april round up
This month I finally got to return to my favourite place for a much needed break, Daymer Bay in Cornwall. My family have been going to the same house for 50 years. It sadly isn’t owned by us but has been in the family who rent it to us for 100 years, this year. These numbers are hard to comprehend. I have visited almost every year of my life until lockdown in 2020 meant that we didn’t get to go. I missed it in that time.
This is where I always notice the first signs of Spring; bright yellow gorse, sea pinks along the cliff paths and daffodils, the smell of wild garlic and overflowing bushes of fennel fronds. It’s a week of seeing extended family and much walking, sometimes battling the elements, sometimes basking in the elements. This year it was the later and we all came back with more freckles and happy to have had a change of scene. Every year we also talk of moving there, looking up schools and searching rightmove. And then we return to Brighton and all it has to offer and let those thoughts go.
What I Read This Month
1. The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett
2. Where To Begin by Cleo Wade
3. The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss
4. The Push by Ashley Audrain
5. Hamnet by Maggie O’ Farrell
I read The Mothers by Britt Bennett a few months ago and really enjoyed it but The Vanishing Half surpassed this with a twisting, clever story about twins and generations of a family and their moving through life, navigating trauma and race and community.
Maggie O’ Farrell’s newest book goes straight into my top 5 books, a beautiful story surrounding the character of Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son who he then wrote a play about entitled Hamlet, of course. This book is so many things; nature, folklore, family, myth, birth, love, grief. Shakespeare is never named specifically, titled ‘The Latin Tutor’ or ‘The Husband’ or ‘The Father’ but the story is really focused on his wife Agnes, a healer and gifted herbalist, a girl who grew up at the edge of a forest. It charts her life and her connection with the land and family and a plague which sweeps through. The way it is written is so magical, it is almost as if back then the line between natural and supernatural was less clear. I am not at all surprised that it has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
MONTHLY FAVOURITES
Turned Up Online For… Julia Samuel & Pandora Sykes on IG live. Julia wrote a book called Grief Works and her newest one is called This Too Shall Pass. Having lost 3 people over the past year who all meant something to me and my Dad being really unwell I found this a very interesting watch, they discuss change, children and the lifting of lockdown.
Watched… Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold documentary. I love Joan Didion’s writing, what an incredible woman but I had no idea of the details of her life before her husband and daughter died within a year of a each, because I read her book A Year of Magical Thinking so this really explained her life beforehand, what a brave woman and great mind.
Listened… I have said this before but I love the Toast Podcast. The new series is here and it is all about rhythm. It explores the ways in which rhythm is harnessed creatively to stir the senses. From the rhythmic pattern that propels you into a poem, the expressiveness of a musical composition to the cadence of speech on stage or sculpting intimate scenes on a film set.
Over & out for another month. x
