kashgar

an ancient city being pulled down, now.  (documentary by http://www.1world1eye.com/)

Bloomsbury deliver the proofs – by bicycle

On Thursday my lovely publishers decided it was time to deliver the proofs of A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar to poor unsuspecting booksellers across London, in 1920s dress of course – well, a nod in that direction thanks to some vintage gear supplied by Flora, Amanda, Katie and other stylish Bloomsberries – and on bicycles.

Here we are about to set off. Me looking like the leader of a Girl Guide expedition, Helen, my editor, looking sophisticated and Katie and colleagues looking glamorous and beautiful.

Below Mr Foyles Bookseller takes it in his stride and my absolute favourite photo is Katie Bond, Bloomsbury Publicity Director, cycling alone in hat amid the London buses. I had lots of fun – thank you Bloomsbury xx

Next Post

There is a spell, for instance,

In every sea-shell:

(H.D.)

Greetings Esteemed Readers (all 14 of you),

In honour of the recently deceased kodak, here are some kodachrome slides from the US, some 40s, mostly 50s or early 60s. They are heartbreaking and I want to write a story or poem about each of them but I absolutely won’t because I am remaining focused, stream-lined in the mind, full attention on Book No 2. I am.

Who are they? Who can they be?

shackled

“My last glimpse of him was about six years ago. I saw my King walking down Shaftesbury Avenue wheeling a pram – a large Victorian pram. I thought to myself: ‘Ah, my dear John: life has caught up with you as well. Like the rest of us you have shackled yourself with children, three lots of twins I’ll be bound, and have been forced to walk them in the Park instead of writing the sonnet you had in mind.’ But judge my relief when I caught up with him, for the pram contained nothing more sinister than a mountain of beer bottles – empties, which he was on his way to sell. We were delighted to see each other, and of course repaired to a pub to celebrate.”

From Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place (Some notes on my friend John Gawsworth). Photograph below: Lawrence and his first wife Nancy.

In my forthcoming novel there is a scene where an English missionary escapes from a city on her bicycle, taking with her a baby in the basket. My dilligent copy-editor asked me if this were feasible? ‘Of course!’ I replied (for the purposes of my story it had to be).  So I was interested to read that when Durrell and Nancy fled Greece when the Nazis invaded in 1941 they carried their three month old daughter Penelope (‘Pinkie’) in a pannier basket ‘like a loaf of bread’.

I’m looking forward to reading more about Nancy in this book, Amateurs in Eden, due out next month.

wired, jitters, transport to where?

I’ve just finished To the North by Elizabeth Bowen, a book I love even if many of the characters are a little cartoonish somehow. As usual, with Bowen, the themes are as fresh and as relevant today as they possibly could be:

“The transport of messages via post, telephone, and telegraph combined with the transport of persons via motorways, shipping routes, and glith paths, has the effect of alienating speech and motion from the human will. Extending into every area of private life, these networks override the boundaries that separate one person from another, creating mysterious and uncontrollable relations of dependency. ‘Even what I think isn’t my own!’

One symptom of this interconnectedness is the jitters: Bowen’s characters are ‘wired’ in every sense, as if their nerve-ends, fused to the surrounding networks, are crepitating with the dips and surges of an unknown current. Another symptom is collective guilt, for the reostion of personal autonomy means that everyine is implicated in the act of betrayal that propels the narrative. Indeed, betrayal and adultery are melodramatic side-effects of the promiscuity endemic to these networks, in which ‘relations stop nowhere,’ in Henry James’s words.

What all Bowen’s forms of transport have in common that is that they sabotage ‘free-will’… show how ‘transport’, in all senses of the word, deprives the characters of agency, reducing them to puppets of their own technology. As Walter Benjamin ha written: ‘all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream’.

I miss letters; I have the jitters. I’m considering going analogue.

(*photograph: a young Sylvia Plath interviewing Bowen)