Showing posts with label new novel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new novel. Show all posts

An Empty Planner, Easter Anyway and a New Book

Easter is happening anyway

If you haven't heard from me for a while, it's because we've been having internet problems and it's still not sorted. Part of the problem is that in this very rural area, lots more people than usual are working from home - or kids are online during the day. Can't complain about that at all, but it puts a strain on a not very adequate system. Now, our landline has gone wonky. I have spent a couple of days galloping about like a mad thing, up and down stairs too,  plugging and unplugging connectors on the instructions of our broadband and landline provider - fair play to EE who answered the phone within seconds which at any time would be good, but in the current difficult situation is outstanding!

The net result is that an engineer is coming to do some (outdoor) work next week. Even though their simple line test indicated that the line was fine, it clearly wasn't, since the woman at the other end could hear the hisses and crackles even while she was talking to me! Meanwhile, with all our phones unplugged, the internet is - just - accessible. And although I have a mobile, the signal here is equally dodgy, so any phonecalls have to be taken at the back of the house. Not quite hanging out of an upstairs window, but it's heading that way ...

Hope lockdown is being kind to you. We feel lucky - and acknowledge this every single day - to be living in a supportive rural community, and to have the blessing of a village shop, a garden and good neighbours. We miss our friends and of course we worry terribly about our son on even more strict lockdown in Barcelona. Although at least he too can work from home so the time passes quickly.

But even without visitors, Easter is happening anyway - and this is still my favourite time of year. The view from the window of the room where I work changes a little every single day, with a haze of green over the trees growing in intensity. My hay fever is growing too, but that's beside the point!

I've another reason to count my blessings. For writers, sitting at home working is a normal condition. And since I've been married to a self employed artist for thirty five years, we're used to working in the same house and avoiding each other if we need to - so to a great extent we're getting on with things and I'm finding the empty year planner quite liberating albeit financially worrying!.

A new novel seems to be underway. Filling my head, at least. More about it in due course. It's the one - contrary to my own expectations - that lots of people have asked me about.


Antique of the Month: My Beloved 'Squire' Piano.

My genuine antique 'B Squire' piano.

Because my new novel, The Posy Ring, due to be published by the ever excellent Saraband in 2018, involves antique dealing, among other things - I thought I would begin to write an 'antique of the month' post. And since I've just had my wonderful old piano tuned, it seems like a good idea to begin with this instrument.

I acquired my upright 'cottage' piano when we first moved to Scotland from Yorkshire, and I've had it since I was twelve years old. That's a very long time, and I love it dearly. I had been learning to play the piano since I was seven years old. My first teacher was a formidable but kindly woman called Miss Ingram who taught at Leeds College of Music in the late 50s. I can remember the head of the college saying that she was an 'iron hand in a velvet glove' and my seven year old self finding this vaguely alarming because she wore little fingerless gloves when she played and taught. The college was in a big and decidedly chilly old building at the end of Wood Lane, in Headingley and I always wondered if the mittens were concealing the iron! She had short grey hair, she wore a faintly Bohemian black velvet jacket over a pleated skirt, she massaged Nivea cream into her hands to keep them supple (the scent of it still takes me back to that time and place) and cleaned her piano keys with milk.

We must have had a piano in the house then, although I don't remember what it was like. But I suspect it had once belonged to my aunt Nora, my mother's much older sister, who was a fine pianist. In fact she had been offered a place at that same college of music to study full time, but she never took it up. Back then 'people like us' - working class people - didn't do things like that, and she  played only for pleasure. Being a good deal older than my mum, she had also - so I'm told - played to accompany the silent movies in the local cinema, when she was still a girl. It was when my mother married my Polish father that things changed, for me at least.

When I was twelve, we moved to Ayrshire and my mother bought me a good piano in the local saleroom. There were two salerooms in the town of Ayr back then, and I can't remember which one it came from but it could easily have been from our single surviving saleroom - the one I visit pretty much every week - Thomas Callan. Mum and dad found me a new music teacher in Ayr and I carried on with my piano lessons until I went off to university in Edinburgh at the age of seventeen, by which time I had reached Grade 7 and was reasonably competent, although I was only ever going to play for fun.


The piano has been tuned by the same person for all those years, a man called Paul Cohen, who is not only a fantastic tuner, who knows all about old instruments, but a brilliant musician in his own right as well. Every time he comes to the house, he marvels at just how good this lovely old piano sounds, because - he says - it IS old. In fact he reckons it dates from the late 1800s! It lives in our cottage sitting room and since the house is much older than the piano, having been built in 1808, and not particularly overheated, the piano seems very happy here.

This time, when he had taken the front off, we examined it more closely, and I took some pictures. The piano was sold by Paterson, Sons and Co but the maker is B Squire - Squire was an old and distinguished London company of piano makers, and when the original Mr Squire died, his wife Betsey took over, in the middle of the 19th century, and thereafter the firm was known as B Squire and Son. Inside, there's a serial number, 17420,  which we can't find anywhere else, but fascinatingly there's also a price of 44 guineas. Which - when you think about what people earned in those days - makes this a very expensive purchase indeed. 

I've played it for many years, sometimes more and sometimes less frequently. Our son had lessons for a couple of years when he was a wee boy, but as his lovely teacher, Lisa Occleston, observed, he was never going to enjoy it much. So when he stopped, I took his lesson slot, to refresh my memory, and a high old time we had every week, while I learned some quite demanding pieces of music. That came to an end when Lisa moved away, and again, I neglected my piano for a while. I always tend to play more in winter than in summer. 

Now I've dug out a heap of music, the piano has been tuned, and I plan to spend a lot more time this winter, refreshing my memory all over again. That's the huge benefit of learning to a certain standard. Even though you neglect it for a while, you don't really forget and can pick it up again with a little application. 

Paul tells me that pianos can hardly be sold these days. Everyone has gone digital. Which seems a pity. When all these gorgeous old instruments have been broken up, they'll probably become valuable all over again. But I wouldn't willingly part with it. And anyway - I don't think we could move it! 



The Physic Garden - Glasgow and Ayr Launches, Coming Soon!

Cover image courtesy of Glasgow Museums
The Physic Garden is, it seems, already 'out there' in paperback. At least that's what some friends and Amazon are telling me (and even sending me pictures to prove it.) But really, the official launch will be on Thursday 27th March, in Waterstones Argyle Street in Glasgow at 7pm and a week later, on Thursday 3rd April, in Ayr's Waterstones at 6.30.  I've been busy inviting friends and acquaintances, and I do hope plenty of people come along.

I'm going to be talking about some of what inspired and lay behind the novel, some of the intensive historical research that went into it and how I feel about my main character, William Lang, who narrates the whole story as an old man looking back on his youth. I'm very fond of him, but there's more to it than that. Actually, I still recall the considered judgement of an 'industry insider' who had better remain nameless that the whole novel was 'just an old man telling his story' which is the kind of remark that burns itself into your heart and stays there, festering slowly. Not even a clutch of excellent reviews and a whole lot of praise can ever quite erase it, although they certainly help!

My publisher Saraband has made a wonderful job of this book - the actual hold-it-in-your-hand artefact  - and the cover, with an image courtesy of the excellent Glasgow Museums, is to die for. This stunning sampler is part of their collection. One of the characters in this literary historical novel, Jenny Caddas, is a fine needlewoman, and in the course of the story she makes an embroidered christening cape. I'm planning to bring a similar cape along to the launches, since I have one in my own textile collection - another source of inspiration, although not the main one.

Now, I'm trying to decide which bits to read out:  just enough to tantalise people into wanting to read more. I've been sitting up late and practising. But really, it's no hardship because I love reading aloud. I suspect most playwrights - and that's what I do when I'm wearing one of my other hats - love reading their work aloud and sometimes even going so far as to act it out. I sometimes think that we're show-offs at heart even though we like to pretend to be quietly self effacing writers.