reading five books

2 March, 2023

After my last Minack book till the next one arrives, I read an interlibrary loan of the memoir of the darling Miranda Hart, about her life with a canine best friend. I enjoyed all of it, but this one passage perfectly described my current mood about life (all brought on by an unfortunately work situation, maybe some of it also because of related thoughts about getting old).

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The rest of the book perked me up. In fact, the sad paragraph perked me up because it described my feelings so perfectly and yet made me laugh.

3 March 2023

Oh joy, the next book in Mark Wallington’s travel memoirs had arrived. It was almost as funny as 500 Mile Walkies.

If you google up an image of Mark Wallington and Boogie, you will find that Boogie was a larger and handsomer dog than the book covers suggest.

Along with the humour of taking a little boat and a big personality dog on a quest for the source of the Thames, Wallington has a knack for describing nature.

And as a former jobbing gardener, which he wrote about in The Day Job, he has an ear for a good gardening chinwag.

4 March 2023

The next day, I went on another excursions with Mark Wallington and Boogie. It was as funny and charming as the first two books, although 500 Mile Walkies does have the edge of being set in Cornwall.

More garden talk:

I immediately followed with Mark’s next travel book, this time without Boogie, who must have been gone by then…a sad thought. What a dog! He would not have had a good time traveling on this spontaneous one man ukulele open mic tour.

Although the book was as full of the so satisfying Wallington humour, there was one moment that took my breath away. There had been a poem that I had found some years ago and shared on Facebook because it got to me so much. I had been trying and trying to remember it; all I could recall is that it mentioned some sort of sound (bells?) and some locations (villages?) but no…it was birds, and counties.

Traveling by train….

I immediately knew that I had found the poem I had sought. I tried to read it to Allan but started to cry too hard to get the last four lines out.

Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

I was pleased when Mark visited Conwy Castle on his journey from open mic to open mic. I have been there and remember it well, although I don’t remember tourist guides in costume.

What I do remember is how interesting it was to look down into surrounding gardens from castle walls.

And I have been in Skipton.

I feel so fortunate to have discovered the Mark Wallington books, all because Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path memoir mentions 500 Mile Walkies as an inspiration. I do hope he writes another memoir, with or without a dog. There is one more, without Boogie, about a trip to Lapland (or so the title suggests), which is on its way to me.

5 March 2023

I had from the library the sequel or companion book to the amazing Life After Life.

Like Life After Life, some of the book takes place in WWII, this time not so much the London Blitz but the experiences of a bomber pilot from the same family. It was mesmerising. Another part of the book includes nature columns written by one of the characters, just wonderful. Kate Atkinson can write anything!

There are quite a few enjoyable excerpts from the nature column.

When one of the characters was…

…I got choked up because, what I haven’t been able to stand to write about yet, some gardens I love (and made) are under a vague threat of being dug up, and I WILL mind.

But wait, look, there is Adlestrop again!

So if I hadn’t found it in The Uke of Wallington, I would have found it here and would have recognised “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire“. Amazing.

Two images of death were chilling, and then comforting. “She was preparing….

And this, which is the way I think about it most of the time. “A handful of heartbeats…that’s

Just as with Life After Life, there is a page in this novel where something happened that so surprised and asoptunded me that my head rose off my shoulders and floated around the room. You will know when you get there.

Allan said to me, re the blog, “There hasn’t been much gardening lately.” The snowdrops and allotments from books do count for something, though. And I did take a walk around the garden to show just how very reading-friendly the weather has been.