Provincial Pleasures

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I saw Belle and Sebastian at the Liverpool Philharmonic last week. I hadn’t seem them in so long. They opened with “Act of the Apostle.”

Morning prayers took the girl unawares She was late for class and she knew it The broadcaster had a voice that was soothing She couldn't tell if it was a man or woman A patch of sun fell onto her neck She put her head on her arms on her desk

Stuart is a great lyricist. 

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I had a great weekend in Halifax, West Yorkshire, this month. The Piece Hall was particularly impressive. 

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The Alderley Edge Mines, Chris J. Carlon, John Sherratt and Son Ltd., 1979

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I haven't been in the shop recently, and when I have I've been working on the till, but I found this yesterday and it amused me a little as it nearly exclusively contained Yeats and Hardy, around ten poems from each, with one or two from Owen, Brooke, and Housman. There are definitely a lot more poets that represent this period, and many popular ones too. I priced it at 99p. Hopefully some enthusiastic A-Level student will pick it up to read over the summer. I guess it's a nice introductiion

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Chinese Vegetable & Vegetarian Cooking, Kenneth Lo.

In the future, when all's well, you shall have this book, and books like this, in your kitchen, and your time shall spent experimenting with nice recipes, and doing nice things, in your nice new home, but that's a long way off right now, a long way off: you must endure more despair, more solitary cups of tea, more time wasted in front of old episodes of Lovejoy, but keep at it, dear one, because think what wonderment awaits you.

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I do like literary biographies, and I like the silly details some of them go into, informing the reader what shoes the writer bought one insignificant afternoon one hundred years past, but this...1000+ pages on the Brontes. Blimey. I think I'll stick with Gaskell's book.

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Yeah.

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Selected Poems: Carol Ann Duffy, Carol Ann Duffy, 1994.

I don't know what I think about Carol Ann Duffy. Some of the topical pieces the Guardian commission are staggeringly bad, and her poems in the AQA anthology, the would-be-profane historical pieces were awful too, but then I will read something, like this piece, which I like. I don't know why I like it, but it's evocative, of something.

See also her poem John Barleycorn. A wonderful poem.

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The greetings cards - which are intended to be funny, and from my experience are capable of amusing idiots in the shop for hours with their witty, subversive banter - have paraphrased the great Philip Larkin's most memorable and infamous line. 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra, just for you.

How very queer.

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Girl with Green Eyes, Edna O'Brien

This is the second instalment of Edna O'Brien's wonderful Country Girls trilogy. I picked this out because I love the cover. Mine, I think, contains a drawing, but this features Rita Tushingham, who starred in the film adaptation. Doesn’t she look beautiful!

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The Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald

It's always nice when a book by one of your favourite novelists comes in, one of your favourite novelists that you believe to be much under-rated, much under-read. I put this out straight away, in the window, centre-stage, where she of course belongs.

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"Almost inevitably, Claire Rayner appeared."

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I found this at the Oxfam shop on Bold Street, Liverpool. I first became aware of Beardsley through the little known pop group the Would-be-Goods. Their song Diminuendo from the highly recommended 2002 LP Brief Lives is a lyrical imagination of the artist's strange and fascinating life. When I first heard it, I had no idea who the singer, Jessica Griffin, was singing about. Who, I wondered restlessly, was this person..."His face a sliver a hatchet, and his morning suit pearl grey/The table talk of Soho keeps the fear of death away." I thought it could be, possibly, about Ronald Firbank, but I wasn't certain, so after a little online research, I wrote to Jessica Griffin, and she told me it was in fact about somebody I had never before encountered: Aubrey Beardsley. I say that; I had never come across his name - I must have seen his face on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his illustrations for Wilde's Salome seemed familiar, but I knew nothing of him. In the song, she mentions his lithograph Par Les Dieux Jemeaux Tous Les Monstres Ne Sont Pas En Afrique which I hoped would feature in this "best of" but alas no. I didn't buy it, but still, better than the usual tat one comes across in charity shops.

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Very old fashioned name that, isn't it, Frank Singleton? I believe this book was initially due to be called Heaven. Glad he didn't change it all that much.

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Scene & Hird - My Autobiography: Volume One 1911-1974, Thora Hird.

"If the weather was warm and sunny, there would be an evening dancing session and I used to love that. Coloured lights would be festooned around the dance floor and although it sounds so simple, it really was quite romantic. When my friends and I were about fifteen, we would often 'click' or 'get off' (they were popular expressions in those days) with the boys who were on holiday in Morecambe, and a spot of dancing under the coloured lights never did hurt anybody, did it? I think probably the sexiest thing we ever did was look into each other's eyes over a cup of hot Horlicks - but it was living!"

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An Invisible Friendship, Joyce Grenfell & Katharine Moore.

I bought this book at a charity shop on Smithdown Road, Liverpool. I love these old fashioned books of letters. You saw a similar book I posted recently, and I hope this will be as good. Grenfell and Moore never met, but they wrote to each other for years, which I find very romantic. Grenfell described Moore in her memoir, "I have a pen-friend I have never seen...We share a taste for reading, the eternal pleasure of seasons, music, sounds and sights, and for people who pleasantly surprise us by their diversity." I think I'll be in good company.

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Cookson is the master of the working-class saga genre that I mentioned a few posts back in reference to Helen Forrester. I've never read any of her books, but she seems quite extraordinary - she published her first novel in her early forties, and went on to write over one hundred, becoming the most borrowed author in British libraries for around thirty years, and selling over one million copies. I mention her because I was in the South Shields recently (where most of her novels are set) and in the museum she featured quite extensively. What moved me most however was the story of the local miner William Jobling - he was hanged and gibetted (a process whereby the dead body is left hanging, on "display") for a crime he didn't commit; scapegoated by the authorities for the miner's union which had formed, the strikes they had arranged, and the education the Church was giving them. Tragic.