January and February have been almost wall-to-wall work, with a great deal of travel to boot. I have already written here about my trip to Malaysia. The following week I was in Dubai (or ‘Do buy’, as the locals call it, with a fine mixture of wit and cynicism). As I returned to the UK two weeks ago, I realise that it’s a little late to write something newsworthy about my visit, but, since it was a fascinating experience – and Dubai is quite different from anywhere else I have been – perhaps you will indulge me by allowing this very belated post.
Dubai is about bling. Not out-for-the-day, cheap-and-cheerful Blackpool and Skegness bling, but the real thing – although I realise that I may be drumming an oxymoron into service by saying so, much as if I’d asserted that Tinseltown was genuine. I’ll revise that a little, therefore. Dubai is expensive. It’s not a place to visit unless a) you have plenty of money (or someone else is footing the bill) and b) you don’t mind paying through the nose for everything, including items that come either cheap or free in other places. The £20 charge for twenty-four hours of Internet access is but a minor example. Most things, from bottled water to chocolates to dinner, cost roughly one and a half times as much as in the UK; and you don’t even think about buying alcohol! A tiny bottle of brandy from the mini-bar will set you back 120 dirhans (that’s about £25); the cheapest bottle of wine in the restaurant that I visited was 270 dirhans, or more than £50. Sure, certain pleasures, some not even legal in the West, are openly available. For example, the second hotel in which I stayed had a private beach, at the top of which were, sitting in a circle, several gentlemen resplendent in djellabas and smoking hookahs. I can’t be entirely certain, but the substance they were exhaling smelled suspiciously like skunk.
Despite the cost and the noise – the place is like a giant building site and, indeed, is said to house one third of the world’s cranes at any one time – Dubai is immensely popular. The serried ranks of hotels stretch for mile upon mile – all the major international chains are represented – so that you’d think there would certainly be over-capacity. However, when by mistake I was booked into my business hotel for two nights instead of three and had to find another, it took several attempts to discover one that wasn’t fully-booked. This second hotel was an eye-opener. It was aimed at holidaymakers rather than business people, so my room, of very modest size, contained two double beds, a balcony overlooking a giant red crane that presided over yet another building site, a well-stocked and exorbitantly expensive mini-bar (with a ‘free’ plastic bag in which to collect ice from the machine in the corridor) and the most magnificent range of ‘free’ toiletries I have ever encountered in a hotel. These included a ‘bath massaging bar’ and ‘moisture infusion facial bar’ (soap to you and me), some mega-rich body cleaner (alias shower gel) and an after-sun cool-and-calm gel (this item accurately described). I must admit that I’m a sucker for toiletries, and these went some small way towards selling me the Dubai dream – or should I say, mirage?
So what is the attraction of this place, which one hundred years ago was just a little village in a rather uninteresting, out-of-the way bit of desert? Put succinctly, what Dubai has to offer, especially to those from more northern climes when the end of January has yet to arrive, is sun, sea, sand and shopping. Oh, and ‘sophistication’. However sceptical I may be – and I tend to choose holiday destinations for their potential for providing either exercise or some insight into culture and history, so Dubai would never have been a natural choice for me – the entrepreneurs who have brought and are still bringing their many cranes and pile-drivers to Dubai have achieved a spectacular success. They’ve created the illusion that a sun-kissed paradise and moneyed leisure are temporarily within the reach of those who aren’t mega-rich, but merely a little better off, or rather a lot better at saving up for holidays, than the average.
What to do in Dubai becomes a challenge if you don’t go with the flow. This consists of lying on the beach (the second hotel had a tennis-court-sized patch of ‘private’ beach, which it thought entitled it to a certain cachet), paddling in the sea and swimming in the pool, in between ordering drinks and burgers from the liveried black stewards who hover solicitously. Oh, and if you fancy something a little more exotic, a man swathed from head to foot in white, like an extra from The English Patient, passes by on his camel every ten minutes or so. He is leading another camel, on which you can buy a ride. I watched several portly, middle-aged English and American men engaged in this activity, and concluded that they must have been deprived of donkey rides as children.
What did I do? I arrived at the second hotel mid-afternoon, having spent more than a day and a half working quite intensely. Venturing out to explore the private beach, where I was able to exchange the token given to me by the hotel receptionist for a bath sheet, I was escorted by one of the liveried stewards to a sun-lounger, across which he carefully angled an umbrella so that I wouldn’t burn. I then stretched out and fell asleep, waking only an hour and a half later. It was the first time I’d sun-bathed on a beach since I took a summer 1977 holiday in Brittany (where the weather was a good deal more chancy) with some beach-loving friends. When I woke up, I enjoyed myself watching people passing (including those on the camel) for half an hour or so. When two hours were up, I was bored and returned to my hotel room to use my absurdly-expensive Internet connection to send some e-mails.
It was an experience, certainly, and one enhanced by a star-lit al fresco dinner (They weren’t really stars, but the lights on the ceaselessly toiling cranes; however, by removing my spectacles and exercising my imagination a little, I could convince myself that the Milky Way was smiling down on me.) in a roof-top restaurant where the food was delicious and the company (I was with two very congenial colleagues) even better. So, if you were to ask me whether I enjoyed my free half-day in Dubai, the answer would be, unequivocally, yes. But if you’d told me that I’d hit the jackpot and earned another six days of leisure there before I could go home, I’m not sure my sanity would have been equal to the privilege.

Last week, the day job took me to Kuala Lumpur. I was away for five days, two of which were spent travelling almost around the clock (mad, I know, but I assure you it was worth it!). Once I had arrived, I was privileged to be the honoured and somewhat overwhelmed guest of two universities in the city. My impressions of the country and its people during so short a stay, although vivid, are therefore inevitably sketchy, so I apologise in advance for any observations that may strike those who know Malaysia better than I do as either incomplete or simply wrong.
Malaysia is a young (just over half a century since independence), very proud country, and also a thrustingly ambitious one. All of these qualities are epitomised by the twin towers – the Petronas Towers – that were built in the KLC district of the city in 1998 and are now the tallest twin towers in the world. Following many recommendations from my Asian colleagues, I chose to spend most of my single free half-day travelling to them and taking the tourists’ trip to the top. As the Towers are eighty-eight storeys high, this provides a panoramic view of Kuala Lumpur and delivers a 360-degree demonstration of just how much development work is taking place there. High-rise buildings are everywhere and many, although dwarfed by the Petronas Towers themselves, are giants by UK standards. Nor is it all about size: most of the buildings are beautifully designed and Malaysians are increasingly strict about the standards of architecture they consider acceptable for their capital city. Whilst at the top of one of the Petronas Towers, I was lucky enough to see an inferior skyscraper being demolished: it collapsed in clouds of black dust.

As I’ve said, my impressions are based on only a little information, but it did strike me that Kuala Lumpans are in such a hurry to become world leaders that they are in danger of destroying not just their immediate past, but also their much older heritage; and this notion resonated with some of my colleagues when I voiced it. I saw little architecture in the city that was more than thirty years old and nothing at all that was likely to have pre-dated my own birth.
Yet, paradoxically, despite their keenness to ‘get on’, the overwhelming majority of Malaysians whom I met, almost all of whom were extremely well-educated, were gentle, polite, courteous, humorous and modest. They were not ‘go-getters’ in the sharp-elbowed sense. They have their own, highly honourable, way of making progress in today’s world. Much of this stems from the fact that they are also very devout. At both of the universities that I visited, the call to prayers sounded five times each day. The prayer rooms hold only twenty to thirty people and those not able to take part exactly on the hour await their turn patiently, but they make it quite clear, whatever the task in which they are engaged or the conference or focus group to which they are contributing, that prayer comes first.
Despite this apparent unanimity about how things should be done, I did observe some collisions as Eastern values met Western ones; not, however, at the universities, where highly-qualified librarians and academics have no problem with reconciling traditional dress and customs with exacting, high-profile jobs. The suite of rooms in which our meetings took place are normally occupied by eminent doctors and surgeons and are designed to help them relax from cutting-edge medical research and surgical operations. That we were very privileged to have had them generously give up these quarters to us for a whole day was not lost upon us.
Most of the men and women employed by the university wear traditional dress. This is at once exuberant and dignified. The men’s tunics and the women’s shalwar kameezes (they call them this, even though mostly the garments consist of three-quarter-length tunics and long skirts, rather than trousers) are beautifully made, often embroidered or sequined, and frequently in very bright colours. Sometimes the women wear tailored versions in heavy silk. The more austere outfits are a little more nun-like, and stick to plainer cloth – usually cotton – in light blues, greys and navy. But all these advocates of traditional dress wear their clothes with pride and often the women fasten their hijabs with many-jewelled brooches or enhance them with a framework of pearls. I saw no black burqas or niqabs at the universities.
Where I did see one such outfit was at the Petronas Towers. Since these are frequented by tourists, its owner may not have been Malaysian. I could see from her eyes and deduce from the age of her husband that she was very young – probably a girl still in her teens. And she didn’t look unhappy: he was holding her hand and they were walking along together, laughing. What was striking was the difference between this couple and another Asian couple (again, of course, I cannot make an accurate guess at their nationality), also taking the Twin Towers tour and also holding hands. The girl, also probably in her late teens, was wearing a short-sleeved black T-shirt and immaculate, but very short, white shorts.
How will Malaysia’s future unfold? From now on, I shall be fascinated to observe and find out. I hope that it will prosper as it wishes, and I also hope that it will at the same time manage to preserve its heritage and its traditions. I think that its most prominent religion may be the key: this week I was extremely honoured to have been able to immerse myself in how true Islam – tolerant, humorous, friendly, hospitable and forgiving – makes a huge contribution to the world in which we live.

Ethel Lang, the lady who held the record as Britain’s oldest woman, died last Wednesday aged 114. I salute her.

I’m hugely pleased and not a little tickled that Mrs Lang’s home town was Barnsley, which I’ve known very well for at least forty years (my husband’s grandmother, aunt and uncle lived in Pogmoor; his uncle worked for the Coal Board). In fact, she spent her whole life there: Barnsley, the heart of the South Yorkshire mining industry and base of Arthur Scargill, former miner and for twenty years president of the National Union of Mineworkers (the final home of the NUM stands stolidly at the corner of Victoria Road and Huddersfield Road, a rather grim, castle-like building, with a poignant sculpture of a mining family as a memorial in front of it); Barnsley, home of the Barnsley chop (effectively a double lamb chop, of almost joint-sized proportions, served to an individual), one of which once famously over-faced Princess Diana; Barnsley, a town dominated by its massive town hall (George Orwell thought the money spent on it would have been better used to improve the terrible living conditions of the miners) and wonderfully served by a fine covered market with two identical car parks (I’m not alone in having had to seek assistance, having ‘mislaid’ my car: the non-pc male attendant told me with some glee that ‘lasses are always doing it!’); Barnsley, whose living and much-loved bard, Ian McMillan, sings its spirit in verse and paints its picture in tweets; Barnsley, whose huge and thriving college has sent out many of the district’s sons and daughters, including the Arctic Monkeys, to succeed in the world; Barnsley, whose metropolitan borough council struggles heroically to maintain its vast rural hinterland as well as the town itself without raising the council tax: a bastion of The People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, as my husband observes with great affection.

So it was the bracing atmosphere and modest amenities of Barnsley that supported Mrs. Lang well into her twelfth decade, not the leafy lanes and rarefied air of a bijou village in the home counties or the endless facilities available in one of our great metropolises. How remarkable is that! And she wasn’t a member of the upper classes or even one of the ‘middle sort’: she left school at fourteen to become a seamstress in a shirt factory and married a plumber. From a solid working-class background, therefore: clearly not in want, but not a life packed with luxury, either.

Not surprisingly, there has been quite a lot of news coverage following Mrs Lang’s death. Most of the articles and TV stories have looked back at the main national and international events of her very long life and, of course, the list is rich and varied: she was born when Queen Victoria still had a year left to reign and lived through two world wars, all the moon landings that have taken place so far and, according to The Times, the births of ten billion people during her lifetime.

I’m sure Mrs. Lang will have been interested in these things, but what are likely to have affected her more nearly are the changes that have happened in Barnsley itself during the same period. She will have remembered vividly the General Strike that took place in 1926, the year before her daughter was born, which was called by the Trades Union Congress in support of 800,000 locked-out coal miners, including the ones working the Barnsley coalfield; she’s likely to have remembered the young evacuees sent to Barnsley during the Second World War and may even have helped to look after some of them; she’s bound to have remembered also the miners’ strikes of 1974, the first since 1926, which led to the temporary introduction of a three-day week, and the strikes of 1984, which were triggered by the announcement that some twenty pits, including Cortonwood Colliery, close by, near Rotherham, were to be closed; she’ll have seen the town grow shabby and poor as the prosperity brought by mining declined, gradually at first, but inexorably, and later much more swiftly, throughout the twentieth century. And I hope that she was also well enough – and mobile enough, after her eyesight began to fail – to see this proud town reinvent itself for the twenty-first century.

Mrs Lang’s daughter said that ‘she tried very, very hard with everything that she did’ and that she enjoyed dancing, knitting, baking her own bread and having her nails painted bright colours. Endeavour and enjoyment seem to have been the secrets of her longevity. She obviously had a strong work ethic. I think it’s likely that she wasn’t a driver, but, if she had been, she’d probably have scorned to be one of the ‘lasses’ who couldn’t find her car (though, if she had found herself in my mislaid-car predicament, it would be nice to think that, like other strong Yorkshire women I have known, she would have given as good as she got if a car park attendant had tried to patronise her).

I propose a toast to Mrs Lang. May her spirit live on in her home town. And may many other daughters and sons of Barnsley chalk up a century or more, sustained by a town that continues to try very, very hard.

 

How does one write a review of an anthology of poetry that will do justice to all its poets and encourage readers to want to taste its fruit? Let me dangle that last word, tantalisingly close, on one of the boughs of Salt Publishing’s latest collection of compressed experience and knowledge, The Best British Poetry 2014. Ah, the temptation of the succulent flavours of sixty-six authors, when insinuated into the conscious and the sub-conscious by Guest Editor Mark Ford, whose introductory blandishments would out-Satan Satan (‘What would Milton or Tennyson make of this poem?’ he asks.). He doesn’t, however, sell the fruit individually, but tells us, to make such a selection as this, that he goes on his ‘nerve: a poem rings one’s bell, or it doesn’t.’

So here I am, already reaching out to taste and try, knowing that not all Ford’s choices will ring my bell, for an anthology is a single collection to appeal to many and, as editor, he can’t please everyone all of the time. And, in a sense, I have the same problem; if I single out individual poets, then those omitted may well feel slighted, even if I explain patiently that my preferences are the ones which chimed with me.

What’s my solution? To say that I’m delighted with the range of poems here and I’m going to highlight one, purely because it sums up for me what the whole is all about. It’s ‘Girl to Snake’, which didn’t just ring out at me; it waved its clapper in my face!

Apart, of course, from the poems themselves, one of the best features of the Salt ‘Best Poetry’ selections is the section of potted bio.s, which include comments about each of the poems by their respective authors. Abigail Parry didn’t need to say much about ‘Girl to Snake’, which speaks plentifully all on its own, though she admits to an ‘attraction’ to poems about ‘transgression, particularly when they feature smooth-talking animals and particularly when the poem’s on the side of the transgression.’ Tantalising, indeed.

Since the poem consists entirely of a girl talking to a snake, the creature itself does no smooth talking, but ‘Ropey Joe’ is seductive, nevertheless, and insinuates himself into the household; he’s ‘thin enough

To slip beneath the door and spill [his] wicked do-si-do

In curlicues and hoops across the floor.’

There is an unmistakeable sense of naughty fun in this, though Abigail Parry says quite clearly that she didn’t intend it to be an ‘overtly sexual poem’. And she’s correct: the sexual symbolism and some gorgeous double-entendres are there all right (and, in slang terms, equally relevant to drug-taking!), but what she captures is the desire for knowledge that overwhelms a girl on the cusp of adulthood; she is desperate to make sense of the things that she has heard of, that appeal because they are forbidden, that constitute a ‘wicked line of dominoes’ in our post-lapsarian world. And she will taste… and she will find out… and the knowledge, however dangerous, will be preferable to the ignorance of innocence.

Parry’s inclusion of the colloquial appellation ‘pal’, her choice of a monologue, her use of those lists to which I’ve recently referred, her deft handling of monosyllables for pace, her command of metre and her deliberate play to the ear all cohere to make the poem ring true and capture that moment in a girl’s life when she simply must step away from the tediously tame reality of the domestic safety her parents have created.

And that’s what you get with this anthology: a tantalising verse crop of fruit on the tree of knowledge, dangled by Mark Ford for our delectation and designed to appeal to our taste and our sense of adventure in a poetic world that has darkness and sadness and pain and disease and war and death and destruction and sex and drugs and vice… and delight. Of course, Milton and Tennyson (and, especially, Blake) knew perfectly well that the things on the knowledge side of the world make much more interesting subjects for poetry than innocence.

Is anything beginning to chime with you yet?

The Best British Poetry 2014, available from Salt Publishing here.

I have an excuse, albeit possibly a feeble one, for the recent lack of posts. The day job took me back to Michigan again during the second week of December and after that I was running to stand still all the way to Christmas (not aided by some ‘organised power cuts’, courtesy of the local Pennine lumber industry). However, I have been thinking of my readers, whose support I appreciate so much, while trying hard to find time to do justice to what became for me one of the outstanding experiences of 2014: my visit to Detroit.
On my first trip to Michigan, at the end of September, I saw nothing of Detroit except the airport and some of the industrial hinterland that lines the motorway en route to Ann Arbor. But, in December, my day-job meetings took place on Wednesday – Friday instead of Monday – Wednesday, so my hosts kindly offered me the opportunity to stay for the weekend in order to explore Michigan a little more. I’m particularly indebted to Jacqui, who generously gave up her Saturday to show Detroit to me and two colleagues.
I have some very hazy childhood memories of television coverage of the race riots that took place in the USA in the 1960s. The one that sticks out was that in Birmingham, Alabama – I remember the newscasters of the day enunciating the two words, always with the emphasis on the second, as if Alabama had only a secondary right to the name ‘Birmingham’. The others seemed to blend into a sense of unrest across the States and the person of Martin Luther King became more vividly real to me than the places where riots occurred. I don’t remember – or perhaps never knew – that there were serious riots in Detroit as well. There, in 1967, more than forty people were killed, hundreds were injured and thousands of properties were destroyed by fire.
Detroit was, of course, home to the American automobile industry. Henry Ford set up his headquarters there and inhabited a huge mansion in the city. Scores of other motor companies had factories and offices there and many famous marques were included among their number: Chrysler, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Studebaker-Packard are just some of the ones that I recognise. The race riots didn’t destroy what had been a flourishing motor-car industry, but they certainly pitched it into what became a very steep decline. This was accelerated, no doubt, by the simultaneous rise of its Japanese competitors, but essentially Detroit was a city that inflicted life-changing wounds upon itself.

The wounds themselves can still be seen today. It is no exaggeration to say that Detroit is one of the most extraordinary places I have ever visited. As you approach the city from the west, you suddenly notice that some of the houses perched on the bank above the motorway have holes in their roofs. Some of the roofs are actually caving in, or the porches to the front or sides of the houses are leaning at drunken angles, in the process of breaking away from the main structure. At first, you may think that you’re just driving through a neighbourhood that’s being redeveloped and (although some of the houses are huge and were obviously once lovely old clapboard homes) assume some kind of slum clearance is taking place. As this continues for mile after mile, it gradually dawns that this IS Detroit: it’s what the city looks like, or, to use a currently popular expression in a less usual context, this is ‘who Detroit is’.
These houses were abandoned in the aftermath of the race riots and they have been left ever since as they were when their owners fled. Some are still owned by the families who vacated them or by their descendants; the legal owners of others can no longer be traced. Some are occupied by squatters or used as crack dens. In some areas, the buildings are being bought up by developers, but it is a slow process. Detroit was bankrupt for very many years (by a wonderful coincidence, it actually emerged from bankruptcy during the week of my visit) and it is only latterly that the municipal authorities have begun in earnest to reinvent the city. A major part of their strategy is to reduce its vast, sprawling conurbation to a more manageable size, but this is a challenging task: many a street contains half a dozen proudly-owned and beautifully-maintained houses interspersed with two or three derelict ones. They lurk like ghouls at a wedding, their windows blind and broken, their beams and rafters exposed like bones peeking through flesh, their crooked limbs gradually causing them to sink to their knees, each one mocking the beauty of its own lost youth. The residents of the street go about their business almost oblivious of the existence of these stricken dwellings and certainly have no intention of moving out in order to oblige town planners by supporting logical but soulless schemes for making the city more compact.
Yet there is also beauty to be found in the dereliction itself and, even where there is ugliness, rather than beauty, the ruins tell a fascinating tale. One man who recognised this early on was Tyree Guyton, a native of Detroit, who was twelve years old when the riots exploded. He decided to take an area of the city in which most of the buildings were derelict and create a series of art installations, using dwellings and objects recovered from them to tell the story of what happened there. Now called The Heidelberg Project, it has gained international renown, though not without its own struggle: the municipal authorities twice destroyed the installations before they finally understood that Guyton was bringing hope and inspiration and a sense of identity to the broken and impoverished communities worst hit by Detroit’s decline.
I’ve taken some photographs of the Heidelberg Project, which I’m proud to be able to share with my readers. However, because of the size and scope of the installations, no individual pictures can really do the whole project justice. The Heidelberg Project is a living work of art: it changes continually. I have never seen anything quite like it, though it carries echoes and reverberations of many other kinds of art, and other tragedies captured by art, that I have been privileged to witness. The ways in which some of the buildings are decorated are reminiscent both of Gaudi and Hundertwasser. Some of the murals must have been inspired by Picasso. Most striking of all is the huge pile of shoes of all types and sizes that comprises one of the installations. I mean no disrespect when I say that immediately it reminded me of the glass case of shoes at Auschwitz. In many cases, the fates of the owners of the Detroit shoes will have been grim, though neither as harsh nor as hopeless as those of the Auschwitz victims: The Heidelberg Project is about renewal as well as remembrance. But no item of apparel is as evocative as the shoe: all of these shoes represent the journeyings of mankind; each of them is lost, discarded, stolen or defunct. The journey has gone on, or been cut short, without them.
If you are ever in Detroit, I’d encourage you to visit The Heidelberg Project. I think it will transform, if not your life, then certainly the way in which you think about people, cities and regeneration. Take a peek at it here. Why all the polka dots? Tyree’s grandpa was fond of jellybeans; Tyree thought these looked like people, all similar, but different in colour, and he transposed them into dots celebrating colour, diversity and harmony. Magic!

The magazine that accompanied Saturday’s edition of The Times was full of lists.  Each of the regular journalists contributed an article based on them, presumably to show solidarity with a population that is currently either toiling away at compiling Christmas lists or trudging through the streets to fulfil them as December sets in and we realise – indeed are perpetually being reminded by the media – that there are only x shopping days left.  To be honest, the result is a bit contrived, though some of the lists – especially Caitlin Moran’s – are great fun.  That said, I’ve long had a fascination with lists myself.  Consciously, it dates back to my student days, when I remember that my tutor drew attention to James Joyce’s magnificent series of lists in Ulysses.  “They may look effortless or random,” he told us, in his mildly admonishing way, “but just try writing lists to equal them yourself.  You’ll find out then that only a genius can produce lists like Joyce’s.”

Whatever the truth of this, some of Joyce’s lists are indeed difficult to surpass. One of my favourites is the list that begins as a pastiche of a passage from the King James Bible and reaches its climax with the following description of Leopold Bloom, fleeing through the streets of Dublin from a hostile reception:

“And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.”

Lists were a part of my life long before I read that, of course.  I belonged to a generation whose mothers sent us up to the corner shop at a very tender age, a note tucked into a purse that also contained exactly the right money to pay for the items listed.  And, as well as shopping lists and Christmas lists, there were birthday lists, lists of people you wanted to come to your party (always more than you were allowed to invite), lists of books you wanted from the library and, on a more mundane note, the elaborate lists of ‘essential’ clothes and equipment that were part of the rite of passage of first attending a grammar school.  Later, as my friends and I married, there were wedding lists – a phenomenon to which I’ve never been able to reconcile myself.  The French go in for them in an even bigger way than we do: the poshest linen and china shops in France all carry ‘listes de mariages’ signs in the windows.  But I’ve always thought that wedding lists are too specific, and therefore slightly off-colour, not to say mercenary.  For example, it may be fine to tell your future wedding guests that you would like tea-cups, but it surprises me that accepted etiquette also allows you to specify ‘Wedgwood Daisy Tea Story’, or some such.  It’s like smiling at someone while you’re simultaneously twisting her arm halfway up her back: ‘You will buy me this china, each set of six cups and saucers costing an eye-watering £240, because I have invited you to my wedding.’

Nevertheless, lists, both your own and other people’s, are mesmerising, and since I’m sure The Times has not devoted a whole magazine to them on a whim, I’m clearly not alone in thinking so.  I’m not sure why this should be.  Perhaps it’s because a list combines comprehensiveness with brevity.  An eclectic list also allows the reader a tantalising, if puzzling, glimpse of its author’s mind:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax– Of cabbages–and kings– And why the sea is boiling hot– And whether pigs have wings.”

Lists can be sinister as well as humorous; they can help you to cope with everyday irritations; they can soothe by striking a common chord with the rest of humanity:

“I’ve got a little list–I’ve got a little list

Of society offenders who might well be underground,

And who never would be missed–who never would be missed!

There’s the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs–

All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs–

All children who are up in dates, and floor you with ’em flat–

All persons who in shaking hands, shake hands with you like _that_–

And all third persons who on spoiling tête-a-têtes insist–

They’d none of ’em be missed–they’d none of ’em be missed!”

And despite what my tutor averred, I think that compiling a list is an excellent way of achieving literary distinction without having to try too hard.  It allows its author to give free rein to his or her imagination without having to take on the full responsibility of plot, characterisation or format.   In order to create a list all you need to do is, as the saying goes, empty your head on to the paper.  Though, with even half an eye on prosperity, you’re likely to want to tweak your list a little before you show it to anyone else.

I’m going to indulge myself by concluding with a bit of a digression.  It’s about the word ‘list’ itself.  It’s one of those words that has multiple meanings.  Thus boats list when they’re sinking.  Knights jousted in the lists.  And ‘list’ was an archaic word for ‘please’.  I love words like this!  And since today’s has been a post full of quotations, I’ve chosen a suitably gnomic one that uses a different meaning for list, to conclude:

“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. Nicodemus answered and said unto him, ‘How can these things be?’”.

Happy Christmas shopping!  Don’t forget your list – you might not survive Christmas without it!  😉

I recently had a conversation with my daughter-in-law, who is not at present able to drink much alcohol, about what alternatives there were for people who dislike soft drinks because they are usually too sweet. By chance, the topic was picked up again when my friend Priscilla visited yesterday and we were reminiscing about the (few and far between) forays into drinking alcohol that we ventured into when students. Yes, I was a student at the height of the student power era and, no, we didn’t all spend our time getting drunk and bed-hopping, as I explained to my son in his adolescent years (somewhat to his disappointment).
The two conversations (and this delightful post by Jacy Brean which recently caught the imagination of lots of blog readers, including me) have started me thinking about beverages generally. When I was a child, tea was the drink of choice for virtually every occasion. We drank tea at every meal, tea when my grandmothers and other relatives visited, tea when the milkman and postman called in on cold days and tea when we went to the seaside – the cafés close to the beach were all fitted with serving hatches in one wall where parents could send their children (i.e., my brother and me!) to buy a pot of tea and carry it on a tray, together with cups, saucers, milk jug and sugar basin, all in in thick white or blue-and-white pottery, down to the sands; the cafés relied on customers to return the crockery when they’d finished with it and clearly almost everyone obliged, as I don’t recall ever being asked for a deposit. Tea was also served with seaside fish and chips, together with thick hunks of white bread and butter, a meal polished off with a generous helping of ice-cream. We were quite innocent of any knowledge of ‘balanced diets’, cholesterol, the cause of coronary heart disease or obesity. We were, in any case, as skinny as rakes, despite, as a family, consuming 4 lbs of white sugar each week, most of it stirred into tea. I gave up adding sugar to drinks only when I reached the sixth form.
The tea we drank at home during my primary school years was not branded. It came from Hannam & Blackbourn, the grocer’s shop in Spalding (long since closed following the advent of the supermarkets). It was weighed out in quarters from a wooden tea chest and wrapped in dark blue ‘sugar paper’. (Sugar, dried fruit, rice and dried pulses were bought and wrapped in the same way.) By the time we had a television, my mother was buying the brands of tea that still flourish today, mainly PG Tips and Typhoo (their branding has changed over the years, but only subtly). We enjoyed watching the PG Tips chimps’ tea parties in the adverts, although I do remember feeling uneasy even then about seeing primates dressed in human clothes. Typhoo adverts were annoying: ‘You-hoo, Typhoo!” I liked the chimps better.
Alternatives to tea were limited. My parents didn’t drink coffee until I was in my teens, though they sometimes rounded off a meal with a cup of “Camp”(sic) Coffee, a chicory-based liquid substitute for coffee which fascinated me because of the picture on the bottle of a hirsute Sikh servant in full national dress serving an equally hairy and rugged Scots soldier wearing a kilt. I assume that the product was invented for consumption by the armed forces in the colonies. I didn’t then understand that the word ‘camp’ had various meanings; looking back, I wonder if that picture was a joke, or at least intended as a double entendre. Nescafé arrived towards the end of my childhood and was reserved for such festivities as whist drives and church fetes. The good ladies who provided refreshments on these occasions considered that the proper way to serve it was by adding a mixture of hot milk diluted with hot water to a sparing teaspoonful of the powder. The result was drinkable, if nothing like coffee. My grandmother would give me a cup of Nescafé if I visited her on a Saturday morning. She didn’t drink it herself, so bought a tiny tin – about the size of the very smallest tin of beans obtainable – and reserved it for my use. I didn’t graduate from powdered coffee to the real thing until I was married, and then only via the percolator, popularised in the 1970s for what I can only describe as the emasculation of the coffee bean. Coffee makers followed some time later, and it is to this period I date my addiction to good coffee.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Other childhood drinks, aside from water from the tap (none of my parents’ generation would have dreamt of paying for water) included the weekly treat of being able to choose a bottle of pop from the pop man (the Corona lorry did the rounds of the local streets: I always chose Dandelion and Burdock and, I recall, my brother liked Cideapple), Ovaltine on cold winters’ nights, milk (which I hated – I never drank my free third pint at school – Margaret Thatcher would have been welcome any time to snatch it from me) and Lucozade, which was strictly reserved for aiding recovery from colds, ‘flu and bronchitis. Occasionally, if we stopped at a pub on the way home from the coast, we were allowed a very weak shandy. This was another hatch-in-the-wall job, my father returning to the car with one beer, three shandies and four packets of crisps, but I remember that we were mainly excited because the break in the journey meant we would overshoot bedtime by at least half an hour.
My father came from a family of Methodists and, though he did not practise the religion himself, he’d grown up in a household where alcohol was banned. It was therefore only when I was a teenager that he began to buy alcohol to drink at home, and then only at Christmas. Each year he would invest in a bottle of sherry, a bottle of whisky and perhaps two bottles of wine. We were allowed a glass of the latter with our Christmas lunch. It was not unusual for some of a year’s quota of whisky and sherry to come out the following Christmas, not having been consumed in the meantime.
Priscilla’s family was a little more convivial, but still not exactly what you would call topers. Her mother introduced me to Asti Spumante. As students (she reminded me yesterday), Priscilla and I experimented by buying a bottle of Barsac, which we managed to make last three or four days. I can’t remember what we drank most of the time, but I suspect it was once again largely tea and tap-water.
So, to revisit the conversation with my daughter-in-law, what do you drink with a meal when you want to cut down on alcohol or it’s entirely off-limits? Given my background, finding alternatives shouldn’t be a problem. I must confess, though, water and tea don’t seem nearly as alluring as an accompaniment to an evening meal as my parents seemed to find it (I still enjoy tea in the afternoon, as you’ll know from here) and, over the years, I’ve become conditioned to appreciate a carefully-cooked dinner much more if it is accompanied by a glass of good wine. (My Barsac days are over: I like a good Pinot Grigio, Bourgogne or Chablis now.) One answer which I intend to explore is to follow the Chinese example and experiment with more unusual kinds of tea. I have no excuse for putting this off, as I already have quite a collection, either supplied by my son on his travels or collected myself on mine, like the ones I brought back from China.
So here’s a toast to tea! And to being in my (tea-) cups often during the course of this winter, if I can find the right ones! I may not carry you or members of my family along with me.

This is the final post on my launch week activities for Sausage Hall.  I’m covering the last two events: Tea at Sausage Hall, an imaginative tea-party given last Wednesday by Alison Cassels, Lynne Holroyd, Claire Pickering and their colleagues at the Wakefield Library at Wakefield One, which regular readers of this blog will know has provided me with granite-strength support ever since In the Family was published two years ago,

and an evening of conversation and readings at the Covent Garden branch of Waterstones, rounding off the celebrations with a London launch on Thursday.

Ever resourceful, Alison and her team provided sausage rolls, cake (Yes, there was cake!) and biscuits for the tea party.  (Her e-mail to me when organising the event reads ‘Can you put chocolate cake in the title of your next book?’)

As always, she promoted the occasion superlatively well and attracted a lively and engaging audience, amongst whom were old friends (such as Marjorie and Pauline – both also fab visitors to my blog) from the library’s book club, as well as many interesting new faces.

There’s obviously a lively and diverse events programme at Wakefield One: under the table bearing the tea-cups was a box containing a plastic skeleton (I was rather disappointed that someone arrived to remove it, as a suitable visual aid never goes amiss), while high on one of the shelves was a stuffed green parrot in a glass case.  (My husband dared me to say ‘Norwegian Green?  Is it nailed to its perch?’, but, though tempted, I’m afraid I failed to rise to the occasion, having on my mind things other than late parrots gone to meet their maker.)

Wakefield One audiences are truly wonderful.


They are united in their love of books and reading, and not afraid to tell it how it is.  I’m delighted that they like my novels, because they would certainly tell me if they didn’t – during the course of the afternoon, they told me exactly what they thought of the work of a writer who is much better known than I am!  As well as being extremely perspicacious, they’re fun and they like to have fun.


They know what they want and they want more of it: I’ve already promised to return to talk to them about DI Yates numbers 4 and 5.  It was my first Wakefield audience that told me how much they enjoyed reading about Juliet Armstrong and that they’d like to see more of her.  I hope that they’ll think I’ve done so in Sausage Hall, where Juliet’s story takes a new turn.

Several of the Wakefield readers had already bought Sausage Hall and came armed with it for me to sign.  Others bought it during the tea-party; as at my other Wakefield events, the books were kindly supplied by Rickaro Books in Horbury.  A man in the audience asked for an interesting, and very relevant, inscription (see caption): apparently, these are the nicknames of his brother and sister-in-law!

The event at Waterstones Covent Garden was masterminded by Jen Shenton, the bookshop’s lovely ‘can-do’ manager.

I hadn’t met her before, but as soon as I saw her I knew what a distinguished bookseller she is.  It’s something you can’t fake: I honestly believe that the best booksellers  are born, not made, though that’s not to say they don’t work hard all the time in order to stay ahead.  I didn’t leave Jen’s shop until almost 9 p.m., and she was still there behind the till, helping customers, smiling and looking as fresh as a daisy, even though she must have been feeling exhausted.

This event also had a wonderful audience.







Many of my friends from the book industry came (which meant they bowled me a few googlies when it came to the questions).  It was a light-hearted, laughter-filled evening, well lubricated with Waterstones wine and sustained by Adams & Harlow sausage rolls.  I was delighted that Tabitha Pelly, who has worked with Salt on PR for Sausage Hall, was able to come.  Like Jen Shenton, she seems never to tire or have a negative thought in her head.

I left the shop laden with some book purchases of my own and headed for King’s Cross station to catch the last train.  It was the perfect end to an extraordinary week.  My only sadness was that Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery, my publishers at Salt, were unable to come.  But I know that they’ve been keen followers of my progress as I’ve sprung Sausage Hall upon the world and I look forward to catching up with them next week.  Today is Chris’s birthday: I’d like to take the opportunity to wish him many happy returns!

Grateful thanks, once again, to Adams and Harlow for their wonderful sponsorship of the launch of Sausage Hall.

In this extraordinary Sausage Hall launch week, which I am enjoying so much and for which I am very grateful, I’d like to pay tribute to two amazing bookshops.

The first is Bookmark, Spalding’s very distinguished bookshop (the CEO of the Booksellers Association, Tim Godfray, has even been known to serve behind the till there on occasion). Bookmark very generously offered to host the Sausage Hall publication day party, which took place in the evening of November 17th, after the day that I spent at Spalding High School. The event was masterminded by Christine Hanson, the owner of the shop (who is both practical and imaginative – she fixed both a toilet roll holder and a broken table joint within minutes of my arrival, while the shop itself, resplendent with its Christmas stock and decorations, achieved a standard that I’d have dearly liked to replicate in my bookselling days), and Sam Buckley, also a former pupil of Spalding High School, who organises author sessions at the shop. Equally generously, the launch party was sponsored by Adams and Harlow, the local pork butchers, who supplied sausage rolls for the occasion.

This event was attended by members of Bookmark’s lively reading group and some old friends of my own. I was astounded to see Finola, a day-job friend – she had driven for more than an hour from Cambridge in order to support me. I was also staunchly supported by Madelaine, one of my oldest friends, and her husband, Marc, who have both offered me hospitality every time I’ve returned to Spalding as Christina James and also bought many copies of my books as presents for everyone they know who might enjoy them.

Madelaine’s contribution to my writing is acknowledged in Sausage Hall. I was also delighted to see Sarah Oliver, whom I first met at the Priory Academy last spring and who came with her husband. The book club members, who lived up to their reputation for being engaged and vivacious, were shrewd and perceptive: as well as listening attentively to two readings from Sausage Hall, they launched into an animated discussion about all three DI Yates novels. Everyone present bought at least one of the books, some more than one. (Sam Buckley later this week let me know that one member of the audience, who had not read any of the novels and took away with her In the Family, returned within forty-eight hours, having read it, to acquire Almost Love and Sausage Hall as well!) And, of course, I couldn’t myself resist making a few purchases in this fairy-tale bookshop.
Having spent the night with my son and daughter-in-law at their house in Cambridgeshire, I arrived in good time on Tuesday November 18th for a signing session at Walkers Bookshop in Stamford. Although I first met Tim Walker, its owner, last year (he’s currently President of the Booksellers Association), I had not visited one of his bookshops before, The one in Stamford is in a listed building in the town centre; he also owns another in Oakham. I was particularly impressed by the huge range of stock in this shop, both the cards and gifts downstairs and the extensive range of books upstairs. Tim and the manager, Jenny Pugh, were respectively at the other shop and taking holiday, but everything had been set up for me and Mandy, the assistant manager on the book floor, couldn’t have made me more welcome.

Bookmark and Walkers are two fine examples of thriving independent bookshops, packed with atmosphere and individual charm and led by brilliantly creative people who understand how to serve their communities very well indeed. It was a privilege and a pleasure for me to have been able to enjoy what they had to offer and I’d very much like to thank Christine and Tim for hosting Sausage Hall events this week.

At first light yesterday, I travelled to Spalding High School, my own former school, to which I had returned only once previously since leaving the sixth form.  I received a wonderful welcome from Adrian Isted, the newly-appointed Head of English, who began the day’s activities by showing me round the school.

First stop was the office of the headteacher, Mrs. Michele Anderson, who is also fairly new to the school.  She was fascinated to hear a little more from me about Mrs. Jeanne Driver, the first married headteacher at the school, who was its leader throughout my school career.  Born Jeanne Ouseley, she lived at 10, High Street, a large house of several storeys situated near the River Welland in Spalding.  Part of this house was divided into flats and there were usually several other teachers living there, as well as two of my fellow sixth formers, Cheryl Ouseley and Elizabeth Davies, both of whom were her nieces.  They called her ‘Auntie Jeanne’, a name that the rest of the sixth form also used affectionately, if unofficially.  Mrs. Driver was one of several strong women who influenced me as a girl.  She had a strong sense of duty and an even stronger work ethic.  We found some of the things she said highly amusing (for example, ‘I stand up whenever I hear the national anthem, even if I’m in the bath.’).  Sometimes she took the notion of duty to an extreme.  I remember she told us that when her husband, who had been in ill health for some time, finally died, she finished marking a set of books before setting in train the preparations for his funeral.  But her influence has lasted all my life.

The school has been added to, but otherwise is little changed.  I suppose the thing that struck me most yesterday is how it seems to have shrunk.  The corridors seemed longer, the stairways steeper, the ceilings higher when I first attended it as an eleven-year-old, then for only a part of the school week – pupils belonging to the first two school years still spent most of their time at the old school building in London Road, the first home of Spalding High School when it was established in 1920 on the site of its predecessor, the privately-owned ‘Welland Academy for Young Ladies’.   (The present school building was completed in 1959, but the London Road property continued to be used by younger pupils for more than twenty years afterwards.)  The assembly hall still boasts its luxurious but absurdly impractical parquet floor. 

In my day it doubled up as a gym (there is now a separate sports hall) and we were obliged to do PE barefoot, which we all hated, so that the floor wouldn’t become scuffed by gym shoes.  The same grand piano stands in the corner, to the left of the stage.  In the corridor outside the headteacher’s office are several group photographs taken of all the teachers and pupils at intervals during the school’s history.  After some searching, I was able to discover myself on one of these – and I could also name all the other girls in my form and most of the teachers.

After the tour, I was interviewed by Eleanor Toal and Holly Hetherington for High Quarterly, the school’s completely online magazine (which is streets ahead of the drab, dark-red-covered printed production of my youth).  Eleanor, the e-zine’s editor, also writes articles for the Spalding Guardian, carrying on the long-standing relationship between the school and the local newspaper.  Eleanor and Holly (who edits Gardening and Food in the mag) knew they were going to be asked to interview me only very shortly before we met, because the intended interviewer was ill, but I wouldn’t have known if they hadn’t told me.  I was much struck by the sensitivity and perspicacity of their questions and enjoyed answering them.

After lunch, I talked to sixth form English students about how to get published.  Jean Hodge, who reports on cultural affairs for the Spalding Guardian, also attended and joined in.  It was quite an exciting occasion, because it also took the first steps towards setting up a short-story competition that the Great British Bookshop has agreed to sponsor at the High School.  Adrian and his colleagues and I will choose the best ten or twelve stories submitted to be published in a single volume at The Great British Bookshop’s expense.  Winners will each receive a free copy of the book, which will then go on sale in TGBB’s extensive distribution network.  I’ll be writing more about the competition in this blog very shortly.

I completed my day at the school with a writers’ workshop for Years 7, 8 and 9 students.  The participants explored some of the key elements of crime fiction (they proved to be very well read) and collaborated to put some of those into practice.  Their discussion illustrated their excellent grasp of linguistic and literary effects and the results were amazing!  Nearly all of these students bought one of my books at the end of the session; some bought all three.  Thank you!

I can’t conclude this post without saying that a remarkable library now exists at Spalding High School.  The library is housed in the same room that I knew, but what a difference in the stock!  The emphasis is on supplying students with books to read for pleasure.  It’s a place of relaxation and also a place where students can go to work in groups.  There’s none of the shushing and grim looks that any talking in the library produced when I was a schoolgirl and all the dusty old Latin grammars and ancient editions of Gray’s Anatomy have been disappeared.  Hats off in particular to Kirsty Lees, the School Librarian and Learning Resources Manager, and to her team.  The school knows how lucky it is to have them and to be able to enjoy the warm and inviting place (complete with crime scene rug featuring a splayed body) that they have turned it into.

It’s almost impossible for me to thank all the people who made this day so special.  I’m deeply grateful to Michele Anderson for making it possible; to Adrian Isted and Kirsty, for making it happen; to Eleanor and Holly, for giving me such a delightful interview; to Jean Hodge, for all her support for Sausage Hall both at this event and elsewhere and, especially, to all the students whom I met yesterday, who were such a joy to work with and who were so keen to develop their own writing.  Thank you all!