a gallimaufry

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week (1–7 July 2019)

 

(Portrait of Sylvia Townsend Warner, undated, from here)

In response to overwhelming popular demand (ahem!), I’d like to invite you to celebrate the life and works of Sylvia Townsend Warner with me this summer! As far as I know, there has been only one Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week, which took place in March 2015, so I hope I am not treading on any toes here. And I hope you’ll take part!

Why read Sylvia Townsend Warner? Well, let Sarah Waters persuade you, writing in the Guardian: 

When Sylvia Townsend Warner died in 1978, she left behind her a body of work of exceptional richness and variety. In a career that had lasted just over half a century, she had been a talented musicologist, an admired poet, diarist and letter-writer, a political journalist, an occasional translator and biographer, a prolific short-story writer, and the author of seven remarkable novels, of which Lolly Willowes was the first. The intelligence of her writing has sometimes resulted in her fiction being misunderstood as difficult, and has perhaps lost her readers; she's certainly one of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years.

Or perhaps Maud Ellmann, writing in The History of British Women’s Writing 1920–1945 Volume 8:

Sylvia Townsend Warner stands alongside Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen as one of the finest British fiction writers of her century, and she also achieved distinction as a poet. [...] To put it bluntly, Sylvia Townsend Warner is much too good to miss.

Townsend Warner’s writing is witty, occasionally malicious, often fanciful to the point of magical realism, lyrical and melancholy. She writes about middle-aged spinsters, failing missionaries and abandoned wives who suddenly cast aside their dull or repressed lives and embark on a transformative adventure. The settings of her novels range from a fourteenth-century Norfolk convent to seventeenth-century Spain to a nineteenth-century volcanic island. In her collection The Kingdoms of Elfin she writes about fairyland in a typically ironic manner; in The Cat’s Cradle Book about cats. Her subjects are so varied it’s possible to love one novel and feel unmoved by another. Ellmann points out that although not ‘modernist’, Townsend Warner experiments continually with form and content, playing with the reader’s expectations. It is sometimes hard to know what to think of her work as she can be unsettling, twitching aside the curtain of dry humour to reveal profound sadness or suffering.

What should you read? Well, as you can see she had a wide range: poetry, novels, short stories, diaries, letters and biography; there’s even a book about Somerset if you enjoy travel writing. You can find a full bibliography (and information about her life, and resources) at the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society but here is a list of what I believe is currently in print (though a few are surprisingly expensive, I think they must be print on demand) and their original publication dates:

Lolly Willowes (1926) (reviewed here by litlove)

Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927; reissued by the NYRB with a novella under the title Mr Fortune)

The True Heart (1929) (reviewed here on Stuck in a Book)

Summer Will Show (1936)

After the Death of Don Juan (1937) 

The Corner that Held Them (1948) (reviewed here on Vulpes Libris)

The Flint Anchor (1954; Kindle only)

Winter in the Air and Other Stories (1955) 

A Stranger with a Bag and Other Stories (1966) 

Kingdoms of Elfin (1977)

Scenes of Childhood and Other Stories (1981)

Selected Stories (1988) (reviewed here on Desperate Reader)

The Music at Long Verney (2001)

 

Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2008)

 

Letters (1982; Kindle only)

The Element of Lavishness: The Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2001)

The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White (2013)

So come on and join in! If you haven’t tried her work before, now is the time. All you need to do is read something by Sylvia Townsend Warner and then write about it during the first week of July. Leave a comment here or on one of my STW posts that week with a link to your post – it can be anywhere, a blog, faceBook, GoodReads – or even write your review in a comment if you like! Or if you’d like to write a guest post here, let me know.

 

the state of me

Today the sun is shining, an afternoon’s training on evaluating students’ speaking and writing skills has been cancelled and we are not exiting the EU with no deal. Reasons to be cheerful!

Another reason to be cheerful: my review of Forms of Enchantment, Marina Warner’s collection of essays on art and artists, is up at Shiny New Books.

Another reason to be cheerful: the world is full of wonderful books! Worried by the prospect of never again being able to buy a British book after Brexit, I have been stockpiling. A little reckless, considering how many unread books I already have, but no half-measures in a crisis...

First: a collection of fairy tales and fairy-tale poems by Theodora Goss. Confession: I’ve already read this. Although I like her novels, I believe she’s a better short-story writer (at the moment, anyway). I did not think that everything in this collection was great but I enjoyed everything, especially ‘Blanchefleur’, a new version of ‘The White Cat’, and ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, which adds a lovely twist to Oscar Wilde’s story (as a child I disliked Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales and found them mawkish, perhaps I should revisit them).

Next: Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, Gingerbread. A novel about a gingerbread-maker, a mysterious long-lost friend, a country that may not exist, by one of the best British writers working today, I can’t wait to start on this. (But I still have about eleventy billion pages of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree to read, not that this is a chore, plus something for SNB...)

Then, well, this is all Hayley’s fault. She wrote a review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories so beguiling that I had to order a copy immediately. And then I accidentally bid on a lot of STW books plus Valentine Ackland’s autobiography, For Sylvia (Ackland was a poet and the lover of STW), and won! Tthe books are the novel The Corner that Held Them, and a collection of short stories called The Innocent and the Guilty.) On a roll, I then bought STW’s diaries, edited by Claire Harman. I suspect the only justification for this will be a STW week. Is there a STW week?

Finally, although not strictly stockpiling as I bought these locally in the kringwinkel or recycling shop:

(Bandits, by Elmore Leonard; Maigret and the Madwoman, by Georges Simenon; The Best Man to Die, by Ruth Rendell; Waiting for Willa, by Dorothy Eden.) I had never heard of Dorothy Eden but who could resist that cover? And it was only 25 cents. According to Wikipedia she was born in New Zealand and emigrated to Britain. I am assuming she’s going to fill the Mary-Stewart-shaped hole in my life.

I like to have at least a small pile of detective novels to hand for times when I am ill or unhappy. Nothing like murder to cheer you up I suppose.

But even while I’m writing this, I am still obsessing over Brexit. Crossing my fingers that the WA is voted down (again) today and that MPs can find a way forward on Monday. Now I am going to take advantage of the nice weather and do some gardening, and then I’m going to work on a rather limp short story I am writing. Have a happy weekend, everyone! What are you reading at the moment?

(Nala, demonstrating how to cope with British politics)

brexit: crunch time...

Yesterday, I was like this:

(John William Waterhouse, Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1907, oil on canvas); found here; this used to belong to Rod Stewart, should you be interested)

But today, I am like this:

(Marc Chagall, Final model for the wall painting at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York: The Triumph of Music (detail), 1966, tempera, gouache and collage on paper mounted on Korean paper, 109 × 91.5 cm. Private collection)

Thank all the powers that be: the EU has thrown the UK a lifeline over Brexit. Next Friday will not bring the Apocalypse.

The pressure remains on Britain to find an acceptable solution, as is entirely right. But Theresa May’s policy of scaring MPs into voting for her deal however much they disliked it has been de-fanged, the gaming is over and the imminent possibility of No Deal – in which direction I fear May was turning, perhaps I do her a disservice – has been removed.

However, do not throw away your stockpiled tins of beans and loo paper quite yet. It is now up to the British Commons to take advantage of this lifeline. If they reject May’s deal a third time next week, they must take control of the process themselves and seek compromises that are acceptable to a majority of MPs. They must develop a plan, agree to EU elections and negotiate a longer extension to Article 50. Otherwise it is No Deal or revocation – and while I would be overjoyed at revocation it can hardly be characterised as a compromise which would find the support of a majority at the moment.

Therefore, I have written to my MP begging him to support the amendment proposed by Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn, Nick Boles and other MPs, which would make it possible for MPs to take over where the government has clearly failed. This is only the first step out of the impasse but I genuinely fear that without it the future for Britain looks dire.

British readers, I urge you, if you agree with me, to write to your MP too. Here is a list of MPs’ contact details, and here is how you can find out who your MP is, if you’re not sure. Our MPs have a tough job but it’s important they know our views if they are to represent us. Now is the time to encourage them to act and to support the amendment.

the last week of brexit?

Of all the Big Dramatic Weeks we’ve had so far with Brexit, this next one may prove to be the Biggest and Most Dramatic. Although the logical action, since Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement, No Deal and a Second Referendum have all been rejected, would be to revoke Article 60 as being the last option left, logic packed up her bags and departed Westminster some time ago along with her good friend common sense.

Instead, it seems almost certain that Theresa May will ask for yet another vote on her WA. Will it pass? Perhaps. Some MPs may choose certainty over further uncertainty, however little they may like the WA. The ERG, who are proving themselves yet again to be not the masterly tacticians they would have us believe, may be realising that this could be their last shot at a ‘hard’ Brexit (hence all that unconvincing waffle about Article 62 of the Vienna Convention). Theresa May is dedicating this weekend to persuading the DUP to back her – who knows what she is promising them, I dread to think. But then again, some MPs may be emboldened by the prospect of a lengthy extension (should the EU grant it) and working towards a cross-party compromise that is more widely palatable to reject the deal again. Then again, if May resigns someone even more inflexible or extreme may replace her. Aaargh! So many games being played...

Whether you are for or against Brexit, it is all pretty stressful, or at least so I find it. The stress is augmented by anger at the cynicism of some MPs, the sheer shoddiness and duplicity. Fellow Brits, how are you coping?

Apart from shouting at screens, I am spending quite a lot of time doing cross-stitch. This is an activity I never would have imagined myself doing. But I am making a cushion cover for my daughter. It is of an owl in the night-time. The design is printed on the canvas and all the wool (enough I hope!) was supplied with the kit, so it’s really so easy that even I can do it. Well, almost, I did absent-mindedly use the wrong colour at one point and have to unpick a lot of it. It seems to hit the same spot as doing a jigsaw puzzle and I find it soothing and addictive.

I am also immersed in an enormous epic fantasy novel, The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. There was a lot of hype about this and it has a nice cover. It is also 800 pages long. When I am faced with the prospect of Nigel Farage or Jacob Rees-Mogg, I run away to another world in which there are dragons and magic and I know that the Nameless One and his cohorts will ultimately be defeated by the forces of good.

I recommend both of these to anyone in the same boat as me. Bon courage, mes amis! How are you getting on?

Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford

When [the door] opened, and Geertje Van Loon wide in bright silks stood there, with Flora and Anne crowding behind her to see, a myriad of little flames spangling the dark hall, it looked as if a treasure-house had opened, a winter cavern set with jewels, and an air laden with spices flowed out.

First published in 2016, Golden Hill has been at the back of my mind ever since, one of those books that you don’t quite leap to buy or borrow when you see it but have a vague intention of reading. It was the sort of book that I might choose to make up a ‘buy one get one free’ offer. Then just before Christmas I was ordering some books as presents and I saw this and just on the spur of the moment bought it. And now I have read it and if you’ve heard that it is amazing, well then you heard aright.

The basic plot is this: in 1746 a charming Englishman disembarks in New York and hurries straight to a counting-house in Golden Hill Street where he presents an order to cash a thousand pounds – an unimaginably large sum which will put the merchant, Mr Lovell, to great trouble to realise. Suspicious, Mr Lovell strikes a bargain with Mr Smith: if the corroborating documents, which have not yet arrived, reach New York in the next sixty days, Smith shall have his money; if  not, he’ll take him to court.

Mr Smith agrees, establishes himself in lodgings, almost immediately has all his cash stolen, and waits. Of course, he is not what he seems to be. But what does he seem to be?

What I loved most of all about this novel was the way that the story was told, in language inflected with the eighteenth century but not weighed down by it. His sentences are often long and rich, but supple and vivid. His characters are pleasingly complex. Although I don’t usually care about spoilers, I am not going to give anything away about the plot because part of the book’s charm is its unexpectedness and its feeling of anything being possible. Also, the ending flips everything on its head and you realise that, like Smith, Golden Hill wasn’t what you thought it was about at all. It may seem to be about the solid centre of New York society but in fact it was about the margins all along. More I shall not write, particularly as I have to rush out into the garden and plant some bulbs now, but I do urge you to read it if you like clever and entertaining novels of great charm (and bonus: it’s also educational! I learnt a lot about American currency in the eighteenth century that I hadn’t known I hadn’t known).

writing progress

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to enter my novel in The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. Before I could do this, I had to revise it. After I first owned up to having written it, both my mother and a kind but also very knowledgeable blogger offered to read and comment on it. Their feedback indicated revisions and I got started on this. Alas, my teaching hours from September to the middle of January gave me no time to continue and it’s only in the last few weeks I’ve been able to get back to it. The deadline for submission is the end of February, not a great deal of time.

And I found, going back to it, that I had completely lost faith in it. It’s hard to judge your own work, I think; at times I thought it was all right, at least in places, but now I think that it just isn’t any good not all the way through, like a stick of rock with ‘this isn’t very good’ written all the way through it. I’ve revised it but not enough really, even if the original idea were strong enough the rest of it isn’t. The other day I just got really fed up and submitted it anyway (then instantly realised I’d forgotten to resolve something, only a very tiny detail but still, sloppy, oops). I suspect it isn’t terribly professional to submit something just because you hate it so much you don’t want to see it any more, but then the advantage the amateur has is that she is not professional. Then I stuffed the final draft and my notebooks into a box and closed it. Joy!

Now I am feeling very cheerful and free. I am having lots of ideas for the next book, maybe they’re better and stronger. One thing I have learnt from writing the first book is that no matter how much you want to fling yourself into your chair and start writing, it is much better to do some research (in this case, because it’s going to be a sort-of historical novel) and planning – the world you’re going to write about, the characters, where roughly the plot is going. Though not too much planning because that would kill it for me, and as long as I’m an amateur, writing as a hobby, the main point is for me to enjoy doing it as who knows if anyone else will ever read it anyway. So, onwards!

(Sadly this is not me writing but Christine de Pizan, an illustration in The Book of the Queen (c. 1410) in the British Library, BL MS Harley 4431, fol. 4r; from here)

of damp hens and lavender

It’s Valentine’s Day, the sun is shining and our kitchen is fragrant with the scent of wet hen, since I spent a portion of this morning washing Daisy’s bottom and drying it with the hair-dryer. Meanwhile, my tiny study is fragrant with the scent of dusty lavender, after a book avalanche knocked over a bowl of dried lavender I had imprudently balanced on the edge of the cupboard. The lavender is everywhere: all over the desk, books, heaps of paper and alas inside a drawer or two as well as I hadn’t closed them. I don’t even know where the bowl is, it seems to have slipped into another dimension. Anyway, perhaps this is a hint that I should tidy up.

All of this has turned my thoughts to James Elroy Flecker, and so I thought I would post a bit of ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’ from Hassan here. I became slightly obsessed with James Elroy Flecker as a teenager after my school put on a production of Hassan. It has been a while now though since I read him and while his attitudes towards the Middle East are disappointing to say the very least, the romantic lushness of much of his work cannot be denied.

Everyone rightly knows the beautiful Epilogue, so here is the Prologue.

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,—

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West:

And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.

II

And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so far:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there

When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells.

When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.

(Uncredited illustration for T.E. Lawrence, An Essay on James Elroy Flecker and Forgotten Warfare; Southampton, Mark Valentine, 1988; found here)

goodbye to january

Hello and happy February!

Sorry I haven’t posted for ages. January and February are my least favourite times of year, dreary and grey, all the fairy lights have been packed away and winter seems to stretch on for ever. I did write a few half-posts, on Brexit, on a couple of the books I’d read, but I lacked the will to finish them.

Anyway, today the sun has been shining and I’ve just baked some flapjacks! Do have one. I hope your 2019 has started well.

(You’ll need a fork.)

I don’t know why I felt the urge to bake flapjacks. Previous attempts have always ended up with something that had to be ‘broken into bars’ with a hammer, proved impermeable to teeth and could have been used as flooring had they been more evenly shaped; the odd pan had to be binned too. But I was inspired by the surprise discovery of two tins of golden syrup at the back of the cupboard. The 2008 ‘anniversary’ tin had been opened and half-used, the contents were now completely hard and blackened, but the ‘use by 2013’ tin was still sealed and what was within looked as I imagined golden syrup to look, so off we went.

(For those who are interested, I used a Mary Berry recipe I found on the internet, but with my previous mishaps in mind I ignored Mary’s advice to cook for 25-35 minutes and instead removed them from our (tiny fan-assisted) oven after 20 minutes. Hence the need for a fork.)

(Also they are very sweet and all your teeth will immediately fall out in horror.)

The Christmas holidays were lovely and I had a fantastic time at New Year as well. I stocked up on some books in charity shops (my favourite find being a 1947 Cresset Press edition of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, which I’ve always wanted to read: this edition is illustrated with lovely wood engravings by Claire Oldham). I learnt that just because a ‘journey planning website’ gives you directions to walk along a road doesn’t mean that it’s safe to do so after dark (because it’s actually an A road with no pavement and cars whistling by at 70 mph). I visited Sissinghurst which might not seem the obvious thing to do on New Year’s Day but it is actually very beautiful with no leaves or flowers but patterns of branches. Of course, I had forgotten to bring my camera. It was nice to see Vita Sackville-West’s writing room again and I was charmed to see honey leaking down one wall of the tower – apparently from an old beehive that someone kept on the roof.

To get through this time of year I stockpile ‘easy’ reading, novels with compulsive narratives and not too much darkness, and I reread a lot too. Here are some of my favourites:

• Folk, by Zoe Gilbert
  I loved this, though much of it is very dark. It’s a collection of sort-of fairy-tales about an island community, focusing on different characters in turn and spanning a couple of generations. Like traditional fairy-tales, these are unsentimental and concerned with birth and death, sex, transformation, cruelty and strange kindnesses, but unlike fairy-tales the characters within them have individuality and when misfortune befalls them it is painful to read. The beauty of the natural world is celebrated even though the life scraped from its woods and seas is a hard and difficult life.
• The Gardener and the Carpenter, by Alison Gopnik
  Gopnik is a child psychologist and philosopher, and in this book she examines developmental psychology and evolutionary biology to demonstrate how modern-day ‘parenting’ is wrong-headed. She characterises a lot of parents as being concerned that they must develop a product: control pretty much every aspect of a child’s life so that it will become a happy, socially-acceptable and preferably high-achieving adult. Instead, parents should focus on their relationship with their children and on creating a ‘garden’ where children can learn and explore and become themselves. I was in agreement with her argument before she even made it, and I particularly enjoyed reading about all the evolutionary biology. It’s also made me very slightly less anxious about the amount of time my daughter spends in front of screens.
• The Dragon Hoard, Tanith Lee
  This was an impulse-buy in a charity shop and is a children’s book. On their seventeenth birthday, royal twins Princess Goodness and Prince Jasleth are cursed by Maligna, a distant relative and wicked enchantress. Princess Goodness becomes insanely good and starts giving away everything her family owns; Prince Jasleth turns into a raven every day, but at varying times and for varying durations. So the prince sets out to seek his fortune, which involves joining a quest to recover a dragon’s hoard. A cheerful, bouncing story, it put me slightly in mind of M.M. Kaye’s An Ordinary Princess.

A couple of weeks ago we reached the end of a fifteen-week course I teach every year. It’s a course with fantastic students but I find it very challenging and I have to spend hours and hours finding and making material and preparing for it. So suddenly I have a lot of free time, and this free time I’ve been devoting to revising my children’s book at breakneck speed in order to enter it for The Times and Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition, the deadline for which is the end of February. I am now completely disenchanted with my book but I decided to enter it anyway, what the hell, sorry judges for foisting it on you but at least it’s quite short. Then I am going to get started on another book which I am very excited about writing.

So for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be revising my book. I’m also going to making some cushion covers as we replaced our existing but broken Hideous Sofa with an even more Hideous Sofa and I plan on disguising it as far as possible if I can just find the fabric I have in mind for them.

I won’t be baking...

dreaming about Christmas

It’s the shortest day of the year today and, looking out of the window while drinking my tea, I can’t but think it’s just as well. Rain and wind and murk is all we’ve had all day, no sign of the sun. However, it’s quite cosy in my cupboard-like study and fairy lights sparkle all the brighter in the gloom. And of course, the dust isn’t quite so noticeable when it’s dark.

I am feeling quite smug as I drink my tea because I have just delivered my last Christmas card and wrapped my last present. And now I am about to start packing, because we’re spending Christmas with my parents. But this is the best moment of packing: considering which books to take.

For my daughter I’m packing One Christmas Wish by Katherine Rundell (illustrated by Emily Sutton), The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden (illustrated by Adrienne Adams), The Little Lamb of Bethlehem by Margaret Tempest and The Night Before Christmas by Clement Moore (illustrated by Angela Barrett) because we like rereading them at Christmas. She’s packing a few other books but I do not yet know what they will be.

I like to reread ‘Babette’s Feast’ (Isak Dinesen) at Christmas but I think I shall read that this evening instead of further weighing down my suitcase. I don’t want to cripple myself, and I happen to know that Father Christmas will be giving me a couple of hefty tomes to bring back (Melmoth by Sarah Perry and The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition by Ursula Le Guin and illustrated by Charles Vess). I know this because I helped Father Christmas out and bought them for myself heh heh heh.

But now I must decide on one – or at most two – books to take with me, for the journey and until Christmas Day. (Although in an emergency I can help myself to my parents’ books, they are kind like that.) What should they be? I have started rereading Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love but I am afraid I’ll finish it before we leave. I was saving The Way Past Winter for the holidays but I had to read that last week to keep myself cheerful during a cat crisis. I want something immersive, perhaps nineteenth-century, not too heavy (literally and figuratively), something of a page-turner. When I have finished my tea, I’ll start looking through the shelves.

Do you have any favourite Christmas books? And what will you be reading over the holidays?

And now this seems as good a time as any to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year, and to hope that 2019 is good to all of you. Thank you for reading my blog, and thank you for all your lovely comments.

(Angela Barrett, ‘A right jolly old elf’, from The Night Before Christmas, Orchard Books, 2012; found here; I don’t know if you can see how luminous the colours are, especially the blues, quite amazing)

a Brexit rant

I don’t write about politics, despite increasingly feeling tempted to do so, because really the internet is already packed with ill-informed hot-takes on the subject and there is no overwhelming need for me to add mine to them. And I feel a little wary of writing about British politics anyway – even about the excruciatingly horrible Home Office – since I no longer live in the country. However, yesterday I was hardly able to work because of all the news coming out of London and today I find I am still incensed about the whole thing, so I’ve decided to write my piece and then perhaps I’ll delete it, perhaps I’ll post it.

A little background: as a British person living in Belgium I was always going to be inclined to support remaining in the EU but I do generally try to consider the bigger picture when voting and while I can hardly claim to have become terribly well-informed on the UK’s membership of the EU before June 2016 I did decide that while I am not the EU’s greatest fan it was simply in everyone’s best interests – especially Britain’s – to remain a member. And ideologically I prefer working with other countries to isolationism. I thought both campaigns were appalling: Leave was full of fantasy and shoddy deceptions and Remain, though less misleading, tried to intimidate voters rather than enumerate the advantages of EU membership (admittedly, here they would have had to counter years of both government and some parts of the Press blaming the EU for what were in fact domestic decisions).

When Leave won, I was very upset. Like many people, I acknowledged that, since the promise had been made to carry out the results of the referendum whatever they might be, the vote must be honoured. But also like many people, I have watched the Brexit negotiations with increasing horror. At what point do we admit that the project is a disaster? How do we say that we uphold democratic choice when that choice was clearly going to harm so many people?

I have always disliked Theresa May’s politics and I thought she was an appalling Home Secretary. Brexit was always going to be insanely difficult, but she has made very poor decisions throughout, starting with her foolish triggering of Article 50 (for which the MPs who voted for it must share some blame). Be that as it may, within the constraints she was given and those she gave herself, it’s hard to see what better deal she could have negotiated. For instance, it is not possible to leave the Customs Union and end Freedom of Movement yet still uphold the Good Friday Agreement and maintain the integrity of the Union. There has to be a border somewhere.

Brexit has really tested MPs in a way that few other recent issues have. If you believe that leaving the EU is going to be disastrous for the country but your constituents overwhelmingly voted to do so, do you vote according to your beliefs or do you represent the views of your constituents? (And vice versa, for MPs who believe that remaining would be disastrous.) This is a real dilemma which has not been helped by people bandying about words like ‘traitor’. There are MPs who have genuinely tried to do their best. And there are others who have taken no responsibility for the situation and who have bailed out while failing to offer one single practical alternative. That really sticks in my craw. The slew of resignations yesterday was particularly unedifying. Ministers cannot have been surprised by what was put before them, least of all the Brexit Secretary, and it’s hard to believe that their haste to distance themselves from May was not done without at least one eye on their future careers.

I hope that MPs will read the text carefully and understand that this is it – this is the deal available for leaving the EU. There is no other deal possible, time has run out. ‘No deal’ is unacceptable. Anyone who thinks it is not unacceptable should first go to Dover and note the space prepared for extra customs checks (hint: there is none) and then go to their nearest hospital, look patients in the eye and convince themselves that the death of that person, when medicines are delayed, is a fair price to pay.

MPs should vote on whether they think that this deal is advantageous or not. If it is not passed, then there should be a second referendum: do we leave the EU with this deal or do we remain. That result should be honoured. (Oh and all British residents in Europe, including those who have lived there longer than fifteen years, should be entitled to a vote this time.) Then ministers should actually pay attention to why many people voted to Leave – because their communities are stagnating and need change and development – and enact policies to help them. This is what I think is the best way forward – though of course, if I read that either David Davies or Dominic Raab has been chosen as prime minister in the next few days, I will be forced to conclude that everyone is an idiot after all.