Another lump of wind is blowing through, and the QEII bridge at Dartford is shut again. Lucky we didn't want to go anywhere. The gale was forecast, and I hadn't picked up the camellia pots since the previous one, on the basis that they'd be better off lying down. My chest is worse too. It's a nice question whether that is my own fault, for going out yesterday, or if it would have got worse anyway. I suppose to find out you'd need to get a large number of volunteers to keep a diary each time they caught a cold, recording the duration and severity of each symptom (tight chest, sore throat, streaming nose, sinus pain, swollen glands, lethargy, enhanced stupidity) and what they did during that period (level of physical exertion, time spent outside, ambient temperature, exposure to air conditioning, stress level, diet) and see if you can find any statistically significant connections. In the meantime everyone will go on believing what they want to believe, so I believe that activity is fine as long as you feel like it (because inactivity is dull), and somebody I used to work with always claimed to know who had given her the cold (which given that she travelled by public transport twice a day was quite a feat).
At least I have the Christmas books. I've finished Katherine Swift's The Morville Year, a series of short essays about her garden based on her Times column. The garden, which she created around an old and distinguished house leased from the National Trust, is beautiful and elaborate, with clipped evergreens, old roses, trained fruit, areas of long grass, bees in old fashioned WBC hives, formal pools and a turf maze. Her prose is beautiful and elaborate as well, something to be taken a few bites at a time, like a box of very rich and expensive chocolates, rather than gobbled down in one sitting (like maltesers). It was written to be read in small weekly doses, so that's fair enough, and it's much posher than anything I could do myself, as is the garden. A nice book. A paperback edition will be coming out in March.
Now I've turned my attention to Designing the Seaside by Fred Gray. I'm not sure how I became aware of this one. It's been out since 2006, and still has no reviews on Amazon. I think it probably came up on a 'people who bought X also bought Y' Amazon initiated search, and I thought the subject sounded interesting. I like the seaside. Childhood outings were to Exmouth or Sidmouth more frequently than to the more iconic Dartmoor, and looking through the index of Designing the Seaside, the Systems Administrator and I have visited the following seaside resorts (that is 'visited' in the sense of having spent some time looking at them, rather than having driven through them on the way to somewhere else (Great Yarmouth) or used the marina overnight and pushed off first thing in the morning (Poole)): Blankenberghe, Bournemouth, Brighton, Brixham, Clacton-on-Sea, Cromer, Eastbourne, Llandudno, Ostend, Paignton, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Ramsgate, Scarborough, Southwold, St Ives, Wells-next-the-Sea and Weymouth. He doesn't mention Aldeburgh, Bridlington or Whitstable, but I think they count as Seaside (Designed) as well. I'm not sure about Whitby, or if it is more of a Port.
Designing the Seaside starts off with the development of Brighton as a resort and takes it from there, looking at seaside architecture, who went to the seaside, what they did, how it was marketed, and why it declined in the UK. The book contains some interesting stuff, both facts and ideas, and is generously illustrated with really good pictures, of old photographs, contemporary drawings, postcards, promotional posters and leaflets. It reads slightly stiffly, not with the easy narrative trot of a popular historian like Peter Hennessey or David Kynaston, and I began to wonder who Fred Gray was, and if he might possibly be a sociologist. I tracked him down easily enough at the University of Sussex, where he is Emeritus Professor of Continuing Education. That didn't really tell me a lot. Prior to that he was The Academic Director of Local and Regional Relationships, and before that the Dean of the Sussex Institute, which included the Centre for Continuing Education and the Departments of Education, Law and Social Work. Finally I discovered that by training he is a geographer. He must be astute in the dark arts of university politics, because despite being Emeritus he still has an office in university premises (Centre for Community Engagement).
I actually loved Geography at school. I know it is not considered a real subject by rigorous academics, because it is all little bits borrowed from other disciplines, like geology, soil science, economics, history, archaeology, climate study, architecture and sociology (though if you take that attitude to geography you probably don't count sociology a real subject either). I don't mind that at all. The fashion for at least the past half century has been for experts to know more and more about increasingly narrow specialisms. We need some people who will hazard a view about how the specialisms fit together. And I would recommend Designing the Seaside, if you are interested in that sort of thing, though the pictures are better than the prose.
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