a gallimaufry

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.

Norse Mythology, retold by Neil Gaiman

There’s an English-language section of my local library; much of its contents don’t appeal but quite a bit does. I probably would not have gone out and bought a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology but there was absolutely no reason not to borrow it, so I did.

I think that this is an important and sometimes overlooked function of libraries. Not many of us have unlimited funds for book purchasing. If we’re going to be parting with money for something, we’re more likely to do so on something from which we’re fairly sure we will get what we want – enjoyment, enlightenment, or whatever. In a library, with nothing to lose, we can take risks with our reading, we can try out that author or dabble in a new genre.

Despite having a copy of Barbara Leonie Picard’s Tales of the Norse Gods and Heroes unread at home, I brought the Gaiman book back with me. What a pleasure it was! The tone was perfect – elegant, clear, funny and lively. (Alas, I had to return the book yesterday so I cannot quote anything here.) Sometimes writers retelling myths get a little bogged down in an archaic style, but Gaiman never does. I’d say, as someone who is profoundly ignorant about these myths, that it is intended as an introduction to them, as it is quite short. But it is such a good introduction I’ll definitely buy a copy for my daughter when she’s older.

I was surprised at how little Odin featured; Loki and Thor are the principal characters in these stories. Blunt force and skill in battle are highly valued (unsurprisingly, given their reputation) by the Vikings, no matter that the slaughter is often completely unnecessary. Thor is really nothing more than a big bully. I was intrigued that trickery also clearly met with the Vikings’ approval. Striking a deal and then reneging on it was praiseworthy; the only possible improvement would be then killing the person you’d just tricked. The gods decide that they need a defensive wall around Asgard to protect them from unfriendly giants. Along comes a mysterious man who says he can do this in three years. His price: the sun, the moon and the goddess Freya. The gods agree (apart from Freya) but only if he can complete the wall over the winter. When it becomes clear that he will succeed, they cunningly prevent him from placing the last stone and completing the wall. And then they kill him. So they have their wall, and they keep the sun, the moon and Freya. Hurrah!

I really enjoyed reading these, I am dusting down the Picard which contains plenty of stories Gaiman didn’t include, but I am very glad that I wasn’t a Viking.

(Johan Egerkrans, Idun, found here)

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Frances Wilson

We lay upon the sloping Turf. Earth & sky were so lovely that they melted our very hearts. The sky to the north was of a chastened yet rich yellow fading into pale blue & streaked & scattered over with steady islands of purple melting away into shades of pink. It made my heart almost feel like a vision to me.

Dorothy Wordsworth, wrote the literary critic Ernest de Sélincourt, was ‘probably the most remarkable and the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public’. I appreciate that is a fairly defined category, but the excerpts of her Grasmere Journal quoted in this brilliant biography reveal a truly great nature writer who has not had her due.

(Silhouette of Dorothy Wordsworth, taken in 1806 when she was thirty-four. From the Wordsworth Trust)

Wilson focuses on the two and a half years of the Grasmere Journal, the pinnacle of Dorothy’s literary achievement, written while she and her brother William were living in Dove Cottage in the Lake District. She is a sensitive reader of what Dorothy writes – and what she doesn’t write – and always works from Dorothy’s own words to discuss Dorothy’s childhood, her life before moving to Grasmere and her life after William married Mary Hutchinson, as well as Dorothy’s own character. The woman who emerges from these pages is complex, passionate and creative: Wilson describes her as a Cathy to William’s Heathcliff.

When Dorothy was six and William seven, their mother died, and Dorothy was separated from her four brothers and sent away to live with an aunt in Halifax. Aunt Elizabeth was kind but Dorothy was never to see her childhood home in Cockermouth again, she wasn’t even allowed back for Christmas. It’s hard to imagine the traumatic effect this must have had on her; it certainly laid the ground for her lack of self-esteem and her need to construct a happier existence through writing. At the age of fifteen, three years after her father’s death, she was sent to live with her grandparents as ‘a professional poor relation’. The grandparents were a ‘joyless’ pair who found Dorothy ‘wild and intractable’; however, Dorothy was now able to become reacquainted with her brothers, whom she had not seen for nine years. She immediately formed a close bond with William, a bond that was to have many of the elements of romantic love in it, for they found themselves in each other.

When William went away to Cambridge to study, Dorothy missed him enormously. Fortunately, after eighteen months she was invited to live with her uncle and his new bride in Norfolk, where she quickly became indispensible as ‘head nurse, housekeeper, tutoress of the little ones or rather superintendent of the nursery’ as her aunt gave birth to a new baby every year. However, she and William corresponded constantly and became even closer. In 1794, aged twenty-two, Dorothy left her uncle’s Norfolk rectory to go for a ‘pilgrimage’, a long walk, through the Lake District, and after this they set up house together in a string of different places, ending in Dove Cottage.

Dorothy began writing the Grasmere Journal for William to read. Far from being artless, her diary entries were the products of intense and accurate observation and careful selection of words. Wilson contrast them with her letters to her childhood friend Jane Pollard. In the letters, Dorothy’s ‘emotions are fashionably exaggerated’; they are ‘so different from the sharpness, shyness, and indirection of her journal entries that it is sometimes hard to believe they are by the same woman’. Wilson notes that occasionally Dorothy wrote two versions of the same day’s events in her journal, evoking quite different emotions. She portrays Dorothy and William’s intense love for each other as symbiotic and feeding off each other. There are echoes of the journals in William’s poetry of the time. Had Mr Mybug been a feminist, he would have undoubtedly claimed that Dorothy wrote William’s poems. The more likely explanation is that William and Dorothy discussed their impressions together before writing them down, or that William read her journal entries and used phrases from them in his own work. Dorothy was valued not only by William, but also by Coleridge and De Quincey, by all who knew her, for her great responsiveness, her sensitivity to what she saw and heard.

(A page from the Grasmere Journal, showing a description of daffodils at Ullswater; the Wordsworth Trust; found here)

After William’s marriage the fire went out of Dorothy’s writing and she seems to have subsided into a more conventional rôle as maiden aunt, helping with the upbringing of the children. Wilson argues that she should not be seen as a ‘victim of nineteenth-century femininity’, yet it is simply impossible not to wonder what her literary career might have been had she had the opportunities of her brother. It does seem at least she has finally received the biography she deserved; Wilson really is an exemplary researcher and writer and as well as looking out for a copy of Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal, I’m keen to read more of Wilson’s work.

casting my vote

Thanks to Brexit, last year I became a Belgian citizen. I couldn’t really envisage a situation in which I, a Brit, would be separated from my Belgian husband and child, but with the British government even then displaying an unedifying mix of incompetence and hostility I thought it best to mitigate that possibility.

Anyway, as a consequence I am now obliged to vote in Belgian elections. Voting is compulsory here, though there is a ‘blank space’ option on the ballot if you don’t care for any of the candidates. If you don’t vote and don’t have a good reason for it, like being out of the country on holiday, you can be fined. Not that this would be a problem for me, since the older I grow, the more important I realise voting is.

Today were the local and provincial elections. There are many political parties here, and they tend to govern in coalitions (I still can’t really understand why the British get in such a froth about coalition governments), but for the first few years of living here I couldn’t really tell my NVA from my CD&V. Keen to cast an informed vote I have been doing my homework over the past few weeks, avidly reading all of the leaflets dropped in our letterbox and rather hoping a candidate or two might pass by so that I could quiz them about their policies. Alas, none did.

There are 33 seats on our local council and so each party is supposed to field 33 candidates, in the unlikely event that they sweep the board. The candidates most likely to win lots of votes are placed high up on the party’s list; those who are thought to be less popular further down. For the smaller parties, I understand, it can be a bit of a scramble to find 33 candidates and sometimes the last few are people who’ve had their arms twisted by a friend or relative after a few pints one Saturday evening. And because it is a small town, people tend to vote for people they know and like.

Clutching my voting card I trotted off with K and E just before lunch to one of the local schools to vote – and not only was it the first time I cast a Belgian vote but it was the first time I had to use a computer to do so! We were first sent to Area 31, where we handed over our ID cards and voting cards and were given a plastic card and shown to a voting booth which contained a rather fearsome-looking computer. I had to push the card into the computer and then use a touch-screen to cast my votes. It was a tiny bit stressful (because computers!) but pleasing too. (I heard K calling that his computer wasn’t working, how glad I was that it wasn’t mine!) A paper slip was printed out at the end with one of those square codey things on it. I left the booth, flailed around another computer and had to be helped by a nice man who showed me what to do with the plastic card, where to scan my slip of paper and where to drop it afterwards. Then I was given back my ID card and my stamped voting card. Success!

I like to think that E regarded me with admiration but perhaps she did not.

(Sunflowers and crabapples in our front garden, nothing to do with voting but the post looked boring with no pictures)

Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey

Many many many moons ago, Oscar and Lucinda won What Shall Helen Read Next? and indeed I did start reading it but despite enjoying it for some reason put it down and didn’t pick it up again until last week. Fortunately, and this is testament to the strength of Carey’s writing, it was very easy to get back into, and I have just finished it.

And finished it in a rage! Jenny was not wrong to warn me in her comment to that earlier post. Peter Carey, how could you? If you will go and create intriguing, complex characters with whom the reader falls in love, then you had better have a very good reason for degrading and killing them off, and I refuse to believe that this was necessary to your artistic enterprise here. It’s not that I insist upon happy endings, by no means, but the ending felt rushed, scrappy and suddenly cruel in a novel which until now had been generous, and what happened seemed a betrayal.

The novel chronicles the childhoods, eventual meeting (they do not meet until page 231!) and subsequent parting of the two titular characters, one born in rural Devon, the other in rural Australia, in the nineteenth century. Brought together by a passion for gambling, their great endeavour is to create and ship to the outback a glass church (and they turn this plan into a wager as well), an airy dream made solid, impractical but beautiful, a triumph of belief over practicality. The novel draws together the ways in which life is a game of chance; from religion (‘We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.’) to love, business to conception, glass-blowing to meeting our future spouse. Gambling gives one the feeling, fleeting, of power and control, of harnessing Fortune to one’s own desires. The end of the novel, in which luck runs out in every way, suggests that this is all a gamble we are destined to lose. We may seem to float along the surface but eventually we will sink. (I found that disappointing.)

Yet still I loved this novel, and I loved it for the characters and for Carey’s writing, which is dry and witty and perfect. He has an amazing talent for juxtaposing elements in a description to bring out their oddness, he studs his prose with precise and unexpected metaphors and he has an ear for the droll in how people speak and behave. I could quote endlessly. Here is how Theophilus, Oscar’s father, sees the boy Oscar: ‘His son was long-necked and delicate. He was light, airy, made from the quills of a bird. He was white and frail. [...] The eyes were so clean and unprotected, like freshly peeled fruit.’ And here is Hugh Stratton’s face: ‘[it] showed, on closer examination, all the fine marks of pain and disappointment that buttered rum could not smooth over’. Here is Theophilus himself: ‘He was a sensualist who believed passionately that he would go to heaven, that heaven outshone any conceivable earthly joy, that it stretched, a silver sheet, across the infinite spaces of eternity.’ And here is Elizabeth, Lucinda’s mother, at her husband’s graveside: ‘But it was anger, not grief, that was her dominant emotion. It lay there like a poacher’s trap ready to snare the unwary.’ I will forgive a lot for writing like this.

what happened in september

(Fluffy Chicken ruling the roost)

Well. That was a busy few weeks. Going back to work after the summer holidays is always a shock to the system (yes I know your heart bleeds for us poor teachers) but it’s been extra specially busy this year partly because I stood in for a colleague who had paternity leave and partly because our school is merging with two others and this involves synthesising all our ways of doing things, which basically boils down to a lot of extra paperwork, never my strongest point.

As I glare at the computer screen and try to look brave in front of new students, cobwebs and cat hair have silted up round the house, there are muddy pawprints in the bath and on every flat surface there seems to be a pile of paper, a miniature stable made from cardboard boxes, a plastic-bottle spaceship or a doll’s encampment. I have also blown up my lovely new food mixery thing, which I bought after this unfortunate incident, and had a first driving lesson which was pretty terrifying for all concerned including the trees.

Meanwhile in the garden, all those weeds who were discouraged from sprouting by the horrifically hot summer have now burst forth with a vengeance everywhere. Last night on Gardener’s World Monty Don told us we should never let weeds get out of hand but should tackle them a little and often; I had to sigh and eat some cheese.

(A rare flower among the weeds)

When I have time to read, it’s mainly been detective novels I’ve purloined from the charity shop and I don’t have anything particular to say about them. I’ve also read Saplings by Noel Streatfeild, The Outcast by Sadie Jones (both of which treated the effect on children of a parent’s sudden death), Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood and The Changeling by Victor Lavalle. The first two explore the effects on children of a parent’s sudden death, the third examines father–child relationships in a clever retelling of The Tempest, although it’s not the main theme of novel, and The Changeling explores the darker side of fatherhood. I hadn’t thought about these connexions until now but they are there. I have written half a confused post about The Changeling but I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it.

Meanwhile, Frosty Chicken spent most of her days brooding.

However, last week she finally left the nest box and returned to the world of general hen business along with the others.

(Clara, Not Speaking to anyone)

In cat news, Clara remained aloof for a week or so but has slowly thawed, at least to Nala. The two of them play with each other, though it’s usually a chasing game that looks as if it teeters on the edge of not being a game. Clara continued to hate Olaf for much longer and I cannot say they are best friends now but all three cats will sleep on the same bed or in the same room together so I feel that all will be well.

(The only time Nala is still enough for a photograph is when she is asleep)

(One of Nala’s collections) (She didn’t arrange it, I should add)

Nala has turned out to be a big baby; she rushes about crazily and then falls asleep on someone and then bounces up again and bounds away. She collects things. She wags her tail like a puppy and is the most frightful thief and greedy-guts. She ate a frying-pan full of bacon which K had foolishly left unattended and will creep up on the unwary and try to bat food out of their hands with a sneaky yet very effective paw.

(Olaf, pretending he hasn’t just embarrassingly fallen out of the walnut tree in front of lots of people)

Olaf, apart from a disturbing taste for cellophane, is more discriminating in his eating habits. He rather views himself as Nala and Clara’s lord and master and simply expects to have the best place on the favourite blanket and first dibs on any food that’s going. However, he is also completely craven when it comes to children. He adores my daughter and loves being petted and spoilt by her and her friends, hurrying up to them when most cats flee in horror at the prospect of being clasped, kissed, bellowed at and bossed about.

(Spot the cats) (There are no prizes though)

Life is easing up a bit and I am feeling more chirpy; I still have to vanquish the combined evils of digital and planning but I am sure the forces of light are with me.

cat business

After the death of Mister Puss, we decided to look for a new feline friend for our remaining cat, Clara. Clara is a much more sociable creature than Mister Puss; she enjoyed teasing him (he hated it) and often tried to play with him (occasionally he did play but he was more likely to swear at her or give her a clip round the ear). And while Mister Puss would be furious to think of any other cat on his patch, and so soon, we started this search very quickly. Quite apart from being able to offer an animal a new home sooner rather than later, we were conscious of there only being one week of school holidays left. Cat introductions are not always easy, it seems, and we thought it would be best if we were able to give everyone lots of attention. Also, to be honest, it distracted from missing Mister Puss and his ginger ways.

As luck would have it we discovered an animal rescue centre very near to where we live, and they had kittens! We made an appointment to visit. The centre re-homes all its kittens in pairs, so there would be two new friends for Clara instead of one. I was pleased about this, I think being a kitten and being removed from both your mother and your siblings must be tough. (Though perhaps I project too much.)

Once we’d explained what we were after, Sonja, the lady in charge, told us that they did not recommend introducing kittens to a household where there was already a cat. I was surprised! She explained that it’s hard to tell very much about a kitten’s character, especially as to whether it will be a sociable cat or not, and if it happened that one of the kittens turned out to be aggressive with other cats (it seems there is a genetic factor here, so one sibling may be friendly and another not) then there would be trouble down the line. Instead, she recommended a sociable cat closer in age to Clara.

Or, in fact, two, because we’d sort of forgotten that there was the option of just adopting one cat. Sonja introduced us to some pairs of cats of Good Character. I did have the wit to ask whether she thought bringing two adult cats home would freak Clara out more than one, but Sonja thought not. And of course we were charmed by these sweet-tempered, friendly cats. So Olaf and Nala came home with us.

Olaf is enormous and very curious. He has climbed up every cupboard in the house, not always with very pleasing results, and if you open a drawer or a door his black-and-white face appears at your elbow, having a good nose inside. Sometimes he sits beside me and presses a paw against my chest. I am not sure what this means. The first night someone managed to knock over the cake tin and gnaw on a fruit scone, and I think it was him.

Nala, a little tortoiseshell cat, is more nervous and shy. She loves being stroked and cuddled, and she’ll climb onto your lap but then go completely loopy and knead your legs frenetically and bounce on and off again many times before settling down.

The two of them have played all over the house and spent yesterday evening both sleeping in my lap while I tried to read. They seem pleased with their new home, as far as I can tell, and are settling in.

But what of Clara? Well, she is not exactly overjoyed to say the least, and it is painful to see her avoiding her own home. However, she has taken it much better than Mister Puss did when she arrived three years ago. She stays mainly outside but pops in and out to give the newbies Hard Stares and they stare back. Clara growls a bit at Nala but I think she’s intimidated by Olaf. That may not seem good but I am actually hopeful: I think that these situations are always difficult at first but get better. Still, if anyone has any tips on smoothing the path to kitty friendship, I should love to know them...

(The first three photographs are of Clara, the next of Olaf, the last of Nala)

Fairy Tale, by Alice Thomas Ellis

(Alice Thomas Ellis photographed by Derrick Santani, in the National Portrait Gallery)

The eyes of the watchers were cold and flat and incurious and the watchers were still. Whenever they moved – be it ever so slightly – there was a brief darkness, a shadow behind the leaves, a hint of something that humanity might call loss, equate with pain. But the watchers knew nothing of that, being indifferent to such matters.

With the illness of Mister Puss and worry surrounding it I’ve been comfort-reading, but before that I was feeling the urge to read about fairies, as you do, but spiky rather than sparkly fairies. I’ve been dipping back into Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s collection of short stories, Kingdoms of Elfin, and re-reading Fairy Tale, by Alice Thomas Ellis. Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s fairies are amoral and often cruel, but the horror of what they do is distanced by the cool impersonal tone in which she writes. Alice Thomas Ellis’s fairies are more disturbing because we find them in a novel with developed human characters. Furthermore, Fairy Tale is steeped in Alice Thomas Ellis’s pitch black humour, and it’s the often jagged juxtaposition of social satire with supernatural  horror that gives the book its disquiet. It’s as if Evelyn Waugh wrote an Edgar Allan Poe story.

Nineteen-year-old Eloise and her ‘nice’ boyfriend Simon have moved from London to a small house in the Welsh countryside, where Simon earns a living picking up agricultural work and Eloise stitches exquisite nightdresses and petticoats for a local boutique:

one of those exclusive little shops with a single garment and something imaginatively incongruous – a monkey’s skull or an old boot – arranged in the window. Simon took the clothes in when Eloise had made a dozen. They were all finished by hand, which made them precious and gave them a hint of pathos, as though child labour had been employed: the women who wore them might feel, at once, delicate and ruthless, like some hard-hearted princess.

Eloise is bored but does not wish to admit it because to do so would be to admit that her fantasy of living in the countryside has not worked out. She pricks her finger; she wishes for a baby. But what she does not know that she and her husband are intruders on fairy land. Peculiar visitors arrive at her door. Eloise’s mother and her friend Myriam arrive, bickering and criticising. Soon the cat is having a nervous breakdown, the house is full of branches and herbs and vegetarian Eloise is craving steak and taking long walks in the rain in which she remains bone dry.

I vaguely remembered reading this a few years ago but I had forgotten just how funny but also surprisingly unpleasant it is. If you prefer your novels to contain sympathetic characters and not to shred pretty much every aspect of modern life, this is not for you. Alice Thomas Ellis’s work is strong meat but she was a perceptive and elegant stylist with an eye for the absurd in modern life and a knifelike wit with which to fillet it.

Her fairies are ancient, alien, predatory:

The [fairy] gamekeeper found it incomprehensible – the conflict in the human race between its passion for interference and its basic indifference to its members. Not that he cared. He didn’t think in human terms. Humans were useful for breeding when you could catch one, and every now and then when it seemed safe he ate one, but otherwise he avoided them on the whole ...

There is little room left for them in twentieth-century Britain and they must fight against human encroachment. Underneath the humour and the folklore lurks an eco-fable, though I am sure Alice Thomas Ellis would hate it to be called so. Anyway, it has reminded me of her other novels, which I must re-read...

(Alice Thomas Ellis with Beryl Bainbridge, whose work she edited; photographed by Edward Hamilton West; from here)

Mister Puss

(Drinking from the paddling pool in happier times)

Our beloved Mister Puss is no more. He became ill and there wasn’t anything we could do for him, so he was put to sleep yesterday. We gave him a beautiful funeral: he was buried in a Cornish Hamper box (the most glamorous cardboard box we could find) decorated with pony stickers and surrounded by flowers we picked from the garden; songs were sung and a cross has been raised on his grave.

Not everyone will be sorry at his death; the local rats and birds are probably dancing with joy.

We miss him and his sweary, bossy ways a lot. Our other cat, Clara, seems slightly lost that she has no one to tease now, although Mister Puss disliked being teased on the whole. Not the friendliest of cats, when he was younger Mister Puss used to hunt my toddler daughter, and gardening was always a scary experience as at any moment a tiny ginger tiger might leap out from a shrub and lacerate my arms, squeaking fiercely. However, he mellowed a lot as he got older and occasionally permitted cuddles, although he remained a cat who was happier outside, having a rumble with the neighbouring cats and slaying and eating the local wildlife (he would eat every last whisker of a rat and even the claws and beak of a crow, though this did give him tummy ache afterwards). During the cold winter evenings he enjoyed coming inside to watch the football with K, sitting on his favourite pink blanket on the arm of the sofa.

We have lots of happy memories of Mister Puss, the first cat I have ever ‘owned’ in so far as one owns a cat, and I wish he could have been with us longer. However, with what may strike some as unseemly haste, we have already made an appointment with a nearby animal rescue centre to look for a new friend or friends for Clara. There are a lot of cats looking for homes and it seems silly to make any of them wait longer than they need.

Thanks for everything Mister Puss, and lots of love.

(A last photograph, taken in a favourite spot)

The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin

‘The hands that wash dishes can be soft as your face,’ [the Major] suddenly sang at the Rector in a loud, crackling falsetto, ‘with mild green Fairy Liquid ... Liquid, Liquid,’ he sang. ‘I like that melodic turn, or whatever you call it, on “Liquid”. Very affecting.’
‘It’s your wits it’s affecting, if you ask me,’ said the Rector. ‘I suppose you haven’t been eating properly again. He doesn’t eat properly,’ he reported to Padmore.
‘Ah,’ said Padmore, pretending to have had a suspicion confirmed.
‘You’d better stay to lunch,’ the Rector told the Major. ‘Liver and bacon today, fill you up with vitamin B.’
‘Good,’ said the Major. He liked eating with the Rector, who not only had a first-rate cook but also declined to allow conversation during meals. Explaining this policy to his Bishop, who had been about to dine with him during the course of a visitation, ‘What is the good,’ the Rector had said, ‘of God giving us delicious-tasting foods, if every time we lift a forkful to our mouths we have to break off to cope with the inane prattling of our guest?’ [...]
‘A Dettol home is a happy home,’ the Major sang.
‘Can’t ask you other two,’ said the Rector, ‘because there’s not enough.’

The Glimpses of the Moon is part of the huge bookish plunder I dragged back to my lair with me after my holiday in England. It came courtesy of the Samaritan’s Bookshop in Ipswich, a place from where it is impossible to leave without at least one book, and on the cover the publisher has excitedly proclaimed, ‘Worth waiting for! His first novel for over twenty years’.  Does the book live up to this? Read on and find out, dear reader.

Edmund Crispin, pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, is best known for The Moving Toyshop, but during the 1940s and 1950s he wrote seven other comic detective novels featuring the Oxford professor of English literature, Gervase Fen. A friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, Crisping was invited to join the Detection Club – whose members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and John Dickson Carr. He was also, under his real name, a composer of film scores; his work includes the music for some of the Carry On films. However, despite early success, Crispin/Montgomery’s life was far from happy. He suffered from ill health, was a chronic alcoholic and was to die of heart failure at only fifty-six. (All of this biographical information is from The Passing Tramp blog, where you can also find discussion of Crispin’s other works.)

The drink and the poor health seem to be the reasons why Crispin’s fans had to wait twenty-six years for The Glimpses of the Moon. The Passing Tramp describes it as ‘a weak book, a succession of sometimes forced comic vignettes strung together by a frayed murder mystery plot’, so if you are new to Crispin’s work it probably isn’t the place to start. I have to say that I enjoyed it on the whole – though I felt the scenes with the hunt and the pylon were an unnecessary indulgence and dragged rather. It is certainly a very odd detective novel, perhaps not really a detective novel at all.

We begin in a Devonshire pub with Fen, the Major and Padmore, a journalist, eight weeks after the gruesome murder of Routh, a local farmer, for which an Australian farm-hand named Hagberd has been arrested and charged. Fen has with him a pig’s head in a sack. All of a sudden, an ancient man named Gobbo starts speaking to them, apparently providing Hagberd with an alibi; Padmore eagerly drags the Major and Fen off in pursuit of corroborating evidence. Soon there has been another murder and the pig’s head in the sack turns out to be not quite what it ought to be...

As The Passing Tramp notes, the structure of the book is indeed a series of comic vignettes involving ever more characters. Everyone is wildly eccentric and bizarrely named; the whole book is completely over the top. The solution to the murder is provided quite perfunctorily at the end of the novel and relies on information that has been withheld from the reader, thus making it impossible to work out in advance as in a more classic, puzzle mystery. Crispin holds back the details of Routh’s death until Chapter 3, which definitely feels like teasing. In a more conventional detective novel the amateur detective would be central; here, Fen is a minor character in the scenes in which he appears and absent for about a third of the book while the police detectives investigate, futilely. Although he does propose the line of inquiry which leads to the identification of the killer, he is hardly involved in the investigation and does not solve it himself – to the exasperation of the Major:

‘Well, my dear fellow, if you say so. But who is the Botticelli murderer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you must know by now, my dear fellow,’ said the Major plaintively. ‘We’re practically at the end of the book.’

There are similar metafictional moments spread out through the book, as when Fen tells Padmore that Crispin ‘writes up’ the accounts of his cases ‘in his own grotesque way’, and there are plenty of literary jokes too. Indeed, Fen explains that the solution to the murder relies on ‘the Chesterton Effect’, named after the author of the Father Brown mysteries. Crispin also pops in a surrogate-Montgomery character, Broderick Thouless, who composes scores for popular films – in this case horror rather than comedy. There is plenty of music in the novel too, from the singing Major to Fen deploring Mahler.

I couldn’t help but come away with the impression that in this book Crispin is really just playing about. The reluctance to divulge basic information about the first murder at the start of the book, the refusal to place his detective centre-stage or provide any clues and the constant divergence into comic scenes that have little to do with the murder plot, the abrupt solution at the end – all of these suggest to me that Crispin is deliberately toying with the reader’s expectations and indulging his own comic instincts (and also his wish to moan about various aspects of modern life, like pylons and hunt protesters). But as a result of jettisoning a more conventional plot Crispin I think loses drive and coherence in the book, and this is compounded by his inability to resist adding more and more characters. Still, it feels as if he was having fun writing it (I hope he was) and that sense of fun does communicate itself; I largely enjoyed it despite its weaknesses and I giggled a lot. It may not be up to his earlier work, but it is still very much worth reading.

Incidentally, the book seems to have no connexion with the Edith Wharton novel of the same title, which seems odd given how literary a writer Crispin is. I am not really sure what it means here, but I think it alludes to the moon as the source of lunacy and so is about flashes of madness.