My Friend Muriel by Jane Duncan

This book was first published in 1959 and it is a terrific book about sundry British people both before and after the war, and it is very romantic. There are snobbish people (of course) and spivvy untrustworthy people and solid reliable people from Scotland, Scottish being the nationality of the proudly biased writer. OK, the past was not always better, and there were clearly dark times, but it is a great book to go back to for a cheery comfort read. The books (the My Friends series) interconnect with each other, so there is some repetition, but each story focuses on a character who is different, as in, odd or strange or gifted, as though Duncan had the idea for "diversity" long before the rest of the world.

Jane Duncan wrote a fictionalised account of her own life and as such, it is particularly valuable as a record of the time she lived in.

Duncan, being meta before her time, also wrote and published books as_ Janet Sandison -- the very books that much later in the 'My Friends' series her fictionalised self writes.

In 1959, the London publishing house of MacMillan was besieged by reporters interested in a new Scottish writer. Jane Duncan was making publishing history: MacMillan had bought no less than seven of her titles in one go. Duncan had been writing for years, burning many of her efforts before anyone read them, hiding others in desk drawers and knitting baskets in her linen cupboard. Set in her childhood haunts on the Black Isle, the first of her books, My Friends The Miss Boyds, depicted Highland life at the close of the Great War. It was the first of a series of 19 Friends titles. Duncan wrote 32 books in total, including eight for children. Not one remains in print but that is about to change. Millrace Publishing, a small, independent, English publisher, is to reissue My Friends The Miss Boyds next month to mark the centenary of Duncan's birth. The story is told through the curious eyes of nine-year-old Janet Sandison, who is sharp and observant but basically ignorant of, and confused by, strange adult ways. But this is no fey depiction of Highland life. There is warmth and humour but the themes are poignant and, for their time, surprisingly frank. Duncan writes of mental illness, of sexual relationships and illegitimacy, but also of a changing world shadowed by war. There is that tinge of darkness that often marks the best of writing, a hint of fear and impermanency, a present shivering in the shadow of an uncertain future.Her books were semi-autobiographical, drawing on the places and faces of her childhood, particularly The Colony, her grandparents' home in the hills above Jemimaville, which became Reachfar in her novels. Duncan spent much of her childhood there. Her father had moved to Glasgow to become a policeman when there was not enough work on the family croft, but he retired to Jemimaville and Duncan, too, chose to spend her final years on the shores of Udale Bay. Her grave is not hard to find at Kirkmichael, where the silence is broken only by birdsong and the mournful call of distant sheep. "In memory of Jane Duncan (Elizabeth Jane Cameron). Author. Died October 1976, aged 66 years." You would think it would be the other way round, that her nom de plume, Jane Duncan, would be in brackets rather than her real name. It suggests that "author" was the dominant part of her. Death silences us all, of course. But how poignant that a woman who wrote so prolifically, in whom there was such pride, should, less than 40 years later, not have a single book left in print. Only now is she to be given another hearing.

Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/jane-duncan-may-be-out-of-print-for-40-years-but-she-is-about-to-be-heard-again-1-475990

Search for Jane Duncan's voice and what rings out clearly is how far ahead of her time she was, how she forged a strong, independent life at a time when women were not encouraged to do so. Her mother died of Asian flu when she was ten and her younger brother Jock was an infant. Jock was sent to his grandparents at The Colony but Duncan attended Lenzie Academy and stayed with her father, who policed the Renton and Alexandria areas. Her father had a housekeeper whom he would go on to marry and Duncan was very unhappy about the relationship. "She didn't like her, to the point that she wouldn't go home if this woman was there," explains Neil. "I think she would have gone to university, got away from home, as quickly as possible. "There weren't many female graduates in the 1930s. "She was a very clever woman," says Neil. "Very strong. She was very pro women and pro women fighting as equals in a man's world. A pretty indomitable character. If she got patronised, she would really go for people." 

Sadly, Clapperton [her husband] became ill with heart disease in Jamaica. Ironically, it was this that catapulted Duncan to literary fame. Worried about the cost of medical bills, she took a manuscript from the linen cupboard and sent it to a London agent. Clapperton died just after she signed her first contract and she came home to Scotland alone to face a new life. "I think she was at a low ebb when she lost Sandy," says Neil. "She was 49 and had no idea how to make a living." Materially, she had nothing. "She wasn't married and obviously had nothing to show for the relationship other than a few pieces of furniture," says Donald. Writing gave her confidence. "I think she had been quite lacking in self-esteem about her writing at the start," says Neil. "But the early ones were best sellers and I think a lot of her character came out then.  

"In terms of social issues, she did not flinch from difficult themes. When the Cameron children demanded to know why Auntie Bet didn't write a book about them, she began her series for children based on an essay they gave her. The youngest Cameron child, Ian, who was born with Down's syndrome, was a special character in these books. We take such a thing for granted now, but at that time, it was a condition people preferred not to talk about. Duncan described Ian as one of the best things to happen to their family. Seonaid remembers that, when Ian was born, her mother was very upset. Duncan came to the rescue. "My parents were told they should send Ian away, that he would hold the other three children back. It was very difficult for them to bring him up but Auntie Bet was very, very supportive and I know she helped financially so mum could get someone in to help in the house. She was very close to Ian really. She was a bit fascinated by him." Neil agrees. "She felt very strongly that Ian's life was at least as valuable as the rest of us – which it is."

She also wrote about lesbians, homosexuals, people with Asperger's or autism, and those disabled by the war. She loved the differences in people and described them in detail, with curiosity and a longing to understand.

It is here that the value of Jane Duncan's voice is underlined. You stand on the remoteness of this hill and wonder how people ever eked out a living here. "I didn't realise until I went back to read the Miss Boyds," says Donald, "what a fascinating historical document it is." There was, perhaps, a certain stiff sensitivity locally at times about the fact that Duncan's work was semi-autobiographical and some characters were recognisable. But to read of those characters now is to bring a generation back to life. "When we look for a picture of Highland life that has now gone, she presents that picture," says writer and broadcaster Carl MacDougall, author of Writing Scotland. She may have been too popular to have attracted many serious literary critics (though she was not without admirers) but, says MacDougall, "what can be overlooked in a writer like Jane Duncan is the actual craft. These novels are well written and very entertaining. I am surprised she hasn't been picked up again before now."

Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/jane-duncan-may-be-out-of-print-for-40-years-but-she-is-about-to-be-heard-again-1-475990

News from Syria

You can't accuse Donald Trump of consistency. One day he says he won't get involved in Syria as he is only interested in defeating Isis. Next thing you know, he sends Trident missiles to Syrian airfields because he suddenly feels outraged for the victims of the chemical weapons attack. He is an emotional person, which is not a bad thing. and now Assad knows he cannot act with impunity in Syria and this is a good outcome, I think. It contrasts strongly with Obama, who felt deeply, and did nothing, or at least, nothing effective.

I don't care if that wasn't the Donald's motive - !

Vaessa Bell - paintings - beautiful exhibition at Dulwich

I had to change my judgement of Vanessa Bell ans I had thought her a painter of ugly blobs in unfortunate colours, and an amateurish try hard. But I really loved many of the pictures in this exhibition and now I am full of respect for Mrs Bell for going on and on with her work and experimenting with, for example, Picasso's style or Matisse's style and continuing to plough her own furrow. I can see now that she did deserve the respect her sister gave her (I sort of feel that VW thought VB the true-er artist of the two.)

Not a holiday

Today I want to catch up with myself. I have been reading too much and doing too much and now I feel unsteady, so to hold on to the railings of my life I will enumerate what I have done this week.
1. Went skiffing on Monday and Wednesday.
2. Had bonfire at allotment, 2nd April finished the digging out of the compost bin, spread about the soil from the compost heap (not rich enough to call it compost), and garnished it with manure to give it some body. The manure was still wet from the field (I had stored it in plastic bags) but quickly dried in the sun. It has been a dry, bright, breezy week. We now have a compost heap of manageable size but no fence around it. Husband is too busy to construct this out of the usual pallets.
3. Bean poles. These are up and there are beans in the ground.
4. I had planted seeds in modules of which only the tomatoes germinated. don't know why. Too hot maybe, when I left the heater on by accident? I have potted on 12 tomato seedlings, tried again with beans and mangetout. Pots all over the conservatory floor (a tiny room where I work). Courgettes next.
5. I read a very good book called Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Claire Morrall.
6. I went on to His Bloody Project which I had to read very fast, for book club.
7. Coxed Husband and Helena, Wednesday evening.
8. Went to book club last night and discussed the book. A very good discussion, although, as usual, the old people digress madly, and the most compos mentis people speak less than those without filters. We had a new member much younger than the rest of us, and not at all shy, which was lovely.
9. Spike came round for lunch yesterday (salmon salad) and we talked about the regatta software. Spike is 62, he has looked after his mum for many years and in February his mum died. He said he feels like an 18-year-old because he is free again. I think he might like a girlfriend. Jane???
10. On Tuesday husband surprised me by remembering our wedding anniversary, and we had a sudden whim to go to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, as I had never been there and he was willing to drive. There was a Vanessa Bell exhibition on. Will post pictures separately. We had a fab lunch in Rocco's Italian restaurant in Dulwich village, which is charming and really the most desirable area to live in London, I should think. Then we walked through a park to another area to see the Horniman Museum, because it was not far away and again, I had never been there. There was a huge display of musical instruments from around the world. This interested us far more than the stuffed animals, although I thought they did very well to make the stuffed animals relevant and interesting.

H G Wells - A Modern Utopia

Wells' Utopia is an alternative world but serves as an imagined future for our world. I have reached the chapter where his Utopian counterpart takes him to London. I was in the same part of London last week (Millbank) and I am able to compare what Wells wanted with what we have.

We have pleasant avenues by the sides of the Thames, but we have too many cars, and Wells didn't mention those.

London's air is dirty, which would have disappointed Wells, but the river is clean and the streets are fairly clean. We would disappoint Wells by our propensity to wear black instead of gay colours. Although you don't generally see people who are ragged or dirty, you do see some. Busking on the bridge, for example. He imagined we would wear woollen robes. It would be lovely to have woollen robes, but few people wear wool at all. Clothes now are very cheaply produced and not expected to last, so making them of wool would be a terrible waste. He imagined that in the clean air, people would often wear white.

Wells imagined that Utopian London would be heated by electricity, which is largely true, although there are also gas boilers, and the roads are sealed, which they are, and there are hardly any dogs or horses, which again is true. So he thought the city would be clean - where did he think the electricity would come from? Had he not seen a power station, burning coal?  No.

He thought everyone would be healthy, walk well, and have clear eyes and shapely bodies. Ah, well, they're not too bad, the Londoners, and in winter many of the office workers go running about in their lunch break displaying fit bodies. (In summer there are too many tourists in the way.)  However, they are all shapes and sizes, and I can't say that Londoners have good complexions, but they are not too noticeably spotty either. He thought that the Utopians would put off the years of decay. Well, that is true, in that some lucky people remain healthy until very old age, but I am beginning to see that as a matter of luck. It is true that we have learned to look after our teeth, on the whole, but having said that I heard something awful on the radio this morning  about children's teeth. - From today's Guardian -

The number of tooth extractions on children aged four and under in English hospitals has risen by almost a quarter over the past decade.

NHS data obtained by the faculty of dental surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) shows there were 9,206 extractions within the age group in 2015-16 compared with 7,444 in 2006-07 – a 24% rise.

He said 90% of tooth decay is preventable through reducing sugar consumption, regular brushing with fluoride toothpaste and routine dental visits, but that 42% of children did not see a dentist in 2015-16 despite treatment being free for under-18s.

 So 42% of children have parents who neglect their well-being. Not much of a Utopia, is it?

Wells says - "they have extended the level years far into the seventies, and age, when it comes, comes swiftly and easily." Hahaha. Old age never comes swiftly and easily. The quicker it comes, I would judge, the more of a shock it is.

However, he does talk about "a ripe, prolonged maturity. .. a grave deliberation, to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a broader handling of life. " This is not the case at all. The drive for novelties is something Wells never anticipated.

He says that education and training in Utopia lasts until the student is twenty years old - 18 is normal in this country although some of the courses are of questionable value. He predicts the Gap year - "then comes the travel year" "and many are still students until 24 or 25." But he concedes that at this stage young adults need to take some responsibility for themselves, but says that their lives don't start in good earnest until the age of 30.  He sees the Utopians settling down to marry at about this time, and before that they fool around with love "play", he calls it.

This is nice - "my eye is caught at once by a young negro, carrying books in his hand, a prosperous-looking, self-respecting young negro, in a trimly-cut coat of purple-blue and silver." Wells was really very unusual for his time in that he wasn't a racist but an internationalist who believed that all races would work together in one world.

He really fulminates against all the nonsense of racism, but is very longwinded.
Then he asks what other alternatives there are to his idea of synthesis of all nations to the World State. "Synthesis... does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean uniformity." As one of his ironically outlined alternatives he predicts mass killings of foreign races, "race-destroying fumigations". He points out the process could go on over and over again.

Howard Jacobson - Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It, part 2, Ideas in art

In fact, I did like it, although with some reservations. This is a collection of essays written for the Observer, so they are all exactly the same length, which is long enough to allow for some anecdotes, illuminations and digressions, and they are serious in a mildly amusing way.

My main gripe is that each essay lacks a date, and a preface, explaining the circumstances that inspired it. Was Jacobson asked to write a preface (or an afterword) with the above, and any thoughts he may have had on re-reading the piece? If he wasn't asked then this failing is the publisher's fault, and if he didn't offer, or if he refused to do it, then it is his fault.

Included is a good essay called "What Things Are For" which was a response to something Tom Stoppard (the famous playwright) had said, and I had to have recourse to the Internet to find what Tom Stoppard had said, and when, in response to what. Credit to Jacobson because he does quote the nub of the argument, and goes forward to explain it and help us to see.

Stoppard made a critical speech about the Turner shortlist in 2001 - that information should have been in the non-existent preface - in which he said: "The term artist isn't intelligible to me if it doesn't entail making." Jacobson explains Stoppard isn't referring to craft and honest labour but....

******

A work not made is a work not undergone, a process of discovery and change not submitted to, revelations not revealed. Every good writer and artist will tell you that the most productive days are those which begin in ignorance and confusion, the tunnel ahead black, and not an idea in your head. Strictly speaking, ideas are your enemy. Ideas are what you had before, not where you might end up. "Never trust the artist, trust the tale," D.H. Lawrence famously wrote, meaning that an achieved work is another thing entirely from anything the artist merely wanted it to be.
The conceptual artist reverses Lawrence's dictum, in effect saying, "Never trust the art, trust the artist's intention."
In art we get beyond ourselves; here is part of the reason we value it. Marooned in the sterility of his will ... the conceptual artist fears the process of change and contradiction which is art's justification. Hence the inertness of his work when we stand before it - no trace anywhere of what else it might have been or any argument it might be having with itself. Mere insistence. Which isn't, as Stoppard reminded us, what art is for.


*******

So what did Stoppard say art is for? Can't find that. But the BBC News site says:

Stoppard made a link between the work of such artists and Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited a urinal in 1917 under the title Fountain.

He said that Duchamp's gesture had been a valid attack on the orthodoxies of the time, but that now conceptual artists were themselves an orthodoxy, championed and supported by the establishment.

Active for the Greens - and allotment, year 2, post 1

On Saturday I was active for the Greens - leafleting in Redhill West. As I have missed loads of meetings recently I was very keen to get out and help. That was a lot of walking on Saturday but I did walk with Liz - whom I liked very much and I met a super guy called Derek who sorted out our leafleting routes. We had lunch in a pub together. Ended up all walked out, exhausted!

On Sunday I was active in the allotment shop, and then, went home with some compost and did my own garden, which involved moving some self-seeded forget-me-knots and some campanula, also self-seeded, to places where I hope they will look lovely.

On Monday it was pouring down and I didn't do much except suffer with my bad cold and buy food at Sainsbury's.

Today I went to the allotment and dug up the last of the potatoes - quite a lot of them - and a few were rotten because the frost must have caught them, but a lot of them were buried deeply so they were fine. I gave some to Bill.  I moved one of the gooseberry bushes so we can put a fence around them and protect the fruit from the birds and the rats. Anne came up and told me that after storm Doris she and Bill had collected our black compost bin from where it had blown to and showed me the sheds that had blown down. Our shed was fine and its roofing felt was fine too, hallelujah. I put some rubbish out for the collection on Friday but I could do with putting out more. I put out a rusty old incinerator. Some of my stuff would be good to burn but we never get a good, calm, dry day!! So I think I will just put it out for rubbish collection.