Tea Cosy

Posted on | July 30, 2010 | No Comments

“Give the spout a drink,” Gramp would say, sloshing a spurt of hot water through the pot before he filled it. Then he’d bring the pot in on a tray with the cups, wearing the tea cosy on his head.

Gran did all the food; banana sandwiches, coffee-cream éclairs, fruit cake. Gramp was in charge of tea. That was his thing; that, and putting the tea cosy on his head. Sometimes we’d pretend not to notice. Everyone would go on talking, reading the paper, watching telly, and Gramp would have to put the milk in the cups, pour the tea and hand them round, all with the cosy on his head, his face grim. He couldn’t take it off until someone laughed.

It wasn’t just at their house. He’d do it at ours too. In photos of us opening presents on Christmas Day, Gramp lurks in the background with our tea cosy on his head. My aunt’s cosy was black and gold; Gramp wore that one tall and proud as a Bishop’s mitre.

Gramp found retirement hard. He liked to be up and doing. He worked part-time as a bearer at a funeral home for a while, and then at Tesco, collecting trolleys. Then he didn’t work at all. He talked less. When he got Parkinson’s, he stopped making the tea.

The last time I saw Gramp laugh was when we played cards at Christmas. He’d played Rummy on the bonnet of his staff car in the desert near Alexandria in the war. He knew this game at least, he said. Wasn’t half bad at it. He told us the rules, twice.

These days we make tea in mugs, plopping in a bag and scrunching it round with a spoon. I bought a cosy once, a while ago, but it’s never been worn.

Word Hunting: A Language-Lovers Sport

Posted on | July 29, 2010 | No Comments

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There are some words that are worth keeping, I’ve always thought. Everyone has their favourites – my friend Neil always swears by cornucopia. Defenestration seems to come up quite regularly. I’ve heard a case made for infinitesimal, although I’ve always had a soft-spot for chevron. But there are thousands of beautiful words I encounter, think ‘oh what a lovely word,’ and then promptly forget. So, I’ve started word hunting, keeping good words I find, just for their own sake.

Old books are ideal for word hunting. Sometimes, opening one is like lifting a stone and surprising the words like woodlice. Non-fiction is ideal, and the more obscure the book, the better the words. In fact, the book itself doesn’t much matter – it’s just a receptacle for its words. I usually don’t even keep the books I collect words from; I reap and get rid. It’s the words that count in this game.

In a secondhand bookshop I found a handwritten shop ledger for a drapers from 1876, belonging to a Master Williams, who wrote his name in a flowery, slanting hand inside the cover. It lists invoices for the orders of cloth going out of the shop. That’s all that’s in the ledger, an everyday thing probably forgotten about once it was full. But it’s a hoard of beautiful words. Here’s a taste of the ones I kept:

In January Master Williams sold shalloon, silk serge and Saxony doeskin, Scotch sheeting, swansdown and India silk handkerchiefs. In February, rough loom, red chintz and Russia duck. In March it was lutestring, lace cardinal and linen huckaback. In April there was calico, cambric and cashmere shawls. In May crimson velvet, Paramatta Cloth, damask and drab moleskin, and in June black crape, bombazine and black moiré. Even to list the words is to start writing a poem.

Word hunting can uncover tiny stories too –in the draper’s ledger, customers spring to life as potential characters for stories. I like to picture the Reverend Steward, who wanted fine white counterpanes and Wilton blankets, standing tutting in the queue behind the more stylishly inclined Reverend E Boyce, ordering a silk umbrella and two pairs of kid gloves. And I think it’s hard not to make assumptions about a Mr. Robert Barnard, who ordered buck-skin braces and mohair socks.

Another word goldmine I found once was something called The Art of Painting in Miniature. All that was left of it were some loose pages held together with a couple of ragged threads. It looked like it might be 18^thCentury (the letter s is written as f), and the author, whose name is missing, is informing the reader about the types of paint used for miniatures. The words (with their old spellings) are luscious. Verditer, Prussian, Indigo Smalt, Carmine, Drop Lake, Chinese Vermillion, Indian Red, Gall-Stone, Terra Sienna, Roman Oker, Sap-Green, Lamp-Black and Flake White

And the tiny story is there too, in all its smelly, dirty, 18^th Century detail: “I would recommend my readers to apply to the slaughtermen at the Victualling Office, or any private slaughter-house who will examine the gall-bladders of the oxen, in many of which gall-stones (being concrescences formed in the bladder) are found; by this mode only, will the artist or amateur attain possession of this unrivalled colour in its pure state.”

Sometimes the most technical books are written like poetry. A Catachism of the Laws of Storms, written by a John Macnab in 1884, is a textbook for trainee sailors on how to navigate through bad weather. The instructions are dry and technical, but the words conjure up the terrifying storms themselves, which John Macnab clearly maintained a healthy awe of. He warns against ragged, immense, pyramidal seas, long rolling and wild with their great rotating, spherical squalls and storm-fields, oscillating and overwhelming as they veer and shift on the outer verge, the cross seas hiding calm centres.

I’m never quite sure when my word collections are going to come in handy, but they always do, sooner or later. Flicking through an old notebook and being delighted all over again by bombazine, verditer or images of squally storm-fields usually sparks off ideas for stories, poems or character names. It’s my belief that some of the most beautiful poems and stories were inspired by their authors’ experiences of word hunting. John Masefield’s poem Cargoes is my favourite example – “Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir…” I’d put money on the fact that he came across the word quinquireme at some point in his sea-faring life, (it’s a kind of ship) and the rest of the poem followed, even if it was years later.

If you’ve discovered you own unusual favourite words, I’d love to hear them. Use the #favouritewords hashtag on Twitter to let them loose on the world.

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A Week of Whales

Posted on | July 18, 2010 | No Comments

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I’ve been haunted by whales this week. It all started with Dave from my writing group trying to list songs about whales, which spawned an eclectic playlist. Then I turned on the TV to be confronted by a whale being dissected.  (They’d just gouged out something called the glove finger – a bit of the ear shaped like a pointing hand in a glove.) Then the next day I wandered into the brilliant Judd Books in Bloomsbury, picked up a collection of Ted Hughes’s poems for children and found his beautiful Moon-Whales poem. Three whales in a row must be a sign, so I set out on a quest for whales in literature.

I started with Ted Hughes’s whales, which swim across the surface of the moon, ‘lifting the moon’s skin / Like a muscle’. It’s a beautifully visual poem, its whales huge, mysterious and geologically slow. The poem’s repeated ‘oo’ and ‘m’ sounds echo the whales’ calls.

Sometimes they plunge deep
Under the moon’s plains
Making their magnetic way
Through the moon’s interior metals
Sending the astronaut’s instruments scatty.

Next, I went back to an early example of whale-lit: Jonah’s Biblical encounter, which already contains all the motifs of the genre – swallowing, fate, death, rebirth and existential angst….

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Poems as performance … John Cooper Clarke

Posted on | July 12, 2010 | No Comments

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Last week I squeezed into a packed and sweaty auditorium at the South Bank Centre to watch performance poet and punk legend John Cooper Clarke’s show for the London Literature Festival.

The Bard of Salford was on good form, despite the temperature. Now in his 60s, he still has the style of Bob Dylan, mixed with the dead-pan delivery of Alan Bennett and just the right sprinkle of Bernard Manning. He delivered a stream of curiously old-fashioned stand-up, interspersed with his own brand of rapid-fire performance poetry. His disjointed jokes and puns revelled in an infectious love of language, perfect for a literary festival. (“If you shot a peasant, could you get off on the grounds of dyslexia?”)

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Judging books by their covers: 75 Years of Penguin Sci Fi

Posted on | July 4, 2010 | No Comments

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The main characteristic of the Penguin paperbacks we have on sale at the secondhand bookshop I work in is scruffiness. They’ve usually been read, re-read, loved, kept in pockets, stuffed under pillows and carried round in bags before being passed on to that great secondhand bookshop in the sky (or Charing Cross Road, in this case). In other words, they’ve fulfilled the vision of Allen Lane, Penguin’s founder, who created a publishing house with the philosophy of making great fiction affordable for all… click to read more at Litro Magazine…

Torquemada and the Torturous Literary Puzzle

Posted on | June 26, 2010 | No Comments

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It might be a sign of the digital times, or an indicator of economic gloom, but working in a second hand bookshop can be slow. We have many techniques for passing the hours: Theatre-Direction Bingo (works especially well on a Saturday night in the West End), Weirdest Book Title competitions and sneaky behind-the-cash-desk chess to name a few. This week my colleague Jan discovered a book called Torquemada’s 112 Best Crossword Puzzles on a dusty shelf in the basement – a collection of cryptic crosswords with literary themes published in 1942. Rashly confident of our book-geek credentials, we tackled one. Click to read more…

Book Clubs: Gangs In Fiction

Posted on | June 18, 2010 | No Comments

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Gangs – it’s a great theme. Hasn’t everyone been in one at some point? We obsess about gangs as kids – starting them, desperate to be included in them, mortified at being barred from them. (Mine was called The Bourne Lane Bunch. We met in secret in the hen shed. My code name was Curly; Karl Wilkinson from next door was my deputy and went by the handle Razor, and our secret symbol was an octopus. It made sense at the time.) Read more…

How To Write A Letter

Posted on | April 2, 2010 | No Comments

“All flourishes and twirls should be rigidly avoided; they are vulgar and pointless” is the sound advice which kicks off How Shall I Word It?, a letter writer for men and women on domestic and business subjects published in 1943. There’s a letter for every situation that might crop up in modern life, starting with the essentials, like how to address the King. Everything’s covered, from domestic issues (Gentleman Asking for Character of Chauffeur) and neighbourly concerns (To Complain of a Boy’s Window Smashing) to awkward social situations (From a Stranger to Another, Telling of her Nurse’s Unkindness to Child) and relationship niggles (Letter from a Gentleman Reproaching his Fiancée with being a Flirt).

Everyone in How Shall I Word It? is either, a) fearfully sorry, b) frightfully disappointed, or c) unutterably wretched. Or, if things are going well, a) tremendously excited, b) immensely flattered or c) bubbling over with happiness. Everyone is particularly happy in the marriage section. Mrs Rhodes is happy about dear Herbert’s happiness at his engagement, as she has always worried he would never find a girl to make him happy. But now she’s sure she can trust her happiness, which relies on Herbert’s happiness, to her new daughter-in-law Maisie. Masie is also extremely happy – she’d been worried that Mrs. Rhodes would be unhappy about the engagement, but now she knows she isn’t, she is herself is much happier, which just adds to how happy she already was at having won Herbert’s love. She is, in fact, the happiest girl alive.

Whatever the situation, the letter-writer has the words to fit. You might think that being sent a chair as a present would have you stumped when it came to penning a thank you note, but no. (“It is the only chair which I have had sent to me, and I like it exceedingly”)

Less pleasant situations are covered, such as seeking compensation from a railway company (“I endeavored to alight, only to fall onto the railway line”), and (not very) threatening letters (“we do trust that you will not force us to this extreme measure.”)
There are even some marketing tips for small businesses, ranging from enticements (“There is a £1 awaiting you in my shop. Yes, this is fact – and the reason is not because we are philanthropic; it is because we are slack”) to vaguely sinister threats (“I am taking the liberty of calling upon you tomorrow evening at 7pm, when, even if you do not wish for any repair work to be done, we can talk cars for a while, for you may be in the market for a new car before the year is out.”)

Often better than old books are the strange things you find inside old books. Here, the previous owner was putting the book to good use, and has left a first draft of one of their letters inside. It lifts commendable sections from Letter of Condolence – On Loss of Child, but then goes off track somewhat when they throw in some creative asides of their own like “may you both live in fear of God and die in peace,” which must have gone down well.

Dervish Flash Fiction

Posted on | April 2, 2010 | No Comments

Dervishes are followers of the mystical Sufi tradition in Islam. Their traditional stories are meant to help Sufi practitioners understand mystical concepts. They’re flash fictions, short and to the point.

My favourite is about Jesus, who is a prophet in Islamic tradition. Jesus is hanging around in the desert with some guys, and they ask him to tell them the Secret Name that he uses to do freaky stuff like bring the dead back to life. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? But Jesus isn’t keen. He says that if he tells them the Name they will abuse it.

But the guys argue that they’re totally in the right place spiritually to know the Name, and in any case, knowing that it really exists will actually strengthen their faith, and so it’s really Jesus’ moral and religious duty to tell them.

Jesus says something Jesus-like, along the lines of “You know not what you ask”, but then tells them the Name anyway. (You get the impressions he’s enjoying this.) So, the guys go away happy.

But later they start to wonder if Jesus has fobbed them off with a dud Word. I mean, would he really tell them the actual Secret Name and just let them walk away with it? Handily there’s a heap of whitened bones nearby which they decide to test it out on. They say the Word and the bones grow flesh and fur and the teeth spring back together, and the wild mountain lion rips them to pieces. Jesus is proved irritatingly right again.

Thankful Villages

Posted on | April 2, 2010 | No Comments

I came across this rather mysterious and lovely phrase while I was flicking through a copy of Brewer’s Britain and Ireland, and was pleased to find that the explanation was equally as intriguing. Thankful villages are those places in Britain where all the men who left to fight in the First World War came back home alive. The phrase was coined by Arthur Mee in his series of The King’s England guidebooks written in the 1930s. Mee identified 28 villages in England which had no war memorials, but since then others have been identified.

The list is a roll call for the sleepy lanes and rustling hedges of the English coutryside; Little Sodbury, Middleton-on-the-Hill, Chantry, Nether Kellett, Claxby, Woolley. I wonder if the residents of Upper Slaughter in Gloucestershire pondered on the irony of their village’s name after they had welcomed all their 44 boys back home in 1918?

It makes you wonder why these particular places were spared. Were the men sent by chance to a less dangerous area, or did they come through hell intact? Did they realise at the time how lucky their village had been, and how did it make them feel? The village of Cayton in Yorkshire was even thankful twice over, escaping the Second World War casualty-free as well.

That only such a tiny handful out of the sixteen thousand villages in England escaped the horrible death toll of the war is an indication of the impact the conflict had on the country. It’s because it is such a part of the English village that we rarely notice the quiet memorial cross with its list of names and wreath of poppies, other than perhaps as a convenient place to sit and eat our fish and chips. Almost a million British men died in the war, and the social fabric of the country was ripped apart by the huge loss of life.

After the war, thousands of villages across the country must have been scarred by the absence of their young men, a silent loss at the centre of village life. The thankful villages escaped this, and instead were marked by the absence of a memorial to the war for many years. Now, some of the villages now have memorial plaques commemorating their men who fought for their country, and their reason to be thankful.

Norman Thorpe or Tom Morgan’s compressive website on the subject identifies the 49 villages that can lay claim to being truly thankful.

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• Word Hunting: A Language-Lovers Sport
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