Are you reading me? Fifty Sheds of Wray..

 



Fifty Sheds of Wray

 

And these are just some of the sheds...

 

Fifty Sheds of Wray - just one  of the wonderfully inventive entrants in this year's famous Scarecrow Festival held in the pretty village of Wray in the Lune Valley. Adopting the theme 'Read Me' the villagers used their ingenuity (and their front gardens) to create their own scarecrows which entertained visitors from all over the country.

Strange how scarecrows have always held a fascination for young children. Barbara Euphan Todd's Worzel Gummidge about a girl and boy who discover this 'half scarecrow, half man' was immortalized on television in the nineteen eighties. But I wonder who knows that in the Middle Ages it was the children themselves who were used as crow-scarers...?  Only a shortage of young children apparently prompted farmers to stuff old clothes with straw and place a turnip on top to do the job!

The most famous scarecrow of all has to be from the1939 American fantasy adventure film Wizard of Oz. Based on the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L Baum, it was not initially a box office success, it seems,  but has made up for it ever since.

'I could while away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers, consultin’ with the rain. And my head I’d be scratchin’, while my thoughts were busy hatchin',  if I only had a brain...' sang the scarecrow. 

If only I had a brain! Now that's a thought that occurs to me when I'm struggling to find the right words sometimes.  I wonder if anyone else feels the same?




 

Expresso Bongo and Mrs Bouquet...

Blog Awards make me smile.  As well as prompting us all to read and comment on what other people are thinking, they also encourage us to tell all. Happy to be awarded the Sunshine Blog Award this week,  I struggled to find some little snippet  I hadn't admitted to before. So here goes...

Although my my nickname is Maz  I also have been known to answer to Mrs Bouquet....no prizes for guessing why...


Here's the second confession:

I met Cliff Richard when I was nine after a concert at the De Montfort Hall, Leicester. He asked me how I was, but I was too dumbstruck to reply.  He'd just made Expresso Bongo - a satire on the music industry for which  (I think) he prefers not to be remembered.

Meanwhile, the  rules of the award are as follows:

* Link to the person who nominated you and thank them.
* Answer 10 questions about yourself.
* Pass on the award to your favourite blogs and link them to your own.

So thank you Barbara at March House books who knows everything there is to know about vintage books for children.  You can find her onhttp://marchhousebookscom.blogspot.com/

And now for the rest of those questions:

I first got published when I was fifteen and still at school - in a national football magazine.
My favourite UK destination - York
Facebook or Twitter - Facebook
The man I would most like to have met - James Stewart
My favourite charity HUSH - the Uk's E.coli Support Group
The writer who most inspired me - Rosie Thomas
When would I like to have lived - Victorian times
My favourite quote - It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations -
Winston Churchill 1930  (I always wonder if that applies to uneducated women, too?)

And now to the blogs I'd like to nominate

Linda at http://lindaproud.wordpress.com/
Hanner Cymraes … means half Welsh woman
Margaret James at Margaret James
Gloria at Gloria Horsehound's Bungalow
Karen at http://writewritingwritten.blogspot.co.uk/
Karen at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?
Helen at http://blogaboutwriting.wordpress.com/
Linda at http://www.novelpointsofview.co.uk/


               
 

Fifties love affairs, a 'famos ritter' and a fairweather award - it must be Tuesday...

A children's author who sells a book every seven seconds in Britain  today admits that many of her readers have no idea how to spell.

Dame Jacqueline Wilson receives several hundred fan letters every week from children in Eastern Europe, Spain and Portugal but it's the Brits who have the worst spelling and grammar. 'Sometimes it is unintentionally and sweetly funny,' she tells The Times today, citing 'I want to be a famos ritter,'
 as one of her favourites.

Particularly well-known for the famous Tracy Beaker series, the author believes in facing tricky subjects head-on, such as divorce, abuse and mental health issues.  Her huge success also makes her the most borrowed children's author from our public libraries in the last decade.

Talking of decades, I was amazed to read the other day of a 105-year-old author of romantic fiction who has two more titles coming out this year.  Ida Pollock began writing when she was fourteen and has produced 123 novels -  eight of them in one year alone.

Mrs Pollock prefers to write about the attraction between men and women  'full of hope and romance' as opposed to some of the more explicit sexual overtones found in novels today. She likes her heroes to be rich and preferably older, with the ability to 'sweep in and save the day.'

These days she dictates her stories to her 69-year-old daughter Rosemary, but says she will never tire of telling stories.

Interestingly, Mrs Pollock's late husband was once married to Enid Blyton.  She herself helped found the Romantic Novelists' Association which recently made her an honorary vice-president to mark her
105th birthday.

I wonder what Ida Pollock thinks of the enormous success of e-books? Or, for that matter of writing blogs like this one?  In this first week of summer weather so far I have been nominated for the Sunshine Blog Award by  Barbara at March House books, whose own blog is included in Tesco's top ten book blogs for children.

Thanks, Barbara (or Bobbie as she likes to be called.) I will be posting my own list of questions and answers, not to mention other nominees next time. In the meantime - here's to more sunshine!

 

I'll be a log in a minute...

I've caused quite a lot of amusement since I acquired my new smartphone - sending unintelligible messages which seem to be immune  to predictive text. So it is with interest and trepidation that I read of the introduction of the new Kalq keyboard, designed at St Andrews University and soon to be made available as a free app on Android.

I'll be a log in a minute,' I texted my friend the other day.
'I always thought you looked a bit wooden,' came the quick-fire reply...

Trusty old Qwerty, which I've used since I first learnt to type, has me racing along on my laptop at around 120 words a minute, as opposed to the  20 words per minute most people manage on the average tablet.  Not surprising, then, that an idea developed in the late nineteenth century has finally found a  serious rival.

Apparently a lot of thought has gone into the study of thumb movements which, as all typists know, are usually reserved for the pressing of the humble space bar.  So, as I'm all fingers and thumbs at the best of times, I suspect I should  give it a go. Kalq, by the way, represents the four letters on the bottom line of the screen, which shows the keyboard split into two.

The developers are due to present their research work at a computing systems conference in Paris on May 1. Paris in the Spring?  I'm beginning to think this is a very good idea after all...


 

An expert on men - at ninety-one - will she tell all?

A loud cheer for the appropriately-named  Eileen Younghusband  whose book 'One Woman's War' has been shortlisted for The People's Book Prize.  The ninety-one-year-old started writing her wartime memoirs four years ago when many women might be content to spend the day knitting socks or pottering about in the garden.

Last week on this blog I championed the demise of the typical granny with her grey bun and steel-rimmed specs.  Now we have the proof! Eileen's latest book discusses the numerous men, famous and not so famous, she has met in of the course her life. 'Men I Have Known' gives some surprising insights, from  encounters with Rex Harrison and Dylan Thomas to her meeting with Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher's infamous predecessor, who apparently  'had no desire to talk to a woman.'  In the most unlikely quote from this book, as seen in The Times this week, Mrs Younghusband says

'Among these men it is for you to know and me to wonder how many I slept with...'

One Woman's War, describes  Mrs Younghusband's life in the Filter Room of RAF Fighter Command, collecting data from radar stations in order to plot the path of German bombers. After that she spent time in Belgium studying the  flight paths of V2 rockets. Even after the war she continued to help the  RAF by showing officers round a Belgian concentration camp, before settling back in Britian to run pubs and hotels.

Meanwhile, this indomitable lady has been studying creative writing, socio-linguistics and philosophy in her spare time.

'One Woman's War' is available from Candy Jar Books priced £8.99
'Men I Have Known' will be launched in Wales this summer  on the author's 92nd birthday.


 

Mother can you spare some time?

My mother around the time that I was born

 

 



 If we could pick our mothers, just as we pick flowers, I wonder what they would be? Prime Ministers or primary school teachers?   Celebrities or stay-at-home mums?

'What do you want to be when you grow up?' I asked the nine-year-old daughter of a friend of mine the other day. 'Successful' came the reply, 'like my mum.' Her mother is a respected artist who works from home, sharing her time and her talent with those she loves most.

The greatest gift a mother can give her child is time. Looking at the grieving Carol Thatcher this week I couldn't help wondering if this is where The Iron Lady went woefully wrong. What do you think?

Men-oh-pause?

A friend of mine has reached that time in her life when  hot flushes have taken over from hot dates.
        'I'd rather stay in and read a good book,' she said to me glumly the other day.
        'Oh well, I said, grinning,  'I knew you'd see sense in the end.'
With sixty being the new fifty and botox available to the masses, I'm surprised anyone feels old these days. Our facebook pages are filled with adverts for anti-wrinkle treatments, 'fat tummy' busters, hair extensions and  lip enhancement, making sure we all spend our money on chasing our long-gone youth.

My daughter found an old book the other day about growing up in the war years, or more accurately, what life was like in 'granny's day.'  The granny on the cover was sitting in her rocking chair knitting, had grey hair in a bun and steel-rimmed glasses. I wonder what the updated version would look like?  She'd probably have died red hair, matching lips, a nose piercing and be posing in a  pink and green Zandra Rhodes dress. Oh, and be called by her first name, of course.

The other thing about oldies these days is that they tend to get married again, something that rarely happened years ago. The tabloids seem full of couples who got together during the war, lost touch, have  met up again and decided to share a seaside bungalow till the end of their days. And why not? Why should being old stop people enjoying themselves?

Meanwhile today's women's magazines are full of photos of actresses like Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman looking exactly as they did fifteen years ago. They don't eat, rarely drink, spend four hours a day in the gym and update their fiancés on a frighteningly regular basis. So what's going to happen when Hollywood runs out of' 'mature-looking' women? You never know - there might  be a chance for me yet...






 

Twenty eighty four? Time for another Orwellian novel...

Sunrise in the Lincolnshire sky

 

 

'It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen...'

 



What makes an author see into the future? Watching a science fiction film the other day, one made way back in the 1940s, I saw a saucer-like  spacecraft glide silently to the ground. As  it came to a standstill the doors opened seamlessly, as if by remote control. Yet remote control hadn't been invented.

My favourite book of all in this genre is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the first line of which is quoted above.  Written in 1948, it's a  breath-taking insight into the world of Big Brother where cameras tracked  the minutiae  of Oceania  'inmates' as they went about their daily lives.

Described as 'the definitive novel of the 20th century,' the book was translated into 65 languages and sold millions of copies world wide.

The name Big Brother is now sadly famous for a very different reason - the popular reality television programme devised in America.   In 2000, the Estate of George Orwell successfully sued CBS for copyright infringement and received undisclosed damages.

Robert McCrum, in an article in the Observer in May 2009, suggests 'The irony of the societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell.'

In the book, Big Brother is the dictator of a totalitarian state where everyone is under complete surveillance by the authorities, mostly by 'telescreens.' Now that we have reached the age of CCTV  what, I wonder, are the next generation's fears for the future? Will Britain still be a green and pleasant land or a place where law and order no longer exists? Are our children aware of the power of the technology they have in their own hands,  a power that is constantly evolving even as I write.

Now may be the time for a bright young graduate to pen a ground-breaking novel about life in 2084.  I can think of an ideal publishing date - 13.13.13.  When the clock strikes thirteen, of course.





 

From Chiclitz to Chick lit....

 Cosied up with your Kindle?   Knee-deep in 99p novels?     Life was so much better when we  borrowed our  books from Boots. Or was it? My favourite  film of all time 'Brief Encounter' sees the heroine calling in at Boots on a regular basis to change her library book (pronouced libe-brear-ree by the wonderful Celia Johnson.)

And this week I learned some fascinating facts about our  reading habits from a thirty-three-year-old hardback book 'Novel and Novelists - a Guide to the World of Fiction,' which  I discovered in a second hand book shop. It begins with the simple statement - The novel could not have had such a long and persistent history had it not been for public demand...

'The main market,' it adds, 'for the (pre-war)  novel was the commercial circulating library.  The largest were the Boots and WH smith chains with up to 400 branches each in their  heyday - whilst a myriad network of 2d or 'cornershop libraries' supplied fiction to the whole population.'

Edited by Martin-Seymour Smith, this 'guide to the world of fiction' makes reference to 'Old Bloody Chiclitz,' one of  400 characters  in Thomas Pynchon's famous novel 'Gravity's Rainbow,'   which won America's National Book Award in 1974.

The Chiclitz character, first seen in Pynchon's novella 'The Crying of Lot 49,' is thought to be a metaphorical form of the once popular 'Chiclets' chewing gum.  The small pieces of chewing gum looked like teeth and 'bloody chicklitz,' it seems,  became  cockney slang for broken teeth.

I'm not sure who invented the name  Chick lit, though the idea has been attributed to international author Kathy Lette. Interestingly, the increasingly  popular independent publisher Choc Lit, founded in 2008,  almost swept the board in national awards for romantic novelists  last year.

 I read recently that there is a growing interest in 'religious chick lit' which sounds to me  like  a bit of an oxymoron. Come to think of it, Oxymoron would be a wonderful name for a character in a 21st century e-book. All I need now is the plot...