fair bit of online time perusing three things: travel, food and poetry. Recently, I asked online friends where would you go with an unlimited budget?

There were some interesting replies – places seen, places craved. But a curious answer came from the wonderful Liz/Sheena who said we travel because it makes us feel a certain way, so should focus on inducing this same feeling in our ordinary lives, in ordinary places.

To some extent I get what she’s saying, but a large part of what appeals to me with travel couldn’t be reproduced in my native land.

I love being the foreigner. The detachment that comes with not speaking the language – tuning out, relaxing, knowing nothing is my concern – the sheer selfishness of just being. I love the quiet watching and pondering a person is free to do when in the role of visiting ghost.

I asked my dad – who’s travelled the world the hard way – where is his favourite place? He said he couldn’t answer. Did I mean most pleasurable or memorable or intense…? He gave a few examples of each – all exotic, dangerous ventures – before settling, briefly, on:

“…the time, having canoed 3000km down the Danube, to stand alone with my feet in the Black Sea, eyes closed, knowing I had done it and it could never be taken away from me.” 

Ah. And that’s the difference between armchair travel and the real kind… now where’s that train schedule?

Honour by Freddie Omm
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Honour is a brilliant read – and quietly clever too. The fast-moving plot will certainly appeal to thriller devotees – it’s a page turner and I defy anyone to read the opening chapter and not want to read on – and yet it’s unique in its treatment, with a storyline, characters and settings to appeal to a much wider audience than just thriller fans. The wonderful pace is aided by clean and spare prose, but with delicious playful touches to the language that lift it above and beyond other books in the genre. There is a lot of wit here and it is this, and the pace, which prevent the book’s subject matter from bogging the reader down in *issues*.

Short punchy chapters, several intermingling story strands, and a fabulous cast of characters populate an involving story about an honour killing in a western consumerist setting – who is the oppressor? Who is the oppressed? What exactly is honour? The story moves briskly along with a supple use of language and glorious black humour, flitting between fundamentalists with murderous intent, advertising executives with one eye on the bottom line and one scouting for the next bandwagon, and bored aristocratic wives with a penchant for rolling in the hay…

You’ll finish this book thinking you’ve read a great romping thriller. But then you’ll realise you read something far more than that – you read an extremely clever subtle observation of the world in which we live, where norms are learned and the lines drawn constituting Right and Wrong are not static, nor absolute.

A cracking read & top marks from me.

The Beauregarde Affair by Brian M. Talgo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Beauregarde Affair is a tale told by a natural raconteur. I would love to hear this serialised on radio, or done as an audio book read by the author. Memoirs in themselves can often be self-indulgent and fall foul of the “oh well, you’d understand if you’d been there” realm, but what Talgo has done here is to fictionalise the memoir slightly – and to do so with such a strong and compelling Voice that it’s surely impossible not to be drawn into this world of stoned misfits – and so, with the edges of Reality tinged with imagined romanticism and the tidying up of events, the whole thing comes together as the most wonderful story, polished and with witty afterthought and honed to perfection. What bits are true, what bits invented, who knows – but one thing for certain it’s a moreish tale of witty hedonistic indulgence that will touch the very soul of anyone who lived through that era and, indeed, I reckon I’ll be having flashbacks for years…

But it’s also a tale of friendships and, no matter the decade, these early bonds – those people with whom we choose to spend our formative years – define and remain with us for life and are not confined to one particular decade in time. And so I don’t think this is a story purely for the stone-heads of the seventies but is a story for anyone who’s ever shared digs with others during their carefree, egotistical party years.

And the snake. Oh how I love the snake… he is almost figurative (though I’m sure he existed!) in that he holds together this story of loves, losses, drunken misdemeanours and innate will to avoid Growing Up for as long as is humanely possible… only to reach his literary peak towards the end. What happens to the snake? You’ll have to read it to find out.

It’s bliss. I cannot recommend it highly enough. But please, Brian Talgo… can we have an audio version??

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Last year I spent five days in remote bliss, staying with my dad in the Spanish mountains. He’s lived in that country on and off for the past three decades or so – happiest in craggy sunshine, away from people, where he can walk and write in peace.

After a decade or so in Amsterdam, and a taste of true population density, he moved back to Spain last year to a tiny place called Sedella (described on the web as a town, but really… no!). Life is critically slow. Two small shops open at random moments, nobody locks doors, weathered village elders gather on worn wooden chairs in the narrow alleys to bitch loudly. There’s an old church, its tower of Moorish origin, where a bell tolls when someone in the village dies. It rings a different note for each gender and tolled twice during the five days I was there. Reflective of the average age-range, I think.

Even this tiny place was too much for my dad. Since my visit he’s moved into the mountains proper and is now isolated from all life bar that of dusk crickets in the dry shrubbery, the tinkling bells of goats passing on their way up/down the cattle paths, and the occasional human visitor breaking free from the Noise of life for a taste of sanity.

The photo above is a very rare shot of us together. He hates having his photo taken (hence the closed eyes) and I have hardly any shots of us together from my childhood (from which he was primarily absent).  Here’s one taken in 1977 (check that collar!). Yeah, I was still quite sweet, my future undetermined – all the potential of Life ahead…

The title of this blog post is a line from an email he sent prior to my visit. I’d assumed we would be doing some serious walking but the temperature was rising to dangerous levels. And I think, too, he realised what I needed was the peace, not rabid exercise. Strangely enough, given his absence from my upbringing, he’s perhaps the only person in existence who really understands me. Genetics, I guess, combined perhaps with that very absence – a lack of the sort of habitual negative judgement that lengthy close proximity can induce. It’s interesting. We’re alike in many ways… both positive and negative.

Whatever. We did walk. Easy routes. Two hours each day, in blistering heat. It was enough. The rest of the time we read, dozed, stared at the mountains. Later we’d eat; drink appalling amounts of beer and wine; talk and argue crap until dawn. It was Just The Thing.

And if I could be anywhere right now, I’d be there.

Snug in quiet mountains where the internet struggles to reach. Where a person can detach from all that shit to talk at length about ancient religious buildings, Crusades fought centuries ago, God, man, space, time… the very smallness of life… about books, theories, poetry, and all things solid. Until too tired or drunk to be coherent. Until too tied up in belligerence to ever reach agreement. And then, as the sky slowly lightens, talk some more regardless…

I took this photo in Paris last summer.

Political and social considerations aside – not to mention the rudeness of photographing someone’s home without their permission – for me, the fascination here is in the detail. As is the poignancy.

I came across it again this evening and thought it’d make a good writers’ exercise if anyone wants to play.

What’s the story? Who lives here?

It’s half past one and I’m sitting here in a house that’s grown chilly, drinking port as it’s the only thing in the cupboard in Detox Month, and waiting for my dog to die. She’s calm but her breathing is fairly laboured; I don’t think she has long to go – maybe a few hours, maybe less. She’s fighting it a little. Periodically raises her head, panic in her eyes, and I have to soothe her into lying back down, try to get her to close those eyes, to sleep, to sleep, sleep…

For a surreal moment I’m struck by the memory of easing my children as toddlers back into sleep after a nightmare. That patient stroking of foreheads, the calm, repetitive whisper, it’s okay, it’s okay. Yet this sleep – as Daisy clearly knows from the reluctance to shut her eyes – will be an eternal one.

Dogs can’t be fooled as easily as children – words mean nothing, it’s body language that counts. Why else would I be sitting on a cold floor at 1.30 in the morning, stroking her head, if it wasn’t Serious…? Yeah, she’s not fooled.

So I go outside for a smoke when she’s calm again. Maybe she’ll better fall asleep without me. The sky is lit by a full moon and a bird’s singing its dawn chorus. Weird. I’d always thought they had internal body clocks – something that measured time in a similar way to our days, hours and minutes. But this bird’s obviously going on sky brightness – it does look like dawn – and is chirruping merrily… though no other is answering.

It’s 2am, Daisy has gone, and the bird’s stopped singing.