RosieBell

Clare Chambers

I took Learning to Swim on holiday. A good novel, witty, clever, sharp characterisation. Some excellent scenes eg the party where the heroine Blush totters painfully on her high heels, and her spangly dress starts unravelling. Falling in love with a family is an old theme of course eg Brideshead Revisited, and the family is well realised. "Old theme" isn’t a put down, any more than courtship would be. Seeing that other families aren’t like yours for good or ill is part of growing up.

She does the Jane Austen trick of establishing a character, in this case, the fantasist Mr Radley, and then making waspish remarks referring to them, which are funny and apt because the character has been firmly established. Denouement not well handled and the in the wrong key to harmonise the rest of the novel, and the happy ending has a tacked on feeling.

Then read The Editor’s Wife, theme adultery, again well done, again some excellent characterisation especially the ex-wife, who is monstrously selfish and self- centred yet you can see that she is good company and likable, and the hero is quite right to keep her in his life. Again, the ending is in a different key, the plot key point outrageously improbable, especially in the Google era. The ending has too much of things coming right, implausibly.

Will read more of her. She doesn’t go on and on as many novelists do. She’s economical and elegant.

Checker and the Derailleurs

Don’t jump your red tonight,
You big yellow Checker,
I’m coming through light
At its last yellow flicker.
Show your bulging brights
Rights into my reflectors.
Listen close and you might
Here my freewheel ticker-ticker.
Hey city slickers:

Lay perpendicular grates!
Check those rectangular plates!
One pothole on Sixth Avenue
Goes all the way to China.

I am a midtown
Pedal pusher.
I am a traffic
Bushwhacker.
My brakes are clogged
With little children.
Greasy strays
Keep my gears workin’.

Diggers, watch your tails;
Old ladies, hold your bladders.
Scarvy starlets, trim your sails
Or choke on Isadora tatters.
Better step back to the curb-
Enough women are batters.
Brave Lolitas, round the curve,
You don’t want to be flatter.
Hey hard-hatters:

Lay perpendicular grates!
Check those rectangular plates!
One pothole on Sixth Avenue
Goes all the way to China.

I am a midtown
Pedal pusher.
I am a traffic
Bushwhacker.
My brakes are clogged
With little children.
Greasy strays
Keep my gears workin’.

From Lionel Shriver’s Checker and the Derailleurs. Checker is a bicycle courier; he’s also a song writer and drummer for a rock band. That’s a pretty good lyric Shriver has written for him, though a bit clever and complicated to work as a rock lyric.
Anyway, nice to have a novel about a rock band, and also a bicycle courier, who loves his bicycle, Zefal, loves being a master of risky urban cycling. Shriver wrote it when she was 30, and it’s full of zest. Schematic, like all her novels. Bounces along – she can set up a strong situation that keeps you following – ending not well done (she’s not good at endings – it’s the hardest part of a novel. You want to hear of what happened to everyone but not in great detail. The ending is the judge handing out sentences.)

Urban life in an area where you don’t have to be rich to live, where there are dives and spaces for the talented to meet and create – she gets that, and shows it. Bridges are climbing cliffs, you find your cave, your shelter, your tribe, your shaman's chants, your dancing. She gets that.

More James Lees Milne

James Lees-Milne, who was Secretary to the National Trust in its early days, did have an enviable job of going about the country looking at properties and deciding if the Trust would take them on.  He is constantly meeting decayed aristocrats in collapsing damp buildings of great beauty. He gives the impression of being a charming, likable, witty man, with a love of art and an appreciation of human beings. I imagine he was ideal for his job.  I caught 3 very good Radio 4 plays about him (only Radio 4 would do 3 plays about such a man), which got me interested in his diaries.

Wednesday, 26^th July 1944

After lunching in Salisbury we drove to Trafalgar. This great red-brick house lies beyond Longford, in the same valley, on the same river, surrounded by beech trees. It was built in 1733 by John Wood, with a Grecian portico added by Revett in 1760, as were the two connecting pavilions. A niece with a distinctly off-centre accent welcomed us. Presently there was a hurried puffing sound, and in bustled Lord Nelson. He is 187, the great-nephew of ‘the Admiral’ as he refers to his forebear, as small as Nelson, with white flowing hair and a large mouth. His spare build, peculiar shape of head and features are identical to the Admiral’s. With a little mutilation, an eye out here, an arm off there, he would be the very incarnation.

Lees-Milne on Churchill

From James Lees-Milne’s Ancestral Voices & Prophesying Peace: Diaries 1942-1945

Lees-Milne detested Churchill, who he thought proto-Fascist.

Wednesday, 5th July 1944

Lee-Milne has “luncheon” with the editor of the Sunday Pictorial.

“He despairs over the future for, he says, no plans are being worked out by the Government. Except as a fighter, Churchill is a disaster. He lives for war and killing Germans, as though they were pigeons. He is a man of no ideals, no principles; is an opportunist surrounded by yes-men, most of them insincere and of little integrity. Aneurin Bevan he thinks one of the few men in the Commons of undoubted integrity, and he is too temperamental. Eden is flabby, middle-aged man, unhappy with the Prime Minister. .. He says no naval battle takes place that is not directed by the Prime Minister personally from the Admiralty, whether he ruses the moment there is an engagement. I said, “Churchill may not be a good man, but surely he is a great man?” He said, “Not a great man in the way Lloyd George was; but undeniably a great personality, which is another matter.” Lloyd George cared passionately for good causes, but alas, today, he is becoming senile and he forgets things.

C. Stuart [the editor] said he often has to attend press conferences in Downing Street, and these invariably end in a flaming row. Churchill loses his temper and dismisses the press, who no longer can resist the temptation of baiting him. They taunt him by inferring that he cares nothing about the future, and enjoys the war like a game of chess. He fears Churchill will certainly try to remain Prime Minister when the war is over and the country will re-elect him. He does not foresee a swing over to Socialism after the war, but a tempered form of dictatorship. All Churchill’s closest associates are unscrupulous, opportunist, fascist, crooked or vicious men; and he went through the list.”

(I had the impression Churchill did have a lot of respect for the Parliamentary tradition, and this would have impeded any dictatorship thoughts. Of course he wasn’t returned in 1945.)

Lees-Milne detested Churchill for having authorised bombing of Rome, Churchill being indifferent to architecture, and Lees-Milne caring more for fine buildings than their inhabitants. I have to say news of Rome being bombed would have caused me more pain than yet another industrial city and its citizens getting incendiarised.

Monday, 22nd November 1943

“Tom Jones [private secretary to Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin] ..told him if Winston Churchill had been born ten years later he would, in the 1930s, have made England a fascist state, ranged with other fascist powers; but he was too old a man with roots too firmly placed in the Victorian aristocratic traditions to adopt so alien a philosophy.”

Not the Netherlands

When cycling activists suggest making a city friendlier to cyclists, we are told, "this is not the Netherlands." That's true in Edinburgh, and every other city.  I stopped at a ceramics shop in Sofia to buy one of their mugs. I asked the shop owner about cycling in Sofia.  I'd seen painted outlines of paths ending and dumping you into traffic.  "We would like it to be better, but we are told this is not the Netherlands." "But Sofia is almost flat," I said. (There's a small gentle hill in the centre.)  "But it's not the Netherlands."

 

Sofia, Bulgaria

Sofia, Bulgaria. Not as charming as Plovdiv, but still pretty nice, in its centre anyway. Again, a variety of architecture. What impressed me most was the underpass under the Boulevard Kniaz Aleksandar Dondukov. There is the Roman street of big slabs – seems you can’t strike a spade in the Balkans without digging up something that the Romans built – but also the underpass is an agreeable space with shops, totally unvandalized and very clean. As well as the Roman bricks there are portions of a painted interior of an orthodox church with a few offerings on the little altar – can you imagine how long that would last here?

Also a view of a hefty, rebarbative building of the communist period from the underpass.

Byzantine. Under Communism churches were often concealed by other buildings. Lenin’s statue has been replaced by Saint Sophia, as in Tbilisi he’s been replaced by Saint George.

Bulgaria makes a lot of products from rose petals. These are popular with tourists, and they waft rose scent in the streets and underpasses.

City gardens. Civilisation is a public space, where even the beggars can beg unmolested, the buskers busk, the limping and swollen old sit in the sun, the eccentrics flaunt their off-beatedness, and friends take a selfie of themselves with the bride at her modest wedding.

Bric-a-brac market in Sofia, Bulgaria, near Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. I sneaked these photos of one stall. Most stalls had Nazi stuff - postcards and busts of Hitler and swastikas on drinks flasks. Very unsettling seeing casual heaps of images which are taboo in our culture. My sister picked up an army shoe cleaning kit in excellent condition. Leather case with swastika stamp and shoe horn and brushes inside. She shuddered and wiped her prints off the case.

 

The 365 tour of Sofia was excellent, the guide an actor with colloquial English and an actor’s instinct of audience. I asked him about the Nazi stuff at the bric-a-brac stalls and he said that it was mostly repro. Talked about Bulgaria’s involvement WWII – either allying with Germany or be invaded by them as a route to Greece; stalled the transport of the Jews eastwards to death. Some bombing by the Allies of the city centre.

Bathhouse from 1900s, now museum

He also spoke with pleased anticipation that Ryanair and other cheap carriers were flying to Sofia. I shuddered at that of course. The beer here is cheap.

Sitting in Sofia airport on the way home I could hear a chorus of flat voices, “It’s coming home, it’s coming home.” It was Friday and I wondered if the first stag parties were on their way.

Sofia, Plovdiv, Kavala – waiting for the tourist euro – economic salvation meaning the spoiling of their cities.

Kavala

You know the walk across hot tarmac, the wave of heat that hits you that shows the Brits they are on holiday? I had that at Glasgow airport in our astonishing summer. When I arrived in Thessaloniki it was pelting with rain. It was after 10 at night and I had pre-ordered a taxi for my late arrival. The bloke who picked me up was a guide, who wanted to point out the beauties of Thessaloniki in the rain and darkness. Then he pulled up a screen on the dashboard and showed me pictures instead, taking both hands off the wheel to gesture his points. He was an agreeable fellow – most Greeks are – so I concealed my fear and asked interested questions.

It rained all night – too wet to walk around the streets near the hotel and find dinner – taxi to the bus station the next morning and bus to Kavala, a couple of hours away through a pleasant landscape of small holdings, olives and coast.

I was meeting my travel companion, TC, who was attending a tourism conference (she’s an academic). We had a little apartment for a few nights, up a steep hill. In the evening she went to the opening reception for the conference, and I to the waterfront for a meal. Thunder, lightning, the waiters running about drying to find dry seats and pulling the restaurant umbrellas around to give us shelter. It was so wet I took a taxi back to the apartment.

TC had meanwhile been addressed at the conference by the mayor, a woman who had made a very good speech – the municipality wants to encourage tourism in Kavala. Then they had an hour’s guided walk. In what would have been a ridiculed plot point in a comedy, the guided tour was pelted on with rain, everyone poking each other with umbrellas and the noise of the water from the sky and rushing in rivers down the streets so loud you couldn’t hear the guide.

I can see why the mayor sees It has possibilities. It has a population of around 50,000, is nicely situated on hills and by the sea, and has an interesting Ottoman old town including an eighteenth century merchant's house you can visit, with a beautiful panelled interior, and the sense of a life lived turned towards inside – women’s quarters set up so they never see the men. It was the house of Mehmet Ali, the founder of a dynasty that ruled Egypt up to Farouk.

 

 

Byzantine Castle

Imaret

 

 

View from castle

There are only a few souvenir shops, some selling attractive ceramics and olive wood spoons and bowls. We bought some sponges and the woman we bought them from pre-haggled – i.e. offered us bargains before she needed to. I assumed she had been on a haggling course and was keen to practice.

Ottoman houses

Kavala Museum suited me. It’s air-conditioned, on one floor, small, choice collection including some coloured busts of women, a style of artefact which I’ve never seen before. Only two visitors when I was there.

The finest structure is an aqueduct built under Suleyman the Magnificent. It is very grand.

You can have an outing to Thassos, an island nearby, with a history of pirates kidnapping the citizens and a monastery beautifully tended by grumpy nuns. 

Archangel Michael Monastery

The most felt history is a memory of a 400 year occupation by the Turks.

Of course we were congratulating ourselves for staying somewhere not full of tourists, or at least not foreign ones, as the cafes were full of holidaying Greeks watching a noisy air show, and like all tourists we hoped that the place would not become too touristy. Greeks need the money though and if their resource is history, buildings, cheap drink and their people's agreeable manner, so be it.

Main square, Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki, where we stayed one night before heading to Bulgaria, was jam-packed and very hot. It has a brilliant Byzantine museum and a waterfront lined with busy cafes. Quite expensive compared to Kavala.

Plovdiv Pedestrianised - Bulgaria

Underpasses – yes I groan how a busy road bisects the old town. The cars get the right of way. And we the pedestrians are forced in the underpass. An underpass conjures up urban menace of urine stench and graffiti and dodgy characters.

Busy road through Old Town

The underpass under the road that cuts up the old town at Plovdiv is beautiful.

 

Attractive façade, ramps so you can push a cycle or buggy or wheelchair, and then shops, Roman paving of large slabs that they discovered when digging the subway, and a fine little museum of Roman mosaics and glass.

Roman slabs in underpass

Then onto the longest pedestrianized area in Europe, longer than Copenhagen. A busy, lively place, where you can stroll and shop and eat at cafes. Also nicely designed with ramps as well as steps.

A Roman stadium was dug up from an earlier level of the city.  It is in excellent nick, being covered so long and pleasantly incorporated into the street, with a cafe on a mezzanine level and views from above.

Plovdiv is Europe’s City of Culture in 2019. It’s a lovely little city, with a mixture of architectural styles, highly walkable and a lively creative quarter. Keep the cars out, make the city live.

The National Revival style of architecture is very attractive.  It was a bourgeois style of national self-assertion against the dominant Ottoman empire (400 years of Turkish occupation).

I'd never heard of Plovdiv until going for a few days to Bulgaria, chosen because the border is close to Thessaloniki. The delightful family hotel we stayed in showed two deeds of ownership - one from 1878 in Turkish script, the other a few years later in Cyrillic, after the liberation.  The Turkish occupation weighs here, like Britain in Ireland. 

 

The Cycling Pankhursts

Sylvia Pankhurst had a difficult relationship with her older sister Christabel. Christabel concentrated on campaigning for the vote for upper middle-class women and during World War I was handing out white feathers to non-combatant men. She ended up as an Adventist in the USA. Meanwhile the less glamorous Sylvia was a socialist as well as a feminist, opposed the First World War and in later years campaigned against Fascism and imperialism.

They were both members of the Clarion Cycle Club, “ a socialist cycling group associated with Robert Blatchford’s radical newspaper The Clarion. Unlike most other cycling organisations of the time, the CCC extended membership to women when it founded its first chapter in 1894. Early invites to club meets often noted that ladies were especially welcome, and generally a handful did attend.”

This anecdote from their cycling days indicates something of the friction between the handsome, physically stronger Christabel and her younger, sicklier sister. It seems appropriate that Christabel had a smart new machine, while Sylvia had a cobbled-together affair made out of gas piping.

“Those were the high days of Robert Blatchford’s Clarion, and the cycling clubs which helped to make its popularity. Christabel had already been demanding a bicycle at Southport in 1893, but the Doctor shrank from the thought of his young daughters riding among the traffic, and it was not until about 1906 that she had her way. I had no desire to ride; but from the habit of loyalty to her, I stood by her side when she made her demands. Our parents took it as matter of course that if Christabel rode I must go with her as a companion. We were now entered as members of the Clarion Cycling Club. Christabel and Mrs. Pankhurst scanned the catalogues of the principal cycle makers, and consulted the club to discover the best machine for speed. The first grade Rudge Whitworth was the final choice; it cost something over £30. I did not care what sort of bicycle I might get. Already, though our parents never discussed such matters in our presence, I had learnt from our aunts that they were not without financial worries. Therefore I was pleased when our teacher mentioned to Mrs. Pankhurst a cheap little machine, which a comrade had made at home out of gas piping. It was of curious design, low geared and rather too small for me; but it did not occur, either to Mrs Pankhurst or to me, that the machine was placing upon me a considerable handicap, when, in rather poor health, I attempted to keep pace with my elder and more athletic sister.

Thenceforward, every available day was spent in cycling. Though the journeys were often too long for me, and I would scarcely pedal the last miles, the Sundays with the club were pleasant. It was delightful to be out in the country, and the men were kind in helping push one up the steepest hills. It was when riding alone with Christabel that I endured a veritable torture. My crimson face and gasping breath were the wordless answer to her impatient ‘Come on!’ Afraid of being considered a nuisance, I would strain and strive till it seemed that my heart would burst. Finally she would disappear from me, climbing some hill, and arrive home somehow an hour before me. I remember being thrown over the handle-bars and rising up so shaken that I had to walk for some distance before I could remount, while she rode on, not noticing that I had ceased to follow. She delighted in hill climbing, and was proud to be able to mount the noted steeps which some of the men in the club essayed in vain. Dr. Pankhurst accepted, but obviously regretted this craze for cycling, which took us away from home every Sunday and seemed to be drawing us away from the public interests so dear to him.

 

One summer holiday we all had rooms in a farm-house at Pickmore, [sic] close to a camp held there by the Clarion Club. Crowds of young men and women, generally rather ostentatious in their love-making, in what was the Clarion way, came down there, and parties of “Cinderella” children were brought in relays for a week’s holiday. Robert Blatchford spent a few days there with his daughters, keeping exclusively to his chosen circle of friends, as he always did. About the same time the Clarion Clubs held their annual gathering in Chester. Christabel insisted that we should go, and I managed to accomplish the journey somehow. Mrs. Pankhurst joined us by train. Blatchford and his friends had booked the commercial room, the only comfortable room in the hotel, whereat there was much murmuring among the members. He came out to talk to Mrs. Pankhurst, and endeavoured to persuade her that Keir Hardie could not be “straight,” because his paper, the Labour Leader must be losing money every week. Christabel and I were both annoyed by this attack on our friend, and when Blatchford presently invited us into the commercial room, Christabel interposed: “Mother, do not go!” Blatchford’s attacks on Hardie because of Hardie’s work for peace and internationalism were a prominent and regrettable feature in the Socialist movement of those days.”

From Sheila Hanlon’s excellent blog on Women’s Cycling

Belated Christmas

I've been silent here for months what with one thing and another.  So here's a Christmas carol for my few remaining readers.

GOOD KING WENCESLAS
Good King Wenceslas looked out,
On the feast of Stephen,
Where the tarmac lay about
Potholed and uneven,
Brightly shone the glass around,
On the infrastructure,
When a cyclist hit the ground,
Suffering a pu- u- -uncture.

“Hither, page and stand by me,
Why’s that cyclist falling?
Yonder transport policy,
Looks like it’s appalling.”
“Sire that is without an end,
Trunk roads get full budget,
When it comes to cycling spend,
They will always fu- u – dge -it.

“Bring me plans and bring me powers
Bring me active travel
Thou and I will ride some hours,
In the mud and gravel.”
Page and monarch forth they rode,
Motorists were brisker,
In the weather nothing slowed.
Passed them by a whi – i -isker.

“Sire this path’s as slick as grease,
Leaf mush makes it slippery,
Undermined by roots from trees,
Hazardous and cripply.”
“Yes my page, this is insane,
Drainage badly fitted,
Bend your way through this chicane
Back to where it’s gri-i -ted.”

In his master’s tracks he rolled,
Tortuous and gated,
Nothing breaks the motors’ mould,
Lanes unsegregated.
Cyclists pray to all the saints,
One day they’ll deliver,
Routes instead of signs and paints,
This year next year ne -e -ver.