Tag: Catherine Fox

Week-end: small adventures

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Lego model of buildings, trees, narrowboat on a river, and a London Underground train disappearing into a tunnel under a road.

I’m on Bluesky now. Having been mostly avoiding Twitter for a while now, I’ve rather lost the knack of microblogging, but for what it’s worth I’m at https://bsky.app/profile/kathleenjowitt.bsky.social.

The good

We took the baby to visit her great-grandma. This was the first trip involving an overnight stay, and went very well, all things considered.

Things change every day. Usually they get slightly easier than they were the day before.

The difficult and perplexing

The baby does not like long car journeys. I shall leave it there.

What’s working

Whingeing in a closed forum to sympathetic people. At the very least it relieves the perception of being on my own. Quite often, I’ve noticed, the problem in question removes itself quite soon afterwards. Coincidence, no doubt, but I’ll take it.

Putting the baby in a sling (see, in particular, Cooking and Moving, below).

And always, always, remembering that whatever the particular moment of difficult is, it’s temporary.

Reading

Finished Acts and Omissions; read Unseen Things Above; now need to see which of the others I have on my e-reader. I am, as ever, a little frustrated that Fox ducks out of showing us any really awful marriage, because I think that’s an important part of the conversation she’s trying to have in these books.

I got round to the Murderbot Diaries (Martha Wells) several years after everyone else and read All Systems Red late on Saturday night. It was enjoyable enough, though I wasn’t blown away.

And in between times I’ve been working my way through the Tiffany Aching books, and have finished The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky so far. I’d never read them before, and they’re lovely.

Writing

Some work on Don’t Quit The Day Job. I would like to do rather a lot more, sharpish.

And the Kickstarter for The Bicyclist’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which my story The Ride for the City (portal fantasy, Cambridge, bonding over terrible books) appears, has just over two days left to run. If you want a copy of the book, the Kickstarter is by far the quickest and most convenient way to get it, and also makes me more money.

Making

I have obtained the fabric for the skirt I was talking about last time. (Olive green twill, with some rather lovely green and red shot lining.) I have also thought about the pattern. But I’m not going to be able to start cutting out until I have an afternoon without a small person strapped to my chest.

Watching

Good Omens, season 2. Quite fun but felt rather lightweight compared with the first season.

Looking at

Some extremely impressive Lego models at Ely Brick Show. I think my favourite was the War of the Worlds diorama, but it’s a tough choice between that and the Underground station.

Cooking

One-pot things that are forgiving with regard to timings. I have some chakchouka in the slow cooker at the moment. The other day I managed to turn all the green tomatoes into green tomato chutney.

Eating

At this precise moment, jelly beans. We’ve had a couple of rather uninteresting pub meals.

Moving

We’ve instituted an evening walk. If it’s late, it’s just up and down the road, to keep within the range of the streetlights. But several times we’ve managed what used to be my morning walk, a full fifty minutes.

Noticing

A small deer (muntjac, maybe?) wandering across someone’s front garden.

In the garden

Picked some of the pears, a few of the apples, and most of the tomatoes. Which feels like a huge achievement, actually.

Appreciating

Family. The friends in my computer. A little more sleep than I was getting before.

Acquisitions

Bras. I’ve managed to lose one, which is weird and annoying.

And I’ve just ordered a travel cot. The hope is that it’ll do for naps downstairs as well as for actual travel. We’re going to need a new pram, as the baby is about to grow out of the pram bit of the existing travel system while being too small still for the pushchair bit.

The cat’s current preferred location

Various points in the sitting room; she spent most of the week on the table at my left elbow while Iwas feeding the baby. You can tell from the fluff deposit.

Line of the week

Some painfully well-observed prayer in Acts and Omissions:

And not being a Charismatic Evangelical either, he hesitates to give the Almighty matey advice in the subjunctive mood.

Monday (oh dear) snippet

A new bit from Day Job:

Why should the world that’s captured between the covers of books be one that only a tiny privileged minority inhabit? As we’ll see in the next section, even the pale, stale and male Western canon develops some significant holes if we remove those who wrote around the edges of their paid employment.

This coming week

Rather a packed schedule, actually, and a party on Saturday!

Anything you’d like to share from last week? Any hopes for this week? Share them here!

Summer-end: big milk thing

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Whoosh. Suddenly it’s six weeks later and we’re rounding off August with a blue moon. It seemed like a good moment to pick things up again over here.

The good

The baby is delightful, and gets more interesting by the day. It’s lovely, too, seeing others’ reactions. So many people are genuinely pleased to see her, friends and strangers and the guy I know by sight but whose name is a mystery.

We have succeeded in getting out of the house. Several times. There was my birthday; there was Pride; there was the Cursillo study day (labyrinths); there was a barbecue at my aunt’s; there were at least three church services.

The difficult and perplexing

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I would say the same thing at times that are not three in the morning. It’s the being on duty all the time.

It’s the first time in years I haven’t been in Ventnor for Fringe week. (I did have a weird feeling last year that It Was All Going To Be Different, though I hadn’t guessed how or why.) I lived it vicariously on the Instagram hashtag.

Hormones. I spent the first month crying about pretty much everything. (Child is not feeding. Child will not stop feeding. Child is small and utterly dependent on me. I wish Pa could have seen her…) Plus, of course, the lack of sleep.

What’s working

Having my mother to stay. Coke (the fizzy sort). Keeping in touch with other adults over the internet. A sausage-shaped cushion thing that ties on behind my back. Remembering that this is my only job at the moment.

Also, let me stop a moment to extol the Really Useful Boxes. Because they are. Quite apart from storing baby clothes and nappies and toys, I’ve been using them as footstools, for handwashing, and for catching and evicting a huge spider. And the cat likes sitting on them.

A fluffy black and white cat sits on a clear plastic box

Reading

A couple of ‘how on earth do I do this motherhood thing’ books: What Mothers Do (especially when it looks like nothing) (Naomi Stadlen); The Gentle Sleep Book (Sarah Ockwell-Smith). Both useful in confirming that I wasn’t missing something obvious, it really is this intense, and there’s only so much you can do before you just decide that this is the way things are and you’re going to go with it; both, I think, pushing back against the Gina Ford school of babyraising (which seems to have fallen out of favour among the professionals, at least in our neck of the woods). Of the two, the Stadlen is the keeper.

The Balloonists: the history of the first aeronauts by L. T. C. Rolt. Rolt was most famously the author of Red for Danger, the absolute classic of disaster analysis. There’s a certain amount of disaster in this (as you’d expect given the quantity of hydrogen used in the early days of ballooning) but it’s by no means the whole story. The whole story is very interesting and engagingly told.

Feeling in need of something trashy I reread Glittering Images (Susan Howatch) and began Glamorous Powers before deciding that really I wanted to read about scandalous bishops more than psychic manpain. So I have abandoned Starbridge and moved on to Lindford (Acts and Omissions, Catherine Fox).

Writing

Nothing to speak of in terms of new words on new pages, but I should have some news on an older project soon.

Making

I’m planning a full skirt in olive green with lilypad patches. Need to do some maths and obtain the olive green…

Watching

A lot of daytime TV. I’m particularly enjoying The Repair Shop at the moment; I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years about physical objects and sentimental value, about what things mean and how good it is when something can keep on doing the job it was made to do.

I’ve also returned to Ghosts, and this time managed to get past the second-hand embarrassment of the early episodes and into the kinder, more constructive stories of season 2.

Before that there was the world athletics championships; before that there was the super combined world cycling championships; before that there was the Tour de France.

Looking at

Pretty cars gathered outside the cathedral. Some gorgeous work by Ely Guild of Woodturners (who, if any of them are reading this, ought all to be charging twice as much for their pieces as they currently do).

Cooking

Is pretty much impossible with a baby. I did manage to pickle some plums (and regret leaving the jars in the conservatory in the hottest month of the year) and, several weeks after that, make the topping of a crumble.

Eating

A lot of ready meals. The charming snackpot that Tony assembles and brings me before he goes to bed and leaves me to the night shift (this evening’s contained two sorts of pretzels, dried apricots, crystallised ginger, a chocolate digestive biscuit, and three Mikado sticks.) And a reuben sandwich at the last (and, for me, only) Foodie Friday market of the year.

Moving

A little bit of walking.

Playing

Whatever will keep me from falling asleep with a baby on my lap. Minesweeper, mostly.

Noticing

Dragonflies. Or are they damselflies? I’m not sure what the difference is. Butterflies. Sunflowers. Hollyhocks.

In the garden

Chaos in the back (it is, infuriatingly, a really good year for fruit, and I’m not managing to get out to pick it, and if I were I wouldn’t get round to doing anything with it). Progress at the front, where we have much less in the way of slate chippings and much more in the way of lavender and thyme.

Appreciating

All the people who have come to see us, sent messages, cards and presents, and generally provided solidarity in a massive life change. The Rosie Birth Centre and the community midwifery team.

Acquisitions

Leaving aside all the baby gifts, or we’d be here all night: a lovely turned elm bowl from the woodturners’ exhibition; a couple more Joanie dresses; a whole load of plants (Norfolk Herbs: very reasonable); more fabric patches than I actually needed; some Pride tat.

Hankering

I haven’t been to the seaside this year other than incidentally, and I’d really like to. I don’t think it’s going to happen, though.

Line of the week

L. T. C. Rolt on the develoment of the dirigible:

Unholy marriages were consummated – most of them only on paper, fortunately – between the balloon, the kite, the ornithopter and the helicopter.

The cat’s current preferred location

In the conservatory, either on top of a large cardboard box, or on the windowsill for optimum garden surveillance.

How has your summer been? Have you also given up on Twitter, or were you never on it in the first place? What’s your social medium of choice these days?

The Reader’s Gazetteer: L

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L takes us back to Britain and back to the ecclesiastical shenanigans novel in Catherine Fox’s Lindchester series.

Lindchester is explicitly in the same universe as Barchester, and it has a rather more explicit location:

The diocese of Lindchester is not large, squashed as it is between Lichfield to the south and Chester to the north; so don’t worry, we will not be travelling far.

This locates it, unusually for an ecclesiastical shenanigans novel, in the northern province. The Archbishop of Canterbury surely has quite enough to deal with in Barchester, Christminster, Starbridge and Torminster. It’s only fair that the Archbishop of York gets to fret about Lindchester’s problems.

Transport links? If you were starting in London, you’d get a train out of Euston. Euston is horrible. Maybe don’t start in London. Change at Crewe.

I’ve been using ‘Lindchester’ as shorthand for the locale in which the action happens. This is not limited to the town of Lindchester itself; it encompasses the whole diocese: Lindchester, Lindford, Cardingforth… (In fact, the narrator is scrupulous about not depicting anything that happens beyond the diocesan boundaries.)

Recently, I’ve been mulling over a hypothesis about fictional places, about the difference between Barchester and Ruritania (I know we haven’t got to the latter yet). And I’m not convinced it’s entirely down to geography. It’s not the difference between a city and a state – in fact, so many modern Ruritanias are so tiny that they basically are cities. I think it’s more to do with the way that the characters – and particularly the protagonist – interacts with the place.

If you’re the protagonist, Ruritania is the place you visit. You might have a longstanding connection with the place, your visit may have a disproportionate effect on the place, and you might very well get more than you bargained for on that visit, but you’re essentially an outsider. Barchester is the place where you live, very probably the place where you were born. In Barchester, you’re a part of the system, the whole complicated interconnected web of human relationships. You may well be able to effect change, but the system is something that has shaped you. You can’t just pass through it.

That’s because the place itself exists within a larger system, whether that’s political, religious, social, or any combination. It’s a system that the author suspects that many of their readers know well, might themselves exist within. Lindchester is a diocese within the Church of England. It operates in a similar way to any other diocese in the Church of England. Happy endings are very much a possibility, but they have to be negotiated within the constraints of the real-life system. The author has control of the fates of the individual characters, but they don’t mess around with the way we all know things work. That would be cheating. That would be far less satisfying.

Books referred to in this post

Lindchester series (Acts and Omissions, Unseen Things Above, Realms of Glory), Catherine Fox

Barchester series, Anthony Trollope

A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L – M – N – O – P – Q – R – S – T – U – V

Engaging with the tradition

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A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with a friend about what I was writing and what he’d been watching. I’m writing the sequel to Speak Its Name, which in its current state is mostly about vocations and relationships and what they do to each other. He’d been watching Fleabag, and thought that it had quite a lot to say to what I was doing, and had I seen it?

I said that I hardly watch any TV at all, because I lack the staying power. I can keep up with something for one or two episodes, but then life gets in the way and I get behind. (So I mostly watch Doctor Who, where you can dip in and out and it makes just as much sense as if you had managed to see last week’s episode.) So no, I hadn’t seen Fleabag.

But it’s a very good point. Whatever you’re writing about, whatever genre you’re writing in, someone will have been there first. (And if you don’t engage with that tradition, then there’s a very real danger of making yourself look like an utter plonker. See: Ian McEwan and sci-fi.)

Speak Its Name and whatever-the-sequel’s-going-to-be-called sit not quite comfortably within the Barchester genre. And that is a tradition that I’ve been engaging with ever since I wrote my undergraduate dissertation (Fit Persons To Serve In The Sacred Ministry of Thy Church: representations of Anglican clergy 1855-65) if not before (my mother, seeing me with a copy of Glittering Images shortly before my A-level exams, prudently removed it from me). Most recently, of course, there’s been Catherine Fox‘s Lindchester. Sometimes I think I’m engaged not so much in a dialogue with Lindchester as in a stand-up screaming match, while at the same time finding it intensely familiar and moving. So maybe I’ll get round to watching Fleabag, or more probably I won’t, but I think I’ve probably done enough homework there.

A Spoke in the Wheel is slightly different. Not so much in terms of genre – I suppose it’s somewhere between a romance and a social problem novel – but in terms of subject matter. I read loads of cycling books, but they were all non-fiction. Most of them were memoirs.

There isn’t really a tradition, you see. Elsewhere (and elsewhen – almost a decade ago, in fact) on the Internet, William Fotheringham has a list of the top ten cycling novels. They’re a mixed bag, and the diversity of genres represented suggests that he had to scratch around quite a lot to find any ten, let alone a top ten.

If I were feeling inspired I’d try matching the titles to the various roles within a team (sprinter, GC contender, domestique, grimpeur, rouleur, etc), but I’m feeling a bit too tired for that. And I’ve only attempted three of them in recent years. (I’m sure I must have had The Adventure of the Priory School read to me when I was a child, but it hasn’t stuck.)

  • Cat ought to be the sort of thing I’d love, but every time I’ve tried it I’ve foundered on the extended passages in italic type.
  • Three Men on the Bummel is not quite as good as Three Men in a Boat, and contains quite a lot of tedious national stereotyping.
  • The Rider was the one I saved for after I’d finished writing A Spoke In The Wheel, because when something’s been sold as ‘the best cycling novel of all time’, it’s a bit intimidating when you’re just trying to write a decent one.

And I’ve now downloaded The Wheels of Chance (thank you, Project Gutenberg).

Actually, the one cycling book I’m really glad I didn’t read before starting ASITW is Fotheringham‘s own Put Me Back On My Bike. I just don’t think I’d have had the nerve to write about fictional doping with that magnificent and uncomfortably vivid account of the tragedy of Tom Simpson always in the back of my mind.

 

* Having said that, I’ve now watched all of Good Omens, so it turns out that I’m perfectly capable of watching television when somebody else organises it and when it’s a day that I didn’t have earmarked for writing. I’m still two episodes behind on Gentleman Jack, though, and it’ll be three if I don’t get my act together this weekend.