WILLIAM HORWOOD » I’M BLOGGING

WAR & PEACE

admin — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:53:50 +0000

What a pleasure to see a truly commercial film which dares to make its deepest points with allegory. I am thinking of Seraphim Falls (2006). It’s currently viewable on BBC iPLayer.

It’s a story of how two tough mens’ paths tragically cross in the American Civil War resulting in the quest for revenge by one of them. It’s also a gritty, realistic Western in which the realism slowly and effectively gives way to allegory and metaphor as strange characters appear on an increasingly bleak and arid landscape to make clear that this is really about the pointlessness of wars, civil and international, like those in Ireland and Palestine.

Francesco Goya’s classic painting Fight with Cudgels (1821) on the same theme shows two giants clubbing each other towards senselessness in their own mire.

One of the clever things about this film is the casting of two men (Pierce Brosnan and Liam Nesson who have each got sympathetic charisma. i.e. one likes them both. So who is right and who is wrong? Who the villain, who the hero? It took me the whole film to work out the answers.

The tag line for the film’s promotion is never turn your back on the past but the true message is rather different. It is that war is stupid, those who engage in it are ignorant, but the only way each generation learns the folly and pity of war is by doing it and learning the error of its ways…. Goya made his painting towards the end of his life, having lived through and survived the bloody Peninsular War. So as Goya’s image implies, and this film shows, war may never stop happening but we can each decide to be pacifist in all we do. Which is not easy for anyone, including me.

Links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479537

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qmfss/Seraphim_Falls (until 2/8/11)

MAKING HAY

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 07:59:36 +0000

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

THE PITY OF IT

admin — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 05:33:53 +0000

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

STUNNINGLY GOOD

admin — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:20:58 +0000

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).

E-BOOK, GOOD BOOK

admin — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:34:22 +0000

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.

FESTIVAL ASCENDANT

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:25:52 +0000

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.

NIGHT

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 11:19:16 +0000

I FOUND myself the other night a sleepless guest in a house with a great deal of ambient nocturnal light. It came from two high street lamps, neighbours’ security lights and a lot of passing traffic …

My friend’s glazed front door was simply astonishing, a glowing blaze of fiery light which I found hypnotic. Sleepless as I was with ideas, new characters, old ones paying a friendly nocturnal visit and certain problems of plot and pacing, I diverted myself by taking a photo of the front door.

Later, still awake, I stood at the dining room window looking out onto the street. I would never do this at home lest my neighbours think I’m odd, which is daft really because they probably already think that anyway. But in a strange house it seemed legitimate and so I stood staring out at nothing in particular for quite a long time. Then, turning to head for the kitchen and a cup of tea I caught a brief glimpse of my profile before my movement made it disappear. Intrigued, I decided take a second photo, this one of my shadow, as I was curious to see what is otherwise impossible for me to see.

So here it is, a self portrait of the insomniac writer thinking about (on this occasion) whether the photograph would be worth looking at. Maybe it is, maybe not.

But here’s a thought.

If I make a hard copy of it and put it among others in my loft, then maybe when I’m gone and my children go through my things to clear them out, they’ll see this picture and one of them will say, ‘That’s Daddy! I wonder what he was thinking about!?’ Then, after a pause for thought, one of them might add, ‘I wonder who took it?’

If there’s life after death, which I personally doubt, but if there is… my ghostly voice will answer, ‘An insomniac took it, you knew him well!’

LINKS: For those who like Al Pacino and thrillers the film Insomnia is worth watching, here’s the link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0278504/ which includes an excellent trailer. As this post implies, insomnia worries me not at all, so I won’t offer a single one of the plus-500,000 pages Google lists under ‘Insomnia Cures’. But this Wikipedia entry offers some fascinating insights about insomnia as well as further links of its own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia

RED LIGHT

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:09:24 +0000

IT’S AN AWE-INSPIRING business witnessing one of Britain’s premier orchestras recording a major new work by a living composer. But there I was last week in Cardiff, at the BBC’s HQ adjacent to the Millennium Centre, with a select audience of five people, watching the 75-member BBC National Orchestra of Wales record Adrian William’s magisterial and profoundly moving new Cello Concerto ahead of its first public performance at the Bangor New Music Festival later this week. The soloist is Raphael Wallfisch and conductor is Grant Llwellyn.
Adrian was once described by Yehudi Menuhin as a “master of intricate patterns and forms”. His astonishing talent and quality was recognized early at the Royal College of Music. While studying there he received recognition for his first mature orchestral work, the gritty and ambitious Symphonic Studies, an achievement acknowledged by the RCM director Sir David Willcocks. More recently (2007) he wrote the music for BBC TV’s series about China’s Terracotta Army and a year later the hauntingly beautiful accompaniment to the BBC’s film Trouble in Amish Paradise.
Now his Cello Concerto (2009) marks the culmination of Adrian Williams’ long standing relationship with cello soloist Raphael Wallfisch, an ardent champion of his work. You can get a feel for the power and range of his work at http://www.adrianwilliamsmusic.com

Naturally, to an unmusical novelist like me, who can just about plod through Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on a piano, and never did get to grips with notation, an invitation to a major recording was something special.
Don’t go in if the red light’s on I was warned. It wasn’t on when I arrived but even so I lingered outside the huge studio, peering through the little windows in the doors, wondering how to get in without being noticed. Orchestras in rehearsal don’t like gawping onlookers for a lot of very good reasons, one of them being that they start coughing when they shouldn’t, and another, apparently the ultimate sin: leaving mobiles on…
Luckily for me there was a traffic jam in Cardiff so several members of the orchestra arrived a few minutes late, including a player of one of the six, repeat six, double basses used in the piece. I hid myself within the shadow of his vast instrument and made my way more or less unseen to the tiered seats to listen and watch.
In addition to the red light outside there were two within, on either side of the orchestra, so that no-one is in doubt when recording is happening. When that light goes on silence reigns and the magic of live performance happens.
Except that in a recording, it seems, you rarely get to hear the whole piece, just bits as each section is recorded to the satisfaction of the producer and composer before moving on to another bit. I saw neither during the playing, just heard their disembodied voices from some other place making comments and adjustments so technical I couldn’t understand them; or so miraculously precise (like picking up in all the melee of sound that a clarinet was not playing an F-sharp when it should have been, naughty, naughty…) that I could only marvel at it all.
Perhaps most impressive was the sight of so many musicians going back and forth through a complex score and starting again, sight reading with total facility and equanimity. Apparently our orchestral musicians are very, very good at this because budgets are tight, time is short, so sight reading to a very high level is essential.
Rookie audience members like me have our own moments of drama, all self induced. The sudden going on of the red light induces an instant throat-tickle; and what briefly troubles my soul as we reach the quietest passages of this exquisite music is the ghastly possibility that after all I did leave the mobile on and the builder working at that moment on the house is about to call about the important matter of the siting of the trench for the new waste pipe. I didn’t cough, he didn’t call and almost immediately the music took over again…

As well as the coming performance at Bangor on Friday (details at http://www.bnmf.co.uk/concerts.php ) Adrian Williams’ Cello Concerto is to be broadcast twice by the BBC over the next month or so and a CD is soon coming out.

SETTING SUNS

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:48:40 +0000

‘Wow!’ you say and want to stop the car and grab your camera and capture the uncatchable – an extraordinary sunset just across that field, past those leafless trees, out over the far beyond of the chalk downland you’re driving across, so striking it seems despite all that to be almost within reach.
So you speed up a bit, look for a lay-by, and fail to find one. You look for a turn to the left, there’s not one of those either and the sunset’s shifting, changing, maybe waning before your eyes.
You slow, you take another peek and it all disappears behind some trees casting them into bright silhouette as a young van driver comes up behind you, threatening.
You speed up again and miss the only lay-by because you can’t stop with the van so close and the sky’s turned from blue to weird green and the clouds are haloed in gold and the sun’s rays shoot up out of them like the last moments of an opera when someone was dying but not wanting to leave.
A fingerpost far ahead, indicating a left.
You speed even more, scudding westward around a bend, the van left behind, the sun suddenly threatening your eyes as the sun visor is pulled down with one hand to save your vision and you turn the wheel hard to the left with the other, making the left and looking for a place to stop.
The van roars by behind, a youthful passenger’s jeering fist in the air. The road dips straight ahead Roman-like and then up the rolling landscape. It veers left again and the sunset moves off to the right, the clouds moving too, doing strange things with the rays which spread out, bifurcate, disappear, reappear and settle down to something less than they were a moment before.
A gate to a field, a place to stop, a car coming towards you in the distance, its sidelights already on.
But the sunset’s still amazing.
You grab your rucksack, , the zip sticks, you pull it anyway, it opens with a protesting rasp, and you take out the camera inside, fingers playing automatically with the settings as you climb out into the cold air, round the back of the car and into a great field of grey chalky soil.
You raise the camera and take a shot. Something’s captured at least.
The light’s going, the clouds shifting, the sky utterly magnificent and you’re smaller than an ant out on that wonderful fold of chalk, you’re there, here, now. No better place to be.
Another picture taken against the light and then a third and you look around and remember that a few miles from where you stand is Watership Down, the most famous fictional Down of all.
The clouds shift, the moment seems finally gone but you jump into the car to see if there’s still a different shot at the dying sun.
You stop again and climb out, more slowly now.
The clouds have gone and the sun’s just itself now, no haloes, no rays: its magnificent dying self beyond a hawthorn hedge and you take a few more shots as off to the right, where it’s already shadowed, and down by the hedge, where it’s almost black, rabbits appear: Fiver and his brother Hazel, Bigwig and General Woundwort.
The sun sets swiftly and you stand alone wondering what happened to Richard Adams who offered you lift once in his chauffeur-driven car from a literary gig in Birmingham and talked anthropomorphic story-telling all the way home like no-one before or since; and who paid you the compliment of having read your book as you read his.
The sun is almost gone and the camera’s no use any more.
You watch evening come. Just you and a chalky field whose subtle harrow lines disappear towards the last light in the sky; and a story that set your imagination alight so many years before, as great stories do; the cool breeze in your hair and the scampering of rabbits you can hear but no longer see.

Richard Adams is now 89 and lives not far from the downland his first novel immortalized. It had many rejections from publishers before it finally found a publishing home with Rex Collings and huge success: a story to warm the heart of every would-be writer. My last meeting with him was at a busy Society of Authors function when I went over to say hello. Fortunately I knew he could be, shall we say, irascible. He peered at me suspiciously and asked what I wrote and I said ‘Duncton Wood’. He replied very tartly, ‘No you didn’t. A fellow called Horwood wrote that.’ I decided it was best not to argue the point. Then, as now, I go to the shelves and hold Watership Down in my hands with pleasure and affection and hope that if the sun is setting finally on its author’s life it is doing so as beautifully, and gloriously as the sunset I chased yesterday across the Downs.

COLOUR IN THE LANDSCAPE

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:58:45 +0000

You have to look hard for colour in the landscape at the moment, even on sunny days. But on drab, drear ones, when the chill factor drags the heartiest walker down, the search becomes nearly pointless. In the snow, which we still have, even more so.

But soon Lesser Celandine will be a bright exception. Last year, when my photograph was taken, a combination of cold, rain and light made the small carpets they form in the woodlands exceptionally thick and yellow. However the cheerful sight of them is always laced with professional guilt. I confused them with winter aconite, the other early flower, in one of my first novels. The result has been three decades of uncertainty of this particular flower, like a grown man who still hesitates over long division because his maths teacher once bellowed in his ear, ‘You don’t do it that way, Horwood!’

Today, after a cold and colourless walk and a restorative hot bath, I continue to strip the wallpaper in a room in my writing house. There’s not much colour there either since the nearly eighty-year-old walls (the house was built in 1932) have an accretion of papers and paints all of which but the first have been unprofessionally applied. The last is, or was, magnolia, that favourite of all colours among the Undecideds. Yet colour suddenly appears when I remove the cladding around the window put up in the Seventies when secondary glazing became the craze.

It reveals the original wallpaper, floral and to some eyes, horrible. But to a novelist, or this one, everything is a source of interest if not beauty. Someone chose this paper and as it happens I know who it was: the original owner of my house was Oxford’s premier car dealer and he built the house as his first family home, not knowing that one day it would be marginalized on a ring road by the very product on which they built their fortune. When cars began to roar by in ever-increasing numbers they moved somewhere better but kept the house for sentimental reasons until their children, by then growing old, sold it to me.

One reason it appealed was that the original owner’s surname began with H like mine and he had two ghastly tiled fireplaces built in the shape of that letter in the main bedrooms. I’ve removed them now, no easy task, but I like physical labour between writing words. Now I’ve reached the wallpaper.

I’ll leave the last good bit to the end but meanwhile continue the slow and curiously relaxing business of stripping the rest of the walls with my steamer. This brings off the layers only slowly, meaning that shadows of the old wallpaper appear like Christ’s face on the Turin Shroud. But my palette knife brutally slides through these vestiges of what went before and then the old is gone forever. Not-so-random thoughts come to me as I continue the job: redecorating a room like this, I tell myself, is not unlike writing a novel. You have to strip away a lot before getting to the essence and then you start building up again. For the novelist, like the decorator, the greatest reward often lies in the process itself.

This morning the snow began to melt and the sun to shine. I went out into my garden to see if, at least, colour’s finally appearing there. Just a winter crocus or two, already wan and fallen, their lifetime over; and sunshine in the netting of the chicken-run (the chickens long gone) in the old orchard. But at least the air’s not freezing any more and amazingly I find the daffodils, like a pack of dogs awaiting freedom, bursting to get out of the carapaces that now seemed barely to hold them. When they come colour will finally return to my garden and also across the landscape, and soon, where the celandine briefly were, bluebells will start to show.