Until this morning, the last time I saw a haymaker using a scythe and making ricks was in the Fifties when I was a child in East Kent.
But there the reaper was today as the sun rose, on the Green in the Oxford parish where I live.
‘It’s easier to cut when it’s still wet with dew,’ he told me, adding with a shake of the head like a countryman who remembers better days, ‘… but scythes are not what they were.’
In fact Michael Buck is a former art teacher, a maker of cob houses, a lover of the Earth and the kind of person who is probably better known and more quietly appreciated by the community in which he lives than he realizes or perhaps much cares about.
Later, in the leisure centre, having a Jacuzzi, I was unsurprised to find myself sharing the bubbling, salty water with someone in whose garden Michael had built a structure and worked for a while.
The ricks, which are supported by a structure of poles so the hay hangs and drys better, are very near a playground. The children may seem indifferent to the hay-making but fifty years from now perhaps one of them will remember, as I do, the sound and the scent and the sight of the scythe, the fallen grass, the ricks of hay and how as the days pass by near swing and roundabout, and across the Green, the hay changes colour from green to yellow, and the scent shifts from sweet to mulchy and the flowers entwined with the grass die.
But not all are dead.
A haymaker can – and this one does – do what a machine cannot: he can choose to leave wild flowers standing. In this case it was a few clumps of knapweed which, the grass around them gone, stand brightly into morning sun.
It’s summer festival time in our Parish, so there are all sorts of things going on as the individuals who make up a community are brought together by activity, mainly low key. From barn dances to birdwatching, music-making to a small horticultural show, arts and crafts and walks. Each has its pleasant moment and is gone.
But hay making seems of a different order, more eternal, taking us back through centuries of rural life, here in the present and promising a future where some things will never be virtual but always real.

Links: the first covers scythes and old-style hay making; the second explains the modern process which we see all over the UK about now (ie before the grasses flower).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythe

http://www.ukagriculture.com/crops/hay_making.cfm

I take photographs continually and they become a visual reference for things done, seen and thought. It takes a while for some thoughts to emerge, others to recede and the images to find their place.
Sometimes one or other lingers on the edge of my mind like a disturbance caught in peripheral vision whose nature and meaning is not clear until, finally aware it is happening, I turn to look at it full on. Then I see its true nature.
The image I’ve pulled up now is from a couple of hundred I took in the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History in Brussels, Belgium, which I visited last year. It’s a photograph of a photograph and if there were names or a place or date to it I regret that I did not record them. But  for anyone raised to imperialism, as the British until recently were, the picture needs no explanation, just some knowledge of modern history and a daily viewing or reading of international news.
In this image we have all the arrogant posturing of the invader and the dreadful combination of obedience, puzzlement and simmering discontent of the invaded. This is the past, present and future of empire.
If you google this museum (details of its website are at the end of this blog) you’ll find a whole lot of posts from military buffs interested in the machinery of warfare, or aircraft now scrapped, or imperial history.
None of that can convey the slow,  unremitting  and finally unforgettable impact that a tour of its countless exhibits instills. Item by item, case by case, room by room, you’ll see our impulse to kill and take from each other made real: bayonets, gas, deceitful leaders, cannon fodder soldiers, weapons designed to burn and maim, trenches designed to protect scared men, orders, ruins and the medals, so many medals. There, too, is the dehumanising gear soldiers have to wear to protect themselves from their own weapons…
Only slowly did I realize that there’s one thing (with one striking exception I’ll come to) which you won’t see. An omission so astonishing that it beggars belief. An absence that gives the lie to this mausoleum to human destructiveness.
Bodies.
The dead.
The wounded.
The horribly destroyed.
You won’t see images of them.
Nor any evidence that I could see of what the Belgians did to the people whose countries that invaded.
The exception?
Right at the end, the one raft of bodies we’re allowed to glimpse are the ultimate victim, their killers the ultimate villain: Jews slain by Germans. Of course! This is Belgium and Germany was the enemy and, to some extent, still is.
So whilst we shake our heads and mutter over the dead Jews and the vile Nazis, our young white officer can posture eternally in front of his black soldiers and we can forget the blood and terror that lies just below the  surface of my picture of a picture – of something, more than likely, all of our ancestors once did, whether as leaders or the led. It is pictures like this we should look at from time to time, lest we forget.

www.klm-mra.be

This is the time of year when Francophiles long to make a pilgrimage to South France and sit in the sun in the lee of a limestone scar, drinking wine, listening to dry, rustling vegetation stirring before hot winds and making important choices about food, shade, sleep and whether or not to move. Failing which, and stuck in England as they may be, there are four books and four films which combine inextricably to give a near South France experience….
Most non-French readers, including me, come to Marcel Pagnol’s two linked novels Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources by way of the two celebrated films of the same name directed by Claude Berri in the late 1980’s. Only now have I read the novels on which the films are based, published in 1991 by QPD and Andre Deutsch.
What a pleasure and joy to read such well-observed, bucolic tales. They have a wonderfully harsh, peasant edge of meanness, perfidy, murder, deceit and revenge. Forget A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle which is a soft-haired puppy dog chewing caramel chocolates by comparison. These are two tough stories about what happens when innocents get done over by the ignorant, self serving, mean-spirited communities into which they stray. And guess what? The innocent are revenged and the guilty suffer the true torments of hell. Very satisfactory.
Pagnol (1895 – 1974) also wrote two accounts of his childhood which were also filmed, this time by Yves Robert: La Gloire de mon père and Le Chateau de ma mère Taken together these books and the films offer great summer reading and viewing. You’ll probably need to track down a copy of the books via www.abebooks.com, whilst DVDs of the films will have to come from one of the sites that carries these older titles, but it’ll be worth it.
As for Marcel Pagnol, his Wikipedia entryis instructive for readers and writers alike and in describing his careers in writing and film explains why his work sits so well in both media.

The new Insight Guide Travel Photography How to take striking images (ed. Tony Halliday) is an object lesson to other publishers and their editors in how to produce a great, readable, perusable  instructional book.

For some bizarre reason such books are often the opposite of what you’d expect for  a visual and exciting subject with very wide appeal. Example: the absolutely dreadful Canon Eos Digital Photography Photo Workshop by Serge Timacheff which does the nearly impossible – it combines poor picture selection, with poor picture quality, bad layout and impenetrable captions. Think that’s unusual? Don’t bother to buy this next one, just trust me: the Collins Complete Photography Course is as clunky as clunky gets and is so badly laid out that it is actually unreadable. A quick perusal of the photography section of any major book store will produce dozens more like these.

Why? There are two good reasons. First,  publishers make the dire mistake of having these books created by photographers rather than good book editors, on the dubious principle that techies must know how to create a book on their specialist subject. Usually, they don’t.  Second, photo selection is a skilled and highly creative business in  which art comes way before educational purpose. If,  like the Collins authors John Garrett and Graeme Harris, you work on the principle that images used must only illustrate the point being made (which sounds logical) you will end up with the equivalent of a restaurant which offers  unpalatable  ingredients rather than seductive dishes.

The Insight Guides are rightly famed for the brilliance of their imagery and the sharp layout of text and graphics all of which, in a great book, need to be offered in an integrated whole. It’s no accident that this new and impressive book is edited by someone who has  two decades of experience producing great travel books.  It’s evident from every page of this book that he has  exactly the corpus of editorial experience and archive materials needed to avoid techie-dom, to side-step clunkiness and do what should be done with such a rich subject: produce a celebration of imagery, colour, visual excitement and… yes… wait for it.. it’s coming… instruction that you want to act on. Result: exactly what is needed by a market full of people like me, who wander the globe with their cameras wondering why their images are  mediocre ; or,   as frustrating, occasionally taking really good ones only to  find they are  unable to maintain that standard with any consistency.

The solution, more or less guaranteed;  pay a modest £14.99  and take Tony Halliday and his team on holiday with you.  He’ll chat to you about the boring stuff – light, composition and the camera; he’ll explain the Rule of Thirds and Golden Section in a visual way you’ll instantly understand; and he’ll take the classic subjects – mountains, seascapes, city lights, peoples and safari and the rest, and shake life back into them for you. The image to the left, of Mt Valier in the French Pyrenees by the editor himself, is the kind of thing he believes that more of us could take if we followed the principles and techniques outlined in his book.

One reason I think this book moves the genre way beyond the simply  instructional  is that it also combines some fascinating photographic travel history (and the appropriate images) with a truly classic archive of great shots by the known and less well known. It’s really good to know in whose footsteps we tread as we raise our cameras to take another image. It might just help make our own better and more memorable.

In ten years time you’ll be looking through this book and planning the next journey and the pictures thereof with pleasure. Your Canon and Collins books will linger only as a bad dream in which you threw them out of a train window in Peru to return them to the environment from which the paper wasted in making them  should never have been wrested in the first place…

Link: www.insightguides.com

Cover price is £14.99; but it’s £8.89 on Amazon (or was when I checked).

PATRICK WHITE, the Australian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, has never been especially popular, commercial or comfortable to read, even for his fans. So I was surprised but pleased to see that he is one of six finalists in the ‘lost’ Man Book Prize with The Vivisector (1970).
My introduction to him was very odd. When I was in my ‘O’ level year someone in my class who was as equally bottom-stream as myself, presented me with White’s novel Voss. He explained that a customer in his Dad’s pub had abandoned it unread among empty beer glasses. Rather than throw it away my friend thought maybe I should have it since, ‘you read books’.
In fact, until that moment, I had never read an adult novel in my life. Feeling complimented but obligated by this unexpected gift, I glanced at the book on the train journey home that afternoon. I was immediately captivated by the far-off alien world White made real and by the occasionally strange use of grammar and language; and by something else I shall explain in a moment.

‘There is a man here, miss, asking for your uncle,’ said Rose. And stood breathing. ‘What man?’ asked the young woman, who was engaged upon some embroidery of a difficult nature, at which she was now forced to look more closely, holding the little frame to the light. ‘Or is it perhaps a gentleman?’ .  ‘I do not know,’ said the servant. ‘It is a kind of foreign man.’….. Something had made this woman monotonous. Her big breasts moved dully as she spoke, or she would stand, and the weight of her silences impressed itself on strangers. If the more sensitive amongst those she served or addressed failed to look at Rose, it was because her manner seemed to accuse the conscience, or it could have been, more simply, that they were embarrassed by her harelip.
‘A foreigner?’ said her mistress, and her Sunday dress sighed. ‘It can only be the German.’

It was this last of several narrative hooks, the German, that pulled me into the story and kept me there. For I had been to school in Germany, a fact curiously ignored by my grammar school, leaving me feeling as alien in my own country as ‘the German’, the Voss of the title, felt in Australia.
I read all of White’s novels in the years afterwards including The Vivisector when it was published in 1970, a first Christmas present from my first wife. It was a shock. A story of an artist, Hurtle Duffield, dedicated to the Australian artist Sidney Nolan on whose life it is based. A bitter portrait of an unloving man whose engagement with women and men is about ruthlessly dissecting them as subjects of his work. The language is wonderful, the characters riveting but the work itself bleak and without pleasure. It left me disturbed and I read no more of his work, moving on to new and more cheerful authors.

Years later, by then an author myself, I came across White’s autobiography Flaws in the Glass. The moment I began reading his bitter and cynical self portrait I recognized Hurtle Duffield – and, it must be said, that same tendency many young novelists (including myself then, I fear!) who  cut their creative teeth with a detached, slightly smug and unengaged view of things. My rejection of White was complete.
Then, last year, I saw the original hard back of Voss in an Oxford bookshop and bought it at once. Again, its brilliance and empathy captured me.
Now I find that The Vivisector is the potential ‘lost’ Man Booker Prize winner. Which puts me in a quandary because I rate the author very highly but this particular book still leaves me (I have just re-read it) feeling low. Unlike, say, J G Farrell’s wonderfully funny and warm Troubles (also short-listed for this prize) which for now gets my first vote. But time to read all the contenders I think… with reviews to follow.

LINKS: The full list is: Patrick White The Vivisector (Vintage); Nina Bawden The Birds in the Trees (Virago); Shirley Hazzard The Bay of Noon (Virago); Mary Renault Fire from Heaven (Arrow); & Muriel Spark The Driver’s Seat (Penguin); J G Farrell Troubles (Phoenix). Full details of the Lost Man Booker Prize and how you can vote here:  http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1412 There is a good Wikipedia entry on Patrick White at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White and the Nobel Prizes website has an excellent critique of all his books, including The Vivisector, at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/hansson/index.html

Many readers, writers and publishers have been thinking this week about the lengthening shadow the arrival of e-books is casting over printed books.  I know I have, wondering if my shelf of the books I’ve written is history. That’s because the latest – the iPad from Apple – has just been launched; while Kindle, the Amazon version, is doing well in the market place.

Just while I was watching Steve Jobs’  much-hyped presentation of the iPad in New York on the Apple website and thinking again about some of the obvious and fearful issues raised – Are the days of books numbered? Will the reading experience be corrupted? Are digital media as attractive for authors as print?  –  I read that yet another survey shows that children spend seven hours in front of screens, watching TV and playing games. The shadows deepened.

Then rescue came in an email from a teacher at Walton Girls’ High School, Grantham, Lincolnshire. Last term she decided to offer her Year 7 students a ‘new’ club activity – reading a book of her choice to any who wanted the old fashioned experience of being read to.

She wrote to tell me what happened because the book she chose was one of my own: The Willows at Christmas, one of my sequels to Kenneth Grahame’s classic.  She explained she had no idea what the response would be, but that she did not expect  the reading to go beyond Christmas.

Well,  the response was overwhelming.  Numbers rose from under ten to over forty by the end. The students demanded the readings continue into the New Year; they had to be  increased from one to three a week; deputations from other classes and older students, who heard what was going on,  complained they were not allowed in….

When the final words of the last chapter were read yesterday I am told that the students applauded – their teacher, the story, the experience. I asked the teacher, Mrs Jackie Brockway, to ask her students to say what the readings had meant for them.  Their answers follow, exactly as spoken to her. She says with some understatement that they are ‘rather telling’.

They are indeed and should be read more than once by publishers, authors, e-book makers, educationists and parents with an interest in books, stories and their audience.

• It’s cosy time. You can sit with your friends and take your blanket and pillow and your teddy and the words fill the air
• It’s better to be read to because it can be expressed
• It doesn’t ache your eyes
• You don’t just sit there staring at the screen
• You can relax
• When you’re read to you feel more comfortable
• It’s warm
• I like being read to because on a screen you can’t think of what words mean.
• When you’re read to you don’t have to think of the words because you know what they are
• On a screen it hurts your eyes and it’s depressing because it gets stressed if you can’t think of the words. I know what they are when I can hear them

What emerges from this is, first, that a significant number of these students do not like or want to read from screens all the time. Second, they recognise and value highly the difference between being read to and reading for themselves, from which we may conclude that both are needed but that one may lead to the other. Thirdly, and very interestingly, ‘difficult’ words are understood and absorbed differently  if spoken in an engaging context, rather than read on the page.  Finally, it is tragically plain from these quotes that some of our  children are reading-to deprived and probably story-told-to deprived too.

In a separate email the experience was described as magical and unforgettable. The plain fact is that these girls will probably remember all their lives those hours snucking down in the company of an inspired teacher reading them a good old fashioned story.  Some will go on to read books they might not otherwise have tried; others – and I am pretty sure this will happen – will go on in years to come to read to their own children, because they’ll remember how wonderful it was to be read to themselves. They might even read Grahame’s original story and so be led back to where I myself started from.

Which brings me back to e-books. True, Mrs Brockway might have read the same story from an iPad or  a Kindle but I doubt if these children would have developed the same attachment to the story, the experience and the notion of a separate book as the bearer of story if she had. The image of her students celebrating after the book was finished looks is like one you might see and pass by in a local newspaper.  But it’s not, so look again.  It’s these particular children and they’re holding up a book in celebration of an individual and  shared experience. That is not something we see every day coming out of our schools; or even, dare I say it, in the homes of our own children.

So when it comes to reaction to  iPad and Kindle, and the fiction they will help sell, let’s remember that it’s not  the medium that is important so much as the imaginative and creative journey they the other new media make possible. E-books may have a growing role but I doubt that we will ever lose our own greater one.

I’m not the only one whose diurnal rhythms are seriously messed up for a few days twice a year by the switch to British Summer Time (last weekend) and back again (due this year early morning Sunday 31st October). I know that because of what friends say and by the incredible number of responses to the MP Tim Yeo’s timely piece in the Guardian last Friday.
Yeo argued that  the Single/Double Summer Time (SDST), proposed by his  private member’s bill in 2006-07  ‘would mean that clocks move forward by one hour throughout the year to GMT+1 in winter and GMT+2 in the summer.’
He added, ‘bringing our waking hours more into line with the hours of daylight would reduce energy demand and cut fuel bills. A Cambridge University study in 2007 showed that both peaks in demand for electricity and actual energy consumption would be lower under SDST, particularly throughout the winter. It was estimated that carbon emissions would be cut annually by 1.2m tonnes at no cost to consumers and without reducing GDP. An earlier study by the Policy Studies Institute also concluded the change would reduce energy use and fuel bills and this was confirmed by the National Grid.’

One of the very odd things about that private members bill was the weird way all the members debating it in the chamber disappeared completely from the camera records of the debate for… two hours; as if that was not enough of a time peculiarity the subsequent Hansard report of the proceedings noted that those who voted against voted two hours prior to those who voted for yet the tellers told the tales as being two hours minus the one before plus the two after making it three less one which (of course) is two; and everybody subsequently had tea in the Commons Tea Room at four which would have been six if it had not been two. By a bizarre coincidence the debate took place on April Fool’s Day (the same date as this post) two years ago less one recurred, depending on your point of view. But back to the point…

BST, or to give it its official and slightly mysterious name, Greenwich Daylight Saving Time (GDST) was introduced in 1916 to aid industrial and agricultural production by ‘increasing’ daylight hours for workers. There have been various temporary changes and experiments since but GDST remains. This link sums it all up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time

The reader comments that followed Yeo’s article – you can read them here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/26/british-summertime-change – run through most of the arguments for and against. My own particular beef is my difficulty of adjusting mentally and physically from one time zone to another, which is effectively what such sudden changes in clock settings require. As a creature of habit, and a lover of the slow processes and cycles of nature, I would prefer no shifts at all. I wish I had the self discipline and bloody-mindedness required to simply ignore government time and stay with ‘natural time’ which is… what?
For me it can be any time standard, provided that once the clocks are set to it they stay where they are – except, that is, for going round and round and reminding us all that while our own personal river of time is getting shorter with each passing year.
It’s about this time every year that I briefly toast the memory of Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who in February 1894 died when a bomb he was carrying up the hill towards the Greenwich Observatory exploded too early. It emerged that his plan was to blow up the Greenwich Meridian and thus, he seemed to think, disrupt the whole world and possibly time as well. Fantastic! I like to think…

A RISING MOON over Christ Church meadow brought the very successful 2010 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival to a memorable end yesterday.
The great thing about literary festivals these days is that they are no longer just about ‘literature’ or dominated but the literary establishment. Rather the opposite. Their programmes now are celebrations of great ideas and current controversies which offer the reading public the opportunity to listen to and rub shoulders with men and women who (in the main) have recently published books expressing those ideas.
Given the importance of issues like global warming and the recent economic meltdown it’s no surprise that it has been the economists, modern historians, geo-politicians and environmentalists with new books out who have been especially popular with the punters.
The festivals themselves are rarely reviewed as a whole, just the individual speakers. Not surprising since it’s nearly impossible for an individual to attend enough of the events to form an objective overview. But it might be worth saying a couple of things about the Oxford festival as a festival. It was very well organised with really excellent and friendly front of house management: warm greetings, quick ticket service and generally knowledgeable staff.
The important business of book sales, whether in the general books sections or around individual signings (all run by Blackwells Bookshop staff) was efficient and well conducted, never an easy thing.
The individual events were often in the hands of volunteer stewards who proved to be a mixed and occasionally eccentric bunch: some too effusive, others very long-winded about the house-keeping stuff that needs to be said at the beginning of each event and many unable to handle mikes properly or thrown by mishaps and inclined to flap. One got so carried away by the panel discussion that he insisted on asking his own question before parting with his mike so the audience could have a chance. Send him to the naughty step!
But overall the stewards’ wonderful friendliness, enthusiasm for authors and their books and good cheer and charm was what made the festival feel festive. It was just wonderful.
With a single exception the venues proved very good, including the marquee which can sometimes be problematic at such festivals. The exception (as any who attended an event there will know) was Christ Church Hall, whose elongated layout and reverberating acoustics proved disastrous for speakers and audience alike. I understand this venue will not be used again.
The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival was an absolute winner this year which got people engaged with, and talking about, ideas and books for which otherwise busy lives so rarely give proper time. It’s great for Oxford, for books and for authors. But most of all it’s great for the reading public and that’s what matters most.