June

From my kitchen window. Roses, white foxgloves, reeds...
          Below, the last of the dog-roses above the pool.

By the pond, the yellow flag which Madwippit (aka author Karen Bush) gave me last year. They didn't flower at all last year but have made up for it this.

 

Pink strawberry flowers and my
Grandad's favourite - sweet pea.      We have peas too, getting very chubby in their pods. 

Then there's the big fella, (below) the teasel.

That white wall behind it is six feet tall. It grows daily and is even taller now.

It's as well defended as a plant can be. Spikes and spines all over it.

But to end with something pretty...

 

How To Be Free - a review

  Life is absurd. 

 

  Be merry. Be free.

 

This sentiment appears on the cover of How To Be Free and runs throughout the book.

It's a most entertaining read. Half the time I agreed with  Hodgkinson's arguments so wholeheartedly, I wanted to cheer. The rest of the time I thought them so crack-brained, I wanted to throw the book across the room. I always enjoy books like this. They make you think.

Tom Hodgkinson, The Idler

Tom Hodgkinson is the editor of The Idler and the author of How To Be Idle. From page one to the end, he rages against the 'mind-forged manacles' that keep people in jobs they hate in order to pay, often, for things they don't need or even really want. They just think they ought to want them. (In his opinion.)

Modern society, he argues, is in all but name, a slave society, but the chains are all 'mind-forged.' It forces people into a rigid system. First it educates them to believe in passing exams and 'getting a good job.' But a 'career' Hodgkinson argues, sets meaningless goals of 'sales targets', 'bonuses' and 'promotion.' People are convinced that a bigger house in a 'better' neighbourhood, a more expensive car, 'designer' clothes and kitchen gadgets are signs of success and, therefore, happiness. But none of these things are, fundamentally, what make people happy.

And, of course, in our present society it's impossible for everyone to have a high-flying career. Some simply aren't interested and they're called stupid, feckless, unambitious and lazy. Others are broken by the stultifying demands of 'career' and many are suddenly made redundant by economic shifts they have no control over. These people are labelled 'failures,' which does its own psychological damage.

The whole notion of 'a good job' and 'a career' are, Hodgkinson says, traps and enslavements. The things that make human beings happy are: friends and family, having a laugh with them, creativity, control over your own life, growing things and tending animals, and having plenty of time to be idle and think.

The book is a series of 29 short essays, all ending with a rousing slogan. Among them are:-

• Banish Anxiety: Be Carefree - Ride a bike.
•  The Tyranny of Bills and the Freedom of Simplicity - Play the ukelele.
• Reject Career and All its Empty Promises -  Find your gift.
• Escape Debt - Cut Up Your Credit Card.
• Forget Government -  Stop Voting.
• Reject Waste, Embrace Thrift - Shovel Shit! 
• Stop Working, Start Living -  Play.

It's all energetically, playfully and wittily written, but Hodgkinson really means it. Every chapter has its own note at the end, giving hints on how you might practically follow up the advice.

As a grumpy old Leftie, I muttered and mumbled about public-school educated Poshos telling the rest of us how to live - haven't we had a gut-full of that, for gods' sake? And it's all right for some with their Trust Funds and the Bank of Mummy and Daddy to fall back on...

But then I had to admit that, for most of my life, I've followed most of what Hodgkinson suggests. I am, I suppose, what he likes to call 'a Bohemian.' Indeed, a rather hard Glaswegian of my acquaintance nicknamed me and Davy 'The Brummie Bohemians' when we learned that, not only weren't we married, but we had no intention of ever getting married. (I was only surprised that this friend thought it worth commenting on at all.)

I didn't plan to be a Bohemian - but then, I've never gone in for life-plans or even five-year-plans. They strike me as very odd. I had no idea I was 'stepping outside the system' or being free. Mostly, I thought I was being broke, but apparently being broke is the new rich.

I've never had 'a career' or wanted one. (My writing is sometimes called 'a career' but, well, hardly.) I've lived from advance to lecture-fee to royalty. I am very frugal and thrifty (some would say stingy.) I will spend money, if I have to, on things I really want - books, travel, plants. Everything else is cheap or second-hand and never replaced until there's not another day's use in it. Because what I don't spend on non-essentials I can put towards stuff I'll enjoy. (And of course, what's 'essential' is open to definition. Fashionable clothes and house redecoration are, for me, non-essential in the extreme whereas books, single malt whisky and trips to the Hebrides... )

I've always had plenty of time to be idle, to read, to think, to write, draw, learn, make... It's also true that I've rarely felt such satisfaction as I have with my recent (and on-going) creation of a wildlife garden combined with growing my own fruit and vegetables. Hodgkinson is a hugely enthusiastic gardener and wants everyone to garden - and I have to agree with him about gardening as a source of happiness.

Hodgkinson blames the sorry state of slavery that exists today on 'Puritans.' He really hates 'Puritans.'

In the good old, Catholic Middle Ages, according to him, we all lived in a demi-paradise. We each of us had our cosy little cottage with a small-holding and all we had to do in return for it was a couple of days' light work a week on the lord's land - and, of course, as we all worked together, there was lots of good fellowship and cheer and it wasn't like work at all really.

The rest of the time we could work at our own pace on our own business, growing our own food or working, with creativity and satisfaction, at some useful craft like blacksmithing, pottery or basket-making. (All working-class crafts, which workers had no choice but to do, all recently taken up as 'artisan jobs' by the middle-classes like Hodgkinson. Excuse my grump. My great-grandfather was a blacksmith: my grandfather was a brick-maker. Neither did the work in order to be happy. Neither had much choice about it.)

Brueghal's peasants whooping it up on one of their many carefree holidays.

 
The Catholic Church was a benevolent overseer to this golden Merry England, providing lots of gorgeous ritual, music and holidays to lighten our days. Life was just wonderful all the time.

But then came the Reformation and the rise of Capitalism. The Catholic church and all the monasteries were destroyed. The peasants' common land was stolen from them and enclosed for the rearing of sheep. Families who'd been comfortably self-sufficient became hired farm hands in tied cottages. Land began to be something the rich speculated in to make fortunes, rather than something used by and for the whole community, to raise food.

Things just got worse and worse with the rise of industry and the dark, satanic mills. Workers became disposessed 'hands' and 'mechanics', forced to work miserably in terrible conditions, for inhumanly long hours, for a pittance. The medieval guilds where masters and men worked together vanished, and Unions were formed from the workers' desperation. Ever since then, workers and employers have been at loggerheads, one side for ever trying on some chicanery in order to make more profit and the other side forever on the defensive, trying to claw out some quality of life from the hellish urban landscape.

Wrong but Wromantic                          Right but Repulsive

For Hodgkinson, the Middle Ages and the 17th Century Cavaliers represent Ease, Joy, Grace, Elegance, Freedom.

Later centuries and the Puritans represent Greed, Narrowness, Ugliness, Rudeness, Joylessness and Slavery. It all reminds me of 1066 and All That, where the Cavaliers are summed up as 'Wrong but Wromantic,' and the Roundheads as 'Right but Repulsive.' (The beautiful drawing is by John Reynolds.)

I recognise that there are some grains of truth in Hodgkinson's account. The idea that all peasants, throughout the entire 400 years or so that make up 'the Middle Ages' were all plague-ridden, shit-encrusted and starving all the time is a nonsense. Excavations have revealed that many 'peasants' lived comfortable and prosperous lives. They did have more public holidays than we do and they could work as hard or as lightly as they chose, just as workers in the later cottage-industries could. As Marx put it, before the Industrial Revolution, work was a part of life. After, work was a sacrifice of life. (But did medieval peasants think that on a freezing cold morning when they had to go out and plough?)

The medieval Catholic Church often did serve a benevolent social role, providing work for makers of beautiful things, giving alms, keeping guest houses for travellers and taking the sick into its care.

But, but... I can't help feeling that Hodgkinson's view of the Middle Ages is seen not so much through rose-tinted specs as a shocking-pink blindfold. The Catholic Church was often anything but benevolent - the Inquisition? The witch-hunts? The Crusades? The slaughter of the Cathars? Where do these things fit into the happy, singy-dancy medieval dream?

And that cosy medieval world of Hodgkinson's, where everybody loves everybody else and they're always singing and dancing and feasting? Were there never any cold winters or hungry gaps? - How about this, from Piers Plowman, by Langland, who was actually present at the time, 600 years ago?

“As I went on my way,
I saw a poor man over the plough bending.

His hood was full of holes,
And his hair stuck out.
His shoes were patched,
His toes peeped out as he the ground trod.
His wife walked by him
In a skirt cut full and high,
Wrapped in a sheet to keep her from the weather,
Bare foot on the bare ice
So that the blood flowed.
At the field’s end lay a little bowl,
And in there lay a little child wrapped in rags
And two more of two years old upon another side.
And all of them sang a song
That was sorrowful to hear.
They all cried a cry,
A sorrowful note.
And the poor man sighed sore and said
“Children be still.”


And with all Hodgkinson's railing against 'slavery' I was a little taken aback at his description of the American Civil War as one fought between the 'rude North and the courteous South.' He doesn't mention that one of the South's 'courteousies' was the enslavement and mistreatment of other human beings. I'll take the grasping North's rudeness, thanks, over that kind of 'courtesy.' It was this kind of thing which enraged me and made me throw the book aside.

Even so, I picked it up again. I can't help agreeing with Hodgkinson more often than I disagree with him. I think he is often silly,  but still has the big picture of our society and how it needs to change, framed about right.

I recommend the book as a stimulating, entertaining and, perhaps, even world-changing read.

The Ghost Drum won the Carnegie Medal.

 

 Ghost Dance and Ghost Song are also available.

The Sterkarm Handshake won the Guardian Fiction Prize. 

 

 

A Sterkarm Kiss and A Sterkarm Tryst are also

available.

 

 

Hot Beer

There was, at last, a pause in the English monsoon. The sun came out and so we went to Beer. The English are notorious for their warm beer. This Beer was stonking hot. Feel the heat rising off those cobbles.

       Near where the concrete path ends and these cobbles begin, a man was talking to two friends. "She said, 'Now you know what child-birth feels like.' I said, 'I don't want to!' But she held my hand, very kind..."

I've never known the sea to be so mirror-still that the cliffs cast such a reflection.

          A woman said to a girl of about eleven, "What will your Mum and Dad say when they find out what you've been doing with us?"  The girl said, in delighted triumph, "Nothing! I've done nothing!"

Beer competes hard for the village in bloom title. Several doorsteps held enormous scarlet geraniums the size of small bushes. There were window-boxes and hanging baskets and stone pots of marigolds and nasturtiums were part of the street furniture.

The lane leading down to the sea got in on the act too, with valerian, wild carrot, flax, bird's foot trefoil...

People swam, lay on the hot pebbles and watched the little white sail-boats glide past.

          "Is it cold?"   -     "Brass monkeys are diving and weeping, mate."   

We went to Sidmouth for the evening. This sandstone cliff beside the river always catches the evening sun.

Next day, Beer was just as hot, but there was a strong breeze. All the flags were horizontal.

Instead of reflecting the cliff, the sea slapped against it and streaks of orange sand could be seen in the water.

But you could turn your back on it and watch the swallows over the cliff.
       As you can see, it's not a crowded place.

           "Shall we get fish'n'chips and eat them on the beach?"
                                        "Better be ready to fight off the sea gulls."
                                                   "Yeah, well, there's no shortage of stones."

But you always have to go home. So we climbed up the cliff path, back to the car and the motorway - and the heat without a sea breeze.

Hope you enjoyed the British summer! Let's hope it lasts a couple of days more.

The Sterkarms Spake Like Th'Owd Uns

There was a Black Country man who was famous for his inventive

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

cursing. He could curse for half an hour without drawing breath or repeating himself.
     One day he misjudged his aim and gave his thumb a good wallop with his hammer. His workmates paused in their own work and waited with interest. He said, "Oh - faddle!"
     His workmates stared. Then one said,
     "Tha coo-ert cuss as tha couldst cuss, cost?"

This tongue-twister is an old Black Country story, handed down to me. An heirloom story. The final line is, of course, in Black Country dialect and translates as:

         "Thou canst not curse as thou couldst curse, canst thou?"

In translation, it becomes quite Shakespearean. As, of course, it is, since the Black Country dialect, like many other despised English dialects, preserves a lot of older English.

What has this to do with the Sterkarms?
     Well, one of the things I've been doing as I've rewritten the Sterkarms over the past year, is to make the Sterkarm's speech more archaic. So I've been grappling with one of the big, perennial problems of writing historical fiction. How do you represent the speech of historical characters?

     One school of thought is that you have your characters speak in modern English because the people of the past didn't think of themselves as being 'historical.' They were right up to the minute fashionistas, and they spoke right-up-to-the-minute Latin, or Aramaic, or Anglo-Norman or whatever.

Red Shift by Alan Garner

     I have a lot of sympathy with that point of view. It was handled superbly in Alan Garner's Red Shift, where one section opens with a conversation between, at first glance, American GIs during the Vietnam War. Only gradually do we realise that they are, in fact, Roman legionaries stranded 'behind the lines' in darkest Celtic Britain.
     After all, the legionaires would have had their own slang, the equivalent of that used by soldiers in later wars. I read somewhere that a lot of our 'classical' Latin is, in fact, slang, that 'caput' actually means, not 'head' but the stopper for a jar. How true this is, I can't say, being no linguist, but it's an interesting idea. The slang of one period becomes the revered classical prose of another. At sometime in the future, 'Hey dude, wassup?' will be heard or read as, 'Dear sir, respectful greetings.'

So I could have made the Sterkarms talk in modern English - except that, in these books, 21st Century characters and 16th Century characters are together in the same time and space, via a time-machine.
     I used to love the old SF series, The Time Tunnel. I've always loved the fantasy of being able to visit other times and experience what life was like then. But even as a child, it irritated me that wherever our time-travellers stepped out of their machine - whether it was Ancient Greece or Revolutionary France - they could instantly understand the locals, and the locals them. Perhaps the

From Wikipedia

series came up with some explanation, similar to Douglas Adam's brilliant 'babel fish,' but if it did, I missed it.
     I was determined not to make that mistake when I wrote the Sterkarms, and made it very clear that the Sterkarm's speech is not immediately understandable to their 21st Century visitors, nor vice-versa.

      “Day glayder migh a finner thu!”
        It gladdens me to find thee!

     When I wrote the first book, The Sterkarm Handshake, I kept to the rule that the Sterkarms spoke in their own dialect, or in a somewhat archaic style, if they were in the company of 21st Century people. But if they were talking among themselves, or with Andrea, who understood them, then I gave their words in modern English.
     Then I wrote the third book, A Sterkarm Tryst.  Most of the action takes place in the 16th Century, but there are plenty of 21st Century people (or 'Elves') milling around there. Or then. I needed to make the distinction between the Sterkarm's speech and the 'Elves'' speech clearer. And if I was going to do that in the third book, then the first two should match. So I rewrote them.

      In 'Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders' Susanne Alleyn warns historical writers against attempting 'theeing and thouing.' It is not as simple, she rightly says, as replacing 'you' with 'thou' or 'thee.' And 'thou' and 'thee' aren't interchangeable.
      She's quite right. The distinction between 'you' and 'thou' is one reason I wanted to use it, because it's a distinction between formal and informal speech which has vanished from modern English, but was very much a part of the Sterkarms' world.
     'Thou' and 'thee' could be used when speaking affectionately to close friends or family, which is why it has become associated with lovers' rhymes, but also when speaking to social inferiors. The meaning here would depend on context. Its use could say, "I know you and trust you well, I regard you as one of my family." Or it could say, "You are so inferior to me that I don't need to bother being polite."
      'You' was used to superiors and to strangers who seemed to be of equal or superior status. As you came to know someone and were friendlier, a point was eventually reached where one person, usually the older, asked, "Shall we be 'thou' to one another?"
     'You' could also be used in situations where you might actually know the person you were speaking to very well, but wanted to emphasise formality - for instance, to transpose this into today's world, two teachers who were actually good friends might address each other as 'you' in front of a class.
      And 'you' could also be used as a weapon against friends, family and lovers. A sudden switch from 'thou' to 'you' signalled that not all was well and the speaker had taken it up the nose.
      Indeed, I'm quite sorry that we've lost the you/thou distinction.

      I still haven't explained what has all this to do with, 'Thou coo-ert cuss as tha couldst cuss, cost?'
      It's simply this: I like to feel I'm standing on firm ground when I attempt something like this. How to avoid the quagmires of using 'thou' when it should be 'thee'? How to feel confident when writing it? I think a loss of confidence in a writer always shows up in the prose.
      Well, my firm ground is simply this: I'm Black Country born and bred. I grew up using such words as 'malkin' (simpleton) and 'gleed' (hot coal) and pronouncing 'laugh' as Shakespeare did - as 'loff.'

      Another old story. The first time a Black Country boy ever saw a (steam)-train go by, he ran screaming to his mother. "Row of housen went past like lightening and fust un's chimney was a-fire!" This boy would have worn 'shoo-en' on his feet. It's the old English plural: instead of adding 's', you added 'en.' The Laland Scots 'een' for 'eyes' has the same plural.

     I grew up familiar with 'thou' and 'thee' too. Many of my grandparents' generation still used it, and certainly my great-grandparents' generation did.
      My parents didn't use 'thee' and 'thou' much themselves. It had been firmly labelled 'old-fashioned' and 'uncouth' by their day. But, when telling stories of their families and joking about 'th'owd uns' they would use the form. 

And he said, "Hey! Thee! Tha'd stand coal cracking on tha yed, thee!" 
And her said, 'That frock'd fit Barnum'n'Bostock's elephant. It'd just do for thee, May.'

       And, 'Tha coo-ert cuss as tha couldst cuss, cost?' The phrase was preserved for the pleasure of saying it and for challenging others to say it and understand it.
      All this was steadying as I tried to find a way for the Sterkarms to speak. I never felt I was being twee or striving for effect - After all, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then archaisms are in the ear of the listener and, to me, many 'quaint, archaic' phrases are simply ordinary, everyday speech.
      "Ar," for 'yes' is not stage country-bumpkin but what many people I know would reply to a question. Myself included.
     There's nothing 'Carry-On' or facetious about the word, 'wench.' It's the usual Black Country word for 'girl' or 'young woman' and 'our wench' means 'my sister.'
     I was only trying to make the Sterkarms spake like th'owd uns.

  A Sterkarm Tryst, published by Open Road, is now available for pre-order by following this link.