Life in the Time of Corona

All our thoughts, and lives, are currently full of Covid 19,  not to be confused with 19 large, intelligent, black birds, that's corvid 19 or a murder of crows.

I've not come to terms with the effects of the pandemic, I can't yet write about something so immediate and so close to home. Trouble is, I'm having difficulty concentrating on writing about anything else as well and there's an article I really need to get on with.

I have already begun writing about disasters. A short story about flooding in Yorkshire and the beginning of a story about the effects of climate change, also involving flooding.

I'll put the Yorkshire story here soon.

Reading Habits Regained

My reading habits have changed drastically over the past ten/fifteen years or so and I 'm trying to put my finger on exactly why. I used to live for books, I could read novels at the rate of ten or a dozen every month - as a teenager it was probably double that, I read my way through the entire science-fiction sections of two public libraries before I found real boys were more engaging than robots and dystopias...but what teenagers do is a different story.

Over the past five-seven years my novel reading fell to about zero. I'm trying to rectify this. January  illnesses (mine and another's) kept me largely indoors, so I've begun to make a conscious effort to get off facebook, get off the news sites, get off-screen entirely (if briefly) and to read fiction - read actual books made of paper. I've got enough of them, what's the point of keeping them if I don't read?

Found I still like Barbara Vine, The House of Stairs was completely compelling, finished it at three in the morning then couldn't sleep. Come February I had to travel north, a long train journey there and back to see how far it is - just as far as I remembered but I can read on trains.

I actually bought a new novel, Gail Honeyman's prizewinning Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, expecting a Bridget Jones type scenario and finding something better, darker and much more unexpected. If I get around to putting it into my Goodreads listings it will go onto my 'might-read-again' shelf. It's currently sitting on a bedside table in a place too far away to care.

So back to the south, back to Barbara Vine.

Good writing week!

This has been my best writing week for a very long time!

I completed and sent off a short screenplay about civilian life during WWI, it's based on the diaries of a woman whose brother was a conscientious objector. This is part of the 'Unheard Voices' project being run by Jan Perry in conjunction with the University of Leeds, to commemorate the centenary of the war. If my screenplay is one of those selected, I hope it will be filmed in the autumn.

I wrote and sent off an article about Art Deco in relation to buildings and ships, which will be published in the summer edition of QS Eye magazine.

I extracted from my reams of research two pared-down artists' biographies - Meraud Guevara and Kay Sage - which I published here on this blog.

I had an idea for a new play - it's about a tramp who remembers he was once a musician - and I've written the opening scene, with dialogue and stage directions.

Finally out of the slough of despond - cheers!

Slipping Again...

Slipping again .... still not writing, it's just not working at the moment. Had writer's block before but not for this length of time. I've written nothing original since last year, apart from one very short, bad story. All I'm reading at the moment is the newspapers so right now I can't even review a book. I'm damned if I'm going to review the Guardian!
 
However I've decided it's better to post something I wrote before than to post nothing, so a few original, if old things will follow in a day/week or two. 
 

                           

Bramley Apple Pie Week

I've just found out that this is National Bramley Apple Pie Week. As far as I know the Bramley apple is more or less exclusively a British obsession, although a friend who lives in Adelaide, South Australia has been able to source a few locally. Originally called Bramley's Seedling, this apple began life as a pip planted in Southwell, near Nottingham by a little girl called Mary Anne Brailsford, two hundred years ago. It got its name not from Mary Anne but from Matthew Bramley, the local butcher who later bought the house and garden, complete with its unique apple tree.

My grandfather, who we all called Fafa, had several apple trees in his garden in West Sussex, his varieties were Cox's Orange Pippin, Worcester Pearmain, Egremont Russet and of course Bramley's Seedling. As children we would help him harvest the apples. We were all enthusiastic tree climbers but were not allowed to climb Fafa's precious apple trees, harvesting had to be done from ladders. The apples were stored in his huge garage, which as far as I know never housed a car. He had hand-built, wooden racks to store the apples in cool dry conditions and the Bramleys would keep for many months. Granny would bottle them with cloves, stew them, convert them into apple crumble, apple fool and of course apple pie.

Now I have three apple trees of my own. None are as large as Fafa's standard sized trees, my garden is smaller than his, but I do have a Bramley, on a dwarfing rootstock. It has never grown above seven feet tall (Fafa's was 20 feet plus and they can get even bigger), but it's a sturdy little tree with a number of spreading branches

Above all, the Bramley is a disease resistant tree and it is tough. Mine spent the first seven years of its life in a sheltered, walled garden in Buckinghamshire. Now it lives half way up the Pennines in a North facing garden in the Grimescar Valley on the edge of Huddersfield. We move house in the 1990's and brought two of our favourite trees up with us. My lovely little Victoria Plum didn't survive the move, but the Bramley did.  Now it thrives in our heavy clay soil and is currently covered in 40 or 50 healthy apples which, in the October rain are still growing and ripening.

We have found that in these more Northern climes our Bramleys really don't sweeten enough to be worth harvesting before November. The Bramley apple is known for its acidity, which renders it edible only when cooked and sweetened and ours remain a challenge to the stomach if picked too early.

So Bramley Apple Pie week this may be, but I won't be celebrating for another month. You don't expect me to actually buy Bramley's, do you?

Comments now welcome...

Blogs and snails

Oh well, slipping already. Better get on with it.

The bad news is it was frosty last night. The good news is we still have a few strawberries on the plants we potted up in the spring! They are on the windowsill in the sitting-room, we had to bring them indoors to save them from the slugs, which were eating everything in sight.

OK so this isn't meant to be a gardening blog, or a diary come to that, just an attempt to discipline myself into writing something every day. I follow a blogger called Clarissa, she's an American academic who blogs several times a day. Surely I can manage it once a day? I'll obviously have to build up to actually having something interesting to say!

Good Day Sunshine

The sun is out, the sky is blue.
I'm beautiful and so are you,
Dear Prudence....

The Beatles permeated my teenage years, I still know most of their lyrics by heart.

Last night's TV programme on the making of their Magical Mystery Tour film reminded me how creative they were as a team. Somehow they were limited individually, although I suppose you can say that about most of us!

The film itself was shown after the documentary and was entertaining, if slightly slow in places, but the songs were still great. I still reckon you can't beat I am the Walrus as a piece of knowing surrealism - the documentary showed there was no naivete, they understood what they were trying to create. Even then in 1967 they weren't a bunch of ignorant kids, they were all very literate and certainly John and Paul understood modern and contemporary art and cinema.

And the sun is out...
the sky is blue...