Nanny Iris and her books

On her last visit to my house before she died in February aged 95, my Nanny Iris casually threw into conversation how her father had taught her to read before she started school. Nan had asked how her great grandson Rufus was faring in Reception, and we were marvelling at that wonderous sorcery of early…

Missing London town during lockdown: Memories of London (Edmondo De Amicis, 1873), An Excursion to the Poor Districts of London (Louis Laurent Simonin, 1862), Absolute Beginners (Colin MacInnes, 1959) and In Our Mad and Furious City (Guy Gunaratne, 2018)

Facebook threw a joyous memory my way the other day: a jaunt I made into London with an almost 7 month old Rufus in February 2018.  I took Ru to the blitzed-church-ruins-turned-into-public-garden of St Dunstan in the East, where his dad had proposed to me almost a year to the day before he was born,…

Nurture through nature: Eight Master Lessons of Nature by Gary Ferguson, Where Poppies Grow: The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War by John Lewis-Stemple, and The Invention of Clouds by Richard Hamblyn

‘We can’t go there. It’s full of drug dealers.’ Thus laboured my beloved’s worn refrain whenever I suggested we explore the mysterious woodland at the top of our road. It took a pandemic, and the dawning realisation that we had exhausted all other fruitful walks within a one-hour radius during the first lockdown, for the…

The Diary of a Georgian Shopkeeper by Thomas Turner (1754-1765)

It’s unclear why Thomas Turner (1729-1793) – shopkeeper, churchwarden and overseer to the Parish Vestry, aka a semi-Big Cheese – decided to keep a diary at the age of 25, and why he abandoned it upon marrying his second wife eleven years later. I wondered if he, in a brief 18th century equivalent (given Georgian…

Thank you, Great Uncle Jack

I keep a spreadsheet of all my books. It’s currently at around the 1500-books mark. I’m giving you all the opportunity to stop reading now. Still with me? Good. Well, it’s the greatest endeavour to which my rudimentary excel skills have been employed (a regret for any grown woman; a travesty for a policy official)….

Lockdown and loneliness

Bastard Covid-19’s prohibition of our habitual touchy-feely ways  –  on a sliding scale from jovial shoulder slaps with a favourite Co-op assistant (we’re pretty tight with the Co-op crew round our way) to warm embraces for family and friends – has reduced our emotional world to include only that which exists between our four brick…

What exactly does one read during a pandemic?!

I had hoped to restore a bit of humour to Bronte’s Page Turners, given my recent focus on subjects as heartening as depression and immortality, but then BOOM: along comes a pandemic like Covid-19, and like most people I am navigating an ever-present readiness to sob and howl What. The. Actual. Fudge. Yesterday evening, as…

Books and immortality #deep

Last year, I set myself a challenge: to finally read the fifty-odd books I inherited from my Nanny Turner when she left us for the big library in the sky in 2014. A wide-ranging collection for a woman with little formal education apart from the English GCSE she took in her 70s (too busy being…

Poems as refuge: In The Pink by The Raving Beauties (1983)

‘Poetry has become divorced from our lives. We no longer feel part of the great oral and written tradition of myths and legends in which so many things were once protected and preserved. Nothing protects us, our minds, bodies and spirits are freely raped in the age of atomic suicide. The eternal truths of language…

My sure solace: books, depression and me (#properjolly)

Last year, over the summer, I experienced a period of major depression. It hit me like a juggernaut, comprising of a familiar crash in confidence but also, less familiarly and far more worryingly, a crash in identity. I had no idea who I was anymore, and struggled to visualise myself as a meaningful human being,…

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

The End We Start From is a ‘cli-fi’ novel, set in Britain as flood waters close over London, and written from the perspective of a woman who has just given birth to her first child. Most parents will concede that the first year of parenthood is the hardest year of one’s life, its balm being…

Kurt Cobain: 25 years on

It’s hard to believe that it was twenty five years ago that I ran out of my parents’ bedroom crying melodramatically that ‘Kurt Cobain’s dead!!!’ after emergency tele-communications from a school friend on a Spring Sunday morning (oh for the days pre-internet/mobile phones, when such shattering news could be delivered so personally).  At 13, my tribute…