steepholm

Today, to assuage my melancholy or perhaps to indulge it, I took a slight detour on the way home from my mother's house in order to visit the wood in Otterbourne where we scattered my father's ashes in 2005. The land belongs to the Woodland Trust, and when he died I gave them some money in his memory - enough to care for an acre there in perpetuity. I'd not been for couple of years, though, and never in May. It's a pleasant spot, where the blackbird's song mingles with the not-so-distant rumble of the M3, and where Charlotte Yonge no doubt walked arm in arm with John Keble many and many a day. (Now they lie in neighbourly repose in nearby Otterbourne churchyard.)

Anyway, when I found the right glade I discovered - much to my surprise - that my father had turned into a bluebell wood!



And they say I've changed.

( Meanwhile, this is now my favourite view in Bristol city centre. )

I've a feeling I may have posted on this subject before - but maybe that was just in my head, where the Voices keep up a lively debate on all the trivia of the day...

When I was small, I knew that I had brown eyes. Certainly that's what was said in my family. My mother and I were left-handed and brown-eyed, my father and brother were right-handed and blue-eyed. That kind of symmetry appealed at the time. All the same, I assume I occasionally thought to carry out an empirical cross-check and look in the mirror, and nothing I saw there made me question the received opinion. I think it wasn't until I was at college that someone who had taken to staring into my eyes a lot happened to mention that they were actually hazel-green. Looking more closely, I saw that they were indeed - although there was also some dark brown there still, and even a fleck or two of blue, and yellow, and slate-grey.

Ever since then, I've not know what colour my eyes are. If I had to fill in a tick-box form describing them, I simply would not know what to say.

As an experiment, I just took three pictures of my left eye, about a minute apart: under artificial light, in bright sunlight, and indoors in natural light. ( Here are the results. )

How would you describe this eye, in terms of colour? (Its fellow is similar.) I thought of doing this as a poll, but I don't want to make this into a leading question.

I was sent Dance in the Vampire Bund as a random freebie with a recent DVD order. I think this may be a good evening to watch it, given that there's unlikely to be anything on TV, and that tomorrow I get 280,000 words worth of children's literature essays to mark.

Yesterday afternoon, seeing the unfamiliar sun taunt me from the far side of the window, I cast my springcleaning marking aside and made an impulse trip to Glastonbury. I'm trying to do more walking these days, and while there are plenty of lovely walks to take in Bristol, it came to me that this would be a very good day to climb Glastonbury Tor. And so it was. The Tor has a steeper side and a shallower side, and I approached by the shallow way, stopping off at the Chalice Well spring en route. I've passed these contemplative gardens many times without (for various reasons) ever looking in, and I'm glad I did so this time - led partly by the memory that they had been the basis for a scene in The Merlin Conspiracy, but mostly by the weather. I supped at the ferrous waters of the red spring, and sat for a while, sharing the space only with a small party of Dutch tourists and various middle-aged and elderly women in knitted woollen hats who were dotted about the place, evincing an air of thoroughly practical mysticism and groundedness. None was hugging trees, but some had taken saplings by the arm to see them across the road, as it were. It was a place for retired Dionysiacs, or al fresco Quakers - at least on this day. In other seasons, other aspects. Here is one of the pools, looking vernal:



Then up the Tor, where I huffed and puffed more than I would have liked. I won't trouble you with misty skylines, but I was pleased to see the metal plate at the top waiting to welcome me by name:



I wanted to come down the steep way, but missed the fact that there was a helical path, so went straight down over the grass - which I should certainly not have done, according to a sign I discovered once at the bottom. I was already convinced by then. I didn't actually fall, but I'd come rather close, and while I don't suppose I'd have killed myself, sliding down a sheep-dropping scree is never a good look. At this point the sun was just catching the terraces in the Tor's flank. Not a Spiral Castle, perhaps, but a Concentric one:



From there, a short country lane back to Glastonbury, which I was just approaching when I heard a sound of ecstatic ululation emanating from some rather industrial-looking doors to my left. The doors were in fact flung open, and inside I could see candlelight and standing water - a sight that instantly brought to mind the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul. Peering in, I saw dimly - but heard clearly - water gushing into a large raised pool directly in front of me, and could just make out numerous channels of water, streaming over the floor at paddling depth. In various alcoves were shrines decked with candles and flowers, and votive offerings with matching votaries. In one part a young woman was playing naked with a dog. In others stood more of the grounded mystical women in woolly hats. All was reflected noise and light, and the running water in which Glastonbury is so rich.

That, apparently, was the White Spring, a chalky counterpart to the ferrous Red Spring of the Chalice Well, disguised as a disused pumping station. I'm very pleased to have found it, and even more pleased not to have known of its existence beforehand: these things are better stumbled upon at first, and visited later in sandals.

Thence to mevennen's house, where I was given a welcome cup of tea and a hot cross bun and had these mysteries unfolded to me. Altogether a very pleasant afternoon in the land of glass apples.

My mother gave me two treasures yesterday. I don't think either's very valuable, but their treasureliness lies in their interest to me.

( Here they are... )

Well, tomorrow's the day, 7.15pm's the time, Millennium Square in Bristol is the place - but it looks as if I may be the first person ever to drown while firewalking...





If I survive, I shall drag my soused-yet-charred self to the computer to let you know how it went. In the meantime, you can feel part of the magic by texting the message DWJF51 £1 to 70070. Alternatively, you can send £2, £3, £4, £5, or £10. You can also donate at my Justgiving page. All proceeds go to St Peter's Hospice - an excellent cause!

( Already donated? Why not relax with a little appropriate music... )

At last! After nine months of not being able to get photographs off my phone, I happened to mention my plight to my daughter - and she transferred them all onto my computer in, er, two minutes.

Of course it's a humiliation, but one for which I'm very grateful, as it means I can now create the "Welcome to Dursley" LJ icon I've long dreamed of for my children's lit posts. Not only that, but here are pictures of Dursley itself. (Why, without your fictional JKR avatar you're beautiful!)

( Dursley )

And Istanbul into the bargain...

( Istanbul )

My shaky camera work doesn't do them justice, but both towns are lovely in their own way.

Yesterday evening I went to see Geraldine McCaughrean, Gillian Cross, Sally Prue and Tim Bowler promote their latest books at Bristol Central Library - the last leg of a British-Isle-wide OUP tour. I got the time wrong and turned up early, which was no big deal except that it meant I also had to leave early, before the wine and chit-chat, so I really only got to hear the authors talk about their books, and not to interact with them.

I admire more than one of these writers (no names, no packdrill) but it strikes me as odd that McCaughrean in particular - such an interesting, original, versatile author - has received so little academic attention. If I hadn't already got involved in two of the Palgrave New Casebooks, I think I'd propose one on her. Maybe someone else will?

It may well be, of course, that her very versatility has worked against her in this respect. You never know what you're going to get when you open a new McCaughrean novel, and while for some of us this is a dazzling strength, perhaps it makes her hard to write about.

Last night she was talking about The Positively Last Performance, a book she was commissioned to write in order to celebrate the town of Margate, and particularly its Theatre Royal - which she imagines as being populated by ghosts of various eras. This sounds a little too like The Graveyard Book for comfort, I thought, and in retrospect it still does, but I forgot that for the time she was reading from it. She's a wonderful stylist, and makes Gaiman seem workmanlike by comparison (albeit a very competent workman). Also, my family-historian sense started tingling: I have relatives in Margate from the second half of the eighteenth century, just when the theatre was in its early days.

There was one thing she said, though, which both intrigued and puzzled me. She confessed that she hesitated to write about ghosts because she didn't believe in them and indeed had theological objections to belief in them. (McCaughrean is a Christian.) On one level, this seems rather odd. Surely you don't have to believe in everything you write about? Isn't that why it's called fiction? Did H. P. Lovecraft believe in Chthulhu?

Another part of me responds, of course you must believe in everything you write! If it wasn't true before, it certainly will be once you've conjured it. This is magical thinking, I know - but isn't the point that all thinking is magical, if you do it right? One of the main rules for doing it right, in my view, is that you shouldn't write against the grain of your nature. So I think McCaughrean was actually correct - although I doubt she would welcome this defence.

An odd experience driving back from my mother's this afternoon. On impulse I decided not to take my usual route (via Salisbury) but to head north through the Test valley, then take the A303 past Stonehenge before meeting up with my usual road a few miles before Longleat. It's a slightly longer route, but takes exactly the same time on account of including a stretch of dual carriageway. All the same, I don't think I've ever driven to Bristol that way before.

From the minute I set off, the car was filled with the scent of sandalwood. It's a smell I strongly associate with my father, who used it as an ingredient in his massage oils. It lasted until I (I actually wrote "we" first time) reached the barrows around Stonehenge, then slowly faded as I approached Bristol. Not coincidentally, I suspect, this route - the valley road, and the road past Stonehenge - are ones I travelled with him more than with anyone else.

It's strange I don't go to Stonehenge more, really. I think there's a kind of snobbishness attached to my feelings about it, which does me no credit. Ever since I read John Aubrey's opinion that Avebury "does as much exceed in greatness the so reknowned Stonehenge, as a cathedral doth a parish Church," I've disdained the more famous monument, and all the more so since they put the fence up. It's not just that you can't touch the stones; but in the relative blankness of Salisbury Plain distance makes them look like a stage prop, and of indeterminate size. I expect to see Spinal Tap.

Still, I feel bad about this now - my father was always very hot on intellectual snobbery - and will make a penitential pilgrimage there soon, and pay the entrance fee.

My printer has for some time been refusing to scan pictures (apparently it's not its job), but recently it also started chewing up my words of wisdom, so I've reluctantly replaced it. So far the new model works fine, but when filling in the inevitable online customer survey I was confronted by the following question:

How comfortable are you with new technology?

• I like to be up-to-date and own the latest technology


• Technology is moving so fast that I don't even bother to try and keep up


• Someone needs to show me how to operate new technology before I am able to use it

Here is a writer who cannot conceive of someone who is comfortable with new technology yet does not feel compelled to buy the latest model of everything, money no object. Apparently the only imaginable reasons for not filling the house with shiny gizmos are a) laziness, or b) incompetence.

Whether this says anything very profound about consumer culture I'm not sure, but it certainly made me feel less charitable towards Epson.