Review

Though I had never seen film or TV versions of  "The Handmaid's Tale", I was aware of them. After all, Margaret Atwood's novel crept into our cultural consciousness some time ago.  Out of curiosity, I was keen to read it. Co-incidentally, I saw it amongst my daughter's university books when she was thinning them out. Frances's honours degree is in American and Canadian Studies.

"The Handmaid's Tale" is commonly referred to as a "dystopian novel". That word - "dystopian" is regularly connected with "1984"  and "Brave New World".  It means "relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice".

The narrator is a handmaid called Offred. We never learn her real name. In effect she is the property of a "commander" called Fred and her purpose is to become pregnant by him. Society has become patriarchal - almost medieval in character. There are daily executions and fear hangs in the air like mist.

I found the novel eminently readable and I loved the clever way that past and present were interwoven. Offred is a survivor and we feel her anxieties and her loneliness. There seems to be no way out of her situation. She is trapped, relying upon small mercies to get by.

When the story's action is effectively over, an afterword section appears in which readers are jettisoned even further into the future. A conference is taking place in which academics are looking back on  the dark interlude in North American history contained in the first forty six chapters. Audio cassette tapes were apparently found in a US Army  footlocker - containing the handmaid's tale.

I found this device unnecessary and difficult to accept. After all, the grammar of Offred's tale had never had an obviously oral quality. It did not seem anything like a transcript. 

Yes. I could have done without that end section. Nonetheless, I enjoyed Margaret Atwood's novel. Each time I returned to the book, I looked forward to getting through three or four more chapters. The vision of the future was both convincing and chilling, containing many echoes of more current times.

I  conclude this short review with a fragment of the novel:-

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”

Margaret Atwood

Conkers

Autumn is the time for conkers. They hold a special place in my heart. Yesterday, I mailed a conker to our son Ian in London. It was still in its husk and it came from his own horse chestnut tree - grown from a conker he picked up when he was three years old. That tree is now almost forty feet tall and I am thinking of having it professionally felled.

Having churned out blogposts for over fifteen years, I have of course blogged about conkers before and I don't really wish to repeat myself. To read those old conker posts please go here (2013) and here (also 2013).

The pictures that accompany this post were taken yesterday in the late afternoon after I had picked up a seed husk that was almost as big as a tennis ball.  By the way, it is unusual to find three conkers in a shell. It's normally just one or two.

Books

You probably heard the 45th President of The United States say this over the weekend:

"It’s been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn't the 'let's read the books' school. And I get it, and I understand it, and it's a very interesting thing, and I’m going to be letting you know about it."

What I want to comment on with this is the aroma of anti-intellectualism and the apparent dismissal of bookish knowledge. Isn't that him all over? He doesn't read books and even the business-related books he has allegedly "written" have been composed by ghost writers. All fakery.

Dismissing the "let's read the books school" will chime happily with a large number of his supporters - perhaps the majority - who probably also found the reading of books pretty tiresome and overrated as they were suffering formal education.

Thank heavens for him that the medical staff dealing with him at The Walter Reed Medical Centre in Washington D.C. most certainly read books during their training. Without their bookish knowledge they would not have the foundation of knowledge that is essential to become effective medical practitioners. They belong to the "let's read books school" and that is why they have been able to help the 45th president to cope with his personal COVID19 health crisis... So far.

Not only does the president sneer at books, he also fails to follow clear guidance about self-isolation as was shown when he cruised around the Walter Reed hospital in his armoured vehicle - known I believe as "The Beast" - waving to his mainly unmasked supporters. Evidently, he belongs to the "let's break the rules school".

Finally , in contrast with the 45th president's dismissive attitude to the "let's read books school", this is what Barack Obama had to say about the value of books back in 2005: ""Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible, from complex word problems and the meaning of our history to scientific discovery and technological proficiency." 

I agree with that.

Distancing

Throughout this pandemic, I have almost always gone grocery shopping in the hour before supermarket closing time. At 9pm, very few people choose to shop so the aisles have been really quiet and I have felt very comfortable about social distancing.

However, this morning I needed to buy a chicken for tonight's Sunday dinner. I was outside "Lidl" on Chesterfield Road before opening time at 10am. To my surprise, a queue was already forming and I was fourth in it. When the doors finally slid open, there must have been thirty other shoppers behind me and more cars entering the car park.

I grabbed my chicken and a few other bits and pieces. By 10.20am I was at the checkout. standing on a two metre social distancing floor sticker. Ahead of me was a woman of my age or slightly older.. She was in fact beyond the next sticker so more than two metres ahead. She turned to me and spoke through her face mask.

"You are supposed to be two metres back!"

"I am two metres back!"

"No you're not. You are endangering my safety."

"What do you think these floor stickers are about?"

"Just get back will you!"

"I am two metres away from you. Do you know what a metre is?"

"Of course I know what a metre is! Don't patronise me!"

"Well don't tell me to get back when I am already two metres away from you!"

"You're upsetting me now!"

And then the pink-haired checkout boy butts in with, "Isn't it a bit early to be arguing like this?"

As he deals with the complaining woman's shopping, I notice that he is comforting her as if she has somehow been wronged and I take this up with him when my shopping has gone through. Meantime the woman, who has been filling her shopping bags on the side bench, passes me on her way out. She is maybe two feet from me.

Why do I allow such things to get under my skin?  Why do I relive them? Why do I get upset? It's always been this way. Hypersensitivity. One of my demons.

Needless to say, I shall stick to late evening shopping in future. Crowded supermarkets cause tensions that I can well do without.

Gallimaufry

There's Beau and Peep on our lawn on Tuesday morning. The sun was rising, casting shadows of houses upon the grass but briefly our faithful sheep were squarely framed in solar limelight. I just had to grab my camera. Five minutes later, the spectacle was over.

Here's another picture - received within the last half hour - of our unborn grandchild, resting in our daughter's womb, unaware of corona or even night and day. He or she has never seen another human face and does not know a single nursery rhyme. I will sing for him or her - "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "The Grand Old Duke of York" over and over. I hope to live long enough to pick brambles with this precious child. Due on January 6th or thereabouts.

The poem I wrote for National Poetry Day includes one of my favourite words: "lament". It seems a very apposite word to use in this year of heartbreak, death and confusion. It is as if we have lost something along the way. Many of the hopes and dreams that will have been present on New Year's Eve have somehow melted away.

The lament that was in my mind as I wrote "In The Time of Corona" was a Scottish tune: "Niel Gow's Lament to His Second Wife". In the late eighteenth century, Niel Gow was Scotland's finest fiddler. His second wife was Margaret Urquhart. She died in 1805 when Niel Gow was seventy eight years old. Surely, not only is the tune a lament for Margaret but also for a life well lived - a life of music in changing times. Please listen:-

Poem

In The Time Of Corona
 
One more twist of the tuning peg
And I swear the D string
Would have snapped.
 
Downwind of her
Up on the moors
Absorbing honeyed sunlight
I watched a mountain hare
Supremely unaware
That everywhere
A cruel hunter stalked
Black beast, panther or cat
Stitched in legends that
Sang of us -
Arbitrary as lightning.
 
In city streets
Litter blew like
Tumbleweed
We’d
Peer from empty windows
Observing nothing,
Noting the numbers
Leaping like
Stock market figures -
The arithmetic of death
That sang of us.
 
A lament
Drifting over the moors
Poignant as a baby’s cry
Or a eulogy to say goodbye
Played upon a violin
Of sorrow fenced within
The orbit of our world.
 
Reaching the end
It is the D string
That resonates -
A single note
Hanging in the air
To scurry away
A mountain hare.

Poetry

Over here in Merrie Olde England, it is National Poetry Day. Why we need a single National Poetry Day has always been unclear to me because from my perspective there should be three hundred and sixty five national poetry days each year. Be glad for the poetry has no ending.

I guess it's about raising the profile of poetry - putting it in the spotlight here at the beginning of October which I have always found to be one of the more fertile months for poetic expression. Leaves fall in October - at least here in the northern hemisphere they do. Days shorten. Birds fly away. Sometimes the light outside is pure gold. These things are  inspirational for poets and would-be poets alike.

I will write a poem today. I have already chosen its title: "In The Time of Corona". That is a deliberate echo of "Love in The Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which I read last year..

The task may change but at the moment I want to make a poem that is set at some future time, as if looking back upon this pandemic to enlighten our descendants. We  ourselves are largely ignorant about living through scarlet fever and typhoid epidemics and what do we really know of cholera? But this strange COVID thing, we have co-existed with it for months now and there are more months to come. It is part of our experience of life.

It is invisible but it is amongst us. We have felt the apprehension, the confusion, the melancholy that it has brought with it. Sweeping around the globe. Stalking the landscape like a mythical beast.. 

Yes. I shall write a poem for National Poetry Day but I haven't written it yet. The teabag is simply swirling in the water. Soon I will be out walking again just because it is a lovely morning. Hopefully, the steps I plod will aid creation. Watch this            space.