steepholm

I've had occasion in these pages to reflect with melancholy ambivalence on my family connection to Francis Galton - but this week brought to light another connection to another rather dubious Francis, albeit the link is not in this case familial.

In the roll of causes and activities that were considered respectable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but are now very much not, eugenics probably tops the list; but also present is the collecting of birds' eggs. In my attempt to build a small library of Butler productions, I recently bought a copy of great-great-uncle Arthur's British Birds, Their Nests and Eggs, published in six volumes in the mid 1890s. I've left the armchair in shot, to give a sense of scale:

I do like that quintessentially 1890s lettering, don't you? The illustrations within are mostly line drawings, by Frohawk, but he also provided several full colour plates of various birds' eggs:

Of course, there's nothing wrong with a scientific book providing this kind of information. This is a book of facts about birds, right, not a collector's manual? I'm far from having read the whole text, but so far I haven't caught Uncle Arthur with his hand in a nest - however, his disarmingly conversational descriptions, full of personal reminiscence as they are, reveal him as an avid trapper and breeder of wild birds, which is hardly much better.

What really struck me, though, was the inscription at the front of my copy:

The recipient, Francis C. R. Jourdain, was at this time a mere curate, and had as yet published nothing on ornithology, but that would change within a couple of years of reading Arthur's book. Of course, I'm not claiming that the shells fell from his eyes on that occasion, although the volumes contain numerous memoranda of errata in what I assume is Jourdain's hand, and I think we can say that he read the work with close attention.

From around 1899 to his death in 1940 he would be an ornithologist of renown - though with a reputation for ill temper that earned him the title Pastor Pugnax, so Wiki tells me. With Lord Rothschild, he founded the British Oological Association, renamed in his honour at his death as the Jourdain Society. In an age when stealing eggs had ceased to be seen as a respectable hobby for either scholars or schoolboys this organisation became notorious, and a police raid at a Society dinner in the mid-1990s led to six convictions. What a difference a century makes!

I'm not sure who the giver, Frances Jourdain, was. Wife? Sister? Not his mother - she was Emily, apparently. His siblings were quite a distinguished lot, it turns out. Among the rest, I'll just mention Margaret Jourdain, who besides her personal achievements became the partner of Ivy Compton-Burnett, one of my favourite mid-century English novelists. Does anyone else read her now?

Admittedly, inspiring Francis Jourdain to steal eggs probably isn't in the same league, morally speaking, as inspiring the Nazis to practise eugenics. But it does continue a rather sinister trend. To quote one of my favourite lines in Compton-Burnett (the speaker is a young child, the subject a hen), “Perhaps it ought not to do a thing that ends in dying."

A comment on a friend's FB led to the following general musing: what books (or films, or whatever) began life as parodies, but have survived the thing they parodied to the extent that the parody is now read/watched, etc. but its original is not?

The example that sparked the discussion was Cold Comfort Farm (who reads Mary Webb today?). Northanger Abbey is another (same question re. Mrs Radcliffe). I'd say that Gulliver might count, on the basis that the travel books it satirises are now largely unread. Someone else volunteered that Diary of a Nobody began as a parody of a particular self-important and longwinded memoir, long forgotten. I wondered too about Chaucer's "Tale of Sir Thopaz" - a parody of mediaeval romances, we're told - but I think it's an open question how many people read the Chaucer without being made to.

Over to you. I feel there must be quite a few still out there!

Before the lockdown, Ayako and I visited Diana Wynne Jones's son Micky and his wife Noriko, mostly to catalogue the books in DWJ's study. While we were there, they kindly let me photograph the original "Fire and Hemlock" picture, which inspired the novel of the same name. Today, they even more kindly gave me permission to post the photograph, which I do here:

As you can see, mine is not a great photograph: there's reflection from the glass, the angle's wonky, and the picture is in any case somewhat faded from having been hung in sunlight for some years. Still, hopefully it gives you an idea.

Micky mentioned that the photograph was not unique: Diana had bought it from a studio, but it was one of a limited print run. Perhaps, if I did a Google image search, other (perhaps more pristine) copies might turn up?

I just tried that, and, by some kind of ambiguous magic, up popped this album cover:

This is the sleeve of the Adrian Snell's debut album, Fireflake (1975). You can hear it in its entirety here, should you wish, but probably the list of track titles will give you a sufficient idea of its genre:

A1 – I Was A Stranger
A2 – Song For John
A3 – My Soul Alive
A4 – This Is The Time To Say
A5 – Making Me Real
B1 – Gethsemane
B2 – Judas Song
B3 – Simon Carry My Cross
B4 – Golgotha
B5 – Jesus – Alive!

In some ways it's hard to imagine a more inappropriate set of songs to hum along to while watching those strange figures loom in and out of the fire, threatening to take you back down that not-so-bonny road to Hunsdon House. Adrian Snell is certainly not one of the acts Seb was so into. Still, I'm sure that DWJ would have been amused by the juxtaposition.

In Japanese, 朝飯前 literally means "before breakfast," or (even more literally) "before the morning meal" - but is used to refer to something that's really easy, a bit like "a piece of cake." The idea is that something so easy that it can be accomplished without the sustenance provided by a full Japanese (rice, miso soup, natto, grilled mackerel, etc., with a health-giving pickled plum on the side) must be child's play indeed.

I suppose it must be a coincidence that the same expression exists in English - although I think it's a little old fashioned now. Think of the Red Queen's "six impossible things before breakfast." Or did Carroll coin it, in fact? It's easy to hear the Red Queen echoed in later usages, such as the "six VCs before breakfast" won on the first day of Gallipoli.

But was "before breakfast" used earlier than the Red Queen? Google Ngram is, as so often, our friend in these situations. In the decades prior to Through the Looking Glass people doing things before breakfast are generally doing them for the sake of their health:

These facts show the importance of breakfasting soon after rising and dressing, at least in many cases. I am fully aware that there are numerous exceptions to this. Some persons not only suffer no injury from but actually appear to be benefited by active exercise taken before breakfast, its effect being with them to create or augment the appetite. But in others the effects are those which I have already stated. I am satisfied from repeated observation that in children disposed to spasmodic and other brain diseases the practice of making them attend school for two hours before breakfast is injurious, and I fully agree therefore with Dr Combe that in boarding schools for the young and growing, who require plenty of sustenance, and are often obliged to rise early, an early breakfast is almost an indispensible condition of health. Epileptics, especially those disposed to morning attacks, should invariably breakfast soon after rising. (Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, Vol. 6, 1842)

A walk to Priessnitz Quelle by the Silver and Fichten Quelles, and back the same way, is more than three miles, and this is the regular walk before breakfast in winter. In summer the guests usually extend their excursions much farther. As they return many stop to drink again and some return by the douches having become sufficiently warm to take that bath before breakfast. ... In his Graefenberg dishabille the patient, whether he be count, baron, captain, general or priest, forgets all his dignity in the feeling of irrepressible joy and energy produced by the plunge bath and the bracing morning air. A few stalk along the path in stiff and formal dignity as if offended at the liberties taken by the careering sporting winds and the merrily waltzing snow that surround them. It is deeply interesting watch this infinite variety in the guests they ascend the mountain on a cold morning before breakfast stopping now and then to pant and breathe, and look back upon the glorious amphitheatre around them. (Water Cure Journal, 1849)

I think the Red Queen probably did kickstart the meme, at least in the English language. The only person doing an impossible thing before breakfast turns out to be Mozart, who uses that opportunity to write the overture to Don Giovanni:

Showers of crotchets and quavers now gushed from the rapid pen. At times, however, and in the midst of writing, nature would assert her sway and cause the composer to relapse into a nod or two. To these, it is generally pretended, the leading passage in the overture turned, repeated, and modulated into a hundred varied shapes, owed its origin. The somnolent fits, however, soon gave way to the cheerful converse of CONSTANTIA and the excellent punch which formed its accompaniment. The overture was completed before breakfast and the copyists scarcely had time to write out the score. (Proceedings against William Hone before his Trials, 1817)

As for me, all I did was write this rambling Livejournal post.

I've been looking at this review of a book on Shakespeare's sonnets. The writers have come up with what they seem to consider a startling conclusion: “Some of these sonnets are addressed to a female and others to a male. To reclaim the term bisexual seems to be quite an original thing to be doing.”

Is it, though? Really? Isn't it actually the most obvious conclusion? Other readings are possible, but all require a degree of wrenching. Why would anyone find it implausible that a man who wrote poems of love and sexual desire to both men and women (or to at least one of each) was romantically and sexually attracted to both men and women?

Occasionally I'm reminded that resistance to the idea of bisexuality still exists. I have to be reminded, because it seems such an absurd thing to be sceptical of that I have difficulty retaining the fact. Women and men are pretty similar in many ways, after all - much more like each other than either is like, say, shoes, yet apparently no one has any trouble believing in heterosexual shoe fetishists.

Perhaps it reflects a more fundamental preference for binary choices. I dare say I could come up with many examples, but here's one that's fresh in my mind. A few months ago I was in a research seminar on an article about George Herbert's The Temple. According to the article, the scholarly orthodoxy had been that the architectural structure of the book (which is divided into sections such as 'The Porch', 'The Altar', and so on) was purely metaphorical; but our author argued that, as a rural vicar, Herbert was very concerned with the literal fabric of his church, too. The answer to the question, 'Is the temple in The Temple metaphorical or literal?' turns out to be, 'A bit of both.'

It's convincing, but frankly I didn't need to be convinced. My immediate reaction was one of surprise that everybody didn't already take that for granted. Flattering as it would be to conclude that all this makes me a particularly subtle and clever thinker, I don't buy it, because these thoughts aren't subtle at all - on the contrary, they take (what seems to me) the path of least resistance through the texts. It's all a bit of mystery.

For anyone who wants to read it, my review of Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected is live at the Journal of Welsh Writing in English. (Full disclosure, the editor was my head of school at the time.) The book was published in 2016, and I submitted my review in July the following year: it's just gone live. This gives me hope that Literary Studies Deconstructed too may yet garner a second review one day...

Minamoto no Yoshitsune really existed (he was a major figure in the 12th-century Genpei War), but he has at least as vigorous a life in the semi-legendary realm, as a hero in the Heike Monogatari and subsequently in Noh and kabuki plays. In these, his bosom pal is the large and formidable Buddhist warrior-monk, Benkei, with whom Yoshitsune spends time on the run from his far less lovable (but ultimately triumphant) brother, Yoritomo. Their exploits are characterised by strength, courage and fighting prowess, but also by cunning and general coolness. The two are said to have become friends after fighting each other on a bridge.

The last detail naturally reminded me of another semi-historical (or perhaps we should say demi-semi-historical) pair of outlaws from my own country's past, Robin Hood and Little John - who also met and became besties after fighting on a bridge. (Given Benkei's being a monk, we might also fold Friar Tuck into the mix.)

Is it possible that there was some mutual influence involved in the two sets of legends? I'd love to think so, but busy as the silk road no doubt was, there must be a limit to how much cultural transmission it could reasonably bear. And anyway, it soon occurred to me that these two pairs weren't unique. The grandaddies of Yoshitsune/Robin Hood and Benkei/Little John are surely Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the Sumerian odd couple who also began their friendship by fighting. Like Yoshitsune, Gilgamesh appears to have been a historical figure before he had a second career as an epic hero.

I wonder if there are other examples out there who fit the bill?

Today I happened to learn the Japanese word for frame story (it’s 枠物語), and it got me thinking about what counts as a frame story in the first place.

My first attempt at a definition was this: a story containing one or more internal narratives. The internal narrative(s) may involve multiple narrators, as in The Decameron, or just one, as in Heart of Darkness.

Thinking about it, though, I realised that there are plenty of stories involving internal narratives where I wouldn’t be happy to call the context in which those narratives appear a frame story. For example: in Oedipus Rex a messenger narrates Oedipus’s self-blinding. It would be strange to refer to the rest of the play as a frame story for that narrative. Is it just because that narrative comprises such a small portion of the play? On the other hand, in the Odyssey Odysseus’s account to the Phaeacians of his travels takes up a substantial portion of the poem (books 7-12), but I still wouldn’t want to call the rest of the Odyssey a frame story for that narrative. If there is a minimum proportion that must be taken up by the internal narrative(s) for the remainder to be considered a frame story, then what is that proportion?

Or is it also to do the with the relationship of the internal narrative to the outer narrative – i.e. it must have a certain independence from it? The Wife of Bath’s tale doesn’t have much to do with making a pilgrimage to Canterbury, for example, but the account of Oedipus’s blinding is intimately related to what happens in the rest of the play - which must surely be an additional factor in helping to disqualify their relationship as one of story to frame?

Does the identity of the internal narrator have a bearing on all this? In The Canterbury Tales the tales are told by characters, but in, say, Louis Sachar’s Holes, the lengthy backstories of the various characters are (iirc) all told by the third-person narrator. Does that continuity of voice make the rest of the book less framelike?

Finally, does it matter whether we return to the frame story at the end of the internal narrative (as in Conrad), or neglect to, as in The Turn of the Screw? If you are still inclined to say that James’s story has a frame, does it matter that the frame is “missing” a piece? If it doesn’t, what about an example such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is just a chain of stories linked together, sometimes segueing in apparently “framey” ways, but in which there is little nesting, and few or no pushes gets popped (to use the language of computer stacks). You might then think of the Metamorphoses as one big frame story, and/or one big internal narrative at the same time – a kind of narrative Möbius strip where the inside and outside are the same.

As I mentioned briefly at the time, I was in Oxford at the end of February, primarily to see a student I'm externally supervising at Oxford Brookes, but also to hear Maria Cecire give a talk at the other University. In between that and tea at St John's I also gave an interview on fantasy literature for the University of Oxford's "Great Writers" podcast series, which has now spawned - nay, uploaded - a Fantasy Literature section.

There's some interesting stuff, but if you'd rather listen to me talk about fantasy, you can do so here.

A misprint spreads halfway round the world while a copyeditor is still tying her laces and making the bows come out even.

I had occasion to reread Philip Larkin's "Toads" today, and (having a cat on my lap) decided to pull it from the internet rather than consulting my first edition of The Less Deceived (although I have of course since checked that). You can find it in many places on the web, but I happened to pull down this copy.

All was going well, until I came to the penultimate verse. Here are the last three, for context:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

See the problem? Yes, that "of" in the second line should be a "to." The trouble with the alternative reading is that it doesn't make any fucking sense.

Naturally, I looked elsewhere on the internet, and found that the poem was widely distributed in both versions, but that the "of" examples seemed, if anything, to be in the majority, especially on sites aimed at the public rather than academia. You can even hear it read aloud that way in a gruff, down-to-earth voice, as here.

It's such an obvious mistake that it's hard to believe that no one spotted it. The sad truth is, I suppose, that people either a) don't expect poetry to make sense or b) don't expect to understand it. Or both. And that, if both, it's hard to lose either.

Here's a strange coincidence, probably of less interest to you than to me. Exactly a year ago, on 12 May 2019, I posted my last entry on my last trip to Japan. It included an account of a visit with my friend Hiroko to the Kameido Tenjin shrine in Tokyo, primarily to see the wisteria trellises, which had happened a few days earlier.

I've just been reading the letters of Mrs Hugh Fraser (Mary Crawford Fraser), collected in her A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan. On 12 May 1889, soon after her arrival, she wrote about a visit a few days earlier to Kameido Tenjin shrine, to see the wisteria with her female friend.

Her letter and my post were written 130 years apart, to the day.

That, along with the fact that I happened to read her letter pretty much exactly a year later, is quite striking - but perhaps I shouldn't be too amazed. Kameido Tenjin is a moderately famous place, which any foreigner might end up visiting - and if they were going to go, it's likely it would be at the height of the wisteria season, that being one of its major attractions. But I'm also struck by how little it's changed (though I have no memory of the bridge she describes). I felt quite in tune with her reaction, too. Of all the foreign writers about Meiji Japan I've read so far (and I'm assembling quite a collection), I feel most in sympathy with Fraser. Although, that may just be a function of the fact that she's a better writer than most.

I took part in a Facebook meme about listing books that I'd loved as a child and continue to love now. I started almost perfunctorily, but warmed to my theme as I continued, to the extent that I thought it worth preserving the sequence here...

( The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe )

( Green Eggs and Ham )

( The Enchanted Castle )

( Tom's Midnight Garden )

( The Dark is Rising )

( Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends )

( King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table )

( The Chrysalids )

( The Owl Service )

Here's a game, if you'd like to play.

A week or two back on Facebook, someone speculated that Ian McEwan was probably even now writing a novel based on the Covid-19 lockdown, and asked for suggestions as to what it would be called. There were some good replies, but the best in my opinion was Containment. In fact, if McEwan doesn't write a book called that now, I'll be disappointed.

So, here's the game: what are other writers going to call their putative Covid-19 books? The writers don't have be alive, but they should have the current events in mind, just as if they were (i.e. you can't put King Lear down for Shakespeare). The titles can be entirely made up, or they can play on ones that actually exist: for example, Virginia Woolf's A Room on One's Own.

Have at it - feel free to coruscate!

I've made a couple of posts in the past about Lucy Boston and Hemingford Grey, notably this one, describing my night spent in Tolly's room some two and a half years ago. If, like me, you're a fan of the books, take 15 minutes to see the author herself in her habitat, some 37 years ago. This video appeared on Youtube just yesterday, from a programme broadcast in 1983:

Watch on YouTube

To quote Mrs Oldknow: "It sounds very sad to say they all died, but it didn't really make so much difference."

Inspired by my recent Two Kinds of Badness post, I thought I might make an occasional series.

Today, I'm thinking about worldbuilding, and once again it occurs to me that there are two kinds of it, which we might call Static and Dynamic.

Tolkien can stand in as my example of the ultimate Static world builder. By this I don't mean, of course, that he didn't develop and revise his world over time, but that, by and large, his aim was to have a world that, as a sub-creator, he could survey and find good: full of detail, self-consistent, multi-faceted. A good static world is one which you can draw maps and write histories of, a landscape you can wander all day, confident that you won't tumble into a bottomless lacuna or fall prey to a contradiction.

The Dynamic world is a zoetrope that has to be kept continually spinning to maintain the illusion of reality. The builder of such worlds is a rhetorician, a magician, a sculptor in ice. They must continually weave new threads to replace the old, which start to fade at the touch of sunlight, and their concern is not the finished product but the performance. J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy is perhaps the ultimate example in its virtuoso mercuriality, but you can find elements of it in much less obviously flamboyant writers. Kenneth Grahame's riverbank world makes no sense when you think about it, especially in its interactions with the human (just how big is Toad?), but the pleasure lies in being persuaded not to think about it, or only when the author chooses to prompt awareness, as one astringent element in a highly complex flavour. (If the contradictions become the main point, then of course you have entered the world of metafiction, which is a different fish kettle.)

Two voices are there: one is of the deep,
And one is of an old half-witted sheep,
And, Wordsworth, both are thine!

I've filleted J. K. Stephen's sonnet there, but those are officially the best bits - the rest is filler. And of course it's perfectly true - some Wordsworth is wonderful, but he can also be banal.

Of course, most poets write better at some times than others. It's the norm for novelists, artists and composers, too, maybe in fact for pretty much any human activity. But the badness of early Wordsworth, at least, is interesting. In that early work, bad Wordsworth and good Wordsworth aren't really very different from each other: each continually teeters on the other's brink. When your shtick is using ordinary language and everyday situations, banality is never going to be more than a redundant syllable away. (W. D. Snodgrass's De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong illustrates this beautifully.) A change of light can prove your fairy feast a pile of stinking leaves, or blow beauty into a drift of dirt.

It's different from the badness of late Wordsworth, such as his sonnet sequence in praise of capital punishment:

IS 'Death', when evil against good has fought
With such fell mastery that a man may dare
By deeds the blackest purpose to lay bare?
Is Death, for one to that condition brought,
For him, or any one, the thing that ought
To be 'most' dreaded? Lawgivers, beware,
Lest, capital pains remitting till ye spare
The murderer, ye, by sanction to that thought
Seemingly given, debase the general mind;
Tempt the vague will tried standards to disown,
Nor only palpable restraints unbind,
But upon Honour's head disturb the crown,
Whose absolute rule permits not to withstand
In the weak love of life his least command.

Why this is not as good as the Lucy poems is not something I propose to discuss here; I leave that to the sagacity of the reader.

Anyway, this all prompts me to ask: what other writers exhibit the quality of keeping greatness and banality not at opposite ends of a spectrum, but as each other's shadows? I'm sure Wordsworth isn't alone.

Well, I've written numerous insightful posts on the ongoing Brexit/constitutional crisis in the UK, only to have each of them upturned by events and all the wisdom spilt on the carpet. Not that I'm complaining. Even without tariffs, there's not enough popcorn on this island for all the entertainment it's providing. It's like a murmuration of a million chickens, all coming home to roost at once. If only people's lives weren't at stake too - but sadly this entertainment is not harmless.

Civil War comparisons are inevitable and apt, and my friend Diane Purkiss (none better qualified) was on the radio this week making them. The matter isn't straightforward, though: the basic pattern of Parliament vs. overweening Executive lines up well - but the stereotypes are askew, for now it is the government side that is made up of dour, insular fanatics, and the Parliamentarians who tend to see Britain as part of a network of continental alliances.

Meanwhile, I spent last week going full Geraldus Cambrensis. I began with lunch at my friend Marie's new house on the west bank of the Severn in the Forest of Dean - that strange bit of England that always feels like it should be in Wales.

She only moved in a couple of years ago, and they're still working on the house, which has bits from a wide selection of centuries. My favourite thing was this donkey-operated cider crush and press, still looking much as it must have done around 1900:

Then it was off to a magical weekend on the Gower, my more-or-less annual offline trip to the world of druids and witches. This time it was very druid-weighted, but I got on well with the one witch, who hailed from Kazakhstan. I can say little more of our eldritch rites (except that they were Pooh-themed), but I think it may be okay to show you the hobbit hole where I resided for three nights:

And maybe to share the last few lines of the Druidical Pooh hum I composed for the occasion:

Of Owl and Rabbit,
Earth and Sky,
A universe is made
Where you and I
Can see displayed
The Ancients’ Wisdom
And their Folly too,
Which is all one.

So, don’t excuse
A lack of brain, but rather muse
What we may gain
By making room for emptiness:
Guest room for unexpected guests
Who stumble into woods like these,
Bringing nectar from the bees.

From the Gower I went to Borth, and met up with my brother, daughter and daughter's boyfriend for a couple of days, before returning to Bristol and the world of grant applications. It's a strange life.

I note, by the way, that Robert Mugabe's dates - 1924-2019 - are the same as my mother's. (They had very little else in common, though.)

On a friend’s FB today I had occasion to quote from one of my favourite C. S. Lewis essays, “The Inner Ring”:

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

I read that when I was far too young to be able to judge whether or not it was true, though the idea was always appealing. But I think there’s quite a lot in it, perhaps especially in the professions that Lewis had as author and a scholar, which happen also to be mine.

You plough your own furrow, doing your own thing, because it’s interesting rather than because you think it will win you fame and/or fortune, then gradually you discover that a modicum of the first at least has indeed come your way. In the last week I’ve had several people come up to me (in person or online) in a strangely star-struck manner that doesn’t sort at all with my self-image or even with my image of my image, as it were. Admittedly I was one of the keynotes in Valencia, so it’s not surprising people would say nice things there, but I was still taken aback to have a Polish scholar tell me how excited her students would be to hear that she’d met me. I mean, wtf? I even seriously wondered whether she might be thinking of a different person, since there was someone with the same name at Cardiff before me and I occasionally get things that were obviously meant for her - but no.

Then there was the person at the children’s book publisher, whom I had to contact to request a review copy, who wrote back telling me how much she had enjoyed Four British Fantasists. How did she even know that was by me, since I wrote it under a different name?

Also, literally while I was writing this post, an email dropped into my inbox informing me that I’d been promoted to Reader.

That, along with the lavishly complimentary reader’s report I just got on my “Japan Reads the Cotswolds” article (which should, all being well, be out in Children’s Literature next year), have gone some way to swell my head like Keats’s autumnal gourd, albeit mine probably contains far less pith.

"Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended..."

I see that I quoted from "Felix Randal" here the day after my mother died. Tomorrow it will be five months since her funeral, and it's another line - the first, in fact - that keeps going through my head.

The weather is to blame. It's hot at the moment, and the habitual thought, "I hope Mum's managing to keep cool" keeps getting triggered - and then I remember that it's no longer really a concern. And I feel sad, with a side salad of relief because I don't need to worry about her, drizzled of course with a vinaigrette of guilt.

When I was a teenager and going through the Gerard Manley Hopkins phase that I guess most teenagers have, my favourite lines from this poem were these:

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

I loved the sudden time shift, the Anglo-Saxon phrasing and alliteration, the unexpectedness of "sandal". That said, I didn't identify with Felix, because death was never far from my forethoughts, nor did I really understand the priest's perspective: why was his first thought "My duty all ended", as if Felix had been first and foremost a burden to him? It seemed a tad uncharitable. Now, though, I appreciate the insight all the more.

Incidentally, Isabella Bird reports that, while staying in Nikkou, she visited a classroom where the children recited the following verse - in part no doubt for its pious Buddhism, but also because (like the quick brown fox jumping the lazy dog) it contains the entire Japanese syllabry, or 五十音:

Colour and perfume vanish away,
What can be lasting in this world?
To-day disappears in the abyss of nothingness;
It is but the passing image of a dream, and causes only a slight trouble.

Apologies if I've earwormed you with that catchy ditty, but I'd love to see the Japanese original.

I've been in Valencia for a few days attending a conference, most of which was in Spanish and thus incomprehensible to me, but everyone was extremely friendly and welcoming, and somehow that didn't matter too much. Why was I there at all, you ask, since I couldn't understand the proceedings? Why, because I had been invited. My keynote went well, thank you very much.

While in Valencia I read Isabella Bird's book about travelling in Japan in the 1870s, and found it very interesting, as an outsider's account of a country in transition from Edo culture to Westernisation. It's full of quotable titbits, but I shall refrain, at least for now. One interesting factoid, though: did you know that the only currency accepted in Japan apart from the yen at that time was the Mexican dollar?

Bird - who already had experience of adventuring in Hawaii and the Rockies before this - was in her mid-forties when she decided to travel the length of Japan (well, from Tokyo to Hokkaido), and she certainly knew her own mind. She isn't afraid of criticising the country: the flea-infested tatami, the food, the abominable roads, etc. On the other hand, this lends her compliments more force, so that when she praises the kindness and courtesy of the Japanese, their immaculate roads and fields, the beauty of the landscape, and so on, we can be confident she means it. Her relationship with her young interpreter, Ito, is also fascinating, if glimpsed only briefly in odd exchanges.

Of course, it turns out that the book has been made into a manga - [不思議の国のバード] (Bird in Wonderland). The Japanese like to look at people looking at them, and of course I like looking at the Japanese doing that, too, especially when refracted through a British children's classic. The allusion to Alice (recalling to me D. C. Angus's The Eastern Wonderland: or Pictures of Japanese Life, which was published at almost the same time as Bird's book, in the early 1880s), only adds to the allure.

Bird in the manga is much younger looking than the real woman, but otherwise it's a fairly faithful adaptation, from what I've seen, but that's only on the basis of a few pages.

How did they handle the fact that Bird, who did not speak Japanese, must speak Japanese in the manga to be understood by its readers? Why, like this:

This is actually quite an accurate representation of my arrival in Valencia.

Teaching Your Grandfather that Eggs Suck

When Imitation is Not Flattery

Fireflake and Hemlock

Before Breakfast

Neither Here Nor There

Dahl's Chickens, Home to Roost at Last

My Big Hairy Friend

Framed?

Singing for my High Tea

Toads Revisited

A Kameido Coincidence

Enduring Love

Containment, and Other Stories

"There are more things than we think. And why shouldn't there be? We don't think much."

Two Kinds of Worldbuilding

Two Kinds of Badness

Severn Wonders

I Didn’t Hear Me Arrive

My Duty All Ended

Englishwomen Abroad

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