Moab is my Washpot. By Stephen Fry. my review

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Stephen Fry is funny and rude, clever and incredibly knowledgeable. I know who he is, of course I do.  He’s entertained me on the telly for three decades, but did I want to read his autobiography?  Not especially, I don’t really read biographies except of the artists I’m researching.

However when I saw this salmon pink paperback on a bookseller’s shelf, I bought it for the cover.  I might well have bought it even if I was quite unfamiliar with Stephen Fry and despite the obscure title. Who is Moab, why does he/she/they matter? And what in heaven or hell is a Washpot? Yes I guessed the reference was from the Old Testament, but I had no intention of re-reading that tome to find it.

My main reason for the purchase was because the cover was largely filled with the monstrous, wise, preposterously ugly but somehow charming visage of a bull elephant seal, with a proportionately tiny blackbird staring up his bulbous nose. An elephant seal, Lain name Mirounga angustirostris - there's s my one bit of erudition. As a child I had seen one, in Berlin Zoo, as far as I know from this book Mr Fry never visited Berlin in his childhood. So why an elephant seal? Just why?

The autobiography encompasses the first 20 years of Fry’s life and no elephant seals are involved. It’s an intense, highly personal, self-deprecating book.  He writes an eruditely meandering – or maybe I mean meanderingly erudite – and excruciatingly honest story.

He presents us with his family, who he basically loves but, especially as a teenager, refuses to get on with and who love him but find him often hard to comprehend.  We see him in middle-class boarding schools, and how he coped with school life, not always well or honestly, but mostly he coped, by managing to withdraw from the system and outwit authority. And we see his love life as his sexuality begins to emerge. 

I did enjoy Stephen's book, it’s poignant, funny and engrossing, although I skimmed here and there, mostly through the meanderingly erudite sections, I don’t have the advantage of his classical education, I wonder if it is an advantage? The Washpot he mentions  in the afterword, as a metaphorical container for his dirty linen, and I believe Moab was a sinner. But the vast elephant seal, I still have no idea because it looks nothing like him!

Will I read the book again? I might, but probably only after I’ve read what comes in the next volume.  

 

What Do You Know?

 What Do You Know?                     By Susan Gilbert

Lanky Larry crawled up a blade of green grass for the first time and into the sunshine, it was dazzling and he knew he must leap into the air, flapping the strange things that had just sprouted from his back. They were called wings but Lanky Larry didn’t know that. He didn’t know much as he had a very small brain and anyway had spent all his life living underground eating grass roots.

Of course Lanky Larry was a crane fly, some people call them Daddy Long Legs, but Lanky Larry didn’t know that either. He no longer thought about grass roots. Now he could fly he knew just two things, one was that flying seemed tricky, he kept bumping into things.  The other thing Lanky Larry knew was that he absolutely had to meet Lanky Lucy, or Lanky Linda or even, if he was lucky, Lanky Leonora.

Most people know at least two things about crane flies, one is that they bump into everything – lights, windows, people, all the time. The other is that they can live very happily blundering into stuff, even if they have lost a leg, or two, or even three. What most people don’t know about crane flies is that they are all called Lanky.

Another thing Lanky Larry probably needed to know, but didn’t know because he had an extremely small brain, was how to recognise the enemy.

Ruby Robin was the enemy, and as Larry bashed into the branch of the apple tree where Ruby Robin had just landed, Ruby knew Lanky Larry would be tasty and she grabbed his middle-left leg. Larry still only knew that he had to meet Lucy, or Linda or even Leonora, so he kept flying but he didn’t get far because Ruby Robin was sitting on the branch holding onto his middle-left leg.

Something that Ruby Robin didn’t know was that Tabitha Tabby Cat was lurking on another branch, just above her.  Tabitha knew that Ruby Robin would be tasty, she pounced but she missed and fell to the grass as Ruby Robin shot off like a rocket, towing Lanky Larry with her.

Lanky Larry was still flapping his wings, trying to fly and he was still only thinking about Lucy, or Linda or even Leonora. Ruby Robin landed on a smaller twig, higher up in the apple tree, preparing to eat Larry. But at that precise moment, Lanky Larry’s beady eyes spotted Lanky Leonora on the buddleia bush.

He knew it was Lanky Leonora, she was supping nectar so delicately, and she was looking at him with her beautiful beady eyes. Lanky Larry’s wings put in an extra burst of effort to get to her, and that was when his leg fell off.

9/11 Where I Was Not

 On our first and my only trip to the USA, Rob and I spent a week in New York being total tourists, before moving on to visit friends Stan and Jen in Medford Lakes, NJ.

If our original itinerary had worked out, we'd have been in New York and would probably have done the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building on the 9th September. Once actually there, the more enigmatic Empire State came first, but might not have done if it hadn't been closer to our hotel. This budget hotel had roaches in the shower and smelled mouldy, but that was ok, it was exciting, we were in the Big Apple!

Luckily, because of various minor complications like Stan and Jen being on holiday in the West Indies and because BA's discounted airmiles tickets weren't available when we'd originally planned to go, we'd reversed the order of our trip and went to Medford Lakes after New York. We never did get to the World Trades Centre and I am eternally grateful for minor complications.

Watching the events on live TV, while in the safe living room of Stan and Jen's charming log-cabin home on the shore of the lake, was nonetheless terrifying. None of us could believe what we were seeing. We spent half the day frantically trying to phone home, to reassure our family in England that we were safe. All the mobile lines were completely overloaded and landlines weren't much better. Eventually managed to get an email through to my in-laws in Leeds and asked them to please phone my mother in Hastings to reassure her.

We carried on watching the inadequate TV reports as Stan managed to get in touch with his cousins in New York, who thankfully were safe too. Meanwhile almost as alarming was seeing that there was nobody on top of this. Politicians were panicking and TV channels had no known pattern, no appropriate template to follow, on how to report an event of this magnitude which was actually happening to their fellow American citizens, not people in far off lands of whom they knew little and cared less.

The pristine, primped and botoxed newsreaders unemotionally reported on whatever garbled messages emerged from the authorities, between jollifying adverts and distraught and panic-stricken vox-pops. Those presenters were without a tear out of place and the requisite perfect, toothy grins were still plastered on their shiny faces, their body language mocking the horrors they were failing to report in any meaningful way.

There was no information.

Later in the day I went alone for a swim in the lake, it was peaceful and temporarily soothing.

                                                                             *

I don’t deliberately try to mark 9/11. The stress (mine), the horror (everyone's) and the fear (the victims), is something I'd like to forget, although I won't. The only events which have come close to affecting me that much since are the horrific Grenfell Tower fire and most recently the impossibly hopeless evacuation of desperate people from Kabul. The only earlier event to have the same effect was, as a child, watching reports from Aberfan. I felt I was one of those children, experiencing that horror.

Ospreyitis Part 2

 I first encountered ospreys - well a single osprey - in about 1965 or 66 when parents drove us to Aviemore for a summer holiday. As a moody teenager all I wanted to do was wander around on my own (certainly not with younger brothers!) or stay at the ice-rink where a few cool guys might be found. However on one particular day we were all piled, partly against our wills, into the car, and driven to Loch Garten where, father claimed, we would see the only ospreys nesting in the UK at that time.

I remember a slightly misty, tree-lined loch and eventually, after much scanning with binoculars, a bird flying in the far distance which father was certain was an osprey. I had no reason to doubt him, he was a twitcher before it was so named and knew his birds. This experience made an impression, I never forgot it or the story of the Loch Garten ospreys, whose nesting location was kept secret and guarded by devotees to prevent peculiarly-minded people from stealing their eggs.

Stealing eggs from wild birds was made illegal in 1954, which didn't stop certain avid collectors who cared not a jot for the actual birds, from continuing to take them.  

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Swimming vs. Sewage

I learned to swim in warm, tropical seas and though the English Channel is my only option these days, I love it. The local sea area from Beachy Head to Hastings pier was recently declared a Marine Conservation Zone and has amongst many other delights, rare chalk reefs, seahorses, dogfish, many spawning species of fish and rock boring piddocks who glow in the dark!

Our beaches are stony at high tide, covered in a fascinating variety of smooth, rounded pebbles from common flints and chert to quartz, jasper and indeterminate geodes with tiny crystals glistening in their crevices. 

Low waters reveal gleaming sands for building castles and canals, there is the remains of a shipwreck, the Amsterdam which foundered in 1749, a  petrified forest and rockpools with a myriad tiny seashells and creatures all enjoyed by locals and holidaymakers alike. The clean waters and beaches have been a huge joy for us all during two Covid summers, until earlier this month.

At the height of the summer holiday, swimming became unwise and unsafe. A major sewage spill near the railway track at Bulverhythe flooded beach-huts, contaminated many miles of sea and beach. Southern Water, whose responsibility it is, spend as little as possible on maintaining the infrastructure whilst awarding their grandees and shareholders huge bonuses from the charges which we have to pay to them, to get fresh water and sewerage.

To say the people who live here are angry is an insulting understatement. Our Marine Conservation Zone is contaminated, beach hut owners lose their prized huts, the Hastings beach-launched fishing fleet may have to go elsewhere and many tourists surely will so many local livelihoods are threatened.

Is this the price we must pay, to live on a fairly crowded island, surrounded by waters which though beautiful are a mere pawn in political games and uncared for by capitalism? It damned well shouldn't be!

Decluttering vs. Stuff

Decluttering, rejection of  'stuff' and the Kondo type of minimalism have become so fashionable, one is expected to feel guilty if disinclined to comply. But this fashion not only ignores individual creativity, it ignores the history that so many people keep safe, around them. 

Possessions are about so much more than style. I have my grandmother's sari, I never wear it but that's not the point. I have more things belonging to her and others of her generation, and subsequent generations. I have things which my children have made, things I've made including many clothes. I don't wear those clothes now and I don't look at the children's creations very often, but I know where they are, and what they signify. 

And I have books, so many books they'd give Ms Kondo the heebie-jeebies! They're not ornaments, they are culture. 

The Fairweather Gardener - A Sucker for Succulents

I've recently realised that I’m a cactus collector, well cacti and other succulents. This seems to have been my unintentional lockdown project. I spent a lot of time potting offsets and cuttings of my houseplants.

The autumn before covid 19 struck, I'd bought a small, three-tier, wooden shelving unit with attractive turned uprights, which was narrow enough to sit on the window board in my conservatory. At first I put a few small cuttings of jade plants (crassula) and a lot of baby spider plants on it. I soon discovered that on a sunny day, I could put the spider plants and one or two other rooted babies outside with a sign, “Houseplants Free to Good Homes” and they’d be re-homed within a couple of hours. 

So the shelving unit now displays some of my small to medium succulents beautifully. On the top shelf is a bears-paw (cotyledon tormentosa), a small jade plant with unusual pointed leaves, a tall, variegated jade plant (crassula ovata variegata) and a long crassula perforata in a beautiful artichoke pot, whose stems are beginning to hang down.

On the middle shelf in a red and green pot is an echinopsis cactus with several babies who need potting on. There's a second echinopsis sharing a low dish with cobweb houseleek (sempervivum) and between the two are my latest editions, four small pots whose occupants I'm not yet sure how to care for so I'm being careful. Two are types of lithops (living stones) which I know can be tricky, one is a string-of-pearls (senecio) which I'm assured is easy, and the fourth is a tiny, unidentified, globe cactus which I'm hoping is as easy as the echinopsis.

The bottom shelf houses another echinopsis, an echiveira (they come in lots of varieties, mostly look the same so I don't know which type this is!) a sad Christmas cactus which I'm nursing but may not survive (I overwatered the poor thing) and some Hawarthia in a strange Spanish pot with crude butterflies decorating it.  

In the pot to the right of the shelving are sanseveiria (snake plant), echinopsis and haworthia which have all been in one very overcrowded pot for ten years, I seriously need to free them! Beside them on a stand are another haworthia below, and above a green jade plant in a lovely red glazed pot. This is only about half of my windowsill collection of succulents and that number doesn't include two large, potted gasteria verrucosa which sit on the floor and are flowering in the sun. 

There's also Mama cactus, who was my first echinopsis and has produced all of the others. She's very fierce, lives mostly outdoors, she flowers every summer and lives in a colony with many daughters and grand-daughters. They will shortly be going out onto the patio, when I can find my thickest gardening gloves.

 

Ospreyitis - Part I

Monty nested at Dyfi 2011-2019

One of my favourite activities has begun again in the past couple of weeks, osprey watching! There's 
no osprey nest in Sussex and that's a fact, they're big birds and the county has a large human population, somebody would have noticed, but I'm told a few fly over on their annual migrations. Not that I've ever seen one of those, I do my osprey watching almost entirely online. 

I began in 2014 with the nest at Dyfi Osprey Project, which was one of a few raptor nests with a dedicated webcam. The resident pair, Monty and Glesni were model parents and their efforts at raising their two chicks Deri and Gwynant. The webcam had sound and I learned how loud young ospreys can be when demanding fish from their father, the female chick, Deri was deafening. I occasionally looked in on the Glaslyn webcam, but didn't follow regularly. At the same time I was also watching peregrine falcons in Worcester and a family of kestrels who nested on St Andrews Church in the same city. 

The next year I still watched the Worcester birds and saw Monty and Glesni successfully rear three chicks but I also began also watching the Glaslyn osprey nestcam with the legendary Mrs G.  The Glaslyn nestcam had no sound, but the fascination was episodes of  'Ospenders', watching the battle for the favours of Mrs G, whose mate of 10 years (known as 11/98, his ring number) had failed to return. 

Mrs G was first courted by a young Scottish osprey ringed CU2, who was named Jimmy for obvious reasons. Next to arrive was Blue 80 who was actually one of Mrs G's sons from 2012, but CU2 Jimmy saw him off, then Jimmy left too.  Mrs G laid several eggs but they probably weren't fertile. Then another young male arrived, and stayed. He was named Aran because he had no ring and he raised two chicks with Mrs G that summer.

The following year (2016, keep up!) I followed three osprey nests and gave up on the Worcester peregrines, who weren't nesting, and the Worcester kestrels whose camera had failed.  Mrs G and Aran at Glaslyn and the Rutland Manton Bay pair of Maya and 33/11 all raise three chicks apiece. Monty and Glesni at Dyfi, reared two, although the female chick, Ceri, fell while still a novice flyer and died of her injuries on the nest - drama and heartache.

By now I was totally hooked on these fantastic birds! Osprey are an ancient species of raptor who have evolved as exclusive fish-eaters over many millions of years, they aren't hawks or eagles. They are hugely successful and range over every continent except Antarctica. They were hunted to near extinction in Europe and were extinct in the UK for 50 years. They're now nesting successfully in Scotland, England and Wales.

The Fairweather Gardener - Indoors

Plants waiting to go outdoors

As a fair-weather gardener, much of my gardening takes place indoors. My parents always had a few  houseplants and dad was quite interested in cacti, the weirder the better. I’ve always liked houseplants, but for ages I seldom had much space for them where I lived. 

Our first proper home, in Stony Stratford, was a tall, period terraced house, whose south-facing windows were beautifully proportioned and elegant with original, eighteen-paned sashes and shutters, but had no window ledges suitable for houseplants. The rear of the house had small, even older windows which faced into a wide, sunless alleyway. I tried, but killed every houseplant except spider plants, aechmea (urn plants) and a rubber tree.

We eventually moved to Huddersfield and a much more conventional, if second-hand, Barratt home, with south facing windows and a wide box-window in the living room. Most houseplants thrived there even in winter and despite the single glazing, except for the rubber tree which finally succumbed after it grew too tall and I tried decapitating it. The final grandchild of my urn plant also eventually expired.

Now in East Sussex, I have a small, not very elegant south-facing conservatory, maybe 3 x 4 metres, which I’ve stacked with plants. I’m fairly certain myspider plants are descendants of the original ones, I also have several generations of crassula ovata, gasteria verrucosa, echinopsis eyrisii and howarthia. Anyone who knows their houseplants will observe this indicates I have an interest in succulents!

However I’ve also got more conventional leafy plants, including a weeping fig (ficus Benjamina) which came from IKEA in Leeds nearly 30 years ago. Then there are three different varieties of dracaena, self-perpetuating zebrina, four-year-old geraniums (zonal pelargoniums), two poinsettia and, waiting to go into the garden, thumbrgia which already have lovely orange, black-eyed flowers, Lewisia and a bright purple celosia. The larger cactus will go outdoors soon as well.

All I need is the weather to warm up a little more and I’ll become an outdoor gardener again.

The Fair Weather Gardener - My Magnolia

Purple is the colour of my true love’s hair… actually it isn’t and that’s not even how the song goes, but purple is definitely the colour of the flowers on my magnolia. It’s looking healthier than for a while, with at least two dozen large blossoms and the green of the leaves just beginning to show. I feel purple today, maybe it’s my hair that wants to be an imperial hue.

Magnolia is the dullest of insipid paint colours, which can't decide if it's vaguely yellowish or pinkish, so it stays vague, but then no paint can ever catch the dazzling, pearlescent hues, the soft velvet texture or sweet, subtle scent of the true magnolia blossom.

Those purple flowers glow in the sunlight at the side of the garden, if it was larger I’d plant the magnolia in the ground, but there isn’t really enough space so the poor thing has now languished in a pot for ten years. Last year I refreshed the compost, although it really needs a bigger pot. And if I do put it into a bigger pot, it will be too heavy for me to move around. The whole point of having plants in pots is to be able to move them, ring the changes.

Why did I buy a magnolia which I knew perfectly well I’d never be able to plant into the ground? Because of its name, magnolia Susan! 

Has Being a Writer Made me into a Book Snob?

 English was my best subject at school and I loved reading. From about nine years old I always asked for books for my birthday and Christmas.  I even wrote my first novel at fourteen, but I never used to call myself a writer I just made stories up. Often they were in my head, not written down and when I actually wrote, I did nothing with the story. Gradually I began to send off occasional articles to magazines etc. Going to university as a mature student gave me the ability to judge my writing and the knowledge to improve it, so I gained the confidence to call myself a writer.

As a writer I like to think I understand how to be creative using the English language, and I believe creativity is admirable. However sometimes I can be less tolerant of people who don’t seem to know what they are doing. Carelessness with sentence structure, spelling mistakes, inaccurate punctuation and uncorrected typos are not creativity and these things annoy me, although they never used to. Unfortunately there are writers who can get all of this technical and grammatical stuff correct, can get published and still can’t put a worthwhile paragraph together, let alone an interesting novel.  

I recognise that my tastes have changed over the years, I’m no longer interested in reading the authors I enjoyed in my teens. However my tastes had changed before I ‘became a writer’. I was already enjoying the intensity of Ian McEwan, the narrative drive of Ian Banks and the dreamlike beauty of Helen Dunmore long before I could define those qualities. I still enjoy their work but am now able to put a finger on why certain of their books are wonderful and others just don’t work for me.

Usually, poor writing quality puts me off reading a novel after a few pages, even if I have incentives for wanting to read it.  At the opposite end of the scale, sometimes a novel is terribly 'cleverly' written and that can also put me off, particularly if the style is un-engaging. I tend to prefer empathetic characters telling an engrossing story rather than clever-clever writing. I’m not saying experimentation with style and structure is wrong, I do it myself, but certain well-known authors can get away with an experiment gone too far. Alienating your reader is probably a poor idea even if you're writing about alienation.

I write book reviews on my blog and on Goodreads, but I don't usually review the badly written books. For a start I seldom finish them and anyway what's the point of being rude, it doesn't help the author? If they're already published, somebody likes their stuff. I do sometimes review the clever-clever books, such authors do probably deserve to be told off!

Mullock - Word of the Day

Mullock could be a handy word when commenting on the activities of certain politicians, eg. those blithering mountebanks have made a total mullock of... (insert official title of latest politicians' balls-up)

Mullock - noun originally describing waste from gold mining activities in Australia. If you prefer non-antipodean words, try slag-heap. 

Scarves I Have Loved

 A rectangle of cloth has a different name according to its purpose. On the floor it’s a mat, at the window a curtain, on the table a tablecloth. Rectangles of cloth for the person also have purposeful

names, if you’re  too cold you don’t want to wear a sarong, if too hot a shawl is unnecessary. 

A scarf on the other hand can serve more than one purpose. It can keep the neck warm, hide a stain or compliment an outfit. If tied around the head it can make you look like Audrey Hepburn or Paloma Faith or, if you call it a bandana, like Jimi Hendrix. 

I’ve got a lot of scarves, probably over 50 although I haven’t counted them all. A couple are knitted winter scarves which were given to me. They’re useful when it’s cold, mostly for lending to other people!  I don’t really like wearing them, reminds me of the icy trudge to school in the freezing winter of 1962. My scarf collection began when I was 18 and in college. I visited Maidstone market in my lunch hour and found stalls selling second hand and vintage clothes. I first bought two scarves, a 1930’s one, long and narrow with an art deco design and one longer and very soft, in pink. Both were silk and the soft pink one was obviously old, the silk perished quite rapidly as I wore it out. 

My favourite scarves are pashmina style, beautiful, soft, fringed scarves which drape beautifully and are just wide enough to cover the shoulders if necessary. I have eight or ten of them, one or two I bought new but most came as gifts or from charity shops. I doubt if any of them are genuine cashmere, I hope they're not, but I think one of the second-hand ones may be silk. All of them have beautiful designs and I chose them because the fabric is beautiful. I prefer vivid colours too, tasteful greys and subtle blues aren’t me, never have been. Reds, oranges, yellows, rusts and greens all feature, sometimes on the same scarf.

Some rectangular garments are very large, incorporating many yards of cloth. Togas don’t count, they were not rectangular but more semi-circular and went out of fashion with the decline of the Roman Empire. Today the longest rectangle of fabric in daily wear is the sari, that nine yards of skilfully folded, tucked and draped cloth which can make any woman look more elegant. Its origins can be traced back to the Indus Valley civilisation almost 4,000 years ago. The everyday sari was made possible by the first cultivation of cotton in that area, without which only the very wealthy could have worn many yards of expensive silk and the general fashion might never have caught on.

I had two saris, both belonged to my granny who had roots in India, though I never saw her wearing them. One was silk and rather beautiful, with intricate designs in blue and gold on a deep pinkish red ground. The other was in a lacy fabric and pale green, I didn’t like it very much, the fabric wasn’t as soft and I gave that one away. I’ve tried to wear the silk one but am too inexperienced to fold and wrap it confidently.

Another thing I have from my grandmother is a large paisley-patterned shawl in wool, with fringes at either end, it looks great and I wear it occasionally but the wool is a bit itchy. She had several of these shawls and, when I was a teenager she cut up two to make me a coat and a jacket. She’d noticed that I liked beautiful fabrics, especially Indian ones. I loved that jacket, in its paisley rainbow of colours, so much that I wore it for years, before I managed to leave it on the tube. The fabric of the coat, while still paisley is more austere, in greens and greys, I wore it when I got married and still have it to wear occasionally  but I mostly keep it in the wardrobe, with cedar rings and a cover to keep the moths away.

Now I’m the age Granny was when she made me the coat and jacket, I sometimes wear scarves to hide a few undesirable neck features, but mostly I wear them because I love their beautiful fabrics. They make me happy.

At Random - My Blogging Topics

 I've decided to introduce a new topic for some pieces in this blog - 'At Random' for thoughts, essays, rants etc. which don't really fit in with any existing named labels/topics.  I already have 55 labels which is unwieldy and introducing a new one for every random entry seems impractical. 

I do need to reduce the whole list, for a start I have reviews under three separate labels which is probably unnecessary.  Some topics are self-contained and explanatory, The Fair Weather Gardener seems obvious, while Unsuitable Authors is ambiguous. Unsuitable why and according to who? The answer to the latter is my grandmother who, after being partly instrumental in teaching me to read before I was five was very censorious about what I read.

...remarkable things... is an open ended label, but only used very occasionally, for things (mostly books) which I've found truly impressive or moving.

Project 31 Women is my ongoing research into 31 specific artists, who all exhibited at one ground-breaking exhibition in 1943. My research into these artists has become more desultory since I produced the first of a flurry of entries in 2013, but it's been my most important project, sharing it has allowed information about some unknown artists to be seen and many people have followed it and used it for their research etc, which I'm very pleased about. The whole point of Project 31 Women was to get these artists known and I won't allow it to fade away.  Ideally I'd like to see the project become a book.

Other labels I will juggle with, is it necessary to have Animals and Wildlife separate? What about Conservation and Environment? I will have to think on't.

 

PREVARICATE - word of the day

 Word of the Day, and of the year so far - Prevaricate - to behave indecisively and avoid important decisions, is from the Latin ‘praevaricari’, to ‘plough crookedly or haphazardly’.  

Thank you to Susie Dent for the etymology

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan - book review

 On Chesil Beach

by 

Ian McEwan

Sue Gilbert's review

Jan 03, 2021  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: might-read-again, favourite-authors

Nearly a five star. Stories like this are why Ian McEwan is one of my favourite authors, I read it almost at one sitting. On Chesil Beach is not a long book and its 166 pages are full of beautiful characterisation, detailed yet uncluttered description and sparse, telling dialogue.

Edward and Florence are innocent, just married and in love. But it's 1962 and even though they are intelligent, educated young people they are stuck with the almost Victorian codes and mores of previous generations. Sadly for them, the summer of love is still a few years away, although their emotional and, in Florence's case physical reserve seems so deeply ingrained, they may have been unable to take advantage of so much liberation.

Intensely moving and intimate story of how love can go so easily wrong, when people won't/can't talk about sex.