Describe one of your favorite moments.
We are here at our holiday cottage, and yesterday all looked lovely, with blue skies and sunshine, with even Daisy snuffling around. The sim to see events at Borders Book Festival.
I had a few things lined up, had missed The Walter Scott Prize announcement. My first event I had a few doubts about, for though I love Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and have blogged briefly on the brilliant life by Charlotte Peacock of her but I couldn’t quite get excited about the description of the event, based on Kerri Andrews lovely book Wanderers and a play about Shepherd currently running at Pitlochry. I would love to see that play but could not imagine this event being as it appeared based on talking heads about any number of things; women who walked in nature or cities and wrote about it, and a play I hadn’t seen or read. i was alone in my doubts. so many had booked for the event, it had been transferred to a larger marquee and that was packed to the gills.
This was a superb event, with slides of Nan, an audio excerpt from the play, readings from Nan’s published ad unpublished, even a chance to see her characteristic handwriting for Kerri Andrews had recently published her correspondence, and even more recently in the touring of the play found more letters (an ‘editors nightmare’). Andrews’ point about Nan was that she wrote about nature not as a competition between it and observers, mainly male, who write about conquering or overcoming its challenges (about themselves that is) but about participation with nature and walks, even partial ones, INTO it, the interiority being the key. My knowledge of Shepherd came via Jenni Fagan’s advocacy of the work of Jessie Kesson, and I asked about that. For Kesson met a ‘Lady’, a ‘lady’ (compared to a working class woman – a ‘wifey’, being for her a class term in a railway carriage on the way to a walk. My question was about ‘walking’ in Kesson’s novels which was so different from that in Shepherd, being not based on the privileges of class status (see Charlotte Peacock on this at this link). It was a fine event.
Nut I jump ahead in my story of the evening in which the beautiful country town that is Melrose shone, even in scudding showers, It is a town blessed by a hill in the prospect up its main street.
The weather had changed and in the Harmony Gardens, looking for my Shepherd event, the sky was blue and the sun in a mild breeze was a blessing. Melrose Abbey shone in the background.
Because there was a big gap between the Shepherd event and the one I favoured, at 9 pm with Tan Twan Eng, I booked to see the gregarious James Naughtie who was speaking about his new BBC Radio venture Reflections, in which people of note in their own time but now retired from public life talked about things they could have done better. The best story he told was about Norman Fowler, the once Secretary of Health and Social services, in days when people saw them as linked, dealing with (or not I thought) the AIDS epidemic health campaign under Margaret Thatcher and what he learned of Thatcher’s divided nature and the perfidy with which she followed her divided lights. she agreed to a health campaign and then sought, without consultation wit her Secretary of State (then Fowler) to undermine it, scared by its apparent (to her) promotion of truths about sexual practice in the UK. He was an amusing gregarious speaker – and I noticed he attended Tan Twan Eng afterwards. This was most enjoyable but I have only a photograph of the empty stage before he mounted it.
At 9 p.m I went to an event I was looking forward to and enjoyed immensely. In the photograph Twan organised for me afterwards yo can see my rather pathetic enactment of Uriah Heep humility, a sure sign of how overwhelming the event as. He spoke of The House of Doors (see my blog thereon at this link) and opened few doors on purpose. Twan had asked not to read from the novel and could not be urged to do otherwise, though he refused beautifully: ‘Reading is private’. I asked him to elaborate on the ‘arcane glyph’ in the novel but was told my question was a spoiler (mea culpa) and also learned that the publishers of the paperback had forgotten to put on the glyph (the glyph is mentioned in the novel, as you will see in my blog, at significant moments). He also spoke of his oeuvre to date constituting a Malaysian project which ends at his next novel. I panicked. I lost my copy of his beautiful first novel and have not read yer, his second one). another project for me then (before or after reading Dante’s Divine Comedy I wonder – lol)
But I got my prize, A lovely dedication on my first edition. See below.
So a good day. Tomorrow Rory Bremner followed by Juano Diaz (my blog on latter at this link).
All my love
Steven xxxxxx
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