BMW

The spark of the idea leapt out of a conversation I had with Dorothea as we walked along the Regents Canal to Regents Park in June. But the kindling has been collected over a couple of years reading with Sue.  Sue initiated a reading group that John and I have been religiously attending one Sunday each month by walking up York Hill and down Valley Road in time for brunch (delicious!). I forget exactly where we started, but something monumental happened when Sue invited us to embark on the grand voyage through Dublin with James Joyce's Ulysses . After that epic journey we went for a paddle up the Thames to visit Beckett's  Murphy , who took us down to Beckenham on a bus and into the wards of the newly built Bethlem Hospital, after that we wandered up Bond Street and into Regents Park alongside Woolf's  Dalloway.   But the "backlog" of the fire – and I'm surprised to discover that "backlog" is in fact the technical term for the large log at the back of...

  Quite by chance, lockdown coincided with the broadcast of a series of recorded readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem,  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . I remember listening to it, the same time each day, as we worked out how to live in the new confinement. It is an inclusive, immersive work of audio and visual art in the 21st century curated by Sarah Chapman who, if I remember well*, is an academic based in Sussex. I first came across her a few years ago because she had organised a shared reading of Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents at the Freud Museum.  Anyway, the point here is that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner was first published in 1798, which is four years before his epic climb of Scawfell (as it was spelled then). I think it was this activity that invested the term "climbing" with its modern connotations. Before, it was not a "thing." If you read the account of it as gleaned by Marina Morpurgo,  who has consulted his letters an...

When I was still a young woman living in Nottingham, my mother knitted me a beautiful coat out of the wool from Herdwick sheep. The coat had a high roll neck that kept the heat in, and buttoned up down the front to my knees; it had no pockets. There were thick lines of cables running its length which traced the contours of my body. I don't know what happened to that coat, but it recently reappeared from the folds of my memory when I read this snippet from a collection of writings inspired by the Lake District. The name – Herdwick – caught my attention. I kept reading, found another word to hold on to ("heaf") and then set about some research. The breed is known for the attachment it forms to the place it lives. The ewes must teach their lambs the place of their birth, a process for which this beautiful word has been coined: 'heafing' (also "hefting"). When a new flock is introduced onto a pasture (for example after the devastation of the foot and mouth e...

  I'll preface a few remarks on Katherine Mansfield with an extract from a letter she wrote to a friend in 1916, when she and her husband, John Middleton Murry (who was also her publisher), were sharing a cottage in Cornwall with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. (The person to whom Katherine refers in this extract as the "Pasty" is their maid.) I want to talk about the L's, but if I do don't tell Kot or Gertler for then it will get back to Lawrence and I will be literally murdered. He has changed very much. He is quite 'lost.' He has become very fond of sewing, especially hemming, and making little copies of pictures. When he is doing these things he is quiet and gentle and kind, but once you start talking I cannot describe the frenzy that comes over him. He simply raves, roars, beats the table, abuses everybody ... What makes these attacks insupportable is the feeling one has at the back of one's mind that he is completely out of control, swallowed ...