Susan Price's 'Nennius' Blog

The Joy of Notebooks? -- Nah.

2019-04-27T00:00:00.000+01:00

Here, a beautiful notebook. Only a tenner.

Earlier this month my Authors Electric colleague, Lynne Garner,asked us what we like to write with.

She mentioned that she had 'many, many notebooks' which she preferred to use when writing poetry. A writer she said, could not have too many notebooks, especially if they were lovely.

Lynne is far from alone in thinking this. Over the years, I've heard dozens of writers sing the praises of their notebooks: the moleskin ones, the leather bound ones, the ones with lovely floral or shiny covers. I've heard many writers say that they keep special notebooks to write down ideas in, and many say that they can't start a new book until they find that special notebook which is just perfect for that particular idea.

This all makes me feel quite left out as in my entire writing career of nearly fifty years I have never, ever given a single spit about any notebook. I buy 'em cheap, treat 'em mean and discard 'em without a thought.

I'm not trying to say that I am right in this and everyone else is wrong -- not at all.

Find it here

I've always thought that writers should adopt whatever method helps them to get the words written (short of GBH or murder.) And if beautiful notebooks do it for you, then stack them high. Put aside money to buy them. If you need a particuarly beautiful notebook in order to get the idea down on paper, then you need it and there's nothing more to be said.

But I feel there may be those like me who, indifferent to the allure of notebooks, are asking themselves: Can I really be a writer at all, if I don't have a notebook habit?

I want to reach out to those writers and assure them that, yes, there is writing without beautiful notebooks.

I have what I think many would feel is a depressingly pragmatic approach to writing, as to most other things in life. Easy and cheap, that's all I ask.

I used to write by hand a lot before PCs happened. Not because of any spiritual feeling of closer contact with the ideas that flow from my heart to my hand (as I've heard some writers put it.) No: it was simply that it was slightly easier than using a big, heavy, clumsy typewriter.

I used to write so much, for so long that I had the most impressive writers' cramp I've ever seen. Not just an achy hand -- not just a trembling hand. My right hand used to go into such violent spasms that it jerked up as high as my shoulder and threw the pen across the room. Which is one way of saying: I've had enough!

That's when I found that I could write almost as well with my left hand as with my right, especially if I turned the paper sideways (a tip from my left-handed aunt.) Not as legibly, but good enough. Several members of my family are left-handed but I'd never had a problem with using my right and had never tried writing left-handed until I wore my right hand out.

For a while I wrote with a typewriter. I never liked it much, but the electric one made it slightly quicker and easier than writing by hand, most of the time. As soon as I could get a computer, I started writing directly onto a computer almost all the time: rough drafts, rewrites, fiction, non-fiction, it doesn't matter. Because it's easier. That's the whole of it. No matter how beautiful the notebook is, I can't grab a whole paragraph and shift it to elsewhere on the page, as I can with a computer. I can't over-write in a notebook. I can't easily add a lot of notes to the end of a day's writing, in different colours and fonts -- and then, next day, shift them around until I decide on the strongest and then over-write them.

I do sometimes do a pubowrimo -- that is, when I'm not getting any writing done, I take a notepad and pen to a pub and write there. But it's the change of scene that's important, the break in routine, not the notepad.

I always use the biggest, cheapest writing pads I can find. And I write from margin to margin, side to side and top to bottom. I think this comes from having been raised in a household where money was scarce, but almost everyone drew and wrote. Drawing and writing pads were jealously guarded and often hidden (since an artist will scribble sketches on the nearest available paper. You have to watch artists.) When I write in a notepad, the idea of leaving wide margins or blank pages to add revisions is against every instinct I learned as a child.

Basic Mathematics

While writing on holiday, I have used notepads, simply because it's more convenient than lugging some electronic device around. I've gone to the local store on some small Hebridean or Greek island and bought the cheapest writing pad they have, of whatever kind -- school exercise types or 'reporter' notebooks. I scribble in it, type up what I've written when I get home, and probably never look at the writing pad again. (Except I am currently using an old reporter type to do hard sums in as I work through Mathematics: A Complete Introduction. I decided to stop being 'bad at maths.' (Or, at least, not as bad.)

I've never kept a notepad of ideas because I know that I would never look back at what I'd written. I've always believed that, if I have a good idea, I'll remember it. I may forget it for a while, but it will eventually come back, bringing friends with it. I think a notepad -- even if I looked at it often, which I wouldn't -- would tend to fix the idea as a first thought, whereas I want it to stay fluid. This may not be the case with others but I know all too well how literal and single-tracked my mind can be. I don't need to encourage that tendency.

As for finding a new, lovely notebook for every new book I write... Nah. I dither about starting something new as much as anyone. I may even do a pubowrimo to get into it. But the pad I write in will be some big, lined, supermarket cheapie. Probably one I've already scribbled other stuff into.

There is no romanticism in my writing soul. I once amused my editor at Faber, Phyllis Hunt, when she asked me if I was writing anything. I said I had 'a couple of things up on the stocks.' "Oh, they're boats?" she said.

I thought about it and said, "They're something that I'm hammering together out of bits of old orange crates and scrap." I admit, it does faintly annoy me when writers (such as Dickens) compare their books to babies or children. I hammer my stuff together. I tear it down and rebuild it. I clear the site and make good. Children aren't allowed on building sites. I've no doubt that this 'hard-hatted worker on a building site' metaphor is found intensely annoying and posey by many, but for me, it chimes better with my attitude to my work. I don't wipe my stories' noses.

Pens, though. That's different.

I don't care much about the paper, but difficult pens infuriate me. Lynne said she dislikes biros and fountain pens, and I agree. Both were banes of my school days. Fountain pens, as Lynne observes, spread ink everywhere except where you wanted it. Biros were uncomfortable to hold and their ink was always turning sticky and blobby, making writing difficult.

uniball vision elite pens

My pen has to be a roller-ball and not just any one. It has to move fast and freely over the paper, in the right or left hand. Not all 'rollerball' pens are made equal. Some catch and scratch and they are quickly discarded. The ones I'm using at the moment are called 'uniball vision elite' and they're very smooth, fast and scribbly.

Just as in my childhood, I find I have to hide good pens. I am beseiged by artists and crossword and sudoki addicts. If I don't hide my best pens and deny that I have them, they are filched to make quick sketches or fill in 3 Down. I will never see that pen again. I've learned, if asked to lend them that pen I was using earlier, to say that I lost it, left it in the cafe, dropped it overboard in the Pentland Firth. Or, cunningly, to have an inferior biro to hand that I can lend them.

If there's a moral to this blog, it's simply that you can be a writer without adding beautiful, expensive notebooks to your shopping list -- although if they seem to help you write, then fill your trolley.

But fast, scribbly pens are essential.

You should always have a few packets of such pens hidden about the place. Never tell an artist or a sudoku addict where they are. Artists and sudoku addicts have no morals when it comes to paper and pens. They will take your last notebook and -- far worse -- your last pen.

https://www.susanpriceauthor.com/

Sculptures Telling Stories

2019-01-26T00:00:00.000+00:00

You might well have heard of the Kennis brothers before.

If you have, never mind. An excuse to look at their work again is always a good thing.

The Kennis brothers, Adrie and Alfons, are unsettlingly identical
Dutch twins. They refuse to call themselves artists, though they are. They are also anatomists and anthropologists and they create the most startlingly original portraits of ancient people that I’ve ever seen.

I was unaware of their work until my brother (and illustrator) Andrew, started outgrabing about a programme we were watching. It had one of those forensic recreations based on a medieval skull. The result always looks much the same, whatever skull is being used: a bland, expressionless face, rather like that of a shop-window dummy.

“Don’t waste our time!” Andrew said. “Send for the Kennis brothers! There should be a law that only the Kennis brothers are allowed to do reconstructions!"

I had never heard of the brothers Kennis, but once directed to their website, I could see Andrew’s point. When you look at one of their recreations, it looks back. It almost speaks. You feel that if you could catch it at the right moment, it would tell you a joke or the story of its life. And I would be all ears.

I think the Kennises refuse to call themselves artists because everything they do is based on research and evidence. Their approach is meticulous. Each of their sculptures is based on an individual skeleton. After much research into the anatomy of that individual and its species, they first build a skeleton -- a neanderthal skeleton or an erectus skeleton. They even build it a flexible spine.

They add muscles of clay. They add rope for arteries. They layer on the skin in translucent layers of silicon, as an oil painter does with layers of coloured pigment.

They don’t guess at the colouring. DNA analysis provides them with the most likely eye, hair and skin colour. One of their most controversial – and beautiful – sculptures is based on the skull of a young man found in Cheddar Gorge. Often known as ‘the oldest Briton’ he dates from 10,000 years ago. (Though one of his direct descendants was found living just down the road. And it's reckoned that 10% of modern Britons are descended from him. That's about six and half million of us.)

The Kennises portrayed him as having dark, wavy hair, quite dark brown ‘black’ skin and blue eyes.

Some people were simply surprised, especially by the contrast between the dark skin and light eyes. But there was the usual ‘political correctness gone mad’ reaction from the usual sources, with the insulting implication that the Kennis brothers had given their subject this colouring on a whim, to gain publicity or kudos for being ‘woke’ and ‘progressive.’

The truth is, they gave him that colouring because that is what their research and the DNA analysis of his bones indicated. The DNA results are never absolutely definitive but they indicated something like a 75% probability that his skin was dark and his eyes light.

What strikes me most forcibly when I first saw the sculpture was not its colouring but its personality: its expression and liveliness. These sculptures change with the angle and lighting. From some angles, Cheddar Man seems about to burst into laughter. His face conveys warmth and friendliness. I don't like the expression but, god help me, he has 'a twinkle in his eye.'

Since it’s moulded around a reconstruction of his skull, he must have looked something like that. Maybe in life he was a miserable so-and-so without a good word for anyone. We'll never know. But even if the personality given him by the Kennises is completely wrong, their sculpture strongly conveys a great truth to us in a way more direct and compelling than words: that these ancient bones we dig up were once living people, as vital as we are.

This post has been all text and no pictures because the Kennis brothers work is copyright. However, here you can read an article about their work, which has many photographs.

And here’s a link to their website, with many more photographs of their work. I’m particularly fond of the Neanderthal grandmother, with the child hugging her.

I think their recreation of Australopithecus Lucy is astonishing — she isn’t human and yet she is, in spades. Chin up, arms on her hips, she looks down her nose at us and stares us out. She has personality all right: she has Attitude. And sass. Looking at her I feel that, any moment, her mouth is going to open and the voice of one of my great, great, great, great, great grandmothers is going to tick me off.

Turkana Boy, too, is an amazing piece of necromancy. (Click down through the pictures on the right of the Moesgaard Museum page.) There he is, stave across his shoulders, head cocked, giving someone some cheek. Looking at them all, I think each one holds a story — is telling us a story — if we could only hear it.

I leave you with a film of Adrie and Alfons at work.

Susan Price won the Carnegie medal for The Ghost Drum

and

The Guardian Award for The Sterkarm Handshake.

Her website, with reviews, writing tips, short stories and book extracts

is here.

Folk Tale Is Always With Us...

2019-01-18T00:00:00.000+00:00

The Wolf's Footprint, Susan Price

Years ago, when I wrote The Wolf's Footprint, I took the children being abandoned in a forest from
the beginning of Hansel and Gretel and added a pinch of Russian folklore: the idea that if you drink water from an animal's footprint, then you turn into that animal.

It's always been popular in schools -- indeed Kate Stilitz turned it into a musical. You can read about that here.

It continues to be my best-seller as an Indie book -- in the UK, the US, in Canada, Australia and Europe. If I knew what it was about the book that appeals so much, I'd put it into everything I write.

Its popularity decided me to spend 2018 in re-publishing some of my books for the same age-group of eight to ten.
Like The Wolf's Footprint, they're a mixture of original story-telling and folklore.

The three I managed to get done -- with the help of my illustrator, Andrew -- are:-

Odin's Monster

Master Thomas Katt and

The Bone Dog.

Odin's Monster, Susan Price

Odin's Monster is set further back in the past than the others: in the Viking Age. I based it loosely on the old Icelandic legend of 'Thorgeir's Bull.'

A witch with a grudge creates a monster and sends it against his enemy -- who happens to be the book's hero, Thord Cat.

The tension racks up as the monster drives away Thord's friends and family until only the old beggar woman, Bergthora, is left to keep him company as he waits for the monster 'to come horned' and kill him.

When I'm reading it in schools, I stop at the point where Thord says, "Now I shall have to find out what it is like to die," and say, "If you want to find out how it ends, you'll have to read the rest yourself."

In one school a teacher who'd been listening, chin in hand, startled me by crying out, "Oh no! You can't stop there!" (I think she was a good teacher.)

The book has illustrations by Andrew Price. The picture on the cover is one of them.

Master Thomas Kat, Susan Price

Master Thomas Katt is set in the Elizabethan Age but it's loosely based on an old Danish folk-story I came on when I was reading every book of obscure folk-lore I could find.

In the folk-tale, an old, childless couple become so besotted with their bull-calf that they take him to be educated by the local clergyman, so that he'll be better fitted to manage the farm when he inherits it.

The clergyman defrauds the old couple of all their money by pretending to educate their calf -- but really, he kills the calf. And he gets away with it.

The lesson of the folk-tale seems to be: Fools deserve to be cheated. I didn't like this. I'd read that Elizabeth I said, "My laws shall ever protect the fools from the knaves." Perhaps it was this that gave me the idea of setting the book in Elizabeth's reign and making the Queen a character in it.

I changed the folk-tale. In my version, it's a kitten the old couple take to be educated -- and the Vicar doesn't get away with his villainy. He tells the old couple that their kitten has run away to sea and, years later, sends them on a wild goose chase (as he thinks) to the Miching Mouse Inn to meet 'Master Thomas Katt, just put in from the shores of Muscovy.' Master Katt, says the Vicar, is their kitten grown into a man.

When the poor old couple find the Miching Mouse, there really is a sea-captain named Thomas Katt and he takes up their cause and discovers that the Vicar has become the Queen's chaplain. Master Katt puts the case before the Queen, who is furious and wants to execute her chaplain forthwith. But Thomas Katt comes up with a better plan...

This book is illustrated too. Here's Master Tom Katt, just put in from Muscovy, listening to the tale of two strangers who think he is their kitten grown up.

It's the tale of a tom-kitten that grew to be a Tom Katt.

The Bone Dog, Susan Price

The Bone Dog has a contemporary setting but ideas from legend and folk-lore have still worked their way in.

Sarah longs for a pet but her parents won't let her have one because they are too expensive and messy. During the summer holidays Sarah goes, as usual, to stay with her grandmother and uncle Bryan who are, matter of factly, witches.

Her uncle promises to make her a pet that will never need to see the vet and won't need feeding. He does so by making her 'a bone dog' from an old fox fur collar belonging to his mother and a bone left over from a meal. He stitches the bone into the fur and brings the thing to life with suitable midnight ceremony.

Sarah teaches her pet tricks and treats it as a sophisticated toy -- until she discovers that she can see and hear what 'Reynardine' sees and hears. When she falls out with the girls next door, she uses her 'pet' to take revenge.

But the idea of a creature created from a bone and controlled by a witch comes from Icelandic legend. Icelandic witches were said to be able to create a 'milk carrier' from a human rib-bone. It would bowl off, end over end, to suckle milk from neighbours' cows and return to the witch with a cheery cry of, "My belly's full, Mummy!" It then vomited milk into a churn the witch had set ready. All very unsavoury. My bone dog is quite sinister but at least he doesn't run around up-chucking stolen milk all over the place.

Three books and all of them started with an idea drawn from folk-lore. I don't know where I'd be without my shelves of myths, legends and folk-lore.

Wishing you all a belated New Year - may it be prosperous. I hope your first-footer brought you plenty of cake, coal and whisky to see you through until this time 2020. (I think we may need it.)

Susan Price won the Carnegie medal for The Ghost Drum

and

The Guardian Award for The Sterkarm Handshake.

Her website, with reviews, writing tips, short stories and book extracts

is here.

The Devil Stood on Dudley's Keep...

2018-11-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

Dudley Castle, Wikimedia, Trevman99

"The Devil stood on Dudley's keep

And far about Him gazed,

And said, 'I never more shall feel

At Hell's fierce flames amazed."

If I look across the valley from my house, I can see Dudley Castle on the opposite hill.

A former owner, John Dudley, was executed for trying to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne and as a child I used to be told that it was 'one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit.' Parliament's guns were set up where the present day Castlegate roundabout is, just by the 24-hour Tesco's. (It's a long way from the castle and gives you an idea of just how big a castle's outer baileys were.)

But the rhyme above refers to the period when industry came to the Black Country, the period from, roughly, 1760 to 1860: the Industrial Revolution.

My Scottish partner has just told me, flatly, that 'nobody knows where the "Black Country" is.' So I'll tell you. It isn't Birmingham. That overgrown village with too high an opinion of itself is to the south-east.

The Black Country was an area of small towns and villages until Industry arrived -- and Industry arrived because of the district's geology. Dudley Castle is built of limestone and the 'Seven Sisters' caverns beneath it are quarried from limestone. Where the Black Country isn't limestone, it's basalt, streaked with rust from the iron in it. Alongside enormous quarries there were enormous 'marl-holes': holes from which marl, or clay had been dug. And through the Black Country ran the massive thirty-foot coal seam. It was said to be the only place in the world where ladders were needed to cut coal.

Cutting coal in 'the thick seam' -- Wikimedia, no restrictions

Clay to make bricks to build factories; iron-ore for smelting iron; limestone to act as a flux for the iron; and coal to fire the furnaces. All of it within a small region which meant little time and energy would be spent hauling raw materials over roads little better than dirt tracks. Once canals were dug -- and the Black Country has many 'cuts' or canals -- the iron and coal could be floated right up to the factory's own quay.

Within a short time, the Black Country became a place of brick-works, coal-mines and iron-works. Coal had been mined and iron worked in the district for centuries. Small, family run mines were common where the thirty-foot seam came close to the surface and 'Smethwick' means 'the town of the smiths.' There had always been back-yard nail and chain shops in Dudley, Oldbury and Cradley Heath. But these had been small-scale cottage-industries, worked as and when demand was there or when the work-shop owners felt like it. At other times, they tended their pigs, chickens or vegetable patch.

But the 'Revolution' meant more mines and deeper; more nail and chain shops, more foundries, more steel mills. There was a sudden steep increase in exploitation too. It was the kind of capitalist free-for-all that the Tories are itching to return us to, if they can only get rid of all that nannying red-tape from the EU: all that wimpy stuff about workers' rights and air and water purity.

There was none of that fuss-potting in the old Black Country. The Agricultural Revolution had forced people off the land:

'They hang the man and flog the woman

Who steals a goose from off the Common--

But leave the greater villain loose

Who steals the Common from the goose.'

People poured into the Black Country from surrounding English counties, from Wales and from Ireland. They came to a place where there were no laws against child labour: children worked in factories and were lowered into mines on the end of a rope, to spend all day down there, in the dark, o be hauled up again after dark had fallen. Many fell to their deaths or were brained by objects falling from above. There were no safety rules, no guards on machinery, no minimum wage, no welfare -- not even something as inadequate as Universal Credit.

Great mechanical hammers pounded day and night, 'wildfire' burst out above ground from ill-kept mines, and a dense dark cloud of smoke and soot obscured daylight. It's said that, at night, the red glow from the foundries and forges reflected off the underside of this cloud of smoke.

"The Devil stood on Dudley's keep

And far about Him gazed,

And said, 'I never more shall feel

At Hell's fierce flames amazed."

The old Black Country was Hell on earth for most.

It's the setting of my book, The Ghost Wife.

The book was partly inspired by the Dudley Devil. His name was Theophilius Dunn and he was born in Netherton, a village near the town of Dudley, in 1790. He made a living as a witch, telling fortunes and 'finding things lost.' He was called 'Devil' because, like 'cunning man,' it was a name for a witch. He was known locally as 'Owd Offie.'

He was supposed to have been such an accomplished witch that 'great personages' came in carriages from as far away as Scotland to consult him. Despite such claims, he seems to have been the usual con-artist, doing business at all the local 'Wakes' or fairs, from a tent decorated with occult symbols. He sold charms and potions.

Theophilius Dunn hanged himself in 1851, at the age of 61. One story has it that he foretold the day of his own death. When that day came, finding himself in good health, he was so annoyed at the thought that one of his predictions wouldn't come true, he made sure it did.

My devil comes to a sticky end too, though not by hanging and I'd like to make it clear that my devil, though inspired by Dunn, is not intended to be a portrait of him. My devil, Amadeus Warley, is far more wicked. And, of course, has genuine supernatural powers.

Another of the characters, Rattle, goes to visit the Devil and has to walk through the town of Dudley (called 'Dudham' in the book) through its streets of slum dwellings, where blood and guts were washed downhill from the market-place beneath the castle walls. The narrow streets were often blocked with refuse, including human waste. A din of hammers rings out on all sides. Dudley was a nailing town.

Rattle is a 'pit bonk wench' -- a girl who usually works on the pit banks, loading coal onto carts, or carting away waste earth and rock to the 'pit bonks.' In my childhood, if a girl or woman was untidy or grubby, they were accused of 'looking like a pit-bonk wench.' The chains of figures cut out of newspaper to amuse children were always called 'pit-bonk wenches.' That, or 'brickle wenches' who were very similar wenches who worked in brick yards.

Pit bonk wenches

The pit bonk wenches you did not mess with. They were muscular and they came mob-handed. Old photographs usually show them dressed in skirts, bonnets and big boots and grimy as anyone would be who worked loading coal all day. I think they'd dressed in their best for these photos, though, as the tales I was told as a child always described them as wearing an old flat cap that had once belonged to a male relative and often one of his old jackets too. Sometimes a shawl or sack was draped around the head and shoulders with the flat cap on top. And a pipe in the corner of the mouth.

I've never seen photos of them wearing trousers but they did. They often rode astride on the horses that pulled the carts and were climbing on and off carts all day. It was easier to wear trousers.

The Ghost Wife herself is not inspired by the Black Country at all. She stems from my reading of sinister Icelandic folk-tales about 'followers' -- a kind of ghost which attaches itself to a particular family and follows them relentlessly through generations. This is usually said to have happened because of a curse inflicted by a witch. The witch -- who was as often male as female -- created the ghost by murdering some luckless beggar and then sends the ghost against his or her enemy, to torment them or spy on them.

In the book a 'Methody' farming family had a rather less religious ancestor who drowned a beggar girl in order to create for himself a witch's familiar. The witch died -- but his familiar continues to haunt the farm-house and attaches herself to some unfortunate young man in every generation. As the Dudham Devil remarks, the classical writers would have called her a succubus.

Paperback

Ebook

A Dip In The O.C.E.A.N

2018-11-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

Ocean surface wave. Jon Sullivan.

I read a few ‘how-to write’ books when younger but as I remember, they concentrated mostly on how to lay out your book and how best to approach publishers. Apart from that, they directed you back to good writers with the instruction to pay attention to the way, for instance, dialogue was used to tell the story and reinforce character. These peeled back the Art a little, so you could take a look at the hidden art.

Some things I’ve seen lately differ from this in that they seem to be trying to provide a formula or recipe for writing a story or novel. Write so many words, make chapters so long, put in so much description, add a certain mix of characters…

O.C.E.A.N, for instance. It stands for:—

Openness — Conscientiousness — Extraversion — Agreeableness — Neuroticism

It began as a a tool used by psychologists to assess patients but has been co-opted by writers to help them build and understand character. Each of these qualities is a sliding scale and probably no neuro-typical adult is 100% Open or 100% Closed. But the theory proposes that every personality is made up of these five qualities in various degrees. (That's if you even accept that such a thing as 'personality' exists. Psychologists and psychiatrists are punching it out in a secret arena even as I type.)

A high score for Openness supposedly makes you curious, imaginative, accepting of other groups’ moral codes and customs, unconventional.

A low score makes you nasty, bitter and twisted— Sorry, I'll re-phrase. It makes you narrow-minded (not that we’re being judgemental here. We’re being scientific.) It also means that you don’t analyse things, are rather incurious, and tend to find ‘foreign’ attitudes repugnant.

Conscientiousness measures the drive to complete tasks. Those scoring highly would be hard-working, punctual, driven, self-disciplined and always finish the job at hand. On time, of course. They sound like nightmares.

Those scoring low for C are laid-back, unreliable, pleasure-seeking and spontaneous. They sound almost as bad as the high-scorers.

Diagram of the Big 5 Personlity Traits: wikimedia

Extraversion —measures the degree of extraversion (obviously) as opposed to introversion. Extraverts love stimulation and company. They have positive outlooks, are the life and soul, always take charge and I hate them. High-scorers on this quality are, apparently, the best leaders. Really? I wouldn’t follow them. Where are they going to lead you? Into the Valley of Death, I’m telling you, lured by all those stimulating, exciting flash-bangs and shell-screams.

A low score for E makes you an introvert. You find too much noise and chatter exhausting and painful. You hate parties and have a tendency to go to the furthest point of an empty Hebridean beach and read a book. Not too exciting a book, mind. Low Es tend to be pessimistic, dour and aloof. My kind of people.

Agreeableness — People who score high on Agreeableness are weak leaders, apparently. They are tolerant, sensitive, kind, warm— like Bhudda and Jesus, y'know. And nobody wants to follow them, obviously. But assuming that the scientists are correct and no one follows those high As -- well, right there, is what is wrong with the human race.

Those scoring highly on A are also forgiving and helpful, but gullible. I get the feeling that, if I ever take this test, I’m not going to score highly on A.

A low score for A makes you suspicious and antagonistic; quick to assert your own rights, irritable, vindictive, uncooperative and rude. Now there is a thumbnail portrait of me that my nearest and cowed would immediately recognise.

Neuroticism — I’ve never been sure what this means, apart from being a word psychologists and doctors use to insult you. Especially if you’re a woman. Apparently, it means ‘emotional instability.’ A tendency to feel sadness. (You mean, there’s an option not to? Where do I sign up?) A tendency to feel vulnerable and, as result, to be anxious, moody, quick-tempered.

A high-scorer is likely to be a hypochondriac, worrying over every little twinge— or one of those who constantly invents horrifying scenarios which ‘might happen’ and then worries themselves into fits over them.

A low scorer is calm and unemotional, self-reliant and wastes no time worrying, to the point of being complacent.

Psychologists presumably find OCEAN useful, though I’m not sure why. I doubt I’m the only person who would simply supply the answers best guaranteed to have the good doctor eating from my hand. Which is exactly what psychopaths do and it’s why they get worse with treatment, not better. Instead of 'working on themselves' and becoming better people every day, they quickly learn exactly what to say to convince the trick-cyclists that they've reformed and can be safely released immediately. But then, psychopaths and me, we’re low on Agreeableness, which makes us manipulative.

It’s suggested that writers use OCEAN's sliding scales to map out our characters, to help us figure out how they will react in any given situation. Presumably, we draw a graph for each one. Consulting our graphs, we can easily see that, if asked to make tea for everyone, A will smile and rush to the kitchen because A scores high on Agreeableness — whereas B will tell everyone where they can go because B scores low. And C wouldn’t even be at the meeting, because C is an introvert.

You can also, it’s said, use these sliding scales to plot a change in a particular characteristic. A character begins a story as overly driven and conscientious but in the course of the story learns to cheer up and relax, little square by little square, as you mark up your graph.

I have occasionally found this diagrammatic approach helpful with plots— but only after I’ve written three-parts of the book in my usual pantser, make-it-up-as-I-go-along style anyway. But it can help, when stuck for an ending, to lay a transparency of a perfect plot over the mess I’ve created and see if this suggests any stream-lining, or points broadly in the direction of a conclusion.

'Dear Boy, why not try acting?'

But I could never begin with ‘The Plan’ and then stick to it. I would find it stifling. I feel the same way about OCEAN. These tricks and schemes always remind me of the anecdote about Laurence Olivier. He spent a long time listening to Dustin Hoffman explain The Method and then said: ‘Dear boy, why don’t you simply try acting?’

For me, characters emerge, from the story you’re telling. For instance, Sandy in The Drover’s Dogs. The idea for the story came from reading about Highland cattle drovers in the 18th and 19th centuries and how they sent their herd dogs home alone while they stayed on at the lowland farms to earn money by helping with the harvest. I wanted to write about those dogs and their independent trek across Scotland for years.

Books seldom come from one idea. Ideas have to cross-pollinate. The cross-pollination happened when my partner told me about the ‘bonders’ of Scotland— farm labourers who were almost slaves. They were often mistreated but if they ran away, would be returned to their bond-owner by the authorities, just as slaves were.

The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price

I imagined a boy in eastern Scotland, running away from a bond he hated and meeting a couple of herd-dogs on their way west, returning to their home in Mull. I needed a character who, though a child, was capable of taking the decision to run away and capable of surviving alone as he trudged more than a hundred miles over rough country.

He had to be a boy who willing to leave his family— so the circumstances of the story dictate the characters of the rest of the family too. Runaways rarely come from happy homes.

I remembered some Scots friends talking about their country childhoods. Once they could walk, they said, home was somewhere they ate breakfast and slept. They always had string, matches and a penknife in their pockets. When they were hungry, they made a fire, stole potatoes from the edge of a field and set them to roast, caught some ‘troot’ with their string, and enjoyed ‘fish and tatties.’ They knew where to find mushrooms, berries and nuts. They stayed outside until long after dark, even when the weather was below freezing. They knew -- without ever seeing Ray Mears or Bear Grylls -- how to build themselves a shelter.

I drew on this in creating Sandy, a hardy, tough little nut. He’s about ten, but already works whenever he can. His relationship with his family is distant because he’s hardly ever at home. After his mother bonds him to a neighbouring farmer, he feels that he owes his parents little. He can’t bear the thought of spending the next ten years as a bonder and runs. He's far more scared of being caught and possibly hung (for stealing himself) than he is of surviving on his own. He knows he can do that.

He readily and gladly befriends the two dogs he meets but is suspicious and fearful of people because they might inform on him and have him sent back to his bond-owner. There is always another, opposing and almost equally strong side to a character, though. Despite his self-reliance and hardiness, Sandy longs to find a safe home where he can drop his guard, where there are people who love and value him. When he finds such a home, his loyalty to his new family is deep.

I didn’t need to plot his Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. I only had to think about the background and time that had formed him.

The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price

It was the same with my Sterkarm books. The Sterkarms are a reiver family, living in a pele tower on the lawless Scottish borders of the sixteenth century. The young hero, Per Sterkarm, is the son of the tower’s laird, which immediately gives him status. It supplies confidence and a ‘sense of entitlement’ but is also something he has to live up to. He can’t lose face or back down from confrontation.

Despite the title of ‘laird,’ his family are glorified cattle farmers in a poor and embattled part of the country, where life was always hard and often desperate. People had to stick together and help each other -- but also be prepared to defend what they had against outsiders. This means that Per has been raised with the attitude ‘Ourselves Alone.’ Everyone outside his family is the enemy and since family is the only security, loyalty to family is everything.

His formal schooling was negligible, but he trained to ride, to shoot with a bow and to fight with weapons from a young age. Physical confidence can be added to his general bumptiousness.

We end with a young man who can be charming when it suits him to be— and generous because in his world, generosity is how you display your status and keep the all-important friends and allies. Per loves the Elf-woman Andrea (who is really a time-traveller) and he is quick to defend her— but when he has to choose between her and his family, he always -- to her dismay -- chooses his family. It would be impossible for him to do anything else.

Capable as he is of charm, if crossed or cornered, he can be murderous— and cunning and treacherous. He cannot bear to lose face in his family’s eyes and he will win by whatever means he has to undertake. As Per sees it, lying is only wrong if he lies to a Sterkarm; treachery is only treacherous if used against Sterkarms. He acknowledges no authority except that of his family— which confuses the time-travelling executive Windsor, who expects obedience from those he sees as beneath him. (And as Per is much younger and one of the 16th-Century 'natives armed with sticks,' Windsor considers him very much beneath him.)

Again, Per’s character rose from his background, his influences, his upbringing. I don’t think that sitting with a blank sheet of paper or screen and trying to calculate how neurotic, agreeable or conscientious he was would have helped.

I could, now, give you his readings for all the qualities. Openness? Almost zero. Accepting of the codes and customs of others? No. It's his family’s way or nothing.

A Sterkarm Kiss by Susan Price

Conscientiousness? Middling. Per's world isn't run by the clock, but by the sun and the seasons. If something seemed to him important and necessary, he would do it, or make sure others did it. The buildings had to be repaired before winter, for instance and there had to be enough fuel to last through the worst of the snow. If a raid ran off their cattle, they had to get out there and ride. This wasn't a matter of conscientiousness but of necessity.

On the other hand, when not pressed by necessity, there's plenty that can wait, especially if there's something better to do, like ale, women and song. (I think this reveals that the OCEAN scale was invented for a 21st Century society -- and only a small part of this society -- that orders its life by the clock.)

Extraversion? Per would score pretty high, but how much this is an inborn quality and how much something his upbringing would have engrained, is hard to say. Life in a pele-tower granted very little quiet or privacy. And when you're a big fish in a very small pond, you're pretty sure that the company is going to welcome you. -- In Handshake, when Per is translated to a 21st Century hospital, he becomes rather shy.

Agreeableness. Per would encompass the whole scale of Agreeableness, from 0 to 100%. On the low end of the scale, he's certainly capable of being vindictive. In fact, his whole family pride themselves on how very vindictive they are. Revenge was a duty. Where there is no reliable force of law to act as a deterrent, then the reputation for being willing and able to take revenge for any slight becomes an important protection. You touch not the Sterkarms with impunity.

Per can certainly be very quick to assert his own rights and inventively uncooperative. But he and his family can also be kind and warm, sensitive to others and helpful. Hospitality was as much a duty as revenge.

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

Neurotic? Well, if being neurotic is the opposite of 'calm and unemotional' then the whole Sterkarm family would probably score high on the Neurotic scale. Their time and place imposed a high degree of day-to-day anxiety. They were at the mercy of the weather and harvests. They never knew when they were going to be attacked. Moodiness, quick temper and raw emotions all round.

But though I've used OCEAN to express this character reading, I didn't arrive at it by using OCEAN. Instead, I studied the time and place the Sterkarms lived in and their way of life. I thought about how it would shape them. I’m tempted to say to those who favour OCEAN, ‘Dear thing, why don’t you simply try writing?’

But perhaps I’m being too harsh. Perhaps I've even misunderstand how OCEAN is meant to be used?

I’d be interested to know how others feel. Is OCEAN something you’d find useful in creating characters? Something you’d consider trying?

Or, if not, how do you get to know your characters?

Susan Price won the Carnegie Medal for The Ghost Drum and the Guardian Fiction Award for The Sterkarm Handshake.

Find out more at her website.

Multiplying, Colour-Burn and Gaussian Blur

2018-09-03T00:00:00.000+01:00

I started with this, drawn on a sheet of scrap paper, copied from a photo of a stuffed fox. I scanned it into the computer. Before I adjusted the contrasts, you could see the type showing through from the other side.

Then I opened the ink sketch in Photoshop, took out the white background of the scrap paper and added a dark background layer. Coloured the drawing, added a title and a screamer.

This is only a try-out for the front cover. I can't do the complete one until I've finished laying out the interior and know how thick the spine will be.
   I used various photos for reference, sometimes using the 'eye-dropper' tool to get an idea of what the colouring should be.
   I was so pleased with the result that I hailed a passing brother. "Cop a butcher's at this," I said.

   He came, he looked. A long silence. Then, grudgingly, "That's pretty good. Come out of it."
   He took over my chair. He over-layered in violet and red. He lowered opacity, multiplied and colour-burned. Recklessly, he employed the polygonal lasso and the Gaussian blur...
   My good friend Karen Bush tells me that she likes it, but the nose of the fox is a bit wonky. It is, I know, but I don't care. The original stuffed fox in the photo may have had its nose put out of joint -- and in any case the 'bone dog' of the story is a sort of Frankenstein fox, created by witch-craft from an old fox-fur clumsily stitched together.

Here's the completed cover.

Amazon 'suppressed' it for a while because they weren't convinced I own the publishing rights. They seem to do this with every book published with Createspace now, which I suppose is a good thing. Frustrating, though. My friend, the above mentioned Karen Bush, a retired member of this blog, was all set to publish her book about how to deal with your dog's fear of fireworks and had arranged an article in Your Dog magazine to help publicise it. But because Amazon suppressed her book she now doubts whether she'll be able to get a proof copy and make any alterations before the article appears.

You can find out about Karen's books on dog-training here.

The Bone Dog is part of a project of mine -- to republish all my out of print books for the age-group 8--10. Since The Wolf's Footprint is my best-seller among my indie-books, it seems to make sense to publish more for that market.

The Wolf's Footprint

Odin's Monster

Bone Dog is available now, both as paperback

and kindle

Sweating with Wolves

2018-07-17T00:00:00.000+01:00

The wolves come...

Friday 13th may be unlucky for some, but not for me.

On Friday July 13th I went into London, to Tiverton Primary School in Tottenham, to see the second performance of a musical play based on my book, The Wolf's Footprint.

It was an exhaustingly hot day -- and I got lost. As I wandered around, interrupted several people as they were going about their business, to ask the way to Tiverton School. Every single one of these randomly selected people was as friendly and helpful as could be. Several pulled out smart-phones and entered the name of the school, so they could show me where it was and guide me on my way. Thanks to them, I found Tiverton in time for the afternoon session.

So thank you, kindly people of Haringey and Tottenham and especially those -- you know who you are -- who were stopped by a hot and dishevelled writer asking, "Do you know where Tiverton School is?"

At the school I spent the afternoon talking with two great classes about -- oh, how a writer works, the writing of Bremen Town Musicians, ghosts, wolves, fairy-tales. I had a great time. I only hope the children had half as good a time as I did.

Then I got to relax in the staff-room and chat to violinist Anna Jenkins and drummer Sebastien Hankin until it was time for the evening performance.

The play was first performed in 2014 and you can read about it here.

The performance this year, with a different cast, was every bit as good. I knew how the story was going to turn out, but I was still on the edge of my seat the whole time.

Wicked courtiers try to dissuade the king from helping his starving people -- in song!

The music moves from the sad and poignant to the boisterous and joyful. How the children danced so energetically -- with encores! -- in that heat, I don't know, but they did. The oldest cast members were no more than twelve but they performed with a confidence and engagement that was a delight.

When Resham Mirza, the admirable head-teacher, tweeted that she had watched the show 'with pride,
joy and admiration' I could only echo her. As the head of this wonderful school she has good reason to be proud. As the Head Governer of the school told me, as we sat in the front row, Resham not only nutures all kinds of artistic expression at the school, but they have great academic results too.

And, of course, there is Kate Stilitz, who wrote the music and lyrics and directed, drawing such wonderful performances from her young cast. Follow the link for a look at Kate's website, where you can see something of the many song-cycles and musical pieces she has written for children to perform. More than one of her pieces has been performed at the Royal Festival or Albert Hall.


The villagers celebrate the arrival of food.

Kate also supplied the trumpeter, Ruben, as he's her son! Grow your own, that's the way.

Tiverton School website

Kate Stilitz's website

Find it on Amazon

2018-07-07T00:00:00.000+01:00

Elfgift and ElfKing by Susan Price

On I go with re-issuing my back-list.

ElfKing would have been out sooner if I could have tracked down a better image for the cover.

I tried using another wikimedia image from the Sutton Hoo hoard... the famous 'man between wolves' from the purse-lid. The original is infilled with scarlet enamel and some think it represents the god Odin (who is a character in ElfKing.)

Trouble was, the rounded shape of the jewel just didn't work with the rectangle of the cover. No matter how I enlarged it, or moved it or the lettering about, the rounded shape just looked wrong.

Besides, my brother said the man 'had a silly face.'

So I used another image, one taken from a helmet plate. The book contains a couple of characters who are almost a Norse version of the Greek 'Heavenly Twins.' (There are some hints that Norse Myth did once have twin brother gods, a little like the Gemini or Dioskouri.)

This works a little better as a design, I think but although the prancing warriors are authentically Viking Age, they are, well, a bit silly.

Just a bit. With their chubby little legs.

I decided I just had to get a cover done and stop messing about with PhotoShop. So I decided on a sword.

As my colleague and friend Katherine Roberts remarked a couple of days ago, a sword isn't a very original image for a fantasy cover. But it says, clearly, 'This is a book with sword-fighting in it. And if you like books with sword-fighting, you might like this.'

Sometimes, you just have to get on with stuff.

After all the work I put into the gold lettering, I decided that the plain white lettering looked much better. So much so, that I went back and made the lettering on Elfgift plain white too.

The slogan on the front of the book, says, 'The day of my death and the manner of my dying were fated long ago.' This isn't really mine. It's a deliberate misquote from the Norse Myths. The god Freyr sends his servant, Skirnir, on a dangerous mission into Giant's Home, to demand the beautiful giantess, Gerd, in marriage. Asked if he isn't afraid to make such a journey, Skirnir replies, why should he be? The length of his life and the day of his death were fated long ago. If he's fated to die in Giant's Home, he will. If not, not. His being afraid won't make any difference to Fate.

Ghost Drum by Susan Price

(I used the first part of Skirnir's reply in Ghost Drum. Skirnir says: 'Fearlessness is better than faint-heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors.' In Ghost Drum it became, after various rewrites, it bcame the homelier, 'Whenever you poke your nose round the door, pack courage and leave fear at home.'

The Norse Myths have been a constant inspiration for me. I don't know if I would even have become a writer if I hadn't collided with them at eleven.)

Oh well. The next task is to get the books up as Kindles. If I can remember how.

Buy Elfgift
Paperback
e-book

Buy ElfKing

Paperback

e-book

Buy Ghost Drum

Paperback

e-book

Visit Susan Price's website

Wolves and Monsters

2018-05-30T14:23:00.001+01:00

Scotland's top-knot

When this blog appears I shall be nowhere near any electrical device capable of displaying it. I shall be right up in Scotland’s top-knot and while I’m up there, intend to visit Morag. She’s Nessie’s little known sister, who keeps herself to herself in Britain’s deepest stretch of inland water, Loch Morar. The most reported sighting of her was in 1969 when two local men ran into her, literally, while messing about in a boat. One of them hit her with an oar and the other fired his rifle at her— whereupon Morag sank beneath the water and I’m not surprised.

The men described her as being brown with rough skin, nine meters (thirty feet) long and having three dorsal humps. They said her head was thirty centimetres (a foot) wide and she held it forty-six centimetres (18 inches) out of the water— until they so rudely interrupted her.

The most recent sighting of Morag was in 2013, by two holiday-makers, who claimed to have seen her three times in two days. If I’m lucky enough to meet her, I shan’t offer her violence or even take her picture— I shall try to interest her in a copy of my Odin’s Monster. My monster isn’t one of Morag’s relatives— though perhaps I should consider writing about one of them. I don’t really know why I haven’t written about a kelpie that transforms itself into a long-backed horse, lures people into riding it and then carries them into deep, cold water and eats them. The legend has definite appeal. But so many monsters, so little time…

Odin's Monster by Susan Price

The monster in Odin’s Monster is a ‘Sending.’ This is an Icelandic concept of monster-ness, because the book is loosely based on an Icelandic legend, Thorgeir’s Bull. The wizard, Thorgeir, was supposed to have lived in the 1800s but I moved it back in time and set it during the Viking Age because, well, I like the Viking Age.

A 'sending' was created by a witch or wizard in a bad mood. At its simplest, the witch or wizard murdered someone, in order to enslave their ghost and ‘send’ it against whoever it was they had a grudge against. Hence the name, ‘sending.’ I used this idea again, in another book, ‘The Ghost Wife.’ Once created, a sending like this could plague a whole family for generations.

The sending or monster in Odin’s Monster, is a kind of super-sending. It’s the dead body of a bull that’s stuffed full of other ghosts— of a man, a woman, a child, an eagle, a bear and others. The monster can appear as any of the ghosts trapped inside it. It can fly like an eagle, roar like a bear, speak with a woman’s voice. In the original legend, Thorgeir is a kind of

stalker with magical powers, which is a frightening thought. He creates his bull to torment the woman who’s turned him down. And her family. For generations.

The Ghost Wife

One detail of the legend that I liked is that, although the bull was said to be ‘devoted’ to Thorgeir, if it ever failed in a task he’d set it, then it rushed home and attacked him instead, sometimes even trying to kill him. I used this in my own story: ‘This is the difficulty of making Sendings. Once you’ve made them, they aren’t easy to control.’

Instead of tormenting a woman, I have my wizard, Kveldulf Witch, torment a story-teller named Thord Cat. He wants Thord Cat to tell the story of his life, of all his murders and double-dealings, of which he's very proud.

But Thord Cat dislikes the witch and refuses the commission. (The pay's rotten anyway.) Appalled by this cheek, Kveldulf calls on his god, Odin, to help him in creating the monster and he sends it against Thord Cat, to try and force him to do what Kveldulf wants. Every time the Sending arrives at the farmstead in one of its guises, it demands that Thord Cat tell its master’s story. On ‘the third time of asking’, if he refuses, it will kill him.

This story for 8 to 11 year olds was first published by A & C Black in 1986, so long ago that I can't believe it. Over the years I’ve had a lot of fun reading the story aloud to children in schools. I still do. It never fails to have them leaning forward in their seats, with open mouths and wide eyes. After Thord Cat’s second refusal, the sending, in its woman shape, says, “Next time I come horned.” I always break off there and say, “If you want to know how it ends, you must read the rest yourselves.”

This usually brings on groans and pleas for just a hint of how it ends, a clue… Teachers have sometimes had children write their own ending for the story before they read it to them.

The Wolf's Footprint by Susan Price

My indie best-seller, by a long way, is The Wolf’s Footprint, which is aimed at a similar age-group. So I thought I should unleash my sending again and send it out into the world, coupled with Wolf’s Footprint. I got my brother, Andrew, to do some new illustrations for Monster in exchange for a cut of the overwhelming riches which will doubtless flood in as soon as it goes on sale.

I put together the cover of Odin's Monster, using one of Andrew’s illustrations. The cover’s okay, but I will probably tweak it a little, now I’ve held an actual copy in my hand. I have a couple of other back-list books written for a similar age-group, which I aim re-issue this year.

In the meantime, I’ve just heard that Kate Stilitz’s brilliant musical version of The Wolf’s Footprint is to be staged again, at Tiverton Primary in London— and I shall be going to see it. Looking forward to that enormously.


The Wolf Pack (in Kate Stilitz's production)

Odin's Monster

The Wolf's Footprint

Review: 'The Lost Words' by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane

2018-03-26T20:12:00.000+01:00

This book really doesn't need any help from me. It's already a classic. But I wanted to review it because I love it.

I wanted to read it from the moment I first heard how it was inspired:-- during one of the regular revisions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, it was decided to exclude certain words, which modern children no longer looked up or needed-- words such as 'bluebell', 'heron,' and 'conker'-- in order to make room for words such as 'broadband' and 'wi'fi'.

The book's wonderful artist, Jackie Morris, was incensed by this. She tells about how the book came about here. (The beautiful picture at the top of this blog is from Jackie's site.)

Many other writers and artists were aghast when they heard about these words being dropped. There is a theory of language that says that when you lose the word for something, you also lose the ability to think about it or consider it important. It becomes something nameless-- and if people haven't even bothered to name something, it can't be important, can it?

Theory apart, how the hell can you dispense with the word 'bluebell'? Every year I go to view the miles of bluebells in the woods on the Clent hills. Somehow, it wouldn't be the same if I walked there thinking, "What a lot of blue flowers."

Rather, when I look down a slope covered with blue and see the blue spreading and filtering through the trees, it adds a lot to know that these are bluebells, wild hyacinths and that such masses of them indicate 'undisturbed ancient woodland.'

But how can 'heron' ever be considered a word that isn't necessary in a children's dictionary? Or dandelion? Dandelion, for god's sake. Dandelion piss-the-bed: dandelion clocks-- how do you even be a child without knowing the word dandelion and what it represents? As well get rid of 'daisy' or 'buttercup.'

I had been trying to work out how to get my paws on a copy of the book, since its beautiful production makes it expensive... While I was still wondering, I saw a tweet from Jackie Morris herself, commenting in surprise that the third Sterkarm book, A Sterkarm Tryst, was in print.

I have a slight aquaintance with Ms. Morris-- I wouldn't presume to claim it to be anything more. So I tweeted back with a suggestion that we do swapsies. I would send her a copy of Tryst (wot I wrote) if she would send me one of The Lost Words.

A Sterkarm Tryst

I think I got the better end of the deal. The book arrived in the post some weeks ago and I have kept it to hand and dipped into it frequently ever since.

It's a much larger book than you might guess from the picture above. And it isn't a book of poems with illustrations. The artist and poet are equals here-- the initial idea came from Jackie Morris and she tells us how writer and artist influenced each other.

Robert Macfarlane, a prize winning poet and writer, has written 'a book of spells'-- the intention being to spell the lost words back into our memories and useage.

Each spell is introduced by a double-page spread where letters blow and tumble among grasses or fern or trees-- as if the lost words were being broken and scattered. Or, perhaps are being called back, spelled back together.

The poems are acrostics, so the word in danger of being lost is spelled, not only in the title, but in the reading and writing of the spell. And the poems are beautiful. The more often you read them--spelling back those lost words-- the more beauty you find in them.

Facing each poem is one of Jackie Morris' rightly celebrated paintings. And then, over the page, a double spread painting-- paintings of acorns, brambles, owls, bluebells, magpies...

I love the whole book, but I think my favourite part is Bluebell. The beautiful poem is followed by a breathtaking double page showing an owl fleeting and a fox slinking through the dusk of a bluebell wood.

But otters, ravens, newts, willow, adders-- you'll find them all here. Magpies too. I love the magpies who 'gossip, bicker, yak and snicker' in my garden. Love their flying dinosaur shapes, their long tails and petrol blue sheen. Currently they are pulling my hedge to bits for nesting material and flying off towing long streamers of dried grass behind them.

"A proportion of the royalties from each copy of The Lost Words will be donated to Action for Conservation, a charity dedicated to inspiring young people to take action for the natural world.... www.actionforconservation.org"

In Scotland, Jane Beaton has raised £25,000 to give the book to all 2,681 schools in Scotland-- for more about this story, follow this link.

Find it on Amazon

Jackie Morris' blog

Susan Price is the author not only of A Sterkarm Tryst, but also of The Sterkarm Handshake and A Sterkarm Kiss-- as well as about 60 other books. You can find out more about them on her website, here.

2018-02-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

This blog is going to be a bit off-topic.
     I'm in the middle of planning for several school visits and my mind is like an over-excited and untrained collie racing round a field, barking furiously and scaring away the sheep it's trying to round up.
     In an attempt to exhaust the over-excited collie, I went to the gym on Tuesday morning. And That Bloke was there again. The one that makes my jaw drop.

     Before you start conjuring up some tall, blond, muscled Adonis, stop and think again. He is nothing whatsoever like that.
     He is Asian and probably no taller than me, though he's certainly much slimmer. And stronger and fitter.
     He doesn't strut around in a skin tight vest with all his tattoos on oiled display. Instead, he dresses anonymously, in a loose t-shirt and knee-length baggy shorts. The most 'don't-look-at-me' gear you could imagine. I haven't seen him talk to anyone, and he does nothing at all to draw attention to himself. Apart from the astonishing stuff he does-- which he performs in an abstracted, absorbed manner with not even the quickest glance round to see if anyone's watching.

      At the centre of the gym floor is a complicated structure of vertical steel bars, with some cross bars. Various platforms can be hooked onto this structure at different heights. There's a punch-bag hanging at one side, and straps with hoops on them, with which some brave people do press-up and what-not.
      The first time I noticed That Bloke, I happened to be on a cycle near this central structure. Absorbed in my own work-out, I barely registered That Bloke when he strolled over and seized hold of one of the vertical bars. I assumed he was going to do some chin-ups, which is a common enough sight. Even the men do them, sometimes.
     Then I realised that That Bloke wasn't hanging down from the upper cross-bars... No, he was standing out horizontally from one of the vertical bars. He had taken hold of a vertical bar at about head-height -- and then raised his whole body, legs and all, so that he stood out, rigidly, horizontally from it. Arms straight out, legs straight out. And there he stayed. Perfectly still. For what seemed like an age. While my jaw slowly dropped lower and lower with every ticking second.

Like this. Honest.

   The core-strength required to hold your body in that position for even a second is, well, considerable. Without even talking about the arm and shoulder strength. Pole-dancers can do this, I know, as part of their routine -- but they don't hold it the position for so long.
     For all the expression That Bloke showed, he might have been standing at a bus-stop.
     Then he dropped to his feet and went off quietly to shake the big heavy ropes.

     He was there again on Tuesday morning. He started off by fixing a plastic platform to the steel frame, at about hip height. Then he stepped up onto it, first with his left leg, then with his right. That is, he lifted one foot onto a platform at hip height -- and then used that one leg to step him up onto the platform. Like climbing a stair where every step is at hip-level. He repeated this stunt several times.
     I thought this was mad enough. But he followed it up by putting both hands flat on this platform -- his feet were on the floor, remember. He then raised his legs in a straight line behind him.
     Picture the scene. His hands are palm down on this hip-height platform. He balances on them while he raises the rest of his body, and his legs, in a straight line behind him. His heels are slightly higher than his head. The palms of his hands are his only contact with anything solid.

      Let me be clear. His feet aren't resting on anything. There is nothing supporting his body except his hands. He is holding his entire body at that sloping angle in empty air.
     Then he did press-ups. While balancing on his hands and holding the whole weight of his body in the air, in a horizontal line, he did several press-ups. I was there. I watched him do it. I wouldn't have believed it otherwise. I didn't even know the human body was capable of that.
     After four or five press-ups, he dropped down, had a drink of water and wandered out of the gym.

    Washboard abs? -- With that kind of core strength, the man must have abs like the steel cable that holds up the Forth Bridge. Somewhere under his loose, baggy t-shirt.
     You wouldn't give him a glance if he passed you in the street. He wasn't tall. He wasn't 'built.' What could be seen of his arms and legs seemed quite slim and normal, and not noteably muscular. He seemed unremarkable in every way -- until he started turning himself into a human shelf-bracket or angle-poise lamp.

When I told Davy about That Bloke, Davy said, "He must be a gymnast. Only a gymnast would want to do that."
      The gym, I should say, is a well-attended but unspectacular 'lifestyle centre' run by the local authority (or, at least, out-sourced by them.) It's not expensive or in any way glitzy. Its clientele spans the local population, from the young and fit to the old and unfit (like me) to people in wheelchairs and people who come along with guide-dogs or carers. And in the middle of us all, this quiet bloke quietly doing astonishing things. And then wandering off. To where? To do what? Leap tall buildings with a single bound?

What I have are been mostly doing, when not gawping at the gym, is sorting out my website, which badly needed it. It had somehow got into such a fankle that not even I could find anything on it.
     It's a work still in progress, but I think a lot of progress has been made. At least you can find your way round it now.
     It's here.
And on it, you can find out more about these.

2018-01-27T00:00:00.000+00:00

Thank you, Lev Butts. You have been an inspiration.

     My Authors Electric colleagues are always being inspirational and Lev was the latest one at it. Before Christmas 2017, Lev did a blog on ideas for presents to give the writers in your life.
   One of Lev's gift ideas was a book on cover design: Cover Design Secrets Bestselling Authors Use to Sell More Books, by Derek Murphy. (Oooh, those sneaky best-selling authors with their secrets. Murphy is no slouch on 'exactly what it says on the tin' titles either.)
     Lev's blog seems to have been quite a success, since just earlier this month, another AE, Reb MacRath was having a bit of a rave about another of his recommends, Arc customisable notebooks.
     But since I've been spared the notebook obsession that seems to strike so many writers, it was the cover design secrets that grabbed me. It had been nagging in the back of my mind for quite some while that not all of my covers were as, well, grabby as they could be.
      What were those secrets that best-selling authors were hogging to themselves? I needed to know.

     I ended up looking into several books on the subject. Look up Murphy's book on Amazon and you will be shown several others covering the same ground.
     What did I glean? -- as my Scots partner always puts it.
     Well, I'd always known that the cover needs to show the would-be reader the kind of book they'll be getting, whether it's humourous, romantic, historical, thrilling adventure or blood-thirsty crime.

     But this is a factual approach. Here you are: there's a castle and someone in historical clothing on the front: it's historical. Or, there's a fast modern car and a gun, so it's contemporary and a thriller.

     I think what I'd failed to grasp -- surprisingly, considering how I've made my living -- is that there needs to be an emotional connection too, just as in story-telling.
     When we write, we most often start with something that shows the reader the character they'll be connecting with. We construct a scene that lures the reader into identifying with that character, that creates an interest in them. So a cover needs to say, not only: This is X kind of book. It has to also say: Don't you want to know more about this person?

Years ago I was commissioned to write a story set in the Viking Age. The publishers wanted something pacey and exciting but historically accurate. After it went out of print, I republished it myself, and this is the cover it had. (Art work by Andrew Price.)

I looked at it again, and considered it in the light of what I'd been reading about book design. Despite all the axe and sword waving, it seems a little aloof and distant. It says: This is a book set in a time when blokes went about in helmets and mail, looking for trouble.

But there's a bunch of them. Milling. Which one are we supposed to be rooting for?

So I fired up PhotoShop and made some changes.

Saga of Aslak Slave-Born by Susan Price

This new cover gets in close and personal and leaves no one in any doubt about which one is Aslak, our main man. It also reminds me of the quote from Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 And All That:

'Britain was attacked by waves of Picts (and, of course, Scots) who had recently learnt how to climb the wall, and of Angles, Saxons and Jutes who, landing at Thanet, soon overran the country with fire (and, of course, the sword).'

Another book of mine which I felt was not being sold by its cover was The Bearwood Witch.

Andrew and I, in designing the cover, had been puzzled what to put on it. There's a witch but it's set, not in fairy-tale forests, but in one of today's grimy inner cities. How to tell the reader that, visually?

We came up with this, but neither of us were very happy with it.

The door-key was supposed to suggest the present day, while the five-pointed star stood for witchcraft. It's quite eye-catching and graphic, but who builds an emotional connection with a key? It doesn't give the reader much idea of what to expect.

Again to PhotoShop. (I know, Karen, I know about PicMonkey but just as the shortest way to a destination is the way you already know well, so is the shortest way to a new cover.)

The Bearwood Witch by Susan Price

I think the new cover (left) does a far better job of connecting a browser with the book and what they can expect from it. Darkness settles over a street of parked cars and terraced housing as we are eyeballed by one of the main characters.

I also discovered that I'd neglected to publish Bearwood Witch as a paperback -- well, that's put right now.

The title of this blog is, of course, inspired by all those ads that keep popping up while you're browsing on-line, with either 'the UK' or the name of some town local to you inserted: Oldbury is going mad for this diet plan! Smethwick is going crazy for these incontinence pads!

Well, the UK as a whole does seem to have gone a bit giddy just lately but I can assure you that neither Smethwick nor Oldbury goes mad for anything.

Except these books. The UK is going mad for them, I tell you. Mad.
__________________________________________________________________________

This is the saga of Aslak Ottarssen, born a slave.

Aslak, and his beloved sister, Astrid, are the children of a Norwegian farmer. Their mother was an

English slave.
     Their father chooses to free Aslak. But Astrid remains a slave.
     Aslak promises that he will buy her freedom when he is a man and can earn enough silver. At fifteen, he goes viking to earn his fortune.
     Returning from sea, he finds that his father has died. Worse: his step-brothers have sold his sister.
     Furious, Aslak leaves his home forever, and calls on his ship-brothers to help him find and free his sister.
     He pursues Astrid across the North: a violent and dangerous place in the Viking Age. His hot temper leads to him being sold into slavery himself, in Jorvik, capital of England's Danelaw.
     But, captive among strangers, he finds unexpected help, faces death, sees a ghost— and meets still more danger.

Can Aslak regain his own freedom and rescue his lost sister?

Kindle Paperback

Zoe wants her dead boyfriend back.

She's heard all about Elizabeth Beckerdyke. About her being a witch. About her speaking to the dead.
Maybe she can raise the dead too?

So Zoe goes knocking on the witch's door.

Duncan is homeless, a rough sleeper.
He's looking for a new life. He fears the witch and he fears for Zoe.

Elizabeth Beckerdyke wants to prove her power.

But can she control what she leads back from the land of the dead?

A dark, disturbing novel of the occult by the award-winning author of The Sterkarm Handshake.

Kindle Paperback

Crofting, Seaweed and Iodine

2017-08-19T00:00:00.000+01:00

Crofters in the Highlands and islands of Scotland have always had a hard life. Even now, although crofting may be a more rewarding way of life, in many ways, than banking or sales, it’s by no means easy.

In a past stretching back into pre-history, crofters supplied almost all their own needs by their own labour: building and maintaining their steading, raising animals to provide meat, milk and wool, making their own clothes and making or repairing their own tools. They grew oats and vegetables but also fished and gathered wild food.

Almost always, a crofter had to pay rent to the owner of the land they farmed, and that rent had to be paid in hard money. Cash was often needed to supply a few needs they could not make, catch or grow for themselves: a little tobacco, perhaps or raisins and spices for Christmas.

One way to earn money was to drive their cattle to the markets where the highest prices were paid. Another, which I learned about when I researched my book The Drover’s Dogs, was to burn kelp.

Kelp, wikimedia, By Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

Kelp is a large and fast-growing seaweed which forms thick kelp forests around rocky coasts. It had been gathered for centuries. Crofters carried it from the beaches on their backs in tall baskets— a heavy load, often carried up steep, hazardous cliff paths. It was spread on fields as fertiliser.

There was also a tradition of burning the kelp to ash and mixing the ash with fat to make an ointment. Because of kelp's high concentration of iodine, it was a quite effective antiseptic.

With the rise of industry, iodine became a far more valuable commodity. It was used in glass-making and pottery as a colouring agent. The cloth trade needed it for bleaching linen. Soap makers used it to turn soap from messy goo into the hard blocks which customers favoured. Iodine was also used in the production of the cleaning agent, soda.

It was easier to import kelp from Europe than to fetch it from the far more remote Scottish Highlands and islands, but European kelp was heavily taxed. So agents made difficult journeys north, offering to buy all the iodine the crofters could produce. Kelp was harvested in Ireland too.

A crofting family would build a kiln. These varied considerably: some were built above ground, somewhat resembling an oven. Others were simple pits. Some, if the crofters could afford it, had an iron grid laid above the pit, on which the kelp was placed and burned.

Kelp was gathered throughout the year, especially in the winter after storms, which tore it from the rocks and washed it up. The seaweed was spread to dry and then piled into stacks, in kelp-ricks which were thatched with heather to keep it dry.

Burning started in June, while the men of the crofting family might be away on a drove. The dried kelp was piled on the iron grid over the pit and set alight.

Crofters burning kelp in Stronsay - Glens of Antrim Historical Society

As the kelp burned to ash, the oil from it dripped into the pit. The smell of the burning seaweed was, it seems, exceptionally powerful and pungent and carried for miles. If you can recall the rank stink of exposed estuary mud on a hot day, imagine that burning and, it seems, you will have a faint idea of the stench.

The end result was a pit full of thick, stinking oil which cooled to a rock-hard substance of greyish, purplish blue. If allowed to go cold, it had to be chipped and chiselled out of the pit, so the burners tried to dig it out before it was completely cold, while it was still easier to work. The iodine blocks were heavy and it was hard, stinking work.

Agents bought these blocks and paid good money for them— though in some parts of Scotland, all the money from the trade went to the local laird. Who did none of the work.

But for those who did profit from this hard, dirty, stinking labour, it was another source of ready cash and for about fifty years, roughly between 1780 and 1830, business was good.

However, in the 1820s, the tax on European seaweed was reduced, and the tax on salt abolished. This made it much cheaper to import seaweed from Europe and much cheaper to make soda from salt than from kelp. These decisions, made in a southern parliament on behalf of southern industries, destroyed the kelp industry of the Highlands and islands.

It also contributed to depopulation of the Highlands because, at the same time, the droving trade was being killed by railways and landlords were raising the rents of crofts. Caught between rising rents and falling profits, many Highlanders left for Canada and America – where, in dreams, they beheld the Hebrides.

After 1830, demand for iodine from Scotland rose again as industry began producing aniline dyes and photographic plates. The seaweed from Europe was no longer enough, and agents once more came to the Highlands. But the industry was never again as strong as it had been, since so many of the people who would once have collected and burned the kelp had left the crofting life - either by choice or eviction.

This gave me an ending to my book The Drover’s Dogs, whose narrator is a Scot telling his Canadian children how he was rescued by two herd dogs and 'brought home' to Mull.

The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price

The ending rose partly from my own research and partly from the research my Scots partner did into his own family. He had a special interest in Drover's Dogs, since he helped me follow the old drove road to Mull, told me of the 'bondage,' the young hero escapes and also painted the cover picture! (And he doesn't like what I've done with it.) Since a branch of his own family had gone to Canada and become quite wealthy farmers, he was quite keen that the family in the book did too.

So I gave him the ending he wanted, to make up for what I did to his painting

Find The Drover's Dogs on Amazon.

June

2017-07-01T00:00:00.000+01:00

From my kitchen window. Roses, white foxgloves, reeds...
Below, the last of the dog-roses above the pool.

By the pond, the yellow flag which Madwippit (aka author Karen Bush) gave me last year. They didn't flower at all last year but have made up for it this.

Pink strawberry flowers and my
Grandad's favourite - sweet pea. We have peas too, getting very chubby in their pods.

Then there's the big fella, (below) the teasel.

That white wall behind it is six feet tall. It grows daily and is even taller now.

It's as well defended as a plant can be. Spikes and spines all over it.

But to end with something pretty...

How To Be Free - a review

2017-06-24T00:00:00.000+01:00

Life is absurd.

Be merry. Be free.

This sentiment appears on the cover of How To Be Free and runs throughout the book.

It's a most entertaining read. Half the time I agreed with Hodgkinson's arguments so wholeheartedly, I wanted to cheer. The rest of the time I thought them so crack-brained, I wanted to throw the book across the room. I always enjoy books like this. They make you think.

Tom Hodgkinson, The Idler

Tom Hodgkinson is the editor of The Idler and the author of How To Be Idle. From page one to the end, he rages against the 'mind-forged manacles' that keep people in jobs they hate in order to pay, often, for things they don't need or even really want. They just think they ought to want them. (In his opinion.)

Modern society, he argues, is in all but name, a slave society, but the chains are all 'mind-forged.' It forces people into a rigid system. First it educates them to believe in passing exams and 'getting a good job.' But a 'career' Hodgkinson argues, sets meaningless goals of 'sales targets', 'bonuses' and 'promotion.' People are convinced that a bigger house in a 'better' neighbourhood, a more expensive car, 'designer' clothes and kitchen gadgets are signs of success and, therefore, happiness. But none of these things are, fundamentally, what make people happy.

And, of course, in our present society it's impossible for everyone to have a high-flying career. Some simply aren't interested and they're called stupid, feckless, unambitious and lazy. Others are broken by the stultifying demands of 'career' and many are suddenly made redundant by economic shifts they have no control over. These people are labelled 'failures,' which does its own psychological damage.

The whole notion of 'a good job' and 'a career' are, Hodgkinson says, traps and enslavements. The things that make human beings happy are: friends and family, having a laugh with them, creativity, control over your own life, growing things and tending animals, and having plenty of time to be idle and think.

The book is a series of 29 short essays, all ending with a rousing slogan. Among them are:-

Banish Anxiety: Be Carefree - Ride a bike.
The Tyranny of Bills and the Freedom of Simplicity - Play the ukelele.
Reject Career and All its Empty Promises - Find your gift.
Escape Debt - Cut Up Your Credit Card.
Forget Government - Stop Voting.
Reject Waste, Embrace Thrift - Shovel Shit!
Stop Working, Start Living - Play.

It's all energetically, playfully and wittily written, but Hodgkinson really means it. Every chapter has its own note at the end, giving hints on how you might practically follow up the advice.

As a grumpy old Leftie, I muttered and mumbled about public-school educated Poshos telling the rest of us how to live - haven't we had a gut-full of that, for gods' sake? And it's all right for some with their Trust Funds and the Bank of Mummy and Daddy to fall back on...

But then I had to admit that, for most of my life, I've followed most of what Hodgkinson suggests. I am, I suppose, what he likes to call 'a Bohemian.' Indeed, a rather hard Glaswegian of my acquaintance nicknamed me and Davy 'The Brummie Bohemians' when we learned that, not only weren't we married, but we had no intention of ever getting married. (I was only surprised that this friend thought it worth commenting on at all.)

I didn't plan to be a Bohemian - but then, I've never gone in for life-plans or even five-year-plans. They strike me as very odd. I had no idea I was 'stepping outside the system' or being free. Mostly, I thought I was being broke, but apparently being broke is the new rich.

I've never had 'a career' or wanted one. (My writing is sometimes called 'a career' but, well, hardly.) I've lived from advance to lecture-fee to royalty. I am very frugal and thrifty (some would say stingy.) I will spend money, if I have to, on things I really want - books, travel, plants. Everything else is cheap or second-hand and never replaced until there's not another day's use in it. Because what I don't spend on non-essentials I can put towards stuff I'll enjoy. (And of course, what's 'essential' is open to definition. Fashionable clothes and house redecoration are, for me, non-essential in the extreme whereas books, single malt whisky and trips to the Hebrides... )

I've always had plenty of time to be idle, to read, to think, to write, draw, learn, make... It's also true that I've rarely felt such satisfaction as I have with my recent (and on-going) creation of a wildlife garden combined with growing my own fruit and vegetables. Hodgkinson is a hugely enthusiastic gardener and wants everyone to garden - and I have to agree with him about gardening as a source of happiness.

Hodgkinson blames the sorry state of slavery that exists today on 'Puritans.' He really hates 'Puritans.'

In the good old, Catholic Middle Ages, according to him, we all lived in a demi-paradise. We each of us had our cosy little cottage with a small-holding and all we had to do in return for it was a couple of days' light work a week on the lord's land - and, of course, as we all worked together, there was lots of good fellowship and cheer and it wasn't like work at all really.

The rest of the time we could work at our own pace on our own business, growing our own food or working, with creativity and satisfaction, at some useful craft like blacksmithing, pottery or basket-making. (All working-class crafts, which workers had no choice but to do, all recently taken up as 'artisan jobs' by the middle-classes like Hodgkinson. Excuse my grump. My great-grandfather was a blacksmith: my grandfather was a brick-maker. Neither did the work in order to be happy. Neither had much choice about it.)

Brueghal's peasants whooping it up on one of their many carefree holidays.

The Catholic Church was a benevolent overseer to this golden Merry England, providing lots of gorgeous ritual, music and holidays to lighten our days. Life was just wonderful all the time.

But then came the Reformation and the rise of Capitalism. The Catholic church and all the monasteries were destroyed. The peasants' common land was stolen from them and enclosed for the rearing of sheep. Families who'd been comfortably self-sufficient became hired farm hands in tied cottages. Land began to be something the rich speculated in to make fortunes, rather than something used by and for the whole community, to raise food.

Things just got worse and worse with the rise of industry and the dark, satanic mills. Workers became disposessed 'hands' and 'mechanics', forced to work miserably in terrible conditions, for inhumanly long hours, for a pittance. The medieval guilds where masters and men worked together vanished, and Unions were formed from the workers' desperation. Ever since then, workers and employers have been at loggerheads, one side for ever trying on some chicanery in order to make more profit and the other side forever on the defensive, trying to claw out some quality of life from the hellish urban landscape.

Wrong but Wromantic Right but Repulsive

For Hodgkinson, the Middle Ages and the 17th Century Cavaliers represent Ease, Joy, Grace, Elegance, Freedom.

Later centuries and the Puritans represent Greed, Narrowness, Ugliness, Rudeness, Joylessness and Slavery. It all reminds me of 1066 and All That, where the Cavaliers are summed up as 'Wrong but Wromantic,' and the Roundheads as 'Right but Repulsive.' (The beautiful drawing is by John Reynolds.)

I recognise that there are some grains of truth in Hodgkinson's account. The idea that all peasants, throughout the entire 400 years or so that make up 'the Middle Ages' were all plague-ridden, shit-encrusted and starving all the time is a nonsense. Excavations have revealed that many 'peasants' lived comfortable and prosperous lives. They did have more public holidays than we do and they could work as hard or as lightly as they chose, just as workers in the later cottage-industries could. As Marx put it, before the Industrial Revolution, work was a part of life. After, work was a sacrifice of life. (But did medieval peasants think that on a freezing cold morning when they had to go out and plough?)

The medieval Catholic Church often did serve a benevolent social role, providing work for makers of beautiful things, giving alms, keeping guest houses for travellers and taking the sick into its care.

But, but... I can't help feeling that Hodgkinson's view of the Middle Ages is seen not so much through rose-tinted specs as a shocking-pink blindfold. The Catholic Church was often anything but benevolent - the Inquisition? The witch-hunts? The Crusades? The slaughter of the Cathars? Where do these things fit into the happy, singy-dancy medieval dream?

And that cosy medieval world of Hodgkinson's, where everybody loves everybody else and they're always singing and dancing and feasting? Were there never any cold winters or hungry gaps? - How about this, from Piers Plowman, by Langland, who was actually present at the time, 600 years ago?

“As I went on my way,
I saw a poor man over the plough bending.

His hood was full of holes,
And his hair stuck out.
His shoes were patched,
His toes peeped out as he the ground trod.
His wife walked by him
In a skirt cut full and high,
Wrapped in a sheet to keep her from the weather,
Bare foot on the bare ice
So that the blood flowed.
At the field’s end lay a little bowl,
And in there lay a little child wrapped in rags
And two more of two years old upon another side.
And all of them sang a song
That was sorrowful to hear.
They all cried a cry,
A sorrowful note.
And the poor man sighed sore and said
“Children be still.”

And with all Hodgkinson's railing against 'slavery' I was a little taken aback at his description of the American Civil War as one fought between the 'rude North and the courteous South.' He doesn't mention that one of the South's 'courteousies' was the enslavement and mistreatment of other human beings. I'll take the grasping North's rudeness, thanks, over that kind of 'courtesy.' It was this kind of thing which enraged me and made me throw the book aside.

Even so, I picked it up again. I can't help agreeing with Hodgkinson more often than I disagree with him. I think he is often silly, but still has the big picture of our society and how it needs to change, framed about right.

I recommend the book as a stimulating, entertaining and, perhaps, even world-changing read.

The Ghost Drum won the Carnegie Medal.

Ghost Dance and Ghost Song are also available.

The Sterkarm Handshake won the Guardian Fiction Prize.

A Sterkarm Kiss and A Sterkarm Tryst are also

available.

Come Into The Garden...

2017-05-27T00:00:00.000+01:00

This is the rather forbidding entrance to my garden. There is barbed wire on the fence. The gate is almost always locked. Few people see what's behind it. But you can come in.

   My orchard, in its pots. There's a plum tree, a purple filbert, a Kentish cob and a Bardsey apple. Crammed among them are potatoes (Pentland javelins) growing in old compost bags, lettuce and rocket, onions and carrots and strawberries. And herbs: rosemary, mint, dill, sage, chives.
   The pond is just out of sight, behind the trees.

      The view from just outside my kitchen door, over the pond, which you can't see because so much has grown up around it. The wrens love to skulk in the undergrowth and then bullet out when you're not expecting them.
      My cherry tree (in a large pot) is just out of shot to the right. Also out of shot, to the left, are a blackberry and a tayberry, in pots. And a fennel. And two small bay trees.
      Below is our 'wild-flower meadow.' It's behind the 'orchard. Beside it, in the black tub, we're growing peas. Out of shot, behind the peas, there are tomatoes in grow-bags.
     We hope all the wild-flowers come out and feast the bees.

This fella below may be my favourite in the garden at the moment.

The big green fella, I mean. It's a teasel. You don't get much idea of scale but it's not far short of six-foot. It spent all last year as a little rosette, hugging the ground, but this year it's going for it.
It's a bit bizarre. Its leaves, as they hug the thick central stem, form little green basins that have filled with rain-water.

     Follow that leaf in the foreground back... See the water shining in the basin? Look a little higher and you can see the round, leafy basin above, cupped around the next outgrowth of leaves.
     Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin's son, suggested that the plant was at least partly carnivorous, trapping insects in these pools and absorbing them. This hasn't been proved, but in 2011 an experiment was done where insects were added to the in-built pools of some lucky teasle plants but not to others, and their growth measured. Those that were fed insects didn't show any increased growth - but they did produce more 30% more seeds than the unfed ones.
   Carnivorous or not, it has teeth. Look at the spikes on that stem. On the underside of the leaves too.

Try to brush one of these big leaves aside and you get a nasty jab.

The water in the leafy basins is supposed to good for the complexion but I don't fancy smearing my face with insect-soup.

And finally....

Raring for a Grow-Bag

2017-04-29T00:00:00.000+01:00

A violet, self-seeded at the pond's edge. And, below, a snakeshead.

I watched the little wren peck its way across the pavement in front of my kitchen door, then vanish into the thickets of grass around the pond. A moment later, it flew out, trailing a long wisp of dried grass behind it.

Twice I've seen the female blackbird with a beak so stuffed with grass that she seemed to have one of the more flamboyant RAF moustaches. Nesting is definately happening not too far away.

Below, Marmalade and alchemy - the heucharia called 'marmalade' and alchemillia mollis.

I have another heucharia called 'Ginger Ale.' I used to have one called 'Creme Caramel' which I loved but a bad winter killed it.

The fruit trees are all doing well. The crab-apple is weighed down with pink and white buds. At the moment it is wrapped up in fleece to protect them from the sudden cold snap. When the wind blows (which is does quite a bit, up here on the Rowley Hills) the tree mows and gibbers at the top of the garden like a Victorian ghost.

The cherry and the Bardesy apple also have flowers or buds and are also wrapped up. The plum and the two hazels have so far produced nothing but leaves but they seem cheerful.

My windowsill is filled with tomato seedlings. When I look at them I can't help feeling that they are excitedly raring to get outside into a grow-bag. They seem to be waving frondy little leaves in the air.

In the cold greenhouse I have a tray of sunflower seedlings which I hope will grow to ten feet tall. They have big, thick, rounded leaves - right bruisers compared to the tomatoes. I shall plant some in my front garden, to astonish and intimidate the passers-by.

My romanescues are coming through and I'm thinking of planting at least one of them in my front garden too, just for the way they look. I think they're like something from another planet - when, of course, they are just part of the ordinary amazingness of this one.

Fractal romanescue - Jon Sullivan - Wikipedia

A Review of A Sterkarm Tryst by Penny Dolan

2017-03-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

Penny Dolan is a wonderful writer whose books include the gripping and beautiful romp, 'A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E'. So I'm thrilled to have this generous review from her, as she is no slouch in the writing stakes and knows what she is talking about.

You can read my review of A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E here.

A STERKARM TRYST by Susan Price, reviewed by Penny Dolan

Susan Price’s long-awaited YA novel A STERKARM TRYST has now been published.

So, because I loved the world of the 16^th Century Border Reivers that was brilliantly evoked in the two earlier titles - THE STERKARM HANDSHAKE and A STERKARM KISS - I bought a copy of this third novel, and was not disappointed.

Earlier events and confrontations are woven lightly into the plot, allowing new readers and re-readers slip easily into this particular storyline. This is science fiction with excellent time-travelling!

The trilogy has an interesting premise: James Windsor, a late 21^st Century entrepreneur, intended to use his company’s Time Tube to colonise and exploit the unspoilt lands of the past.

Windsor thought his men would easily secure such a backward territory - and then they met the Sterkarms. Of all the feuding families in the Debatable Lands, the Sterkarms are the most treacherous: everyone knows that a Sterkarm handshake might promise friendship with the right hand while the left hand carries a blade to slide between your ribs.

At first, the Sterkarms treat the 21^st century intruders with wary respect, deciding these strangers must be Elves. After all, they can appear and disappear, dress in unknown materials, and carry magic pills that take away pain. And from these "Elvenkind" springs the relationship that stands at the heart of the novels.

Andrea Mitchell, a 21st Century anthropologist, finds the love of her life in Per Sterkarm, the family heir, and at the start of THE STERKARM TRYST, she has come through time to her lover again, though uncertain of any welcome.

Known as his "Entraya", his Elf-May, she has a hard task. She has to warn Per and the Sterkarm family that a deadly new enemy has entered their lands. Windsor has time-travelled a group of Sterkarms from an almost parallel time dimension into this one. These are warriors who know this wild landscape as they do, and who fight with matching ferocity and who look just as they do. They will know all the Sterkarm tricks, and Windsor is behind them.

How can Andrea even explain this phenomenon?

How can a Sterkarm attack another to whom - it seems - they owe loyalty?

And how, I wondered, can a writer manage two almost-identical casts?

Susan Price does. Carefully, scene by scene, she moves the action forward, resolving what the reader wants resolved, and ending with treachery getting what it deserves. The headings keep the story straight and satisfying in its conclusions.

However, I must say that the plot was not the only thing that made A STERKARM TRYST a compelling experience for me. Within the storytelling, I heard rich echoes of the traditions, superstitions and legends of the Border Ballads, as well as the languages and voices of the region and its past. Humour is there too, within the pages, as well as moments when the differences between the present and the past are suddenly very evident.

Moreover, the dramatic landscape of the book is recognisably that of the Borders, an area of wild uplands and uncertain weather, a place where cattle-raids were then part of the culture, and where hunger was a constant threat.

I enjoyed being within that way of life, following the descriptions of an active community and culture, along with glimpses of cooking methods, housekeeping and textiles, herbal lore, fear and superstition. Captured in the writing too, was the importance of respectful behaviour and right words and acting according to your status: the sense of a time and place where any perceived insult might mean death.

A STERKARM TRYST feels a very physical story. It moves through camps and hovels and crowded stone towers, past the stink of unwashed clothes and the gutting of meat and the hard lives and gory deaths of men and women: this is not a benign or moral fairy-tale. Besides, survival depends on a reputation for cunning and treachery, especially when there are two lots of Sterkarms riding out, as well as Windsor’s thugs and their 21st Century weapons.

Yet, reading the book from the comfort of home - and despite all the violence - it is hard not to admire the warmth and energy and the bonds of family loyalty and protection within the Sterkarm clan. Like Andrea/Entraya, I found the Sterkarms beguiling, and welcomed the many characters that Susan Price has created – Toorkild, Lady Isobel, Sweet Milk, Gobby, Mistress Crosar, Joan Grannam, Davy, Cho and more - each one entirely convincing, for all their faults.

Especially that blue-eyed, fair-haired hero, Per May Sterkarm. And Cuddy. I have to mention them. Read the book and you’ll discover why.

Penny Dolan.

All three titles, including THE STERKARM TRYST, are published by OpenPress in a handsomely-matching set of covers or as e-books.

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE

Hailing Far Spring...

2017-02-17T00:00:00.000+00:00

Valentine's Day is when the birds do choose their make.

Right enough, action in the garden is hotting up.

Here's my garden, in a picture taken last year.

It is so bleak and grey and cold out there at the moment - except for one bright clump of primroses at the end of the pond which have never stopped flowering. But shoots are coming up everywhere: all over the garden and in pots. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to them flowering.

The pond we dug out last January has been wonderfully successful in increasing the number of visiting birds. Before we had zero. Now they come winging in every single day. We have our own little colony of sparrows and before, I never appreciated how acrobatic they are. They hover at the feeders while trying to find a place. They chase each other round them. Today I saw a couple doing loop-the-loops around each other in mid-air. They reguarly come down in a mob to drink at the pool's edge and bathe, even on the coldest day.

We've got used to the fact that the birds resent our presence in the garden. If we linger over tasks, they crowd the trees and yell at us. If we persist, they drop down to slightly nearer branches and yell louder. I've come to recognise the peculiar whistling whoop that starlings make and the craak-craak-craak of magpies. The moment we step back inside the house, they come down to the pond and feeders in flocks before we can pull the door shut.

The magpies swagger about, wearing their gangster black-and-white. Until I saw them close up and so often, I never realised what an iridescent shimmer of petrol blue runs over their black feathers.

The starlings come in gangs of five and seven, with wicked beaks like stilettos, and frantically fight to get into small hanging bird tables and squabble with the sparrows over the spaces on the feeders. Or they plummet down and raid the ground-feeder.

There is a tiny wren that we see more and more often as Spring approaches. It drank from the pond today, a tiny little ball on the edge of a slate. It searched the rose bush above the pond and walks

Wren: Dibyendu Ash, wikimedia

vertically up walls, investigating the slight crevices between bricks. A couple of days ago it was right by the patio doors, pecking away at something invisible and taking no notice of us. Update: I was turning the compost heap yesterday and a bird above me in the tree was calling out repeatedly in a very loud but melodious voice. Thinking it might be the blackbird, I looked up - and it was the wren. I could see it clearly silhouetted against the sky: a tiny round ball with its tail stuck up at right angles. Its voice is about five times bigger than it is.

Woodpigeons, robins, blackbirds, bluetits and dunnocks visit us reguarly. The bluetit, yesterday, perched on the very highest twig of the leafless lilac and turned this way and that, stretching up onto tip-toe, as he shouted and yelled. Another bluetit came to a lower branch and appeared to listen. They whizz back and forth to the feeders like tiny, bright bits of animated enamel.

And this character (below) has dropped in every day for a week. He has a long spring-loaded tail which you can't see in this photo but which constantly twitches up and down as he hops and pecks about the pond and investigates the ground-feeder.

Grey Wagtail: Wikimedia: Glyn Baker

Thrilled with so much success, I have plans for next year. I've invested in a silver birch and a holly for my 'wood.' And I'm creating a mini-orchard where my shed used to be. I have a cherry, a bardsey apple and a plum tree, all grown in pots. They have leaf-buds and seem to be doing well. I'm keenly looking forward to seeing how they do.

They will add more leafage, more pollen-producing flowers (never mind the hay-fever) more bark - and therefore more insects. Which in turn will mean more birds and animals that eat insects. I would like to see frogs in my pond. And a newt. I would really love to have a newt.

I planted a St. Swithin rose today, to climb over a fence, both to hide the rather ugly fence and to provide more hiding/living space for birds and insects. I'd like to have a hazel tree in a pot because I love hazelnuts. And strawberries and bilberries. Perhaps a tiny wild flower meadow in a raised bed.
We shall see how much of this comes to - er - fruition.

Singalong With The Sterkarms

2017-01-21T19:36:00.000+00:00

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

Tryst: (Old French) an appointed station in hunting. An appointed meeting place, often of lovers. To engage to meet a person or persons. A cattle market, e.g. 'The Falkirk Tryst.'

A Sterkarm Tryst: an appointed meeting place of which only one side is aware: an ambush.

On January 24th, the third Sterkarm book, A Sterkarm Tryst, will be published.

It's the third in the series. The first two, after being out of print for some years, have been republished by Open Road. They are The Sterkarm Handshake and A Sterkarm Kiss.

The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price

A Sterkarm Kiss by Susan Price

(I've just been messaged on Facebook by a reader, who tells me she can now at last read Kiss, which she's been trying to find for ten years, and has pre-ordered Tryst. I can only say thank you for your stamina and thank you again.)

The books were inspired by the reivers of the Scottish Borders though Handshake only came to life for me when I thought of sending workers for a 21st Century company through a time machine to the 16th Century Border Country, where they hope to mine the coal, oil and gas. The 16th Century 'natives,' the Sterkarms, suppose them to be Elves. After all, the strange clothes of the 21st Century people give them an eldritch appearance and their carts which move without horses demonstrate their supernatural powers.

The Sterkarms, the local Riding or Raiding* Family, welcome the Elves at first, for their magical wee white pills which take away pain (aspirin). The welcome doesn't last. The Border men were notoriously 'ill to tame,' as a contemporary put it, and the Sterkarms don't relish being told what they can and cannot do, even by Elves.

*The word 'raid' is from the Scandinavian or Scottish form of the Old English 'rade', which meant 'road.' Our word 'road' is from the same Old English word, which also gave us 'ridan' or 'ride'. A road was where you rode. A track over a moor or through a wood is still called 'a ride.'

Raiding was often what you were doing when you rode down a road or ride. So a 'Riding Family' and a 'Raiding Family' were the same thing. Ride, road and raid all stem from the same word.

And 'reivers', as in Scottish Border reivers, comes from the same root as 'bereave,' which survives to the present almost exclusively in the sense of bereavement by death. 'To reave' originally meant to rob, to take, to forcibly deprive.
I just thought you might like to know that.

Looking back over the books, I realise that the words and music of old ballads run through all of them. (I hear the music, anyway.) The 21st-Century heroine, Andrea, is 'embedded' (in more ways than one) with the 16th-Century Sterkarms and learns many songs from them. She finds that the songs often give her the words to understand the Sterkarms and her own situation.

The higher on the wing it climbs

The sweeter sings the lark,

And the sweeter that a young man speaks

The falser is his heart.

He'll kiss thee and embrace thee

Until he has thee won,

Then he'll turn him round and leave thee

All for some other one.

Then there's the ballad which gives the Sterkarms their rallying cry and boast:

The 'Sterkarm Handshake': their badge

My hob is swift-footed and sure,

My sword hangs down at my knee,

I never held back from a fight:

Come who dares and meddle with me!

A 'hob' was the breed of small, strong, intelligent horse which the reivers rode (down roads on raids). This ballad was historically associated with the Elliot family rather than the Armstrongs on whom the Sterkarms are very, very loosely based. ('Sterkarm' means 'strong arm.)

These old songs fitted themselves naturally into the story as I wrote. I'd known many of them by heart for decades before I had any idea of writing the Sterkarm books. I never had to hunt for a quote. The scene I was working on would set a particular song playing in my head.

I knew the songs because, while still a young teenager, my love of folklore led me to Child's Ballads. I was already familiar with the lyrics before I discovered recordings of them by various folk-groups and singers.

I was a deep-dyed folkie, me. I was having none of your long-haired sensitive types strumming acoustic guitars while they intoned modern protest songs. If it wasn't at least 200 years old, I didn't want to hear it. I wanted elbow-pipes, Shetland fiddles and bodhrans. I wanted people with closed eyes singing unaccompanied with one hand over an ear. "As I walked out one midsummer morning..."

It was the stories, of course, that attracted me. I wanted to hear about the Billy Blind starting up at the bed's foot and the loathly worm toddling about the tree. And the Broomfield Hill. And Twa Corbies.

I often listen to music while writing and, for me, the music has to be fitted to the book I'm working on. It creates the atmosphere. For the Sterkarms, it had to be traditional folk, especially the Border Ballads. The music and words of the ballads were as much a part of setting the Sterkarm scene as details of their food, clothing, furniture and buildings.

I wasn't too purist, though. In A Sterkarm Handshake, Per Sterkarm is hurrying through the alleys of the tower, on his way to Andrea's 'bower' (which just means 'bedroom' or 'sleeping place.) He thinks he's on a promise.

Oh, pleasant thoughts come to my mind

As I turn back smooth sheets so fine,

And her two white breasts are standing so

Like sweet pink roses that bloom in snow.

The second book, A Sterkarm Kiss ends with the lines:

For there's sweeter rest

On a true-love's breast

Than any other where.

Neither of these quotes come from the Border ballads, although folk-song is, by its very nature, hard to date or pin down to a specific place. The first verse, as far as I know, comes from 'The Factory Maid.'

I'm a hand-loom weaver by my trade,

But I'm in love with a factory-maid,

And could I but her favour win,

I'd break my looms and weave with steam.

This dates it, roughly, to the late 18th or 19th century and means that this version is

Mayhew's broadside ballad seller

likely to have been a 'broadside ballad.' These were lyrics, printed on the long sheets of paper which gave them their name. Often written about hot topics of the day, such as industrialisation, they were sold in market-places. There was no music but the name of some well-known tune would be given. 'To be sung to the tune of...'

The lines about the true-love's breast come from a song with a beautiful tune, which I know as 'Searching for Lambs.' (This being what 'the loveliest maid that e'er I saw' was doing when her lover walked out one midsummer morning.) It's very hard to guess at a date for the lovely maid and her ewes, but the song doesn't have that robust mix of extreme vengeful violence and the supernatural that typifies the Border ballads, so it's probably later.

The date for my Sterkarms is about 1520 (though there were reivers long before and after this date.) Some of the songs I quote are certainly later and can be roughly dated to the late 1700s, but this doesn't mean that the Sterkarms wouldn't know something close to these lyrics and tunes. I justify my inclusion of them by the way that elements of folk-tales and ballads 'migrate,' from song to song and tale to tale over long periods of time.

The songs and stories were spread by word of mouth. If a singer or story-teller couldn't remember a detail, they invented their own. Or inserted a verse they could remember from another song. They might also take a verse from one song and put it into another simply because they liked it. They might change an ending to make it happier (see Johnny of Briedesley below) or change the relationships within a song, for example, having the hero murdered by his mother instead of his lover.

The same applies to the music. If they couldn't remember a tune, then they set the words to another or made up a variation. Other lyrics and tunes were updated. These tried-and-tested old tales can go on for centuries. Some researchers think some folk-tales go back to the Bronze Age.

Some old songs almost seem to be compilations of verses:

Oh had I wist, when first I kissed

That Love had been so ill to win,

I'd have shut my heart in a silver cage

And pinned it with a silver pin.

The men of the forest, they asked it of me,

How many sweet strawberries grow in the salt sea?

I answered them well, with a tear in my e'e;

'As many fish swim in the forest.'

When cockle-shells turn silver bells

When fishes swim from tree to tree

When ice and snow turn fire to burn

It's then, my love, that I'll love thee.

The writers of broadside ballads certainly drew on these old songs too, re-using verses to save time as they tried to make a living. So because a verse about a factory maid was published in a broadsheet ballad in, say 1810, it doesn't mean that something very like it wouldn't have been known very much earlier.

And just because a gentle love song doesn't mention treachery, incest, fratricide, infanticide or any of the other -cides so popular in the Border ballads, it doesn't mean it wasn't known on the Borders. Even there, they had their quieter moments.

I thought it a pity that my readers couldn't hear the songs that are quoted so frequently throughout the Sterkarm books - and then realised that there was a way for me to share them. If you have a Facebook or Spotify account, here's a link to my playlist for the Sterkarm books.

The songs here are the best versions I could find on Spotify of the ballads I quote, but they aren't definitive. For instance, in the linked Johnny of Breadiesley, sung by Ewan McColl, Johnny kills seven enemies and rides away triumphant. In other versions, he is killed: His good grey hounds are sleeping,/ his good grey hawk has flown,/ a grass green turf is at his head,/ and his hunting all is done. The verse quoted above, from January, [The higher on the wing it climbs...] also has slightly different words in the recording by June Tabor.

If you like songs about murder, revenge killings and executions - plus the occasional love-song - and if you like deep-dyed folk - this is for you.

The Droving Trade

2017-01-08T19:27:00.000+00:00

Can you imagine spending two months of every year walking 150 miles (242 kilometres) over challenging terrain, scrambling up steep, rocky hills, trudging miles across moors, fording rivers, lakes and even stretches of sea?
For company, you’d have a large herd of long horned cattle: unpredictable, dangerous beasts. Most nights, you would sleep on the ground beside them.

At journey’s end, having sold the cattle, you’d earn extra money by working at the local harvest before walking all the way home again. You would do this year after year, in hot sunshine, clouds of midges and pouring rain.

To us, with our comfortable, mostly indolent lives, this seems almost unbelievable, but it’s simply a description of the droving trade which went on for centuries. Highland regions, such as the Welsh and Scottish mountains, were best suited to pastoral farming, but to make a decent profit the beasts had to be brought to market in more prosperous regions, where higher prices were paid for meat.

No railways existed until the 1830s. There were no road vehicles capable of transporting large numbers of cattle, and no useable roads for such vehicles in any case. A huge amount of freight transport went by sea and river, but the task of transporting several hundred unhappy steers by small boats was expensive and difficult. And once landed, the cattle were still a long way from the best markets.

The simplest solution was to walk the beasts to market, step by step. Pigs, sheep and geese were also droved, with the geese fitted with sturdy boots for the journey by dipping their feet in tar.

I researched the droving trade for my book, The Drover’s Dogs. My knowledge is slanted towards the Scottish trade, especially the journey from the Hebridean island of Mull in the west, to Lowland Scotland’s great ‘Tryst’ or cattle market in Falkirk in the east. (‘Tryst’ means ‘meeting place’ and, at the cattle trysts, sellers and buyers from all over Scotland met to do business.)

The drover's road from Mull to Falkirk, from The Drover's Dogs

A ‘drover’ could mean a herdsman who walked alongside the cattle with his dog and perhaps owned a couple of the driven beasts to a wealthy man whose main business was droving. Quite often, like Lachlan in my book, they were crofters themselves who would be driving their own beasts to market and earned extra income by adding some of their neighbour’s cattle to their drove.

The drover might buy his neighbours cattle outright, or he might simply promise to sell the cattle at the best price he could, and pass on the money to the crofter, minus an agreed cut.

In about May of each year, a drover would start enquiring among his neighbours: Who wanted to send beasts to market and how many? Roughly around June, the drovers began herding the cattle together in one place. A man might gather together a large herd, and had to remember who the owners of them all were, and what agreement he'd made with them. Later, he'd have to remember how much the beasts sold for. Some drovers could read and write. Many were illiterate and probably used tally-sticks to help them keep account. They also, undoubtedly, developed accurate and sharp memories.

Highlanders didn’t have a good reputation throughout most of the period and drovers were reputed to be lazy, drunken, dirty and stupid. They were called lazy because they often slept late at their ‘stances,’ the overnight camping places chosen for the water, shelter and grazing they provided. Drovers were seen sitting over their fires, eating breakfast and chatting until mid-morning. And even once started, they dawdled along.

This wasn’t laziness. Hurried cattle lost weight and became less valuable. People who called the drovers ‘lazy’ had obviously never considered the hardness and danger of the drover’s life. To come from Mull, the cattle were first driven to Grass Point on Loch Spelve and loaded on to boats which carried them across the strait to the island of Kerrera. The cattle were unwilling. Drovers could be gored, trampled or crushed.

After disembarking on Kerrera, the cattle were driven the length of the island and then swum across the narrow stretch of sea to the mainland at Oban. Many men stripped off and swam with the cattle: another dangerous enterprise.

Once the mainland was gained, they walked the cattle up into hills and crossed Loch Awe and the sea loch, Loch Fyne. They were still only half-way. They had to skirt Loch Lomond, journey along the shores of Loch Katrine and even then there were miles to walk before they reached Falkirk. This is a lot easier to write down and read than it was to do it in 1800 or earlier!

In earlier centuries, the cattle might have to be defended against robbers, though this was less likely in 1800, when my story is set. The drovers’ diet for this arduous journey was mostly oats, onions and whisky. I imagine they made what later became known as 'Waterloo porridge' because the soldiers before Waterloo were forbidden a fire to make a hot meal. Dry oats were mixed into cold water. The onions were probably eaten as we would eat an apple. For a little more protein, they might open one of the bullock’s neck veins and mix the blood into their porridge

So the accusation of laziness doesn’t stand, but drovers were certainly dirty, at least while droving, since they slept rough or in the notoriously unsavoury inns of the Highlands. There was probably also some substance to the accusation of drunkenness. If I had to live like that, I would make the most of the whisky too.

But stupid? Many reasons probably underlay this insult. The drovers were usually considered illiterate, uneducated farm-hands. They were also Highlanders too, and Highlanders, in 1715 and 1745 had risen in rebellion against the English state. The last Jacobite uprising had taken place a mere 55 years before my story is set: within living memory.

The Highlanders first language was Gaelic and they were mostly Catholic, so they were divided by language, culture and religion from the English and from Lowland Scots who, at best, considered Highlanders to be ‘noble savages.’ At worst, they thought them
a lower form of life: stupid, dishonest and dangerous.

But a successful drover needed a sharp intelligence. Success depended on bringing the cattle to market in good condition and perhaps even better fed on grazing along the way than they had started. To manage this, a drover needed not only expert knowledge of cattle but a weather eye and close acquaintance with every stance along the way. Would the tracks ahead be muddy and impassable: was it worth taking another way? Was it worth hurrying the cattle a little to reach the next stance before another drove who might leave nothing to graze?

He had to be able to manage men, and have a phenomenal memory for places, people and the deals he’d made. Even if illiterate, he likely had great quickness with numbers. I'm reminded of an Italian
woman I once knew who was illiterate in both English and Italian, but to assume from this that she was stupid would have been a big mistake. She understood numbers, prices and weights very well, adding up, subtracting and dividing long lists of numbers with a speed and accuracy that made me dizzy. Lord help anyone who tried to short-change her. I imagine that, from long practice, the drovers had the same facility. In short, to be sure of finding a fool at a drovers' stance, you had to take one with you.

Drovers were also honest, or as honest as any trader can be. Most business at the time was conducted on a handshake and a dishonest man would soon have had no business at all. Again, I offer a modern parallel. I have family connections with a small island where a great deal of business is still conducted on trust because nearly all families are interconnected and everyone knows, or knows of, everyone else.
Any incoming clever-clogs who try to take advantage of this trusting ‘naivety’ soon find that no locals will do any business with them at all. No credit is to be had. If they need an electrician, decorator, plumber etc, it's impossible to find one who isn't solidly booked up. Word has gone round. I imagine that any drover who tried to cheat the crofters would soon have found himself with no trade and no friends.

Although probably as old as agriculture, the droving trade prospered with the rise of urban living. Demand for meat grew with the population and wealth of towns. Prices rose in those markets that supplied urban areas and it was more profitable to undertake the arduous droves to those markets than sell or barter your cattle more locally.

The real hey-day came in the 18^th and early 19^th Centuries. Towns continued to grow and wars in Europe meant a steep rise in demand for beef from the Army and Navy.

A Welsh bank note

The increase in droving stimulated the development of banking. Returning drovers often carried large, heavy sums of cash across lonely moors and mountains. So banks set up near the Trysts. The drover could place his cash in their strongboxes and receive in return a paper ‘note’ which was lighter to carry and less temptation to robbers. On reaching the end of his journey, he took this note to another branch of the bank and ‘cashed it.’ Payment was sometimes accepted in these signed and co-signed notes, fore-runners of paper money.

Many of these banks, such as Llandovery’s Black Ox Bank, took an ox or bull as their symbol, in honour of their connection with the droving trade. The Welsh one, above, has a drawing of sheep.

The end of the droving trade was brought about mainly by two things: peace and steam.

The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price

The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, meant a great fall in the demand for beef. At the same time, agricultural improvements meant that greater numbers of cattle were kept alive over winter and larger, fatter cattle were bred, in greater numbers, close to towns where demand was greatest.

And then came steam which ‘carried away the droving trade.’ By the 1840s, railways had spread throughout west Scotland (and the rest of Britain.) Tracks could extend to depots almost at the dock-sides. Cattle could be shipped in the large holds of sturdy, iron steam-ships and then loaded into cattle trucks which were dragged away by steam-train. Drovers arrived at market to find that all demand had been satisfied by cattle who’d arrived more speedily by train.

The Sterkarm Handshake

The ancient droving trade had been a hard one, but it had been one way a highland crofter could earn hard cash to pay his rent. Its end pushed many crofters into hardship and emigration.

Susan Price is the Carnegie medal winning author of The Ghost Drum and The Sterkarm Handshake.

The Drover’s Dogs is her first entirely original self-published book.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

2016-12-25T00:00:00.000+00:00

My mother loved Christmas.

You know who he is - illustrated by T Nast (Public Domain Review)

     She was born in 1929, the youngest of six children. Every year, at Christmas, she told us about Christmas when she'd been a child.
   The Christmas, for instance when, coming down in the morning, she found a monkey in the kitchen. One of her three older brothers had somehow acquired it at the Christmas Wake (a fair.) Christmas spirit had probably been strong in the brother, if not the monkey. What happened to the monkey? As with many of my mother's stories, I don't know. I can't remember her ever telling me that. Perhaps she didn't know herself. I can't imagine the monkey remaining a member of the household for very long after my grandmother arrived home.

Every Christmas without fail, we heard about the big white enamelled bucket. It had a lid. It was a lidded big white enamel bucket.
   For most of the year the big white enamelled bucket with a lid was for fetching water from the pump in the yard and storing it in the house. But at Christmas, it was used for storing nuts instead. What was done with the water over Christmas? Were people pushed out into the freezing slippery yard with jugs and basins? Again, I was never told. But at Christmas, for sure, that big white enamelled bucket with the lid was filled to overflowing with monkey-nuts, walnuts, cobnuts and brazils, all of them still in their shells. The nutcrackers lay on the top, nestling into the nuts, ready for use. I think it was the great quantity of that luxury, nuts, that had impressed my mother.

Walnuts were, by the way, fun for all the family. Carefully shell two walnuts so you have four perfect half-shells. Scrape them out and make them smooth. Scoop up a passing cat. (There were always a few cats about in my mother's house. There was one which my mother strongly resented because it could open the back door when she was still too short to reach the latch. On returning from school to an empty house, she used to have to wait in the yard until the cat chose to saunter home and let her in. Despite this, she was a great cat-lover in later life.)
     Anyroad, the cat and the walnut shells. Fit a half-shell onto each of its paws, then put the cat down on the bare stone flags or tiles. There were no carpets in my mother's home. The cat finds itself tap-dancing. Never having heard a sound from its own feet before, it attempts to escape the clatter, only to tap louder. The more frantically the cat tries to escape the noise, the louder the clatter of walnut shells on stone becomes.
     This was more fun for my mother's brothers, admittedly, than for the cat. But they had to make their own entertainment in those days.
   Another use for walnut shells. Mum taught us how to make little boats out of the half-shells. Fitted with matchstick masts and paper sails, they formed a flotilla in a bowl of water.
     And corks. Most bottles in her childhood had real corks, and more corks were pulled at Christmas than at any other time. These were turned into horses, to stand about on the bowl's shore, admiring the boats. The horses' legs were matchsticks, and a head and neck were cut out of card. A slit in the end of the cork allowed the cardboard head to be slotted into place. Tails and manes could be made from bits of old wool. You could blacken the end of the matchsticks to make hooves and draw in eyes and mouths. You could even make them saddles and reins.


Walnuts, wikimedia

My mother, as the youngest of six, considered herself spoiled but Christmas in the 1930s was still for most people, as it had been for centuries, a brief time of treats in a year of penny-pinching and making-do. Another of my mother's memories was of how an apple was a thing to be cherished and hoarded for days. She polished it on her sleeve, sniffed it, imagined how it would taste. She showed it off and would have all the other children in the street following her about and trying to become her bestest friend, in the hope that, when she finally ate the apple, they might be allowed to have the core.

At Christmas she looked forward to having a rare tangerine in the toe of her stocking - and this was one of her old socks, not a novelty gift-bag. The stocking would hold a sugar mouse too, and some nuts and raisins.

tangerine: Wikimedia

     My grandmother spread the cost of Christmas over many weeks. After all, she had six sugar mice and six tangerines to buy. She bought white mice for the boys and pink ones for the girls from their corner shop (which was a house with its front room turned into a shop.)
     My mother told me of the ingenious way that my grandmother and other women stretched their money. Twenty of them met, every week, in the local pub. The landlady of the pub, who they obviously trusted, acted as treasurer. Each woman put a shilling (5p) into a big jar. For the first week, nothing was paid out, but a time-table was drawn up for twenty weeks ahead. Each woman drew one of these weeks out of a hat.
     The next week, they again put in a shilling, so the jar held 40 shillings or two pounds. The woman who had drawn the first week was given twenty shillings, or one pound, from the jar.
     The next week, they all put in another shilling and the woman who'd drawn the second week was given a pound - and so on. This 'Inflation Calculator' reckons that £1 in 1935 would have been worth about £50 today, whereas the shilling each woman put in was worth about £2-50.
     This ingenious system allowed the women to budget ahead. This week and next week, they were hard-up - ah, but the week after that they would have a whole pound to play with. They could delay large purchases, like coal, until 'their week.' They also made arrangements between each other. If one woman desperately needed the money that week and another could wait, they swopped weeks. When it was their week to receive a pound, they often asked to be given only 19/- (the /- meant 'shilling') and so covered their payment into the pool.

But I was telling you about sugar mice. After Christmas, my mother said, she and the brothers nearest her in age hid their stocking and sugar-mouse from the others. The utmost ingenuity and enterprise had to be used because if one of them found the stockings belonging to the others, they would eat sugar-mouse, raisins, nuts and all while hoping that the others hadn't found their special, secret, undetectable hiding-place. The two oldest sisters never bothered to hide their stockings. Since their mother worked, these two acted as mothers to the rest and it was considered bad form to gnaw their mice when they hadn't even hidden them. (The oldest brother's stocking was also safe. He worked in a steel-mill, flinging and catching bolts of white-hot iron with a pair of long tongs. Nobody was going to nick his sugar-mouse.)

My mother was usually given a 'Wonder Book' for Christmas too: a large, hard-backed book, full of stories, puzzles, things to make, and experiments to try. They were often beautifully illustrated. My mother loved and treasured hers but one day, when she was twelve, returned home from school to find that her mother had given all of them away, together with many of her toys because 'she was too old for things like that now.'
   This was one reason why my mother bought us so many books, including second-hand copies of her old wonder-books, and why she would never, never even consider throwing or giving away anything that belonged to us without our permission. I don't think she ever forgave my grandmother for giving away her things. (To speak in my grandmother's defense: She had herself started work at 10, so perhaps 12 did seem 'too old' for toys to her. Also, she never understood why anyone would waste their time reading. She spent Christmas at our house once, in her old age and stared for a long time at the floor-to-ceiling books before shaking her head and saying, "But what use am they?" We were without answer. To us, it was like asking what use the floor or walls were.)

My mother copied her mother in this much: she started buying for Christmas in August. Gifts would be stashed away in the bottom of her wardrobe or on top of it. Bottles of booze and ingredients for baking would be packed onto the back pantry shelf. The chest at the bottom of the hall would be slowly filled with nets of nuts, bags of crisps, packets of biscuits and sweets. She never allowed for the fact that she had only three children (four when my youngest brother arrived) and not six. We would be eating 'Christmas treats' until Easter.
   In the week running up to Christmas, she would organise us as hands for her mincepie factory. She would make the pastry. One of us would grease tins. Another would cut out pastry circles. A third would fill the pies. The one who'd been greasing tins would then go to the other end of the line and stick on lids. Milk and egg was brushed on. Sugar was sprinkled. Mother operated the oven, putting tray after tray in, and bringing out sweet, spicy mincepies in batches of twelve.

Nightcomers by Susan Price

We always had a Christmas tree and Mom would tell us how, when she'd been a child, they had a 'bush' not a tree. This was a construction of coat-hangers or wooden rods, fastened together to make a cross. It was covered with greenery or tinsel and hung from the ceiling. Glass ornaments, holly or mistletoe could be added, according to taste.
     Many of the ornaments we hung on our tree had a long history and stories attached. In the 'trimmings-box' we had some bits of blackened string with odd little wormy bits dangling from them. My mother told us that this had once been tinsel. When new it had been as bright and shiny as the glittering tinsel we enjoyed, but it had tarnished and turned black. We still hung it on our tree, in memory of Christmases past.
     My mother's memories of Christmas and my own inspired my story 'The Christmas Trees' which, if you're still in the mood for Christmas, you can read here.

   It's the gentlest and most nostalgic story in my collection, Nightcomers: Eight Stories of the Uncanny.

Gain Inner Peace by Filing Your Tax Return

2016-12-03T00:00:00.000+00:00

Found inner peace? Not.

It's so easy to file your taxes on-line!

Go paperless. Submit your tax return on-line.

Gain inner peace by filing your taxes on-line.

I've just wasted about three days of my life trying to gain this inner peace. My rug is badly chewed. I have carpet fibres in my teeth and bald patches on my head.

Like so much government double-speak - like, 'We're in this together' and 'The NHS is safe in our hands' - they know very well that not a word, not a syllable, not a letter of it is true, but still, they stoutly maintain these falsehoods in the face of our boos and hisses.

I first logged on to complete my return a couple of months ago. I found that it had been partly filled in for me by some HMI gremlin. The gremlin stated that I had been paid a sum of money as an employee. Because I had been paid this sum, I owed Pay-As-You-Earn tax.

This was completely wrong. I haven't been employed by another party for about 40 years. Even when I was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, even when I go into schools to give talks and workshops, I retain my self-employed status, as do most writers.

The money that HMI had its underpants twisted about had nothing to do with employment. It came from a matured investment.

Long, long ago, O Best Beloveds, back in the stone-age, it was not possible for a self-employed person to have a personal pension. So, thinking that I should salt away a few quid for my old age, I opened a 'Retirement Account' into which I intended to stuff what little surplus moolah came my way.

Almost immediately after I opened it, the law changed and I was able to set up a personal pension, which seemed the better option. I couldn't take the money from the Retirement Account: it was in there for the long term. So I just left it. I added no more to it.

Then old age came upon me and I was notified that the account had matured. The matured pot was hardly life-altering. It wouldn't have bought a Tory MP a pedigree duck, let alone build a duck house. So I took it as cash. It was this money that HMI were claiming was payment for employment that I owed PAYE on.

Baphomet. Contact Him @widdershins...

I attempted to correct the on-line form. This only resulted in a lot of red splatter and big error messages. It wouldn't allow me to go forward to the next page until I had corrected the 'errors.'

So I wrote to the Taxman, asking what I should do. I suggested they send me a paper tax form which wouldn't answer back when I filled it in.

I wrote to them because my experience of trying to contact tax people by phone is dismal. It's much easier to contact Baphomet. With the taxman, even if you have a cup of coffee and a book and hang on the phone for hours, when you finally get through, you are immediately cut off. Deliberately, I suspect. Now, I have relatives that work in tax-offices and so I've heard something of the pressure tax-office workers are under and I don't blame them. Much.

Months passed. And finally, I got a letter from HMI. It said I was now too late to return a paper tax-form without being fined. Phone the number on the letter, it said, to be talked through the problem.

So I phoned, luckily without high expectations, and explained. A bored young woman said, "Oh, just ignore it and when you get to any other comments, put an explanation in there. When we check the form, we'll see it."

I went back to the on-line form. Whenever you sign in now, you get a phone-call from a rather abrupt robotic female who dictates a number to you. To some numbers she gives a Russian accent, while others she speaks as a South African. Occasionally she sounds a bit American. It's often quite hard to tell what numbers she's saying because, just as you've got used to one barely comprehensible accent, she springs another on you. And then snaps, "Goodbye."

I went through this rigmarole with her several times because as soon as I got into the HMI site, it crashed, putting up a message 'We are having problems. Try again later.' This happened at least three times.

When I finally managed to log on, all those big red letters and error messages about owing money on PAYE had vanished. The gremlins had been in again, tidying up.

Still, I thought I ought to mention it in 'any other comments' just to make sure the mistake was understood. I wrote in a few words, but wasn't allowed to submit them. Red error messages again. And then the whole site crashed.

Another conversation with the woman with the strangely shifting accent. Another crash. And so the long winter evenings wore on. How glad I am to have HMI and their number-fixated friend to pass the time with. I've nothing better to do after all.

With perseverence, I got back on the site - and somehow, everything was okay, my message was suddenly acceptable and I'm allowed to submit. My tax return is, finally, done.

If this terrible site, with its glitches and crashes, had delayed me until January 31st, I'm sure HMI would have gleefully fined me. Or is that the reason why the site is so bad? To give an excuse to fine people?

Filing on-line is easy? It provides inner peace? Whoever came up with those slogans, they owe me a new rug and I would like to eat their young. Baphomet has some great recipes.

Where Did That Phobia Go?

2016-09-24T00:00:00.000+01:00

So there I was, mug of coffee in hand, feet up on the coffee table, watching a documentary about life behind the scenes at the zoo. There was stuff about the tiger-keepers and the elephant-keepers and the gorilla-keepers, all very interesting, and then the scene switched to the spider-wrangler. He was trying to persuade two large tarantulas to mate without the female eating the male, always a ticklish situation.

Flanders and Swann, Wikimedia Commons

          I watched attentively as he let the spiders walk from one of his hands to the other, as they sized each other up. Then the thought crossed my mind: Aren't I supposed to have a phobia about spiders?
          I always did have, for as far back as I can remember. My mother hated them. My aunt loathed them even more. I have myself shuddered with loathing at the mere sight of them and, previously, had to look away if one came on a screen near me. I made diversions through pet-stores, to avoid the glass tanks of spiders. I quickly turned pages to avoid pictures of them. I dreaded, like Flanders and Swann, meeting one in the bath. (Warning for those following the link: the video with this song has pictures of several big spiders.)
So it was quite a surprise to find myself watching these big hairy spiders cavorting about while feeling absolutely nothing except mild interest.
My 'phobia' was pretty mild as phobias go. I've heard of people being trapped in their flat because of a spider on the wall above the door. They dared not pass under the beast and had to phone for help. I've never been that bad. I would not be dictated to by an invertebrate, not even by a spider the size of a dinner plate. I would get mad and have at it with the yard brush.
         Though an acquaintance who lived in Australia for a time once flipped down her sun-visor and deposited a huge spider, which had been hiding behind it, into her lap. She screamed and drove off the road, overturning her car. As she hung upside down in the seat-belts, thankfully unhurt, all she could think was: Where is it? If that happened to me, even now, I think the result would be exactly the same. Looking at an expected spider is one thing. Having a huge one unexpectedly dropped in your lap is quite another.
        Previously, I could have walked under a door with a spider above it, but not without a cold grue. And I had always thought, once you had those feelings about something, you were stuck with them for life unless you took active measures to overcome them. I had done nothing.
         There wasn't even any sense of this loathing for spiders fading away. One day I couldn't look at an image of one without hiding my eyes. The next, it seemed, I was happily watching them disport all their eight legs about the place.
          Perhaps this lessening of fear had something to do with all the little black spiders in my garden.


Spot the sparrow	pa

I've been doing a lot of gardening work over the past year, and every square inch seems to have its own little black, square spider, which scuttles off for its life when my shadow falls on it. I say 'square' because they are quite compact little things which could easily be drawn inside a square. I've seen so many of them, so often, that I've grown quite fond of them. Perhaps they've been therapeutic.
          But I also find myself leaning close to examine the markings on much bigger, leggier specimens that, not long ago, would have horrified me. I now find their shape quite elegant and beautiful when previously I found it nothing but repulsive.
          I'm not saying that I'm keen to have a tarantula sitting in my hand or crawling up my arm, like the zoo's spider-wrangler, who was just showing off. I think that's taking things a bit far. But still... How or why do life-long feelings of loathing and repulsion simply pack up and leave one day, without their owner even noticing?

          I am curious about other's experience. Has anyone else suddenly found a fear - whether it's of heights, birds, open spaces or vegetables - suddenly almost vanish like this?
          And if so, what do you think lessened it?

September Garden

2016-09-10T00:00:00.000+01:00

All these photos were taken in my garden. I went up the path, a couple of days ago, to throw scraps on the compost, and this surprise was waiting for me.

Close up, I think they look like little toothed monsters.

A pot of cherry-pie by my kitchen door has been attracting bees as big as my thumb - but none stayed around to have their picture taken.

The scent is as warm and sweet as cherry-pie.

The bees on the climbing hydrangea were more obliging.

I never liked the blue and pink bush hydrangeas my mother grew, but this one is a beauty. And it smells of honey.

I love the way these leaves hold the raindrops, but the plant is a thug. It's due for a severe weeding.

No takers this year, though it has been investigated. Perhaps next, when the ivy's grown a little more.

The pond continues to be a joy. Waterboatmen scull across it, hoverflies touch down on the lily-pads, spiders trot over the surface. (They have hydrophobic feet, I have learned, much to my surprise.) A large family of sparrows visits daily, to take communual baths and to drink.

But this, my favourite flower in the whole garden, won't take a good picture.

It's a hawksbill geranium and I love its simple, clear shape. Even more, I love its colour which is a deep, rich, slightly purple blue. But in every photo I've taken, with three different cameras, it looks almost white. To get it to look blue, above, I've had to fiddle with colour balance and contrast, and it doesn't do this beautiful flower justice at all. I can only assure you that, in the petal, it's a very pure and beautiful blue, deeper than sky-blue but nowhere near plum. It delights me every time I see it and I'm sorry that I can't share it here.