steepholm

I'm currently in Antwerp - the first time I've set foot on the continent since 2019, and that was only to change planes. I'm in a hotel near city's impressive basilica of a railway station, with an anchovy-laden pizza decocting quietly in my stomach. It's only a brief visit, though, to give a lecture; tomorrow, back to Birmingham and thence Bristol.

It's really embarrassing a) how little I find I'm able to use French (I never had Flemish) and b) how little it matters, everyone else being fluent in English. I seem to have the kind of brain that can only hold one foreign language at a time, and of course that's currently Japanese. I thought I was doing okay when I arrived at the hotel and introduced myself as Catherine Butler in a half-decent accent, but then heard myself add involuntarily, "desu" - a real confidence knocker.

Actually, most of the French I need is hidden somewhere in my head, but to get at it I need to heave the Japanese out of the way, and more often than not a residual layer of German too - and by then the moment's passed. A few seconds too late, I remember what it was I wanted to say, but now it's no more than a case of l'esprit d'escalier.

The irony isn't lost on me.

I gave a lecture in Tokyo this morning - or this afternoon, Japan time, since it was of course via Zoom and I still in Bristol. It was nice to see some familiar faces from the Japan children's literature side, and the lecture went well, but... "I awoke in California, many miles from Spancil Hill."

I couldn't settle to my normal work afterwards, and having had a full weekend of writing decided to take a break in Lacock. After all, I have been a member of the National Trust for a full year now, and only used my magic card once. I also suspected (correctly) that I might have the cloisters at Lacock Abbey to myself - or rather, have to share them with no one but the ghosts of Harry, Ron and Hermione.



I'm not going to put lots of pictures of Lacock here, because I'm sure I've done it in the past, but this time I took in perhaps the oldest bus shelter in the country, which apparently doubles as the town jail:



In my book Death of a Ghost (2006 - and still reading pretty well!) there's a minor character, a rich businessman whose sober appearance and lifestyle is leavened only by a love of extravagant topiary. I think he may have moved to Lacock.



I wonder what the villagers make of this rather voluptuous hedge? No one has attacked it yet, at least, though I feel that a Midsomer Murders plot can't be far behind.

I bought some bramble jam and glass earrings, made a deep spiritual connection with this meditative sheep, and returned refreshed. Now, on with my potted account of children's literature in Meiji Japan!



How was your Monday?

Well, I've finally made landfall. Yesterday my final class was taught, and (since I will be on research leave in the autumn semester) I will not have to teach another until 2022. Of course, there's a lot of marking between where I am now (still sloshing about on the foreshore with saltwater in my sea boots) and the chalky uplands where I can actually do research, and I will of course continue to edit Children's Literature in Education and supervise sundry PhD students throughout; but still, a deep sense of peace has descended. Time to settle down and watch season 2 of the karmic Thai school drama, Girl From Nowhere, I think. (I asked on FB in vain, and I ask again here: does anyone other than me watch this show? As I've mentioned before, it's really not like anything else I've seen. I'd love to hear someone else's opinion.)

Meanwhile, I made my first ever visit to the Star and Garter, once the domain of Dutty Ken, St Paul's legend, and still with a tempting line in curried goat. This was actually my first pint of draught beer in over a year.



I got my second jab earlier in the week, with none of the unpleasant effects of the first, beyond a certain tiredness. Now I just have to hope that Japan gets its vaccine act together quickly enough for me to be able to take up the visiting scholarship at Tokyo Joshidai in September. I'd say the chances are 50:50 or rather less at present.

In politics, Keir Starmer's "Like the Tories But Less So" slogan doesn't seem to have been quite as inspiring as he hoped - and I gather he wants to change it to "Even More Like the Tories But Less So." Good luck with that.

Drive-by post achievement unlocked. Now, back to marking dissertations.

I've exchanged contracts on a new house, and will (COVID-19 willing) be moving in on Monday! This is very pleasing after such a long delay - my offer was first accepted all the way back in January - but naturally it happens to fall on the first day of the new semester, so these are proving to be rather busy days...

All the same, it's hard not to get a little distracted by some of the things I keep discovering as I pack. Like this, for example - perhaps my grandfather's first ever publication. Aged 16, in 1901, he took to the letters pages of The Vegetarian to engage in a protracted correspondence about the relationship of vegetarianism and Christianity, of which this is the opening salvo:



But I must get back to my packing!

(If you would like my new address, by the way, feel free to message me.)

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.

There's a nice John Finnemore sketch in which Pachelbel gets annoyed by people only ever wanting to hear his Canon and ignoring his more ambitious work. This is of course a common phenomenon. My brother, serious contemporary composer, is dogged by his setting of Roald Dahl's Dirty Beasts poems (initially narrated by the author himself), which has been performed and recorded far more than his other pieces. Richmal Crompton came to resent William Brown, Conan Doyle couldn't shake off Sherlock Holmes, and so on. Rather than be grateful for having had one more hit than most people, it's easy to focus on the fact that you are going to be remembered for something you don't consider your best work.

My father greatly took to a picture I drew at primary school, a portrait in pastels of six duckling chicks which had recently taking to wandering up our lawn. He framed it and hung it on the wall, perhaps as an earnest of things to come. Later, when I was a published novelist, he would still hark back to that picture in a way that clearly implied my creative output had been going downhill ever since.


You are Not to Agree with Him

So anyway, I was looking at my Academia.edu page just now, and had a similar sensation. Not everything I've put up there is for download, but of those that are the top 3 are an eclectic mix, and don't necessarily represent anything like what I'd have predicted or think of as my best:

1: 'Tolkien and Worldbuilding' - 3,920 views.

This 2013 casebook essay is far and away my most read piece. I think it's a pretty solid piece of work, but why so much more successful than the rest? I suppose it got on some reading lists.

2. ‘“You are feeling very sleepy…”: hypnosis, enchantment and mind-control in children’s fiction’ 1,435 views.

This is a surprise entry - from an article published in 2005 (and written three years earlier). It doesn't connect to any of my main research themes, but it's an original piece. I once saw it recommended on a page written by a hypnotist, which I found flattering - perhaps it's mostly hypnotists who download it?

3. ‘Experimental Girls: Feminist and Transgender Discourses in Bill’s New Frock and Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl?’ - 530 views

This 2009 article is to date my only publication on gender stuff, and has done pretty well in download terms - I assume for the theme rather than because the world is awash with Fine or Sachar researchers.

Contrarwise, the lowest scoring piece is the only one that ever actually won an award: ‘Alan Garner’s Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of “Tam Lin”’ was ChLA Honor Article in 2002, and is about one of the authors on whom my critical reputation rests. It has 47 views.

Go figure.

You know how you keep putting something off because you're too busy to do it justice right now, but putting it off makes it even more daunting, because the amount that needs to be done just keeps getting bigger, etc?

I've been a bit that way for the last couple of weeks re. blogging. I've had a lot on, in fact, and done quite a few things I would like to have blogged about, but I was too busy doing them, and so the recordkeeping rather went by the wayside.

However, I'm declaring an amnesty. Rather than try to describe the last few weeks in one go I'll just jot down the headlines here, and hope to fill in some of the blanks over future entries, which will I trust from today be back to their former desultory frequency.

First, there was the Diana Wynne Jones conference in Bristol, which I organised with my friend Farah M, which involved just shy of 100 people coming to the Watershed to talk about DWJ. It was a great success, I think it's fair to say, though the weather was shit - but that was worse news for the balloon fiesta than for us...

The next day it was a night at my brother's in Brighton, then off via Gatwick to Stockholm for IRSCL - my first visit to the city. (I liked it a lot, though it was a tad too hipster for me.) The ABBA museum with Clémentine was a special highlight, along with the visit to the Golden Hall in the City Hall, which is apparently where they all dish out those glittering prizes we've heard so much about.

I was back in my bed by 4am on Monday morning, then off to work by 10 - where I did some needful work-y things, and since then I've been trying to catch up on all the other work stuff: articles and grant applications and the like. Oh, and Eriko came over for the night on Thursday, which was fun.

There you have a very bare-bones account! I'll try to fill in some of the detail later, but meanwhile, have some pictures of Stockholm...

One more sleep till the Christmas break, and I'm hoping not to wake up to a pile of marking at the end of my bed...

Yesterday was my last time paying a toll on the Second Severn Crossing, now officially renamed "The Prince of Wales Bridge" by politically correct history-rewriters (or doesn't that argument count when it's done by royalists?). The cost of the bridge was paid off a year ago, but the Treasury has been collecting the the Going-to-Wales tax, disguised as a toll, since then. As I write this the toll booths are being broken up for firewood, and their surly inhabitants pushed out into the night to wander the Severn's treacherous foreshore under the crystalline sky - just in time for Christmas. I wanted to ask about that as I paid over my last £5.60, indeed, but there was a queue behind me.

I still have some things on my plate - work from PhD students, various articles and books to review, Children's Literature in Education business and so on, but basically I have until Christmas to do some research of my own - something to which I've been more or less a stranger since September. In particular, the hefty pile of material from my Japanese voyage has yet to receive its final, triumphant transfiguration into scholarship, and looks more like an early draft of The Key to All Mythologies.

It's been a particularly busy term, not least because I packed in a lot of external examining (MA programmes in Wolverhampton and Roehampton, PhDs in Valencia and Dublin), as well as various extras on university home turf. I can blame no one but myself for all this, and in fact the work was generally interesting, but I do feel more than usually exhausted at this point, from the constant travel as much as anything. Hence my recent tendency to fall asleep at the wheel of this blog.

That's all going to change now, though! Look forward to vexatiously frequent entries from now on!

In the unlikely event that you've been asking yourself "Where's Steepholm?" over the last couple of days, the correct answer was "Valencia". I was part of a jury for a public doctoral defence - the first such procedure I've ever taken part in. (UK-style vivas are quite a different and more private thing, though not necessarily less tense.) Very interesting it was too, though since it's not my story to tell, I'll leave it at that, except to say that the defence was successful, and everybody was happy at the end of it. Unless of course the candidate had some secret enemies in the room, but if so they had the discretion to hide their chagrin.

It was a bit of a harsh trip, logistically. I had to catch a bus from Bristol to Gatwick at 2.25am on Friday, fly to Spain, and then preside over the defence in the afternoon. The following day I asked for an evening flight home so that I could take some time to look at the city, but that meant (thanks to some French air-traffic-control shenanigans) that my flight was delayed, I missed the last bus back to Bristol, and had to spend five hours in the early hours of Sunday at Gatwick, before catching the 5.40am home. It's now Sunday evening, and I've not had a lot of sleep.

Given that, here are some illustrated highlights of my trip, rather than a connected narrative. Some of the facts here come via the doctoral candidate, Catalina, who has also worked as a tour guide in Valencia, and kindly gave me and the other examiner a city tour yesterday.



First, paella. Almost the only thing I knew about Valencia was that it's the home of paella. In many places paella is made with seafood, but the traditional ingredients in its home town are, it turns out, chicken and rabbit, with snails and the local water rat as optional extras (mine had neither, sadly, but it was still delicious). Valencians never eat paella in the evening - it's strictly a lunch dish.

That was lunch yesterday: Friday evening was a rather opulent, multi-course affair, which was all delicious (though since I was among strangers I resisted the urge to photograph it). I think the strangest single dish contained the following elements, all of which had equal billing: pork snout, salmon roe, artichokes and parmesan cheese. It tasted nice (especially the artichokes), but in what fevered pipe dream did anyone come up with that combination?

Valencia is a Spanish city built in (or around) a Moorish city, built on a Visigothic city, built on a Roman city. I love places like that, and have done ever since I lived in York, which is similarly palimpsestuous. Here, for example, is the medieval "mountain gate", outside which barbers used to have their stalls, ready to shave any shaggy mountaineer coming to the big city for trade or talk:



Impressive, isn't it? But just a few yards inside, built into existing houses and shops, much of the Moorish city wall still remains. The Valencians are a practical people. Here are a couple of Moorish towers, about a thousand years old apiece, just being parts of people's houses, down back streets and beside little car parks:



The Moors themselves were far from averse to a bit of bricolage. Witness this walled-in arch, featuring bits of saints from a Visigothic church:



In the more on-show parts of the city, there's a good deal of Catholic bling, especially here in the church of St Nicolas:



Even St Raphael seems to be bragging about how much bigger his fish was:



More impressive to me (of the austere tastes) is this market hall, once home to traders in the silk that was for centuries Valencia's main commodity (before competition and disease in the mulberry trees made them turn instead to oranges). Each skeined pillar twists toward the heavens:



But besides the old Valencia, there's an ultra-modern Valencia, built by modern architects and sculptors. Here is a scene from circa 2100, near my hotel:



There's some controversy in the city as to whether such expensive projects should be indulged in, when the old town needs so much support, and the country's on its uppers. As to that, I stay loftily neutral; but I'll be going back next year, Brexit sakoku notwithstanding, to look round Valencia again!

If there are any Aardman fans here, feel free to flick through my Flickr account, where you will find ample photographic evidence of my trip to Cribbs Causeway (Bristol's very own out-of-town shopping centre) last week, in part to visit the Gromit Unleashed exhibition, in which all of the Wallace, Gromit and Feathers McGraw statues previously scattered throughout Bristol for the summer are reunited in one place. I'll start you off with a couple of faves, concentrating on allusions:


Star Trek


Where's Wally?


Monsters Inc.


Alice in Wonderland

But there are plenty of other themes, too. What will next year bring?

Or, if your bent runs more to haltingly delivered lectures on children's fantasy literature and the end of the Great War, with particular emphasis on memory and repression, you may like to hear the podcast of the lecture I gave last week at Exeter University as part of The Empathy Effect, a project I'm involved with. (The link's at the bottom.)