a lovely day

The postman brought us a letter that wasn't for us.  It had a postcode on it, not ours, and the name of a road, not the road where we live.  The only detail that matched our address was that the house had the same name.  I was irritated enough to find a post office website where I could register an official complaint.  It happens too often, that we get mail that is clearly addressed to the neighbours, or mail addressed to any other house called the same as ours in the CO postcode area.  It is difficult, philosophically speaking, to know what mail we haven't received.  I'm currently short two sets of concert tickets, and hoping the LSO really will sort that out on the door as easily as they say they can, and have previously missed a monthly subscription magazine (though to even things out the postman has in the past brought me two of those addressed to other people), but who knows which of my friends, relatives or acquaintances I've offended by failing to reply to something they sent me, which I never received?  From now on I am going to complain every time, and if I don't get satisfaction there's always the nuclear option of contacting You and Yours.

Apart from that it was a very beautiful day.  The Systems Administrator hadn't heard of Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, or Beyond The Tower, John Marriott's history of East London (the latter was something of a joint present, but it's traditional we give each other at least one book we want to read ourselves.  Anyway, it gives us something to talk about) and seemed pleased with both.  Target Tirpitz had featured on the radar, but not to the extent of buying it yet, so that was a mixture of something already on the SA's wish list, and some total surprises.  I still think Amazon's search algorithms are marvellous, and the reader comments give a fair idea what a book is like, even if you don't agree with their conclusions.  If I had gone into the best independent bookshop in Britain and said that I wanted books for somebody who was interested in cricket, railway history, the visual imagery of twentieth century soviet Russia, the history of London and the second world war, I don't see how they could have come up with recommendations for all of them off the top of their heads.  Suggesting the latest Max Hastings doesn't count.

There are so many jobs needing doing in the garden, it was a toss-up where to start, but I settled on Strulching the borders where the bulb foliage is lengthening by the day, while it was still upright enough for me to shake the mulch down between the leaves.  I've used nearly six of my 25 bags on the last pallet in two days, which makes me wonder if I should have gone for 50 bags and got a cheaper price per bag.  However, when I come to the end of the areas I've recently weeded the rate of application will slow, and the Strulch gradually goes damp and rather solid in its bags if not stored under cover (and I don't have anywhere) and is easier to apply when dry.  Also, the bulk bags physically degrade over time.  I discovered this empirically when I was using the last of my previous order, which had hung around the end of the house for months.  As I dragged it down the stairs by the conservatory the bag disintegrated spectacularly, spilling damp mineralised straw over the steps and my feet.

The Systems Administrator celebrated the beautiful day by letting the chickens out for a yomp in the afternoon.  The new little hens didn't want to come out of their run, but as soon as the older hen and the rooster saw the chicken gates go across the way up to the meadow and the back garden, which are there to encourage them to stay in the front garden and make the chicken minder's life easier, they went running to the outside door of the run, ready for their turn in the garden.  They haven't been let out since late November, and I could work out the date because it was the day I got the rose thorn in my knuckle.  After that it got too cold to sit with them, and then we were both ill, and couldn't face minding them.  Today they were very happy, and fussed about the herb bed plucking beakfuls of greenery.  We had to buy some eggs, me for my lunch party and the SA for Cheltenham week cooked breakfasts, and the bought ones are anaemic looking things with pale yellow yolks, compared to those produced by our own hens.  With fresh parsley and lemon balm in their diet the eggs should now be even better.

bookish pleasures

Last night I managed to do something I've never done before, and delete the task bar from my laptop.  This mystified the Systems Administrator, who asked what on earth I'd been doing, and I said nothing except try to open Windows Explorer.  The SA had to resort to the nuclear option of temporarily removing the battery.  The SA is not a fan of Windows 7.  One friend who is a Mac user says we should convert, but I couldn't face the hassle, unless I had to.

What I was trying to do was get into Amazon to buy something for my Kindle.  I was given the Kindle in the autumn for my birthday, and was thrilled with it (when the bewildered eastern European delivery driver finally managed to find our house), but the other books I was given at the same time kept me going until December, and the SA and I have a pact not to buy ourselves books in the run up to birthdays and Christmas, so once I'd finished Andrew Rawnsley's history of the last years of the Labour government on the Kindle I didn't like to get anything else.

I did download some poetry, some free and some very cheap.  Cheap poetry on Kindle turned out not to be a good idea, as the budget edition of the poems and prose of Ernest Dowson dispensed with the lines in the poetry and ran each verse together into a single paragraph.  I think that is down to inappropriate use of text recognition software, as distinct from scanning images into electronic book form.

Amazon are missing a trick when it comes to sales for Kindles, though I dare say they are working on it, because it still doesn't seem to be possible to buy a download as a present for somebody else.  A download purchased on my Amazon account is directed to my Kindle, and I can't find any option to present it to another person instead.  Amazon will let you print or e-mail gift certificates, and being able to do the same thing for an electronic book should be the next logical step.  True, you rob the recipient of the pleasure of choice compared to a gift certificate, but that's the case when you give a physical book, and part of the fun of giving and receiving books is hitting the right note, thus demonstrating how carefully you have observed and understood your loved one's tastes.

I decided to follow up the Andrew Rawnsley with Alistair Darling's memoirs.  Poor Alistair Darling, I don't think he has made it big time in the political biography stakes, as Back from the Brink is already down to £2.09 as an e-book.  The SA would like to read that as well at some point, and another area where Amazon ought to up their game with Kindles is that there needs to be a way of lending e-books other than by lending the reading device.  The SA and I share quite a few of our books, or at least we do in some subjects.  History, politics, food and some aspects of urban design are joint enthusiasms, though I won't be clamouring to borrow The Kronstadt Revolution when the SA's finished it, and the SA's familiarity with my gardening books stops at checking the covers very carefully to see which ones I've already got.  There was a new history of East London that we both eyed up and neither bought, in case the other did, and a book about skyscrapers that the SA thought about buying for me but felt embarrassed that it might really be a present to self.  The covering phrase when presenting a parcel of probable mutual interest is 'this is a bit of a present for both of us'.

Addendum  A late straggling Christmas card arrived this morning.  From the annotations on the envelope we gathered it had reached us via another house, whose occupants had kindly bothered to stick it back in the post with a note saying it wasn't theirs.  Our predecessors  probably thought the name they chose for this house was very appropriate and charming.  It is appropriate, though a bit naff, and it is unfortunate that there are at least two other houses with the same name in nearby villages.  Add in the English tendency to name a road after the place it goes to, and there's ample scope for confusion.  I was slightly indignant the card went astray as it had our full postcode on the envelope, but looking at that carefully I though the sender had probably written H as U.

shopping for books

I wasn't going to write again about shopping so soon.  I was going to write about how I have planted the Colchicum bulbs that arrived last week without chopping lumps out of any of the other bulbs which are planted there already, which is a minor triumph.  And how the Robinia hispida has flopped all over the lawn, and I forgot to buy any stakes when I was at the garden centre, after my trip to the dump (aka tip, aka household recycling centre), which has got a new member of staff who looks disconcertingly like Ronnie Barker (have you noticed how things are disconcerting, but concerted?).

Then I read a few pages of the Telegraph website while drinking a mug of tea and digesting my lunch, and found another wail about independent bookshop closures.  It is not a very well informed complaint, since the savings on Amazon are not a matter of saving 10p as the author says in her article, but of paying between 30 and 50% less.  And it's just silly to say that an independent bookshop is the last place where you can talk to strangers without resorting to dating websites.  I talk to lots of strangers every time I go to work (OK, that is at an independent retailer, albeit not a bookseller).  If they look as though they might appreciate it, I even recite bits of poetry to them.  Or if you want to talk to strangers you can join a club or society for something you're interested in.  I talked to several strangers at the wildlife fair last week.  One of the silliest reasons given for keeping post offices open (there are many good reasons) was that queueing in the post office was one of the only times in the week that some old people got to talk to someone.  If that is true, it is an urgent reason for making proper social provision for old people, not for forcing the Systems Administrator to go and queue in the post office to to insure the van, instead of taking the preferred option of buying a tax disc over the internet.

But the really ignorant bit of Ms. Caplan's article is when she says that Amazon can't recommend what you should read next, and for that you need a real person.  Sorry Nina, but Amazon's algorithms are incredibly powerful.  It tracks your purchasing history for ever, and it identifies what else other people with similar purchasing patterns bought, and it makes a very good job of it.  Sometimes it comes up with titles by authors I know and like, and sometimes by authors I don't know.  The great majority of the time, when I check those out in the review pages of the broadsheets or hear about them on R4, they review well, and when I get round to reading some of them I generally like them.  The Amazon readers' reviews are also very useful.  I don't necessarily accept their conclusions, but they give a strong pointer to what kind of book it is, and I can decide for myself if I think I'd like that sort of thing.

On the strength of my having bought a lot of Roger Deakin, Amazon told me that I might like Caught by the River, a series of essays about about rivers (link to Amazon here).  When my mum asked me what I would like for Christmas, I suggested that, and she kindly bought it for me.  Being a staunch supporter of her local independent bookshop (and reluctant to put her card details online), she ordered it from her friendly local bookshop.  When she collected it, she had a conversation with the friendly local bookshop owner, who said it looked interesting and she might order another copy for the bookshop.  Er, excuse me.  You are meant to be providing your customers with ideas of things they might like, not cribbing ideas for good new titles from the Great Satan Amazon.  Caught by the River is a lovely book, by the way, and I heartily recommend it.  I liked it so much I even ended up buying a print from the man who did some of the illustrations (over the internet, naturally enough).

I'm glad I've got that off my chest, and now I shall go and pull up some more weeds.

it's World Book Day

Today is World Book Day.  There are readings, and competitions, and publishers are randomly giving away books.  Giving people books that they might actually like, as distinct from giving something that the donor likes, or thinks the recipient ought to like, or doesn't have a clue if they'll like but hell, it's a present and the would-be gift-giver is out of time or ideas, is a tricky business.  It helps if the target of your generosity has a reasonably large intellectual hinterland, some hobbies or interests.  It also helps greatly if you have access to their bookshelves to find out what they've already got, or at least an idea of what they're likely to have bought for themselves.

I like buying history books for other people who are interested in history, because I know enough about it to judge where the book is coming from, and whether the author is a trained historian, or a jobbing journalist, or has a particular political axe to grind, as well as the touchy-feely stuff like is it on nice paper and are there lots of good pictures.  I'll give it a go with railway books, though trains are not my thing personally.  Fiction is difficult.  Aim too highbrow and you bore and baffle the recipient, who will wistfully think of all the things they could have got instead.  Aim too middlebrow or lowbrow and you insult them.  And to give anybody you're supposed to be close to a book that they simply don't connect with is painful.  It suggests you are not so close as you thought you were.  Why on earth, he/she will think, do they think I would like this?  I've given a lot of fiction away over the years, and I'm afraid a significant portion of it has failed to hit the spot, but then I've received a few duff, weird and baffling volumes back.  Of course sometimes you are given a book that you love, that you didn't even know existed, and this makes you think that the donor must truly be a soul-mate.

Instead of taking the risk of giving a book to anybody on World Book Day I will merely make a recommendation.  The last work of fiction I read was The Emigrants by W G Sebald.  This was as a follow-on to Austerlitz by the same author, which I read last year.  The Emigrants consists of four disconnected narratives, each telling the life story of a European Jew displaced to the UK or US.  Austerlitz is a longer narrative on the same theme.  All the stories are told by an un-named first-person narrator, who themself sounds so lost and solitary that they could be the emigrant of the title, but in each case it turns out that this is somebody else's story.  That story often starts in the middle, with the emigrant's life in their new country, before looping back in time, maybe on a subsequent meeting with the narrator, to take in their European childhood and departure from the land of their birth.  Through the device of a bundle of letters or journal being passed to the narrator the story often then switches further back in time, to a friend or relative's story, unfolding layer within layer like an onion.  The tone of the prose is cool, even, and detached, with small remembered details standing out with curious, gripping clarity.  Sebald does not tell us what to think.  We are shown an artist working in his studio in the industrial north of England, repeatedly building up the painted surface and scraping it away again.  We are left to ourselves to make the parallel between his method of working, and the traumatic and total loss of his family and country.

Sebald himself moved from his native Bavaria to England in 1966, and stayed here for the rest of his life, though he wrote in Geman, so I have only read his astonishing and beautiful books in translation.  He died in a car accident in 2001.  There will not be any more books.  Read the ones there are.