Lovely as always Deborah. Your monopribysxare beautiful. I really admire how you experiment, it makes me feel like I need to try more of that. This morning I’ve taken a walk along the Regents Canal and am reading this in a nice narrow boat cafe (so not in the way back from Kew!).
I’ve heard about Garner’s new book and like you didn’t read him as a child so I wondered if I should try read all his books first? I loved Treacle Walker.
Oh and my local library found me a copy of A Fugue In Time. It has the same library card in it from 1960’s and I love that. I write down all the books you recommend so that I can read them! X
What a lovely place to sit and read! Thank you, Cally, I am not sure what I shall do with them but they are such fun and unpredictable things to make.
The Alan Garner is brilliant. He is so fascinating on the creative process and the area where he lives. I felt naughty buying it as a hardback, but I am so glad I did. I would just grab it if you see it at the library.
Let me know what you think of A Fugue in Time. It has stayed with me. I looked for an old copy while I was away, but no luck. I love It library books are the original copy, mine was the same. It is such a pity it is not better known. X
Thanks! I teach Monday-Wednesday so Thursday morning to try go somewhere nice to have breakfast. This Thursday I went to the Victoria and Albert museum.
And the one I can completely understand - I teach on Thursdays and Fridays (and Wednesdays are often for Teacher Training). So Sundays and particularly Mondays are the days when I go off for a really good morning coffee.
A lovely post as always and such beautiful photos of your trip away. I have lost count of the number of times I have packed a sketchbook for a holiday or even for a local walk with the intention to draw and end up not even taking it out of my bag. As you mentioned, there are many other ways to ‘gather the landscape’ and sometimes it’s enough to just be fully present where we are and take everything in through all of our senses. Pocket treasures, photos and a clearer head are often what I end up with along with another blank sketchbook page to be filled when I’m back home. X
I am going away for a couple of days before Christmas and I am already pondering just how much I should take! I always worry that I will leave something vital at home and end up taking everything bar the kitchen sink. But there are other ways and I don't want breaks to be a place of pressure instead of enjoying what there is to be discovered. I am glad I am not alone in this. Thank you very much for reading it.
I am so glad you eased into your break and found your sense of place by the end of the week. We put ourselves under so much pressure sometimes, it is easy to quench the creative spark but the embers are there, they just need the right moment to flash back into flame. Sometimes we just have to be and see what emerges…
I am also a latecomer to Alan Garner and I find his books magical but also somewhat baffling. My theory is that if I keep returning to them they might, like all favourite books, unveil new aspects and ideas to me as I age…
Thank you, I hope your week went well too? He is sometimes baffling, especialy the fiction, but there are moments that I think are extraordinary, and I keep hoping for more of those moments. I think his essays in the Voice that Thunders are astonishing.
I think we do just have to be sometimes and it is so easy to forget that. I find it very difficult!
I had a lovely week thanks and like you, spent it topping myself up with nature and just pottering about but I agree, I also have to nudge myself to lean in to just being..
The last Garner book I read was Thursbitch and I still think about it. I find his books an uncomfortable read sometimes, they really make you work and sometimes I feel like I’m not up to the assignment!
I am glad! I have yet to read Thursbitch, but now want to as he covers it in “Thrums and Powsels,” though I shall be prepared to be challanged and bamboozled!
I’ve just started reading The Lie of the Land, I’ve been looking for something like this for ages. I really enjoyed the Joan Bakewell film, Flowering in Autumn, how refreshing to listen to something positive about growing old! I’ve now got Little Dorrit on my reading list too. Thanks so much for these lovely inspirations! Beautiful photos!
Do let me know what you think! I couldn't stop reading it once I got into it and will certainly now reading more of her work. It is so well plotted and apparently took 7 years to write, and I can understand why. I love the Joan Bakewell film, especially Paula Rego. Her incomprehension of what she could do if not paint was a joy. I found it so uplifting. Thank you so much for your message.
I’ve been loving and living this holiday of yours vicariously for a few days now under our leaden skies!
I’ve ordered a stack of Alan Garner books from the library…essays and anecdotes plus an anthology of other writer’s thoughts about him and just yesterday started a re read of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Listening to the audio version while I stitched this afternoon and realised I probably first read it about sixty years ago which is ever so slightly terrifying to consider.
Such realisations are indeed very unsettling! I have just been reading an interview with Alan Bennett - how can he be ninety? Oh dear.
Is A Voice that Thunders amongst your selection? It was the first book I read of him and think it remarkable. His latest is in the same vein and will return to it. Hus description of his writing process I found fascinating.
I was so lucky in the Peaks and wish I could have stayed longer.
Yes, that’s one of the books plus the latest one you mentioned and also his memoir, Where Shall We Run To. Added in First Light published by Unbound and edited by Erika Wagner which I’ve bought.
I think you’re getting your own back on me for recommending all those books for fifteen years 😂😂
I LOVE your riverbank trees! And, not previously familiar with Alan Garner as an American, I just read Treacle Walker after being encouraged for so long by Simon Haisell. It was quite something!
Thank you very much, Anne! I loved drawing there and wish it wasn't quite so far away so that I could do some more. Strangely, Simon wrote of "Powsels and Thrums" in a Note and we both loved it. "Treacle Walker" is such a strange, yet beguiling, book and I am so glad I read it. But this book of essays is wonderful and I now want to read more of his novels.
That was delightful, Deborah. It felt like I was taking time out in the Peaks too. I love the story about the woman feeding the ducks. As someone who blows kisses and waves to the cows in the field opposite my house, I quite understand her motivation. I also loved Alan Garner's 'Treacle Walker'. It was so totally out there but a great way of describing the mysteries of the beyond.
I confess my visit all feels rather dreamlike now and wish I could return to see that landscape again, it was so rich in colour. I am pleased you liked it. I talk to creatures all the time, it seems perfectly sensible to me! She bid farewell with such warmth, I found it very touching. I suspect that she goes there most days. "Treacle Walker" is strange but rather marvellous, isn't it? It has left such an impression eventhough when I finished it, I was not sure what I had read. This selection of essays is extraordinary and it is hard to believe he is 90. I am glad I still have lots more of his to read.
Really loved reading this thank you so much - I am a regular packer of huge amounts of art materials for a break only to find that I often just want to write and think … and all I probably need is a pencil and a sketchbook not the gouache, watercolours, pencils, brushes etc that I’ve weighted down my bags with ! I too love Alan Garner - his writing is weird and mysterious but as you say seeps in somehow ….The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Owl Service fascinated me as a child, and as an adult ‘The Stone Book Quartet’ just speaks to makers and lovers of the land so powerfully. Shall definitely put the new one on my list. And it’s time too to begin my annual read of/listen to The Pickwick Papers’. It’s huge, sprawling, humane, compassionate and funny in turn. There’s a wonderful version read by Gabriel Woolf which is so comforting - highly recommend for the winter ! Thank you for some new reading suggestions and to the commenters as well for more !
Oh Deborah thank you ! That’s so kind of you. Was just sitting here avoiding going to the studio (not sure why …) and you’ve given me the impetus… and I might try Great Expectations next - I only know it from films and haven’t really got to grips with it but films can never really convey the sheer vastness of Dickens. I loved Anton Lesser as Falco on Radio 4 …now I might have to go and look those up again !
Dear Sarah, thank you very much for such a lovely message to begin the day and fit restacking my post. I take everything bar the kitchen sink, just in case, and nearly all of it invariably doesn't seem the light of day! I haven't yet read The Stone Book, but think that is what I should read next as it sounds as though it speak to me.nor have I read Pickwick Papers but I am going to look up that recording now as it will lovely company in general studio. I am assuming that you know Anton Lessee's recordings of Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol? If not they are marvellous and are my pre-Christmas listens (on Naxos CDs). I have been looking at your beautiful work and couldn't resist my favourite carol!
In one of those odd coincidences I had, immediately before reading this, been drafting my own Substack for next week in which I also mention Dickens. Like you I never read him when young but discovered him in adulthood. 'Little Dorrit' remains possibly the only book which has made me cry actual tears WITHOUT any character dying or suffering particular tragedy, just the unbearable sadness and loneliness of trying to do the right thing.
Thanks for the link to the Alan Garner video, which has sent me down another rabbit hole finding out about his extraordinary house, or rather houses. (I grew up in Alderley Edge and would occasionally meet Alan Garner when he visited the bookshop where I had a Saturday job - I'm not sure he ever said more than hello to me though so I cannot offer any great anecdotes or insights).
Perhaps it is better to come to him later? I find it incredible how Dickens achieved what he did in such a short lifetime.
Mr Dorrit still makes me boil in his utter selfishness, and Maggie is such a tender creation. It is deeply moving.
I think simply saying hello to him is thrilling enough! I would love to go walking at Alderley Edge and have you seen that his house is now secured as a Trust? https://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/about-us/ I would love to be able to visit.
Oh I did not know that! The site doesn't seem to have been updated for a while and is still showing events and guided tours from early this year, but I will check back the next time I am going to be in the area. (We return quite often as we still have friends there).
This is glorious Deborah. As well as doubtful, patient and exploratory, followed by unexpected resolutions. I feel that same pressure, to write in my case, when I go somewhere special for a few days to do so. Which is why the holiday reading I best remember is “Miss Garnett’s Angel” by Sally Vickers. I’d booked five long wanted days at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales (a library with rooms!) and was getting nowhere. Until I decided not to write at all, and read the book I’d brought with me instead. A mystery tale of a holiday in out-of season Venice involving an ancient chapel, one of the Apocryphal books of the bible, a dubious stranger who only might be an angel - and me, being intrigued and educated. Learning in those few days, as my own words began to return, that I write better when I’m reading well.
Ronnie, this meant a great deal, thank you. Yes, you have encapsulated that experience perfectly. The expectation is so high, and somewhat paralysing, and sometimes it is best to just let go. Reading allows you to do that. I loved "Miss Garnett's Angel", and can remember too exactly when I read it. Reading is vital. One of the reasons I decided to leave so much of social media (not an easy thing to do for a visual artist) was that I was no longer reading and there is no doubt my attention span was affected. I now spend those precious hours catching up and I am so glad I did.
Lovely writing. And for what it’s worth, writing trips are the same. So much pressure! Yet the value and meaning usually arrive, albeit sometimes months later, once the experience has been composted down.
Thank you very much, you have made my day! Yes, it does filter down but wouldn't it be lovely to go away without a thought of "making" it into something. I confess I miss that. Having said that, I loved the Peaks, there was such a sense of peace that I hadn't felt since during lockdown.
I long for Dartmoor at the moment but would be more than happy with the Peaks. I only drive very locally, though, which makes adventures difficult (though not impossible!)
Another wonderful read and recommendations. Fascinating to see that surviving section of the Marshalsea prison, very evocative. Lovely dipper photograph too!
So glad to hear you had a great week away! Your photographs are beautiful. I was delighted to be reminded of “Windhover”, and charmed by the lady and the ducks. Your posts are always so full of wonders! I’m looking forward to getting the new Alan Garner - I remember loving “The Owl Service” as a child/teenager (can’t remember how old I was) and was also very taken with “Treacle Walker” (although I’m not able to explain why - there’s just something about it!)
Thank you, Amy. Like you I can't really explain what I thought about "Treacle Walker" though it has stayed with me. These essays are extraordinary, there is no sense of his talent waning. He writes so beautifully about his house and his life there.
Such an engrossing, beautifully illustrated post, Deborah & thanks for the mention. I panicked slightly as I haven't actually read The Lie of the Land, but a friend did and she recommended it to me. Have just checked the Guardian review which says 'The Three Graces features a number of characters from previous novels, including A Private Place, The Lie of the Land and The Golden Rule, and although it’s not necessary to have read those earlier works, Craig’s continuing interest in exposing the fault lines of class, wealth and the inequality of opportunity is striking'. I didn't know that, but it sounds like an interesting (almost) series! Glad that your trip away brought you so many good things.
I am sorry to have given rise to the panic! Her writing is so insightful, especially about the reality of rural living. This novel apparently took 7 years to write and I can undeestand why as it is so well plotted. It has wonderful Wilkie Collins hooks at the end of chapters so it is very hard to stop reading. I find it fascinating that characters reappear in other novels and I will certainly read more! Thank you very much for reading it.
This is a beautiful essay, Deborah. So vivid ! Every year I find the color of autumn absolutely gorgeous. They seem to me somehow « deeper », more nuanced than those of the summer.
I’m curious about watercolor prints - how do you make those?
Thank you so much, I am pleased you liked it. The autumn colour this year where I stayed was very beautiful but by the end of the week, following a very windy night, many of the leaves fell, so I saw it just in time.
I am hoping to make a video of me making these watercolour monoprints, but that might be in a few weeks! I use heavy, smooth paper and very wet washes of colour. I place the plants within the pools of colour. I then add a little more stronger pigment around them, to accentuate them. A sheet of cling film is then placed over the paper and pushed around the plants. It makes some interesting textures in the wet paint too. I then place a board, and several heavy books, on top and leave it to dry for at least 24 hours. The results are variable but I like the unexpected results it yields!
Lovely as always Deborah. Your monopribysxare beautiful. I really admire how you experiment, it makes me feel like I need to try more of that. This morning I’ve taken a walk along the Regents Canal and am reading this in a nice narrow boat cafe (so not in the way back from Kew!).
I’ve heard about Garner’s new book and like you didn’t read him as a child so I wondered if I should try read all his books first? I loved Treacle Walker.
Oh and my local library found me a copy of A Fugue In Time. It has the same library card in it from 1960’s and I love that. I write down all the books you recommend so that I can read them! X
What a lovely place to sit and read! Thank you, Cally, I am not sure what I shall do with them but they are such fun and unpredictable things to make.
The Alan Garner is brilliant. He is so fascinating on the creative process and the area where he lives. I felt naughty buying it as a hardback, but I am so glad I did. I would just grab it if you see it at the library.
Let me know what you think of A Fugue in Time. It has stayed with me. I looked for an old copy while I was away, but no luck. I love It library books are the original copy, mine was the same. It is such a pity it is not better known. X
I adored “A fugue in time” - I read it on Deborah’s recommendation, and it absolutely blew me away! Highly recommended!
I rarely reread books, but I would love to read it again.
I’m really enjoying it!
atmospheric
It really is an amazing book - so atmospheric.
Oops!
I am pleased!
Not on the way back from Kew but still - sounds wonderful : a narrow boat cafe.
I’ve become quite a fan of your comments :) - you choose beautiful places to walk and be in.
Doesn't it sound lovely? do look at Cally's wonderful work here https://callyconwayprints.com/
Thanks! I teach Monday-Wednesday so Thursday morning to try go somewhere nice to have breakfast. This Thursday I went to the Victoria and Albert museum.
PS Your prints are incredible !
That’s so kind of you, thank you. I’m still getting to grips with Substack and find it hard to see comments and reply so I’m a bit slow…
🤍It’s a lovely ritual.
And the one I can completely understand - I teach on Thursdays and Fridays (and Wednesdays are often for Teacher Training). So Sundays and particularly Mondays are the days when I go off for a really good morning coffee.
A lovely post as always and such beautiful photos of your trip away. I have lost count of the number of times I have packed a sketchbook for a holiday or even for a local walk with the intention to draw and end up not even taking it out of my bag. As you mentioned, there are many other ways to ‘gather the landscape’ and sometimes it’s enough to just be fully present where we are and take everything in through all of our senses. Pocket treasures, photos and a clearer head are often what I end up with along with another blank sketchbook page to be filled when I’m back home. X
I am going away for a couple of days before Christmas and I am already pondering just how much I should take! I always worry that I will leave something vital at home and end up taking everything bar the kitchen sink. But there are other ways and I don't want breaks to be a place of pressure instead of enjoying what there is to be discovered. I am glad I am not alone in this. Thank you very much for reading it.
I am so glad you eased into your break and found your sense of place by the end of the week. We put ourselves under so much pressure sometimes, it is easy to quench the creative spark but the embers are there, they just need the right moment to flash back into flame. Sometimes we just have to be and see what emerges…
I am also a latecomer to Alan Garner and I find his books magical but also somewhat baffling. My theory is that if I keep returning to them they might, like all favourite books, unveil new aspects and ideas to me as I age…
Thank you, I hope your week went well too? He is sometimes baffling, especialy the fiction, but there are moments that I think are extraordinary, and I keep hoping for more of those moments. I think his essays in the Voice that Thunders are astonishing.
I think we do just have to be sometimes and it is so easy to forget that. I find it very difficult!
I had a lovely week thanks and like you, spent it topping myself up with nature and just pottering about but I agree, I also have to nudge myself to lean in to just being..
The last Garner book I read was Thursbitch and I still think about it. I find his books an uncomfortable read sometimes, they really make you work and sometimes I feel like I’m not up to the assignment!
I am glad! I have yet to read Thursbitch, but now want to as he covers it in “Thrums and Powsels,” though I shall be prepared to be challanged and bamboozled!
I’ve just started reading The Lie of the Land, I’ve been looking for something like this for ages. I really enjoyed the Joan Bakewell film, Flowering in Autumn, how refreshing to listen to something positive about growing old! I’ve now got Little Dorrit on my reading list too. Thanks so much for these lovely inspirations! Beautiful photos!
Do let me know what you think! I couldn't stop reading it once I got into it and will certainly now reading more of her work. It is so well plotted and apparently took 7 years to write, and I can understand why. I love the Joan Bakewell film, especially Paula Rego. Her incomprehension of what she could do if not paint was a joy. I found it so uplifting. Thank you so much for your message.
I’ve been loving and living this holiday of yours vicariously for a few days now under our leaden skies!
I’ve ordered a stack of Alan Garner books from the library…essays and anecdotes plus an anthology of other writer’s thoughts about him and just yesterday started a re read of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Listening to the audio version while I stitched this afternoon and realised I probably first read it about sixty years ago which is ever so slightly terrifying to consider.
Such realisations are indeed very unsettling! I have just been reading an interview with Alan Bennett - how can he be ninety? Oh dear.
Is A Voice that Thunders amongst your selection? It was the first book I read of him and think it remarkable. His latest is in the same vein and will return to it. Hus description of his writing process I found fascinating.
I was so lucky in the Peaks and wish I could have stayed longer.
Yes, that’s one of the books plus the latest one you mentioned and also his memoir, Where Shall We Run To. Added in First Light published by Unbound and edited by Erika Wagner which I’ve bought.
I think you’re getting your own back on me for recommending all those books for fifteen years 😂😂
I LOVE your riverbank trees! And, not previously familiar with Alan Garner as an American, I just read Treacle Walker after being encouraged for so long by Simon Haisell. It was quite something!
Thank you very much, Anne! I loved drawing there and wish it wasn't quite so far away so that I could do some more. Strangely, Simon wrote of "Powsels and Thrums" in a Note and we both loved it. "Treacle Walker" is such a strange, yet beguiling, book and I am so glad I read it. But this book of essays is wonderful and I now want to read more of his novels.
That was delightful, Deborah. It felt like I was taking time out in the Peaks too. I love the story about the woman feeding the ducks. As someone who blows kisses and waves to the cows in the field opposite my house, I quite understand her motivation. I also loved Alan Garner's 'Treacle Walker'. It was so totally out there but a great way of describing the mysteries of the beyond.
I confess my visit all feels rather dreamlike now and wish I could return to see that landscape again, it was so rich in colour. I am pleased you liked it. I talk to creatures all the time, it seems perfectly sensible to me! She bid farewell with such warmth, I found it very touching. I suspect that she goes there most days. "Treacle Walker" is strange but rather marvellous, isn't it? It has left such an impression eventhough when I finished it, I was not sure what I had read. This selection of essays is extraordinary and it is hard to believe he is 90. I am glad I still have lots more of his to read.
Really loved reading this thank you so much - I am a regular packer of huge amounts of art materials for a break only to find that I often just want to write and think … and all I probably need is a pencil and a sketchbook not the gouache, watercolours, pencils, brushes etc that I’ve weighted down my bags with ! I too love Alan Garner - his writing is weird and mysterious but as you say seeps in somehow ….The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Owl Service fascinated me as a child, and as an adult ‘The Stone Book Quartet’ just speaks to makers and lovers of the land so powerfully. Shall definitely put the new one on my list. And it’s time too to begin my annual read of/listen to The Pickwick Papers’. It’s huge, sprawling, humane, compassionate and funny in turn. There’s a wonderful version read by Gabriel Woolf which is so comforting - highly recommend for the winter ! Thank you for some new reading suggestions and to the commenters as well for more !
Oh Deborah thank you ! That’s so kind of you. Was just sitting here avoiding going to the studio (not sure why …) and you’ve given me the impetus… and I might try Great Expectations next - I only know it from films and haven’t really got to grips with it but films can never really convey the sheer vastness of Dickens. I loved Anton Lesser as Falco on Radio 4 …now I might have to go and look those up again !
I am a Falco fan too! ;) I think he could read anything and I will listen. I am now off to the studio too. Have a good day x
Dear Sarah, thank you very much for such a lovely message to begin the day and fit restacking my post. I take everything bar the kitchen sink, just in case, and nearly all of it invariably doesn't seem the light of day! I haven't yet read The Stone Book, but think that is what I should read next as it sounds as though it speak to me.nor have I read Pickwick Papers but I am going to look up that recording now as it will lovely company in general studio. I am assuming that you know Anton Lessee's recordings of Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol? If not they are marvellous and are my pre-Christmas listens (on Naxos CDs). I have been looking at your beautiful work and couldn't resist my favourite carol!
In one of those odd coincidences I had, immediately before reading this, been drafting my own Substack for next week in which I also mention Dickens. Like you I never read him when young but discovered him in adulthood. 'Little Dorrit' remains possibly the only book which has made me cry actual tears WITHOUT any character dying or suffering particular tragedy, just the unbearable sadness and loneliness of trying to do the right thing.
Thanks for the link to the Alan Garner video, which has sent me down another rabbit hole finding out about his extraordinary house, or rather houses. (I grew up in Alderley Edge and would occasionally meet Alan Garner when he visited the bookshop where I had a Saturday job - I'm not sure he ever said more than hello to me though so I cannot offer any great anecdotes or insights).
Perhaps it is better to come to him later? I find it incredible how Dickens achieved what he did in such a short lifetime.
Mr Dorrit still makes me boil in his utter selfishness, and Maggie is such a tender creation. It is deeply moving.
I think simply saying hello to him is thrilling enough! I would love to go walking at Alderley Edge and have you seen that his house is now secured as a Trust? https://www.theblackdentrust.org.uk/about-us/ I would love to be able to visit.
Thank you very much for reading it.
Oh I did not know that! The site doesn't seem to have been updated for a while and is still showing events and guided tours from early this year, but I will check back the next time I am going to be in the area. (We return quite often as we still have friends there).
This is glorious Deborah. As well as doubtful, patient and exploratory, followed by unexpected resolutions. I feel that same pressure, to write in my case, when I go somewhere special for a few days to do so. Which is why the holiday reading I best remember is “Miss Garnett’s Angel” by Sally Vickers. I’d booked five long wanted days at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales (a library with rooms!) and was getting nowhere. Until I decided not to write at all, and read the book I’d brought with me instead. A mystery tale of a holiday in out-of season Venice involving an ancient chapel, one of the Apocryphal books of the bible, a dubious stranger who only might be an angel - and me, being intrigued and educated. Learning in those few days, as my own words began to return, that I write better when I’m reading well.
Ronnie, this meant a great deal, thank you. Yes, you have encapsulated that experience perfectly. The expectation is so high, and somewhat paralysing, and sometimes it is best to just let go. Reading allows you to do that. I loved "Miss Garnett's Angel", and can remember too exactly when I read it. Reading is vital. One of the reasons I decided to leave so much of social media (not an easy thing to do for a visual artist) was that I was no longer reading and there is no doubt my attention span was affected. I now spend those precious hours catching up and I am so glad I did.
Lovely writing. And for what it’s worth, writing trips are the same. So much pressure! Yet the value and meaning usually arrive, albeit sometimes months later, once the experience has been composted down.
Thank you very much, you have made my day! Yes, it does filter down but wouldn't it be lovely to go away without a thought of "making" it into something. I confess I miss that. Having said that, I loved the Peaks, there was such a sense of peace that I hadn't felt since during lockdown.
I long for Dartmoor at the moment but would be more than happy with the Peaks. I only drive very locally, though, which makes adventures difficult (though not impossible!)
Another wonderful read and recommendations. Fascinating to see that surviving section of the Marshalsea prison, very evocative. Lovely dipper photograph too!
Thank you! The Marshalsea must have been a wretched place and I was amazed to find this small remnant of it.
So glad to hear you had a great week away! Your photographs are beautiful. I was delighted to be reminded of “Windhover”, and charmed by the lady and the ducks. Your posts are always so full of wonders! I’m looking forward to getting the new Alan Garner - I remember loving “The Owl Service” as a child/teenager (can’t remember how old I was) and was also very taken with “Treacle Walker” (although I’m not able to explain why - there’s just something about it!)
Thank you, Amy. Like you I can't really explain what I thought about "Treacle Walker" though it has stayed with me. These essays are extraordinary, there is no sense of his talent waning. He writes so beautifully about his house and his life there.
Such an engrossing, beautifully illustrated post, Deborah & thanks for the mention. I panicked slightly as I haven't actually read The Lie of the Land, but a friend did and she recommended it to me. Have just checked the Guardian review which says 'The Three Graces features a number of characters from previous novels, including A Private Place, The Lie of the Land and The Golden Rule, and although it’s not necessary to have read those earlier works, Craig’s continuing interest in exposing the fault lines of class, wealth and the inequality of opportunity is striking'. I didn't know that, but it sounds like an interesting (almost) series! Glad that your trip away brought you so many good things.
I am sorry to have given rise to the panic! Her writing is so insightful, especially about the reality of rural living. This novel apparently took 7 years to write and I can undeestand why as it is so well plotted. It has wonderful Wilkie Collins hooks at the end of chapters so it is very hard to stop reading. I find it fascinating that characters reappear in other novels and I will certainly read more! Thank you very much for reading it.
This is a beautiful essay, Deborah. So vivid ! Every year I find the color of autumn absolutely gorgeous. They seem to me somehow « deeper », more nuanced than those of the summer.
I’m curious about watercolor prints - how do you make those?
Thank you so much, I am pleased you liked it. The autumn colour this year where I stayed was very beautiful but by the end of the week, following a very windy night, many of the leaves fell, so I saw it just in time.
I am hoping to make a video of me making these watercolour monoprints, but that might be in a few weeks! I use heavy, smooth paper and very wet washes of colour. I place the plants within the pools of colour. I then add a little more stronger pigment around them, to accentuate them. A sheet of cling film is then placed over the paper and pushed around the plants. It makes some interesting textures in the wet paint too. I then place a board, and several heavy books, on top and leave it to dry for at least 24 hours. The results are variable but I like the unexpected results it yields!
Oh that sounds like a potentially amazing process! I will wait for the video - and try and make some with my little students 🎨
So glad you had such a lovely, creative trip 🌿
Thank you, David. I can now see why you love it so much. I really didn't want to come home!