Ramblings
This morning we drove to Southampton General Hospital for the next of this round of BCG vaccine instillations. All went smoothly and the after affects are as expected, which means I could just about manage to finish reading ‘Devices and Desires’ but not to write the review; that will have to wait a bit.
Tonight we dined on chicken Kiev, ratatouille, boiled potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, and runner beans.
What we now term the Pond Bed runs along the Kitchen Path to the
Patio Bed. During the last few days, Jackie has been planting such as these primulas in this stretch of ground.
These images show part of the rim of the rocky water feature that lay buried beneath this area when we bought the house 11 years ago. What we hadn’t realised, and Jackie had now discovered, was that many of the rocks had joined rather thin soil in filling the large sculptured pond. This is clearly why nothing of any depth has satisfactorily grown there. The Head Gardener had managed to prise out a few of these rough-hewn slabs of stone, but had to leave most of them for Martin to tackle today.
Our friend has recycled the stone to strengthen the walls around the beds and to create a footpath through the pond one.
He cleared up the refuse and tipped some of the sifted soil into the bed which he
then levelled off with more redistributed earth and compost.
Before lunch I took another poles practicing walk down Downton Lane.
I spent the afternoon reading enough of ‘Devices and Desires’ for the end to be in sight.
This evening we dined on second helpings of yesterday’s spicy merguez casserole boosted by the addition of Ferndene Farm Shop pork and garlic sausages and fresh vegetables, with which Jackie drank Diet Coke and I finished the Shiraz.
A tiny screw had escaped from my specs, meaning that I kept losing a lens. We took it to Boots Opticians in New Milton this morning. After a brief wait the problem was nailed. While we were in the small town which has a plethora of cheap eating houses, we stayed for brunch at The Garden Café.
This afternoon I accompanied Jackie on a visit to Ferndene Farm Shop to buy mushrooms for tonight’s dinner, and we continued on a forest drive.
The view of snowdrops along Beckley Road was blemished by the presence of crushed drink cans, so I looked skywards to bare
branches brightened by the emerging sun.
A pair of mallards now rivalled ponies for occupation of the winterbourne pool at the high point of Pound Lane. While the horses slurped their soup the ducks dived in search of sustenance.
Further down the road we glimpsed a pair of greys foraging in the darkened woodland.
On the road into Burley, her own pony tail swaying with that of her steed, and sporting a jacket bearing the legend TEAM HONG KONG CHINA, we fell in behind a young rider who let us know she was turning off and thanked us for our patience.
Controlled burning of gorse was under way on the moorland alongside Holmsley Passage.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s spicy merguez sausage casserole; boiled potatoes; crunchy carrots; firm cauliflower and its chopped up leaves, with which I drank more of the Shiraz.
No culling was done from
My header picture today does not appear on the above post, but it shows me on my mobile phone telling the Nottingham Post newspaper the good news.
For much of this cold, overcast, day I continued reading ‘Devices and Desires’.
This evening we dined at Rokali’s where I enjoyed Naga chilli prawn and special rice, as Jackie did paneer shashlik; I drank Kingfisher and she drank Diet Coke. The food was as plentiful and perfectly cooked; the service as friendly and efficient as ever; the ambience so comforting.
Having begun the book yesterday, I read much more today of P.D. James’s ‘Devices and Desires’.
Tonight’s dinner consisted of succulent duck roasted in plum sauce, boiled potatoes; crunchy carrots; firm Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and cauliflower; with fried chestnut mushrooms. Jackie drank Diet Coke and I drank Paarl Shiraz 2023
About 37 years ago in Newark I bought a Victorian armchair which
became my counselling seat. I had met a tax inspector on the train during my days of commuting to London four days a week. He had told me how, when he interviewed suspects he always occupied a higher perch to give him more of a sense of power. I did the opposite because I wanted to keep clients at ease. They were already giving me the power of their trust.
Not only was my chair lower on the ground but it was long in the seat and therefore just right for my legs. Why was this so?
A bustle is a padded undergarment or wire frame used to add fullness, or support the drapery, at the back of women’s dresses in the mid-to-late 19th century.[1][2] Bustles are worn under the skirt in the back, just below the waist, to keep the skirt from dragging. Heavy fabric tended to pull the back of a skirt down and flatten it. As a result a woman’s petticoated skirt would lose its shape during everyday wear (from merely sitting down or moving about). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bustle
This chair accommodated a behind bolstered by a bustle, the owner of which could happily dangle her legs in comfort from nearer the edge. As can be seen, I must have worn my chair to a frazzle. Particularly as there is not much call for voluminous rear ends today, this chair was now occupying too much space.
https://derrickjknight.com/2025/01/27/repairs-and-refurbishment/ contains images of the Victorian rocking chair Dillon used to rock our great-granddaughter Ellie to sleep during her first two and a half years of life. It was already very creaky, and, a twenty-first birthday present from Jessica’s mother, I had never seen it without gaping joints. The above-mentioned post features Andrew Sharp carrying it off for refurbishment.
Today he brought it back, with every joint glued tight and no creaking to be heard.
He had noticed that the triangular blocks to hold the seat at the front were rather too small for the job, and replaced them.
The iron springs beneath the hessian were intact, but the material
needed replacing. Here, in his mobile, Andrew displays this process midway;
and here is the finished article ready to be placed on the blocks.
He is always keen to explain all his careful refurbishment.
Jackie was more than happy to try it out.
Andrew returned the refurbished rocker today and took the bustle chair off to auction. He had volunteered to do this and give us the proceeds. Because he was doing us a favour and we all knew this would simply be regarded as a project for a buyer we asked him to keep the money.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s wholesome shepherd’s pie; quite white cauliflower; crunchy carrots; fried chestnut mushrooms, and tasty gravy, with which she drank Diet Coke and I drank Whole Berry Cabernet Sauvignon 2021.
Given her conviction that the members of this multi-talented family were so tightly knit Juliet Barker wrote her life as of the family rather than of individual members.
She makes the point that for the best part of a century and a half until her 1994 publication we had relied on Mrs Gaskell’s biased and misleading depiction of the Haworth parsonage; the father Patrick Brontë; and the brother, Branwell, which, with compelling evidence, she largely debunks.
As is my wont, I will attempt to avoid spoilers, by not revealing too many details, although I do show many of the chapter headings from my Weidenfeld & Nicholson paperback edition of 1995, complete with the author’s prose beneath them. It is most significant that the eldest two of the six siblings did not reach adulthood, and why and how they did not. The four who did were all competent artists as well as exceptional writers.
After the early death of his wife and mother of the children, Patrick did his best to bring up the siblings with the help of their maternal aunt. Barker contends that he was a far more caring parent than the one described by Gaskell.
Our author bases her work on letters, publications, and reported conversations of friends, relatives, and witnesses contemporary with the family members. She balances differing views and claims, whereas she contends that Mrs Gaskell’s informants are largely biased or untrue.
Juliet Barker sets the scenes that would have been familiar to the Brontës themselves and compares them to locations in the 1990s. Thus, “the fell hand of the twentieth century has destroyed most of the Dewsbury that Patrick Brontë knew. Its once proud and separate identity has been lost, swallowed up in the vast and characterless urban sprawl which oozes southwards from Bradford and Leeds. Today, its most dominant feature is the road system – a Gordian knot of flyovers, dual carriageways and underpasses apparently designed to prevent anyone either entering or leaving the town. The shabby remains of late Victorian municipal splendour are dwarfed by the concrete stanchions of modern bridges. Semi-derelict mills, empty warehouses and demolition sites are a depressing foretaste of the town centre. Dewsbury is a town which has lost its way; having obliterated its past it gives the impression it has no confidence in its future. Yet in December 1809, when Patrick arrived, Dewsbury was a distinct entity, a town with a venerable history and a prosperous future in the boom years of the late nineteenth-century wool trade.”
The historical context is also pinpointed by such as the Luddites battle against machines in 1812, the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the coming of the railway in the 1840s, and the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The three surviving sisters and their brother Branwell spent their childhood years writing what Barker terms juvenilia in which they played out their own relationships in their creations of characters which continued into their young adulthoods, and “the attraction of such piquantly shocking characteristics in their creations was that they were so alien to the conventionality of life at the parsonage.” The Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo made him a hero in these works given the fictitious character name.
Barker presents many balanced extracts from her source materials, including their groundbreaking novels, interpreting how the juvenile fantasies and the lives of the three major writers influence their mature works. In particular she considers the many contemporary attempts to identify the originals of many of the characters.
Relationships with publishers and reviewers are explored. In particular how they affect individual family members and how such relationships ebb and flow over the years, especially in an age when communication was mostly by long distance letter writing and subject to misinterpretation. People could not make an appointment by telephone, text, or e-mail; rather they may travel miles to turn up on a doorstep where they may or may not be welcome – indeed they may be too late to attend a deathbed or may not have known someone was even ill.
These are the front and back covers of my copy of the book. The portrait of the three sisters is by Branwell who erased himself from the central space.
The title page illustration is by Emily;
these selected chapter headings. The gallery, where the individual artists are named, can be accessed by clicking on any one of the images.
I closed my posting of this review before we dined on Jackie’s wholesome shepherds pie, parsnips, mushrooms, carrots, broccoli, mange touts, garden peas, and spinach, with which she drank Diet Coke and I finished the Malbec.
On another cold-cloudy day Jackie drove me to Southampton General Hospital to begin my next round of BCG vaccine instillation. This went smoothly, but the after effects are more than somewhat inconducive to concentration.
I did manage to finish reading Juliet Barker’s ‘The Brontës’, but maintaining focus may take a day or two for a review.
This evening we dined on Bird’s Eye battered cod; oven chips, baked beans, and garden peas, with which I drank more of the Malbec.
This finger-tingling morning we transported another 14 bags of garden refuse to Efford Recycling Centre and returned with
two plant stands to replace two that have rusted away in the Westbrook Arbour. The black one between the two chairs is made of cast iron and not likely to rust.
Afterwards I culled all pictures except two from
This afternoon I read more of ‘The Brontës’, before dinner which consisted of the second half of yesterday’s roast chicken with similar fresh vegetables accompanied by Diet Coke for Jackie and Valle de Eco Malbec 2023 for me.
This morning we woke to the smell of burning oil. Once more our heating was not working.
Top temperature outside today was four degrees centigrade; I don’t know what it was inside, but I certainly wasn’t going out – so after lunch I practiced with my Nordic poles, reaching No. 21 Downton Lane before turning back. I didn’t time the walk this time, yet a stiff cold breeze added enough of a chill factor for me to travel as nippily as possible.
There is still a small supply of crab apples to nurture our regular blackbird visitor.
This afternoon Steve of Norman’s heating came to fix the boiler problem. There was a small amount of oil where it shouldn’t be in the system; Steve cleared it out.
Later, I read more of ‘The Brontës’ before dinner, which consisted of succulent roast chicken; crisp roast potatoes; crunchy carrots; firm Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and cauliflower with its chopped leaves for brassica; and tasty gravy with which I finished the Bordeaux while Jackie drank Diet Coke.