Dateslexia by Sheena Wilkinson

Molesworth, as any fule kno, was cynical about history, which ‘started badly and hav been getting steadily worse.’ And Arnold Toynbee (or Henry Ford, or possibly lots of people) said that history was just ‘one damn thing after another.’ At school, at least for previous generations, it involved mostly learning dates – 1066 and all that.

But history isn’t one thing after another. It’s lots of things all happening at once, with posterity judging which aspects we remember. Take winter 1918, the period when Star By Star, my most recent novel is set, specifically the seven weeks (and one day) between 25 October and 14 December. What was happening then? Well, the Great War was limping to its close; the flu pandemic which would kill at least 50 million people worldwide was raging; in Ireland, Sinn Féin was gearing itself up to fight an election campaign which would, after a great deal more bloodshed, bring about an independent – and divided – Ireland, and of course, at that election, on Saturday 14 December, 1918, women in Britain and Ireland voted for the first time in parliamentary elections, as did working-class men. You can’t see any of these things in isolation: they all influenced each other, and history played out as it did because of the interplay between them.

Writing a book about all that accessible to teens  was challenging, but the book was written in winter 2017/18, when things did indeed seem to be getting steadily worse. It was quite easy to identify with my heroine’s feeling that huge and mostly terrible things were happening in the world around her. Giving her agency to influence what she could actually made me feel better about my own role in history, if that doesn’t sound pretentious.

One of the ways in which I harnessed all this galloping history and domesticated it was by knowing exactly where I was in the year 1918, to the very day. This helped enormously.  The novel’s action begins on Friday 25^th October 1918. Stella, the heroine, however, for a small but important plot reason, has mixed up the dates and believes it to be the 26^th.

So what? Well, I didn’t know a year ago, when I started writing, that Star By Star would be officially published on the 26^th October, which felt serendipitous and funny. When I mentioned this to my editor, Gráinne, she admitted that, perhaps catching Stella’s dateslexia, she had kept mistakenly thinking it was the 25^th – to the extent that she had printed that date on some promotional material. It didn’t matter a jot, of course, but it amused us.

Because the action of the novel is so compressed, I know what was happening in the story almost every day of those seven weeks, and as I embark on various events to celebrate publication, I can’t help thinking, 99 years ago, today… I’m writing this post on 3^rd November, the night when Stella has her first significant encounter with Sandy, the traumatised war veteran who becomes her best friend. Next Thursday, 9^th November, I’ll be officially launching the book in Dublin, and will be very aware of its being the day in the story when a very important letter was sent. And then, next Saturday, at the Belfast launch, I will be so very conscious that it’s 11 November, a date of huge import in the real world 99 years ago too, but also in the story. On both occasions, I will read from the appropriate day in the story, just because I can.

I realise it’s weird to think this way about a story I made up and characters who aren’t real. But I also know that, if we are to bring our histories and our stories and our characters alive for readers, we have to live in them to some extent. Where can we live but days? Philip Larkin said, and I would add, where can we live but stories?

I don’t know what I’ll be doing on 14^th December this year, but I do know that part of me will be living in the story, cheering Stella on as she tries to fulfil her suffragette mother’s legacy on Election Day, a day that would change Ireland, and Britain, forever. In a last twist, my editor has just returned from Barcelona, where, like Stella, she witnessed history being made – though exactly what history, we will have to wait and find out.

Tiny Beauties by Joan Lennon

I remember seeing them first in the old Chambers Street Museum in Edinburgh, before its transformation into the National Museum of Scotland.  Then they were tucked into an old-fashioned display case in a side gallery.  Now they are part of the Grand Gallery's Window on the World - a three storey high Cabinet of Curiosities.  They are the Blaschka models - tiny beauties in glass -

(my photos, taken through glass on a sunny day, but I did my best!)

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists interested in studying hard-to-preserve invertebrate animals and sea plants had to depend on 2D drawings.  The Blaschkas, father (Leopold Blaschka 1822-1895) and son (Rudolf Blaschka 1857-1939), took on the challenge of making 3D educational models in, of all things, glass.  They are painstakingly, astonishingly accurate and they are minute.  Many are smaller than the length of my thumb - the biggest are less than the length of my hand.  And I have dinky hands. 

I visit them every time I go to the Museum, and I would love to see more.  The Blaschkas were commissioned by museums far and wide - Harvard Museum of Natural History, for example, has an entire section dedicated to Blaschka flower models, and the Natural History Museum in London has examples like this utterly gorgeous tiny octopus -

(Wikipedia)

Knowledge of the techniques the Blaschkas used to create these undeniable works of art died with them.  Part of me is sad about that.  But part of me finds it oddly satisfying.  Sometimes mystery can be exquisite too.


P.S. More about the Blaschka story can be found here and here. 
P.P.S. I call dibs on writing the graphic novel version!


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Walking Mountain.

Cairnholy and Wayland's Smithy: Neolithic connections

Here is the massive, and massively impressive, neolithic chambered long barrow of Wayland's Smithy, a step and a stride off the prehistoric track called the Ridgeway, near Uffington in Oxfordshire. The barrow was restored in the early 1960s following excavations by  Stuart Piggot and Richard Atkinson, and is believed to have been built in two phases: a small timber burial chamber built around 3590 and 3550 BCE and a later stone-chambered long barrow around 3460 to 3400 BCE. So... very, very old. As we live locally, we often take Polly our dog there, and she enjoys exploring it.

The barrow is entered by a passageway situated behind the middle two stones of the imposing facade. It was presumably blocked by a door once upon a time, and leads into a cruciform chamber.

As Polly likes to demonstrate, you can turn right, or left, or go straight on. In each case you will find yourself in a small 'room' where bones of the dead once lay. Enormous capstones roof the chamber, but if you stand on top you can now peek down through gaps which were doubtless filled in when the tomb was in use.

Behind the burial chamber, the mound of the long barrow stretches for over 180 feet (56 m), subsiding in height as it goes, and lined on either side with marker stones.

But the purpose of this post is not to tell you about Wayland's Smithy per se - you can look it up online or find books to tell you all about it and the legend associated with it. No: what I want to do is show you pictures of another long barrow far to the north, which we came across by accident this summer, on holiday in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. It is Cairn Holy, near the village of Carsluith.  Here, up a rocky path, on the flank of a hill with views of the sea, are two chambered cairns. Or that's how the notices describe them. To me, no expert, but keenly familiar with the long barrows of Oxfordshire and Wiltshire, they are simply miniature versions of Wayland's Smithy. Here is the facade of Cairn Holy 1. It's a little gem.

With me and Polly for scale, you can see how much daintier it is than mighty Wayland's Smithy, but nevertheless the similarities are striking. Behind two tall central stones - the entrance stones, one might call them -  is a narrow passage and then a burial chamber or kist.

This box-like construction may have been the original tomb, with the elaborate facade and long barrow added at a later phase. No bones have been found in the acid soil, but part of a jadeite axe lay here - jadeite traded or brought from the Alps - and a stone carved or engraved with a spiral pattern, which is now in Edinburgh. Behind the entrance a long barrow slopes back down the hill, edged with marker stones in precisely the same way as at Wayland's Smithy.

Just a short distance up the hill is the second tomb, Cairn Holy 2, built to a similar plan. Silhouetted against the light like a finger pointing to the sky is the tallest of the two entrance stones, and you can clearly see the lid or capstone of the box-like chamber. In this tomb, a flint knife and arrowhead were found, and fragments of five or six neolithic 'Beaker' type pots.

In the picture below you can see Polly taking an archeological interest in the entrance. And there's the sea in the distance. Such a view!

She was absolutely fascinated. What could live in there? And then she explored the roof.

The point of this post is not so much to show you pictures of our dog even though she is clearly the Keenest Brain in Dogdom, to quote Dodie Smith. Rather, I wanted to share the thought that struck me while I was clambering around this breathtaking site: Cairnholy is around 350 miles north of Wayland's Smithy: a distance that even by car travelling on a motorway takes six and a half hours. Yet having visited both, I feel convinced that the people who built Wayland's Smithy would, immediately, have recognised and understood the architecture and cultural purpose of Cairn Holy. And vice-versa. They would have known exactly what the other structure meant, and what it was for.

I don't know which was built first, but in view of the recent revelation that the domestic architecture of Skara Brae in distant Orkney both pre-dates and is replicated by the internal planning of hut dwellings at Durrington Walls near Stonehenge, it wouldn't at all surprise me to learn that Cairn Holy predates Wayland's Smithy. That this culture, this style of funeral monument, worked its way south, not the other way about. Our neolithic ancestors were not, we are discovering, parochial. They travelled widely by land and sea, and traded in ideas and beliefs as well as artefacts.

But what precisely those beliefs might have been? Like Polly, we can only wonder.

The Ghost: A Cultural History – A Review by Anna Mazzola

‘The English have been haunted too long for their own good,’ declared the cover blurb for the 1963 compendium The Stately Ghosts of England. ‘We have become blasé,’ it continued. ‘We shoulder our way through this perpetual danse macabre with hardly a thought.’

In her new book, The Ghost: A Cultural History, Susan Owens seeks to address this, taking a long and fascinating look at how, from at least the 8th century onwards, ghosts have been making their spectral way through our art, our fiction and our architecture. In the course of her extensive research, Owens realised that, ‘ghosts are mirrors of the times. They reflect our preoccupations, moving with the tide of cultural trends and matching the mood of each age.’

Ghostly mirrors of our times

Looking at a wide range of art, literature, folklore and film, art historian and curator Susan Owens examines how each age has created and responded to a particular type of ghost. Certainly, they have not always been the wispy presences we think of today. In the 12th century, a ghost was less likely to flit through your door, ‘more likely to break it down and beat you to death with the broken planks’. During the Medieval era, the undead tended to take the form of savage beasts or decaying corpses, seeking release from purgatory, or dispensing moral lessons. With the Reformation and the removal of purgatory, they were ‘reimagined as refugees from the afterlife…obsessed with seeing justice done.’ Ghosts were forever popping up to reveal terrible crimes or prevent miscarriages of justice, one even appearing in the witness box to shock the murderer into a confession.

In the mid-17^th century, people’s interest in ghosts took a scientific slant: experiments were conducted, data gathered, theories put forward. Thomas Hobbs was not impressed, stating that the very word ghost, ‘signifieth nothing, neither in heaven, nor earth, but the Imaginary inhabitants of mans brain.’

Sceptics have been present all along, one writer noting in 1730 that, ‘Nothing weakens the Minds and turns the Brains of the English people more than the delusive Horrors which the common stories of Daemons and Goblins bring with them.’ However, the beliefs were entrenched. The ghosts were going nowhere.

Commercial opportunities

Writers, ever on the lookout for the next bestseller, have made good use of the ghost. Daniel Defoe clawed his way out of debt by writing A True Relation, relating the story of Mrs Veal’s ghost. And in 1764, poor old Conrad was crushed to death by a gigantic helmet at the Castle of Otranto, marking the beginning of the gothic novel. A growing army of maggot-covered corpses, bleeding ghost nuns and phantom knights would be employed to satiate the demands of the reading public.

It wasn’t just writers who saw the commercial opportunities represented by ghosts. The Cock Lane ghost of 1762, which communicated through spooky rappings and scratchings, generated great excitement and numerous visits, until it was revealed to be a hoax perpetrated by a young girl under duress from her father. 

Now you see me…

By the late eighteenth century ghosts had a new look. They were still wearing white, that being the colour of grave clothes (undyed linen and, later, wool), but they had ditched the unfashionable shrouds they’d worn in the 17^th century and replaced them with simple white shirts. And as time went on, they adopted a new quality. They became see-through. When Dickens described Marley’s ghost as ‘transparent: so that Scrooge…looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons of his coat behind’ he was drawing on a fairly recent convention.

'Stave One: Marley's Ghost'
American Household Edition (1876) of Dickens's Christmas Stories

The idea was reinforced by the invention of photography at the end of the 1830s: ‘It was not long before shadowy figures, produced by the technique of double-exposure, were interpreted as ghosts that had been detected by the camera’s mechanical eye.’

Reality followed art. In her 1848 compendium The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Catherine Crowe described ‘true accounts’ of cloudy or ‘vapoury’ ghosts.

The huge popularity of these ‘true tales’ coincided with a rise in fictional ghost stories and with the surge of a movement which was brought to England by an American woman called Maria Hayden, who in 1852 advertised her services as a medium with the power to contact the dead. ‘Up and down the land, tables were rapped and tilted, and planchettes poised expectantly over paper.’ Spiritualism was a hit. 

The sceptics were still amongst us, however. In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research began an inquiry into ‘that large body of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and spiritualistic’. And in 1890, Charlotte Sophia Burne, the first female president of the Folklore Society demanded that folklorists get out of their armchairs and do ‘a great deal more recording’ of ghost stories and folk tales before the oral traditions died.

Ghost stories

One of the most interesting aspects of The Ghost is its exploration of the ghost story and how it has changed over time. Victorian ghost stories had to be gripping and sensational in order to fit in with the demands of the magazine format. They became very much a convention – a Christmas treat. Later eras broke free of the formula, however. In the 1950s, Muriel Spark reinvented them as everyday apparitions, ‘modern, urban and articulate.’ The ghosts of Hilary Mantel’s 2005 novel, Beyond Black, are ‘repetitive, dreary, demanding.’ Today’s writers and artists are, Owens says, ‘re-imagining what ghosts are, what they do, what they mean to us…more creatively and more broadly than ever before.’

Engraving by R. Graves entitled 'The Ghost Story', circa 1870.

Always with us

The proliferation of books, blogs and television programmes devoted to ‘true hauntings’ show that ghosts have become ‘more entrenched than ever in our heritage.’

They continue to imbue our art, our fiction, our lives. On 1 July 2016, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, around one thousand four hundred men, all wearing First World War army uniform, mixed silently with commuters all over Britain. The National Theatre confirmed that the work was partly inspired by accounts of people seeing their dead loved ones’ ghosts both during and after the war. ‘For a few hours that day,’ Owens writes, ‘the Great War’s ghosts were made visible.’

This is a fascinating and beautifully-presented exploration of our centuries-long relationship with ghosts – a relationship that has survived scientific, political and religious revolutions. In 1778, Dr Johnson said of the supernatural: ‘All argument is against it; but all belief is for it’. It seems not much has changed.

I will be speaking to Susan Owens, as well as to Andrew Taylor (Fireside Gothic) and Laura Purcell (The Silent Companions) at History by the River on 14 November 2017. 

Pictures of the Past

I get to talk about history a lot. One of my favourite moments is when people show their emotions about the past. So many of us care about a period or a moment and that passion comes out in conversation. Because I’ve been working on theory (again) I want to talk about this at a vast and deep cultural level. It’s not vast and deep that brings out that passion, however. 

This month you get a few scenes from my photo collection, and I’ll tell you just a little about why I took the picture. I’ll share joy instead of theory. And if any of you want to share things you love about history (places, people, periods) I’d love to hear about it in the comments. This is a difficult year for many of us, and happiness is worth sharing.

Near Melbourne, 1976. Photograph: Gillian Polack

Hopetoun, Vic. 1977, Photograph: Gillian Polack

At Versailles, 1986. Photograph: Gillian Polack

Ueno, Japan, 1986. Photograph: Gillian Polack

Peterborough, 1986 Photograph: Gillian Polack

The first picture is friends discovering the town of Emerald and the Puffing Billy train. My friends were new to Melbourne and this was the day they looked at each other and said "Yes, we all belong."

The second is a school excursion to the Mallee in Victoria in my teens. This is when I realised how powerful photographs were for memory.

My visit to Versailles was when I was doing work for a doctorate. I wondered if there was a way of  taking the pcitures so that you couldn't see anything modern in them. This was that experiment. The Ueno picture is from earlier that year when I was on my way to England and France to Sydney, just to give you a picture of the young photographer.

For the last picture, we've gone forward again. My first cloister garden. Since then I've taken thousands of pictures of medieval buildings. With each one I understand the Middle Ages just a little more.

And I'm sorry for the delay in getting the comments up - I was unexpectedly in Exeter.

"Phone for the fish knives, Norman" by Mary Hoffman

I am a member of the forum Gransnet (think Mumsnet + 25 years) and far and away the most popular post recently has been "What kitchen gadget could you not do without?" Everyone had one and was keen to post pictures of their favourite small paring knife or whatever. It got me musing, because my mum had been a cook and taught me basic English cooking so thoroughly that I still use many of her techniques, even though she'd be amazed at the Indian, Thai, Chinese and even Italian food made in my kitchen today.

So when Vintage Kitchenalia by Emma Kay  (Amberley) arrived in the post, it brought back a few nice memories.

Everything in my mother's kitchen was made from scratch, a method I still tend to follow. Of course there was not much by way of ready-made food available in the 50s and 60s and a big supermarket shop was a concept way in the future. My mother shopped and cooked every day.

She bought lamb or beef from the butcher and put it through one of these:

So a shepherd's pie was made from freshly minced meat. She made her own pastry, though her hand was not considered as cool as my Auntie Maggie's - a cool hand being the secret of light pastry. But her Yorkshire puddings were legendary. Oh what would she think of my recourse to Jus-Rol and Aunt Bessie?

But, great cook though she was, she didn't make her own bread, at least not that I can remember. I expect she did when she was "in service" (She gave up  work when she married, which was common in my parents' social class in 1932, the year of their wedding.) That's something that the many owners of bread-makers now do, even if they buy other processed food.

Another thing that is incontrovertibly better is domestic coffee-brewing. In my first family's home, the abominations of Camp and Bev liquid "coffee" were the norm, except on Saturdays when coffee was "perked" on the stove.

You put the ground coffee in the metal basket, water in the pot, lowered the basket into the pot and put the whole caboodle on to the gas flame on top of the cooker. The water boiled all up through the basket and fell down again through the ground coffee. You could watch it doing this through the glass knob at the top. At the beginning it smelled delicious but they left it on the gas far too long and the wonderful aroma deteriorated into something burnt and unpleasant.

Nevertheless, when we married, we asked for and got a Russell Hobbs electric percolator. And when it died after eighteen months, out of guarantee, like suckers we bought another one, which did the same. Years of experimenting with the different ways of making coffee followed in search of the perfect cup.

And after many experiments with drip methods, espresso machines, "Moka" stove top models and electric, we settled decades ago on the simple cafetière:

There's nothing to go wrong apart from breaking the glass goblet, which can be replaced.

Emma Kay is more focussed on tea but an earlier book by Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork (Particular Books 2012), devotes the last section of her book to the other popular hot beverage, beginning, "Coffee technology has become perplexing."

One thing is sure: what you display and use in your kitchen - which might be two different things - say a lot about you as an individual, your class, education, travel and commitment to such things as organic food, minimising of packaging etc. etc. It has become a cliché that people with expensive gadget-filled kitchens and shelves of glossy recipe books, often do know more than pop a frozen pizza in the microwave before pouring a glass of supermarket wine and settling down to watch yet another glamorous TV Chef or a competitive programme about baking.

Was it ever thus?

Emma Kay has chapters on storage, preparation, cookware, moulds, utensils and serving, which are all fascinating subjects in their own right. (Who now owns a mould or makes blancmange, jelly or "shape"?).

And a truly riveting list of 1929 of the equipment for a kitchen in a "household of about six persons." This was about the time my mum was a cook and I wonder if she had a tin pudding mould, a "netted mop," a cinder sifter and a knife-cleaning machine.

And what would such a list contain nearly 90 years later?

What strikes one most on reading Vintage Kitchenalia, is what hard work it all was. The section on "Dairy," for example, tells us about cream, cheese and butter-making tools and even talks about making your own ice-cream.

Of course the invention of refrigeration revolutionised storage and cooking of food. I remember own first fridge entering the kitchen. Before that, food sat in our larder, in a meat-safe or a china cheese wedge.  And I remember in the 70s going to the house of a old schoolfriend who had a freezer and thinking "this will never catch on."

Now I revel in my American-style fridge freezer, have an old Bosch in the garage and even another small freezer there. But I still crave a larder like my mothers, with cool marble shelves lined with jars of jam, marmalade, chutney and pickled onions, all home made. (I do make the preserves but they live in the garage too).

I particularly enjoy Emma Kay's chapter on utensils. I do have a wire whisk, but for egg whites and cream, do prefer this:

And although I have a food processor, I still use a pestle and mortar for spices:

In fact there would be several items in my kitchen that my mother would recognise.

But can YOU recognise these? Answers in the comments below.

And do you know why John Betjeman put fish knives in his 1958 poem "How to get on in society"?


 Finally, do share your own indispensable kitchen gadget, with a photo.


Food tastes best when you eat it with your own spoon. Danish Proverb