Snow dog



Wild with excitement at this strange white stuff

Drifting snow and dog-tail



Spot the dog

Beams and motes

Being half-Norwegian my mother was ahead of her time with regard to health in so far as the British were concerned. We were pushed outside at every opportunity, even when in our prams. So much so that one of my sisters, with her tan, was taken for an Asian baby. The mainstays of our diet were potato soup, stewed apple and grated raw vegetables. She even managed to persuade my brothers’ prep school to introduce salad into their meals.

    In my teens and early twenties I suffered from anorexia and then compulsive eating. One of the ways I managed to cure myself was by concentrating on the quality of what I ate rather than the quantity. That led to an interest in complementary health and eventually I knew so much about the subject that I was paid to write about it – for magazines, encyclopaedias and partworks (the book/magazine hybrid that you buy in instalments).

    As a hangover from my eating disorder days however I can’t eat chocolate sensibly. I either have lots or I have none at all. I put up with this, allowing myself the occasional binge, as beating oneself up is part of the problem, and not beating oneself up part of the cure.

    On Monday I decided that, since I hadn’t had any chocolate since Christmas, it was time for a binge. I went down to the village shop and bought a mars bar, a mint aero, a small Cadbury’s milk chocolate and a small packet of chocolate raisins. (Posh chocolate is no good for binges. It has to be bog-standard stuff.) Back home I ate them all at once. I felt fine. After supper, I decided that I was still in binge mode, so I had four pieces of ryvita, butter and cheese, which I topped off with a handful of walnuts.

    During the night, my stomach – used to a near-vegan diet – started to complain. I felt violently sick and spent several hours hanging over the red-for-danger bowl that we keep for such purposes.

    The next morning as Frog and I ate our usual breakfast in bed we heard a news item (about a new-style Coca-Cola advertisement) which mentioned that two in three American adults are obese and one in three American children. I began to expound my theory about junk food, that because it lacks the necessary nutrients it doesn’t satisfy. Your body is looking for the vitamins, minerals and so on that it wants and so prompts you to keep eating. ‘A healthy diet is so important,’ I said.

    The room fell silent.

    ‘Ah,’ I said after a few minutes. ‘I’m a fine one to talk.’

    Luckily, Frog laughed otherwise I might have bopped him one.

A couple of the books to which I have contributed



Sunrise

A place apart

In the eighteenth century ‘gentlemen and ladies would sooner travel to the south of France and back again’ than venture down to the West Country (according to Gentleman’s Magazine, quoted in my Gothick Devon). This was because of the state of the roads, described as ‘all mud, which rises, spues and squeezes into the ditches’. Devon (and Cornwall) therefore remained as places apart.

    Belief in the supernatural for instance lingered long after it was scoffed at elsewhere and even in the twentieth century people remembered the old stories – of pixies, wild hunts, black dogs, hairy hands, devils (many of these stories documented by Ruth St Leger-Gordon in her 1964 book The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor).

    James Ravilious (son of war artist Eric Ravilious), who had trained as an accountant and then taught art in London, moved to Devon in 1972. Having recently taken up photography, he was asked by the Beaford Art Centre in North Devon to start a small archive of local pictures. So entranced was he however by what he encountered that the project took seventeen years. He realised that he was documenting a vanishing rural way of life and went on to take similar pictures in France, Italy, Greece and Ireland.
    The 5,000 photographs he took of Devon are now recognised as an internationally important collection. Do check them out (www.jamesravilious.com ). They’re funny, moving and quirky. (I won’t reproduce any here as they’re in copyright and, as an author suffering from illegal downloads of my books, the last thing I want to do is infringe anyone else’s rights.) The pictures are available as cards too, which was how I came across them.

    When I first came to Devon in 1971 I thought it was a bit of a dump. It rained all the time and there were no shops. I returned however in 1976 and grew to love the place. Whenever I passed the blue ‘Welcome to Devon’ sign on the M5 or the ‘Devon’ sign on the A303, when returning from some visit to family in the south-east, my head would clear and my heart would lift. I would feel free again. It was something to do with the space and the lack of people and the fact that everyone was poor so money didn’t count for much.

    Now I don’t want to moan (then again, perhaps I do), but that doesn’t happen any more. Devon is now like everywhere else. The population has doubled in the last forty years. They are building a new town a few miles away from where we live and we can see the lights at night. A phone mast stares in at our bedroom window. The hedges are enclosed in fences, the wild patches are disappearing. People rush around in smart cars.

    At the end of December Frog bought a Telegraph. (I know, I’m sorry. He says it’s a good read and ‘you don’t have to believe it’.) We hardly ever buy newspapers but he wanted to look at the New Year’s Honours List. I browsed through it and came across a page of aphorisms from famous people – their favourite of the pieces of advice they’d been given over the course of their lives. Most of the advice gave me that awful weary feeling that New Year’s Resolutions do but one piece I loved. It was from the writer Susan Hill and it went something like, ‘If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.’

    Sorry, this is turning into rather a long post, but I will get to the point eventually, I promise.

    As an inflexible Taurean, I run my life on military lines – lists of goals, daily ‘to do’ lists, one job finished before another is started, etc etc. Frog on the other hand is a slippery Piscean. He only ever does anything when it’s urgent. He has hundreds of jobs on the go at once. If I make him a list he loses it or writes something silly on the end like ‘Be happy’. 'Nature is strong,' says another Piscean, a sister-in-law, when I wail at the development of Devon.

    So what I’ve been thinking is this. What you see reflects what you are inside, so maybe it’s me I’ve built over. It’s me who’s becoming too civilised. Maybe I need to take Susan Hill’s advice and do nothing occasionally. Take a break at the end of the 'to do' list.* Wait before starting a new one. Sit down. Watch the birds. Even if I can no longer find that place apart outside, I can still find it inside.

    And at least the mud never goes away.

*It occurred to me while out walking Dog this morning (Sunday) that I could even take a break in the middle of a 'to do' list, or even - heaven forfend - before starting to tackle one. Would the world survive without me? I shall just have to see.

Anguish in the soul

I love all my aunts but Aunt Susan, my father’s elder sister, had a special place in my heart because she was my godmother and because she saved my life when I was only a few hours' old. I was born at home and Aunt Susan was staying to help out. Glancing into my cot, she saw that I was turning blue so picked me up by a foot and shook me till I started breathing again.

    Their mother died of pneumonia when Aunt Susan was eight and my father six. (There were two younger children too, one of whom was to die of muscular dystrophy.) Aunt Susan was always a good talker, a fount of hilarious stories, but in her later years she started to tell me about that time, about how desperate she was, how she prayed and prayed, how she was sent away to boarding school because they thought a change of environment might help her. (It did.)

    She married a Staffordshire farmer and had four boys. I used to love going to stay there, but I think Aunt Susan missed the city-life she’d known when young. As the children left home she began to suffer from depression. Religion still played a big part in her life, but – like me – she took refuge in reading. The library van came every fortnight to Abbot’s Bromley, the village to which she and Uncle Philip had retired. She would walk the mile or so to the van’s stopping point with her tartan shopping bag on wheels and then drag it back home laden with books.

    She died in her eighties and Frog and I went up to the funeral. She was buried in the traditional way, in the village’s lovely country churchyard. It was a beautiful October day, and throughout the ceremony as we stood round the grave and the vicar spoke the service a blackbird sat in a nearby hawthorn tree and sang. I knew it was her way of telling us she was all right at last.

In the last post but one I mentioned ‘golden eras’. My golden era was the year I spent working and travelling in Australia in my early twenties.

    ‘What is it about this place?’ I asked a fellow Brit, whose reactions were the same as mine. ‘Why are we so happy here?’

    ‘The people don’t have anguish in their souls like we do,’ she replied.

    Yes, I thought. She was right.  

     What did the Aussies’ lack of anguish stem from? (I won’t say ‘does’ because I fear they may have changed.) I would say that at least in part it stemmed from the landscape which was still untamed, still so much bigger than human civilisation. It had presence. It gave perspective and meaning.

   What our anguish stems from I don’t know. Guilt perhaps, for what our country has done and is doing to other countries, for what we are doing to the environment. A dearth of spiritual certainty.

    All I know is that Aunt Susan's anguish at least is gone.



Aunt Susan, my father (right) and Bill, who died