Some Book Recommendation - Books about European History

 

A little while ago, I wrote this piece for a fairly new site called Shepherd.com 

It was a great pleasure - and certainly related to the massive amount of research I had undertaken, both for my new book, The Last Lancer, about the Polish side of my family, and a previous 'companion' volume, A Proper Person to be Detained, about the Leeds Irish side.

But in considering which books to pick, I was also taken back to the research I had done for my novel The Jewel, about Jean Armour, Robert Burns's longsuffering but largely unsung (except by the poet himself!) wife - and back even further to my radio dramatisation of Stevenson's great adventure story. 

Most writers are very fond of reading so it's good to be able to write about the books that we've loved enough to want to recommend them to other people. 

Listening and Watching - The Price of a Fish Supper

 A couple of weeks ago, MAD Productions staged another handful of performances of my play The Price of a Fish Supper, originally produced at Glasgow's Oran Mor as one of their A Play, A Pie and a Pint series. It's a single hander, i.e. a long monologue and consequently a very 'big learn' for the actor involved, but Ken O'Hara (above) has made the part uniquely his own. 

For me, once he is on stage, he is Rab, the troubled but essentially decent ex-fisherman who hangs about the harbour and tells his tragic (but often very funny) story to whoever will listen. 

It's a play about the long, sad demise of the traditional Scottish fishing industry, a play about friendship and family, about where and how people fit into the world in which they find themselves, and the possibility, or otherwise, of redemption. It's a play that tackles adult themes and pulls no punches. 

Thanks to Ken O'Hara and to Isi Nimmo, who directs, the play has had a long life beyond that first well reviewed production. I've done the occasional after-show Q & A session. Every single time, somebody has asked me or Ken if he ad-libs it. And every time, he points out that, with the exception of the very occasional phrase, it was all written down. Carefully constructed by me. Even down to the way it's written on the page, orchestrated, almost like a long poem. (If you want to see for yourself, it's available here, published by Nick Hern Books.) 

I always wonder if they would ask the same question if I were young and male. I suspect not!

All the same, it's Ken who brings Rab vividly to life. Plays are meant to be experienced in performance. Not as words on a page.

It also makes me think about how Rab first came into my mind, telling me his tale before he told anyone else. Which is what it feels like to write in a single voice like this - you listen and your character speaks.

In the 1970s, I did a postgraduate Masters in Folk Life Studies. My dissertation was on the fishing traditions of the Carrick district of South Ayrshire. I interviewed many elderly fishermen over a period of a year. and their vivid descriptions of the herring fishing have stayed with me ever since. Even more to the point, my husband was once a trawler skipper here in Ayrshire. Eventually, he moved on to skipper charter yachts and then came ashore to work as a woodcarver and artist, but he too had stories to tell. We had and still have friends who worked at the fishing. So there was a certain amount of immersion going on for me - and many of the tales told in the play are certainly based on truth.

After the most recent production of Fish Supper, it struck me that one of the most valuable pieces of writing advice I can give anyone - whether you're aiming to write plays or fiction - is to watch and listen. Watch how people behave. Listen to how they speak.

You have to be fascinated by people. All kinds of people. What they do, what they say and how they say it. 

 

I wrote this poem about perfumes, and one scent in particular, a number of years ago. It has been published in a pamphlet and elsewhere online, but given the subject of my two previous posts, it seems like a good time to resurrect it. 

THE SCENT OF BLUE

 

A concert in Edinburgh, years ago.

She manages to find a single seat.

Two people sweep past, ushered by the

front of house manager in his dark suit.

She sees a famous conductor,

silver haired, sharp featured like some

bird of prey, but smaller than you would

expect, in evening dress.

On his arm a thin woman,

taller than he is, strides with

striking face and hair, a cloud of

grey blonde curls around her head.

Not a young woman but a

diva surely, inhabiting her clothes,

inhabiting her skin with such confidence.

She wants to be like that some day,

longs for self possession.

And she remembers the scent of her,

musky, mysterious, a heavy, night time

scent, like flowers after dark.

The scent of passion.

The scent of money.

The scent of blue.

 

She searches for the scent for years. 

Her mother wore Tweed.

Now she wishes she could

open a wardrobe door, and

smell her mother’s plain sweet scent,

almost as much as she

wishes she could tell her mother so.

 

As a girl, she wears Bluebell,

fresh and full of hope, or

Diorissimo, like the lilac she once

carried through the streets,

on her way from meeting a man

she desired and admired, thinking

Girl with Lilac, still so young,

self conscious, not possessed.

 

Later, she tries l’Air du Temps and

Je Reviens and Fleurs de Rocaille

but they are none of them the scent of blue.

She wears Chanel, briefly, with dreams of Marilyn,

loves to watch her, loves to hear her voice,

satisfying as chocolate or olives but

Number Five is not her scent, never suits her, never will.

 

She discovers Mitsouko.

Some tester in some chemist’s shop somewhere.

An old, old fashioned scent,

syncopated, unexpected, not to every taste.

When she wears it,

women ask her what it is,

I love your scent they say.

How strange the way scent lingers in the mind. 

How strange the way scent

changes on warm skin.

On her it ripens to something

peachy, mossy, rich and rare.

But it is not the scent of blue.

She loses her heart.

It is an affair of  telephone lines,

more profound, more sweet and

bitter than Mitsouko,

a sad song in the dark,

and the colour of that time is blue.

 

Afterwards, she searches through

Bellodgia, Apres L’Ondee, Nuit de Noel, Apercu

Until drawn by nostalgia

She finds Joy,

dearly bought  roses and jasmine,

a summer garden in one small bottle.

She loves Joy.

She marries in Joy.

She wears Mitsouko

and she forgets the scent of blue.

 

Older, she glances in her mirror and only

sometimes likes what she sees.

She finds Arpege,

not just  rose and jasmine but

 bergamot, orange blossom, peach, vanilla, ylang ylang,

one essence piled on another like the notes on the piano she

used to, sometimes still does, play.

Oh this is not a scent for the very young.

It is too dark for that,

a memory of something  lost,

an unfinished story.

This scent has a past.

 

She sees him across a room.

Another woman ushers him,

this way and that, makes introductions,

a little charmed the way women

always were charmed by this man.

It used to make her smile the way

women flocked around this

man who belonged to

nobody but himself.

 

She is wearing Arpège.

Not a scent for the very young,

vertiginous as the layers of time between.

With age comes wisdom,

but like mud stirred at the bottom of a  pool,

memories bubble to the surface.

Not wisely but too well they loved.

Now, they are waving across a

chasm of years.

They speak in measured tones,

they speak and walk away,

they speak again in careful words, that

every now and then

recall the scent of

 

No.

It will not do.

Only innocently in dreams

can one recapture that

first fine careless

 

So much more is forgotten

Than is ever remembered.

And the clock insists

let it be let it be.

 

1911

One summer evening

a young man observes the way twilight closes the flowers,

whose scent lingers on the last heat of the day,

the way the light goes out of the sky,

painting it dark blue, how

soon the war will tear this place apart.

How soon all things resort to sadness.

 

In a new century,

She finds among jasmine and rose,

vanilla and violet,

a dark twist of anise, like the

twist of a knife.

First last always.

The scent of the diva.

The scent of passion.

Fine beyond imagining.

She sees it is essentially

sad, sad, sad, a

sad scent:

L’Heure Bleue.

All things come to sadness in the end.

The beautiful bitter foolish scent of blue.

Catherine Czerkawska

 

 PS All my content is free, but if you like what I write, then maybe you would enjoy one of my books. There are links to most of them on here. You are welcome to share content but only if you attribute it to me, and link to my blog. Thank-you!

 

Perfumes I've Loved - Part Two

 Continuing my trawl back through perfumes I've loved  - I flirted with various floral perfumes as well as my favourite chypres:  Diorissimo and Champs Elysees (my Guerlain habit again) to name a couple. Champs Elysees is, like so many lovely scents, hard to find now, but it used to be readily and not too expensively available in those cut price toiletry chains. 

Another Guerlain favourite, until they stopped producing it, was one of their Aqua Allegoria range (gorgeous bottles too!) - Ylang and Vanille - a lovely, light scent with something of the hippy sixties about it. 

For a while, I wore Lanvin's Arpege - first produced in 1927. I still love it but it has to be the vintage version: flowery, powdery, green, a very classy scent that sits well on my skin and that comes in a beautiful black bottle.

That's another thing you need to know about scents. Something that suits one person may not suit you at all. You need to wear it and give it time. Don't be in too much of a hurry.

More recently, Aldi's Jo Malone Dupes have given me a lot of fun. I have them, and sometimes wear them, but they're not my favourites, although their room fragrances are lovely. I love neroli and M & S did a number of genuine Italian orange blossom scents for a while, but they've cut back on their range. Very fortuitously I discovered that their Neroli Riviera - still available and not too expensive - not only smells lovely, but keeps the Scottish midgies away too! 

My current day to day favourite is Calandre by Paco Rabanne. Launched in 1969, it's like nothing else. Fragrantica , my go-to site for perfumes, describes it as a 'floral aldehyde'  and goes on to describe it:  'Top notes are Aldehydes, Green Notes and Bergamot; middle notes are Rose, Lily-of-the-Valley, Orris Root, Hyacinth, Geranium and Jasmine; base notes are Oakmoss, Vetiver, Musk, Sandalwood and Amber' which sounds like a complex mish mash but is, essentially, quite heavenly! 

It's an evocative scent for me because it was given to me many years ago by the mother of a lovely Catalan lad who stayed us for a couple of summers while he improved his English and learned about the family business. She send a parcel of gifts afterwards, among which was a bottle of Calandre - I recently rediscovered it and was taken right back to what was a very happy time. 

That's what scent does. It can take you back in time, or sometimes, magically, into somebody else's life. 

Useful for a writer.

Finally - my all-time favourite is Guerlain's L'Heure Bleue. The Blue Hour. 

I first smelled this at a concert when I was in my early 20s. An older woman, stylish, elegant, drifted past me on the arm of a famous conductor, and left behind a faint trace of the most wonderful, exotic perfume I had ever smelled. I had no idea what it was. Many years later, I found it. Guerlain's own website calls it the 'fragrance of suspended time' and so it is. Dating from 1912, it is evocative of 'that time of day when day embraces night and silence fully envelopes the world ... a moment of stillness and grace tinted with deep blue.'

If I could afford it, I'd wear it all the time. Instead, I hoard my vintage bottles and use it sparingly. We had a friend, no longer with us, who - whenever he visited us - would ask me to fetch down a bottle of this scent so that he could smell it! I love it so much that I wrote a poem about it. I've posted the poem online before, but I'll post it again. Watch this space.

 

                             

PS All my content is free, but if you like what I write, then maybe you would enjoy one of my books! There are links to most of them on here. 

Perfumes I've Loved - Part One

II est de forts parfums pour qui toute matière

Est poreuse. On dirait qu'ils pénètrent le verre.

Baudelaire

(There are strong perfumes for which all matter

Is porous. One would say they go through glass.)

Some of my favourites.

I've loved so many perfumes, but especially vintage scents. In fact I probably get as much pleasure from perfumes as I do from reading. But perhaps it's just that, as a writer, I love stories, and so many fragrances have a tale to tell that - like all the best stories - reveals itself slowly. 

My go-to site for finding out about scents and their history is Fragrantica, and I link to it often on this post, but there are plenty of serious perfume blogs out there, if you care to look for them.

The first perfume I really became aware of was Lentheric's Tweed - in its original formulation, which dates from the 1930s. The later reformulation was a thin imitation, but my mum wore the original, sparingly because money was tight. 

Every Christmas my dad would buy her a bottle of the 'eau de parfum', beautifully packaged, in a little bottle with its characteristic 1950s wooden top. I remember the excitement of going with him to buy it, a day or two before Christmas. I have a few old bottles of it still, acquired here and there online, and although vintage scents like this can take a while to settle down on your skin, give it time and the true scent emerges. It reminds me of my pretty mum. After she died, all her best clothes still had a faint scent of Tweed. A woody, earthy, oakmossy, spicy scent and - yes - something of the scent of heather, which suited mum down to the ground.

Scents, loosely, fall into two categories - those in which chypres predominate (Tweed is one of them) and floral. So many modern fragrances, especially those to which celebrities lend their names, tend to be flowery. No bad thing if they're made with genuine flower oils and essences, but chypres are a lot more grown up! My aunt, whom I loved, wore Coty's Chypre back then, and as soon as I could, I begged or borrowed a bottle and dabbed it on too - another warm, dry, woody, mossy scent and not too expensive in the 1950s and 60s. 

I would just love to get my hands (and my nose) on one of those beautiful old bottles of Coty's Chypre because I know the scent would not just go through glass, but through time as well, carrying me back to my childhood and teenage years - but this rare vintage scent is fiendishly expensive. Even the empty bottles are little works of art. 

That's the thing about good elderly scents - even though they may smell a bit odd at first, those are just the so called 'top notes'. Most old scents, made with precious ingredients, will survive. Give them time and most of them will reveal their true selves, the scents of the past. As a historical novelist, I think that's another reason why I like them so much. 

During my twenties, I spent money I could ill afford on perfumes. 

I acquired - I've no idea how - a bottle of something called Fleurs de Rocaille, launched in 1934, but although I was intrigued by it, it didn't suit me - far too sophisticated for the person I was back then. I also loved Je Reviens by Worth - another old scent, a floral this time, but with a glamorous musky base and once again, nothing like the miserable modern reformulation. But it was an unlucky scent for me. Every time I wore it, my love life went disastrously wrong, so I began to avoid it! 

Penhaligon's Bluebell was my favourite when I was a student, generally a prized birthday gift and not something I could afford to buy for myself. I have an old bottle in my collection and still splash it on from time to time in spring, but it's a springtime scent in more ways than one, and seems too young for me now. Still love its distinct fragrance of hyacinths though. Another scent my mother loved - a floral this time but a spicy one - was Blue Carnation by Roger & Gallet - a true clove carnation scent. I remember wearing it myself for a while, so it must have been affordable back then, or perhaps I borrowed mum's, but it is, alas, long gone and the few surviving bottles command truly eye watering prices these days, even on eBay. 

In my twenties and thirties, Guerlain's legendary Mitsouko - another chypre, fruity and delicious and mysterious - was a revelation. For a while I could appreciate it only by going into the perfume departments of expensive stores and dousing myself in it - then walking about and inhaling it. I still love it. It's a long lasting scent and even the cologne, liberally applied for an evening out, will be with you the following morning, a faint but evocative scent, like a memory of something wonderful. 

Later, I was lucky enough to acquire a big beautiful bottle of the eau de toilette on eBay and I'm still working my way through it. (The eau de parfum is even nicer if you can find the vintage version.) It never loses its potency. It is, I have to admit, rather too powerful a scent for everyday use - and those with allergies might not like it at all - which probably explains why I have quite a lot of it left.

I spend so much of my time sitting at a desk, working on a PC, inhabiting other worlds. Sometimes I just like to wear the scent that suits what I'm working on. Mostly, you see, I just wear it for me. Perfumes for which all matter is porous. What a wonderful, uncanny thought that is.

  

Vintage Lanvin

 

Next time, I'll write about L'Heure Bleu - my all time favourite. You may even get a poem as well.

PS All my content is free, and free of advertising. But if you like what I write, then maybe you would enjoy one of my books! There are links to most of them on here. 

NHS - Failing Gradually Then Suddenly

Should I resort to Culpepper?

About seven weeks ago, I was in a tearing hurry over something, tripped, fell and in the process managed to crack my head on a door frame. I didn't 'have a fall'. (Have you noticed how they always say older people have 'had a fall' as though there was a certain inevitability about it.)  I just had an accident. I didn't lose consciousness, but I did have a large egg shaped bump on my head, which was sore but pretty soon faded. Then, a few weeks later, I started to get pains in my neck, just below where I'd hit my head. They were quite mild at first so I used ibuprofen gel. 

They got worse. 

Some ten days ago, my neck and shoulder became so painful that I was interspersing paracetamol with ibuprofen every couple of hours. It was like extreme toothache - the pain you get when you have an abscess, only relocated elsewhere. I did a lot of night time reading but very little sleeping.

Worried, I phoned my medical practice. The best they could offer me was a telephone appointment with a nurse practitioner in a couple of days time. I took it, carried on taking the pills, and then had a brief chat with her. I pointed out the crack on the head and wondered if I needed an X-Ray. She suggested that because the pain was so acute, I should go to A & E. I waited an hour to see the triage nurse. 

'We can't help you,' she said. 

I'm not blaming her. She was under strict orders. 'Nothing to do with the bump on the head. It was too long ago. You've probably turned the wrong way in bed.' I was close to tears by this point, between the weeks of pain, the worry and the lack of sleep, so she went out to speak to a doctor and came back within seconds. 'He says it's nothing to do with the bump on the head. It's not your fault. You shouldn't have been sent here. You need to go home and phone your GP again. They have emergency appointments.'

This was about 10.30 in the morning. There were six people in the waiting room. 'It would be six hours before you could see a doctor anyway' she said, briskly. On the way out, a stressed elderly woman grabbed my arm and said 'it's a disgrace, that's what it is.'

I should probably point out here that I have never, not once, been into A & E on my own behalf before. Only with my mum when she had terminal cancer. I tend to ignore problems and assume they will go away. On the way home, I tried to call the GP several times but it was always engaged. 

Fortunately my husband was driving. And even more fortunately, there was a traffic jam which meant that we took a detour and stopped at a village pharmacy where a kindly pharmacist listened to me with sympathy. 'It sounds like a trapped nerve and it can be excruciating,' she said. She suspected that it might indeed have to do with the bump on the head, since it had gradually been building ever since. She had several useful suggestions. She gave me more painkillers, suggested that very gentle yoga exercises might be a good thing, and thought I might try Tiger Balm. She also suggested that I should persevere in trying to see a GP, but that if it did turn out to be nerve compression, an osteopath might be the answer. Tiger Balm, surprisingly, helped. Ibuprofen helped too, but I had to stop taking it after a day or two because it was upsetting my stomach,

I followed her suggestions as far as possible, and the acute pain abated just enough for me to sleep, with the aid of Nytol. That was more than a week ago. The pain has now mutated into something a little more bearable but just as unpleasant. Like a series of intense, exceedingly weird electric shocks through my neck and head as well as very painful and tender skin, with no evidence of any inflammation on the surface. The 'shocks' come and go throughout the day. It's wearing me down.

Last week, I got through to the GP practice, but was told that it would be a couple of weeks before I could see one of the four GPs face to face. By dint of polite pleading, I got a phone appointment with an actual doctor for next Tuesday. 

On the same day, with desperation setting in, I contacted a private clinic recommended by a friend and now I have an appointment with a fully qualified osteopath on Monday afternoon. When I told them the history of this injury, they too suspected that the bump on the side of the head might well have something to do with it, and the pain and other symptoms sounded like nerve compression. 

We'll see. It's going to cost me money we can ill afford, but I can't go on like this, and the NHS has - so far - been no help at all. 

Throughout my adult life, I've been lucky enough to be reasonably fit, and seldom needed to visit a GP, so I don't think I had realised just how poor the service had become, although I had heard similar or infinitely worse tales from friends. 

I'm old enough to remember when you could go to your doctor's surgery and wait to be seen. The doctor knew you, your family, your situation, your medical history. Unless you could get there early, you might have to wait a couple of hours. but he would see everyone in the surgery. It was hard cheese if you needed to get to work, but it was a valid excuse. If somebody arrived in acute pain, or obviously very ill, they would jump the queue. If you were too ill to come to the surgery, the doctor would visit you at home later or - as a last resort - call an ambulance for you himself. The last doctor to do this in our town retired when our son was very young - more than thirty years ago. For a while the new health centre with its appointment system worked reasonably well. Until it didn't. 

'Gradually then suddenly,' to quote Hemingway.

I don't know exactly what has gone wrong. Who does?  13 years of Tories? Money? Staffing? Brexit? Some deadly combination of all these things? Too many patients and too few doctors? I've just checked on the practice website. There are four doctors, two advanced nurse practitioners, a practice nurse, a staff nurse, a 'health care assistant', a practice manager and eight medical administrators. 

There are two practices in this smallish town. 

But knowing just how much of my own time is taken up with the demands of the (cue hollow laugh) 'paper free office' in which admin for a house and two micro-businesses, my own and my husband's, seems to take a million times longer than it ever did in the olden days - I sometimes wonder if the systems have just got completely out of hand and overriden considerations of patient care. In much the same way, with less disastrous consequences, as the Scottish Book Trust now seems to have more than 70 staff members to 'support Scotland's writers' while Creative Scotland has roughly the same number. All doing what? Admin? Create a space and the demands of bureaucracy will expand to fill it, like cavity wall insulation. 

And you know what the worst of it is? It's everything. All this admin doesn't work. None of it really works. Nothing including the NHS, education, the Post Office, the police, the water companies, transport, local government, banking  - nothing works the way it should. 

If we paid a small sum to see a GP as people do in many EU countries, would it make a difference? Or would it just compound the problems? I have no answers to these questions. When I do, very occasionally, get to see a GP, I find them as helpful, as kind, as my old GP ever was. So that isn't where the problem lies. But as far as access to resources go, we compare very badly with our European neighbours. 

All I know is that, sadly, the elderly NHS, 75 years old,  is showing her age. She has grown confused and forgetful, weary and uncommunicative, and those of us who love her are finding her increasingly difficult to access when we badly need her help and advice. She is, in short, falling apart at the seams, and we're falling apart with her. Whether she is now beyond saving is up for debate but the alternative is too hideous for all but the wealthy to contemplate. 

PS

I've now seen an (excellent) osteopath and in a few days I'll be seeing an (also excellent, caring) doctor. The condition hasn't gone away, but it's improving a little. It's clear that the problem doesn't lie with the health professionals. It lies, sadly, with the systems surrounding them. The professionals are like those musicians, valiantly playing on, while the Titanic is sinking around them. 

The Last Lancer, Now Published in the USA

 

On 11th July The Last Lancer will be published in the USA and I'm really hoping that the Polish diaspora, many of whom are US based, will get behind it. This is mainly because so many of my Polish friends, here in Scotland, have told me that reading it reminded them of their own fathers and grandfathers, the pre-war childhood and tragic wartime experiences they seldom spoke about. People would tell me how they wished that they had asked their parents about the past, but so often hesitated, and now regretted all those stories left untold. 

These good friends were in my mind as I researched and wrote this book. I did ask my father, thank heavens, although he died much too young, back in 1995. I still miss him. Still wish I could chat to him. Walk with him. Hug him. Nevertheless, he wrote all kinds of vivid and fascinating details down for me. Later, I visited Poland myself, worked there for a year, and managed to piece together even more of the story. 

With my dad in 1950s Yorkshire.

My father, Julian Czerkawski was born in 1926 near Lwow, in Polish Galicia, on his father's large and fairly prosperous estate. He was the son of a Polish lancer - one of the celebrated cavalrymen who inherited the legacy of the famous 'winged hussars'. For hundreds of years, they had made their home in these heavily disputed borderlands. It seemed to me, hearing and reading about it later, as though these were people who were living on the slopes of a volcano. Dormant but rumbling away. 

The Czerkawski family in 1926 -
my grandfather in the centre.

 War devastated the family in ways which are seldom fully understood, here in the UK. Fortunate to   escape with his life, Dad eventually made his way to England as a refugee, an 'alien' as they were   called. Poland might as well have been outer space. His identity papers reveal that under 'next of kin' he had entered a Polish phrase that means 'closest family to nobody.' He was fortunate to meet and marry my Leeds Irish mother. (You can read about her family story in my book called A Proper Person to be Detained.) But an ache remained for the people and places of his childhood, even if he spoke of them only rarely.

In 2022, Putin's war in Ukraine and the sight of refugees passing through Lviv, formerly Lwow, added urgency to my desire to uncover something of what had been lost a generation before.

This book is the result, a book that Neal Ascherson, expert on the history of Poland and Ukraine, has called 'very moving and intensely interesting.'

Sadly, there is a sense in which Poland is still, for most people here in the UK, a 'faraway place with strange sounding names'. But perhaps for that wider Polish diaspora  (20 million people worldwide) especially in the USA, it will fill some achingly large gaps in people's family history. 

I do hope so. 

Meanwhile, I would dearly love to find a US and/or Polish publisher who would be interested in translating and publishing this book in Polish. Enquiries here in the UK have so far failed to elicit any interest. There seems to be an inability to understand the nature of the shifting borders in this part of the world, which results in an equally fixed inability to understand that this is a book about Ukraine too. It is also a book that goes some way towards explaining why Ukrainians fleeing Putin's war received such a warm welcome from Poles. We knew. We understood. We felt for and with them.

Please feel free to contact me for further information about the book.

If you're interested in translation rights, do please contact my publisher Saraband.  

The Winger Hussars by Alan Lees

Whatever Happened to Creative Writing?

 

Edinburgh days.

The writing career I embarked on many years ago seems unrecognisable to me now. I studied English Language and Literature at Edinburgh University where there was a thriving community of young people who wrote in their spare time or who just loved literature, poetry, theatre, for itself and not as a means to an end, not as a way to promote 'wellbeing' or primarily as a way to tackle various 'issues' - although we did write about issues that seemed important to us. But the practice itself, the 'doing' was the thing. We seemed to enjoy books, plays, poems with less angst, less fear of censure, more freedom to just be ourselves. Sensitivity readers were unknown. Beta readers were unknown. We wrote because we needed to write, loved to write. We learned by writing a lot, and by working with a trusted editor or - in the case of drama - with a trusted director. And if that seems like nostalgia, maybe it is.

A friend of mine organised poetry festivals and they were sold out. Young people came along in droves to listen to poets. The vast majority of my fellow students were, like me, from comprehensive schools. Years later, when I was working at another Scottish university, they organised a poetry event, with a few well known poets. Even with the benefit of social media, hardly anyone came. An experienced and successful playwright, working in the department for a while, generously offered one to one advice sessions to students on film and theatre courses. Again, nobody came. He couldn't understand it and neither could I.

It sometimes seems as though the focus on the formality of the actual courses, the pressing need to get the degree at the end of it, means that the joy in actual creative practice has disappeared.

The original Writers in Residence schemes meant that a writer with a certain level of experience would be given a residency at a university, and would be expected to do some hours of teaching. This would normally be a mixture of workshops, tutorials, one to one advice sessions and the very occasional lecture which would often be open to the public. Writers were autonomous and organised their own timetables. It would be no more than, for example, 15 or 20 hours per week, including preparation time, but the salary would be for 30 or 40 hours, so it was assumed that the writer would have a room of their own and about 20 hours of paid time to write. When I was at Edinburgh, Norman MacCaig was writer in residence, with Robert Garioch before him. They were there to encourage creative writing within the student body, and they usually did. 

As the years went by, there was a sort of 'mission creep'. You started to hear that universities were taking advantage, paying for 15 hours, expecting 30. The paid 'time to write' practically disappeared. On new campuses, individual rooms were hard to come by. At some new campuses, lecturers' rooms were often shared and (appallingly, even though I love my Kindle!) without bookshelves. 

Partly to address this problem, partly, I think, to raise its profile, Creative Writing became an academic subject. I remember that the change was just beginning as I was finishing my Masters in the 70s. Now there are degrees in Creative Writing all over the place, but these courses are - in my opinion - seldom practical enough. The Uni Guide admits that 'unemployment rates are currently looking quite high overall, with salaries on the lower side.' Typical graduate job areas, the site goes on to admit, are as 'sale assistants and retail cashiers.'  

Many graduates emerge into ever more shark infested publishing waters, thinking they are going to get an agent and a deal, but few do. And nobody ever seems to tell them that getting an agent won't even guarantee getting a publisher.

I saw an ad for a so called Writer in Residence for Edinburgh University a few years ago and realised that Norman MacCaig, arguably one of Scotland's finest poets, wouldn't have been qualified to apply, because the position required a degree in Creative Writing. That seemed to me to encapsulate what writing at university level has become. This is nothing to do with quality or talent, because many of these lecturers will be very talented indeed. Writing pays so little nowadays that most of us have to do something else to make ends meet. (Sometimes as sales assistants and retail cashiers!) But once you subject your creativity, your words and ideas, to the kind of rigorous academic analysis demanded by these courses, it can disappear like snow off a dyke. It's not the teaching that's the problem. I taught EFL for several years and wrote plenty while I was doing it. It's the intensive and persistent involvement in other people's creativity that can damage your own.

Every year a handful of graduates will get publishing deals, but many more won't, and even those who do will seldom make any money. Which wouldn't matter too much, as long as they loved what they did and used it elsewhere. I was astonished some years ago when speaking to a class of young people doing a Creative Writing course, to find that only two or three of them ever did any writing of their own, (nor even much reading) beyond the amount prescribed by the course. They had none of the passion for the work that dedicated writers, young and old, still have. The desperate compulsion to write.  Which made me think that they might have been better doing a good general arts course and reading widely - as we did back when we still queued for cheap theatre tickets, went to poetry festivals and - if we were so inclined - wrote whatever we liked, obsessively, whenever we could.

Fine Bears for Sale

 

It's no secret that I love old teddy bears. Especially my own old bears, Mr Tubby and Teddy Robinson that are almost as old as me. You can see them in the picture at the bottom of the page. Mr Tubby (in red) is a Chiltern Hugmee and Teddy Robinson is (I think) an even older and very threadbare Chad Valley ted. Very well loved. Others have joined the family over the years including an original 'Gabrielle' Paddington Bear, complete with his 'please look after this bear' label - a 21st birthday gift from my parents, and all the more precious for that. 

These days, trying hard not to acquire any more bears for myself, because we just don't have the space, I still occasionally buy them for rehoming. It's so nice to rescue them and sell them on to 'arctophiles' like me. The two most recent acquisitions above have obviously been much loved in their lifetimes. The bear on the left of the picture is a very old and large  Merrythought ted - he has his Merrythought button in his ear, and the company only copied Steiff in using ear buttons for a short time. The bear on the left is - we think - a German bear, but we don't know the maker. Not a Steiff but with certain recognisable features of old German bears, including a protruding, shaved muzzle, a very solid body, small ears and quite large pads to his feet. He also has a growler - sort of! He grunts in protest every time you tip him up. 

They'll be for sale in our Etsy Store very soon. We sell my husband's art and my antiques and collectables on there - in my case as a way of helping to fund and to buy time for the thing I love even more than teddy bears - my writing! 

Teddy Robinson and Mr Tubby -
definitely not for sale!

My Late Neighbour's Rose

 

This has been a very good year for roses. A warm dry June helped, and this old white rose has done incredibly well this summer. It's still flowering - just. 

It reminds me of my late neighbour, Mary Mackenzie, who gave it to me from her own garden. She called it the Jacobite Rose - not the small, sweet, wild rose of Scotland, but (I think) Rosa Alba which is also known as the white rose of York. Certainly a rose that has been cultivated in Europe since ancient times. 

It had grown very leggy over the years and I pruned it back quite a bit but it seems to have had a new lease of life this year.

Mary had several of these in her garden, along with masses of daffodils in early spring - she used to give me huge bunches of them to take up to the village cemetery after my mum and dad died - and then a little later on lots of crimson tulips and poppies.

She was one of the first female graduates in accountancy from Glasgow University. She was still doing accounts well into her eighties, including ours, and I vividly remember her finding an error on the self employed tax return (back when these forms were on paper) and phoning the Revenue to tell them. 'Oh no, Mrs Mackenzie,' they said. 'That couldn't happen.' But she was right. And many forms had to be recalled. 

She was formidably intelligent and formidably intrepid. Her husband, Bill, had been on the 1953 ascent of Everest, and although he wasn't with the party that got to the summit, he did reach the camp just below the peak. As a world class ski-er, he had also been involved in helping scientists to escape Nazi occupied Norway and had run training sessions for troops in the Highlands. But no shrinking violet herself, Mary had been a spy in German occupied France, had gone on many expeditions to remote parts of the world, and had survived a plane crash by crawling several miles through inhospitable terrain with a broken leg. 

When Bill died,  Mary was determined to walk up the hill with the funeral procession, but - then in her eighties - nabbed a lift in the funeral car half way up. 'I said I'd go on with him to the end,' she said to me, mischievously, 'But this might be a bridge too far!' 

I miss her and her wisdom. When, during her own memorial service, some years later, the minister alluded to her bravery during the war, we breathed a sigh of relief, because somebody had been spreading malicious rumours that this was untrue, that she was 'just an old dear, imagining things.'

Well, she was very dear to us, but she hadn't imagined or made up her extraordinary life. It's sad that sometimes, you only find out exactly what people have been and done at their funerals. 

We are all so much more than what we become. You only need to ask.