My Life in Houses

 

My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster

This a book club choice. If you thoroughly enjoy one detailed description of rooms and houses after another, it is definitely something for you. But for someone who isn't at all enthralled by a continual succession of such accounts, the question in my mind from the start was what on earth can there be to sustain interest?

I could find very little. A touch of humour would have helped. Nay, an outsize overdose of it. But this is straight-faced, straight-laced writing. Some greater insight into climbing up the socio-economic ladder from a rented home on a working-class council estate in Carlisle to owning a large house in London, a weekend cottage in the Lake District and a holiday home in Portugal all at the same time, might have helped. Alas, there was little of that either. Even the autobiographical background is minimal and also very sketchy. For example, Forster suddenly reveals that she got married from one of her homes and out of nowhere we learn she has a husband, not a word about him having previously been mentioned. And like her parents and children, he remains a shadowy figure. There tends to be more detail about wallpaper than her family. And as I was not waiting with baited breath to discover whether there would be a sitting tenant in the next abode or noisy neighbours, I can only label the book – for me – a colossal bore. Moreover, it adds insult to injury in exceeding its proclaimed mandate by describing houses other people lived in (Elizabeth Barret Browning and Daphne du Maurier) in addition to Forster's own.

I fear this made me maliciously hope she would discover all her dwellings were suffering from untreatable dry rot, woodworm, leaking roofs, ditto drains, flooding and severe subsidence, while a horde of the most obnoxious sitting tenants, who had been temporarily absent and whom she didn't previously know about, suddenly turn up to claim their right of abode. Plus that the neighbours on either side and at the back are the loudest and most abusive people on the planet. It might have injected some spark of life into the book. At best, I thought it could have made a series of articles in a House & Home-type magazine.

The others in the group may well have had very different views. In my exile, I still don't know, although the meeting at which it was to be discussed has been held. Most of the online reviewers would certainly disagree with me – but then a large percentage of them proclaim themselves to be Forster admirers on the basis of her other books. When I looked, both the UK and US Amazon sites had 150-odd 'global' reviews, i.e. they were substantially the same, and both had an average rating of 4.6 (!). GoodReads had 76 reviews and 605 ratings, with an average score of 3.9.

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Swedish cooking - 1

The first Swedish cookery book was published in 1650, but a couple of hundred years went by before such books were in anything like common use. A very popular volume containing some three thousand recipes and much else, was published in 1878-79 by a Stockholm doctor called Charles Emil Hagdahl. Naturally, he had an interest in food’s healing qualities. Thus he stated that lettuce was found to have such a cooling effect on burning amorous feelings in medieval times that nuns at a particular convent were advised to eat lots of it. However, he realised people had been consuming it for hundreds of years without curing the complaint and was uncertain whether love had grown stronger or lettuce weaker.

From: What You Should Know About Sweden

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Frankie and Stankie

 

Some thoughts on Trapido's book: I came to it expecting to read an illuminating tale of life in apartheid South Africa and was greatly disappointed as this aspect, although undoubtedly there to some degree, is completely overwhelmed by so much else. I could certainly have done without most of the little girlie with her favourite doll or dolls stuff and the endless, schoolgirl ramblings around best friends, teachers, their pets and clothes etc. etc. The more it went on, and on, the more it made each Kindle page cry out “Time to abandon ship and spend time on something more rewarding.”

The book is as clearly autobiographical as anything I have read that claims to be something else. But it is also in some part a family history, with largely irrelevant details about all the German relatives, who then disappear off stage, plus a potted history of the country after the arrival of Europeans, but especially in the apartheid era. Add the parts together and what do you get? Definitely not a coherent whole. Whatever it is, it's nothing I would call a novel.

If there is no plot – and there is no plot – the writing must sparkle enough to maintain interest. The author has indeed been praised at times for her fine prose. Hmmm. Well, I found little to admire about her way with words in general, whereas for me at any rate, there were some severe lapses that made my tummy complain. When I read about men who had to bend their heads in order to “affect an entry”, that “nobody else can take its sequence on board”, that “her mum will have an absolute fit” (what are absolute and non-absolute fits and is there something between?), and when “cranial undulations” came along to crown it all, there was not only a severe disturbance to my literary digestion, but my poor innocent Kindle was placed in grave danger of being tossed into the Californian wildfires. After that, though, I could almost have forgiven the second sentence in Chapter eight for being sixty-two words long. Almost.

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Surprise, surprise

 

A family visit to loved ones who live six thousand miles away, isn't for an afternoon, a day or a weekend. So when I arrived early in March it was for a three-week stay. More than six months later I'm still with them. Unable to forecast the future, I hadn't reckoned on a pandemic leaving me marooned. And even months into my prolonged presence here, I didn't dream that I, and they, would become evacuees, with ash falling from the sky and wildfires breathing their foul breath upon us. But then they say life is full of surprises. Unfortunately, not all of them are pleasant.

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Stranded

I came to visit my nearest and dearest early in March. Nearly three months and repeated flight cancellations later, here I am still. At the same time, my 90-day maximum ESTA allowance for staying in the country without a visa, is almost over. So what happens now? Who knows? The authority in charge of these matters says it will be in touch within 24-48 hours.

 

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Dismal Reading

A 432-page dystopia would not be my preferred reading at any time let alone in these dire days. But that is what members of the book club chose at their last (online) meeting, for discussion next time. Owing to the 9-hour difference between Stockholm and the location where I am stranded, I had no say in the matter. But the next meeting is due to take place two hours later, to accommodate me.

Thus I have been struggling to get through at least a substantial part of the work, reading reluctantly in fits and starts and escaping for relief after each chapter to anything from Sherlock Homes (I hadn't read all the tales) and The Three Musketeers (I hadn't read that either) to books on photography, publishing and making soup, (all downloaded free of charge from you-know-where.) Almost to my own surprise, the one that has intrigued me most, as it would seem to contradict my distaste for the dismal, is Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year 1665.

Those were very different times when it comes to medical knowledge and resources. And there was no means of rapidly transporting people from one country and continent to another, taking the disease with them. Yet there are some remarkable similarities with the present situation. Despite all the advances of the past three-to-four centuries, knowledge of the current affliction and how to cure or prevent it is woefully weak. Then as now, there were the unscrupulous, quick to take advantage of our ignorance and fears, nowadays with a surge in cyber fraud, at that time by going around offering to sell wonder potions that were either useless or dangerous.

Then, although transport may have been very different in 1665, the first two cases Defoe mentions were Frenchmen in London. Moreover, many of the wealthier citizens left the city for the countryside, thus spreading the disease to rural areas that might have remained free of it. And while surrounding boroughs recorded alarming increases in the number of fatalities, the City of London suffered much less owing to draconian measures announced by the Lord Mayor, something of an equivalent to the lock-down of our day but very much harsher, with imprisonment for anyone who did not comply.

To some extent the measures were counter-productive as nobody was allowed to enter or leave a house where someone had contracted the disease. Such a house was watched night and day. It meant that others in the household who might have escaped the illness were condemned to stay where they were most likely to get it and according to Defoe, many died as a result.

Not pleasant reading, yet I turn to it in preference to Atwood's fictional Gilead, which I have now finally decided to abandon.

 

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Can there be beneficial Corona effects?

Could some benefits nevertheless result from the deadly virus? For instance, could many employers and employees realise there can be certain advantages in working from home when and where possible? At least part of the time. Can it be that many people are more efficient when spared the hassle of getting to and from work and the distractions of the office?

This would mean fewer vehicles on the roads. There is certainly far less traffic right now. This must mean fewer accidents, fewer people killed or injured, less pressure from this source on the hard-pressed health services, cleaner air for this reason and because so few planes are flying – with further health benefits, greatly reduced dependence on imported fossil fuel, benefiting both the economy and the climate. Could the deadly virus be saving some lives as well as taking so many?

Then what effect can being confined to the home be having? Could it lead to a lasting growth in distance learning, food deliveries, the birth rate, perhaps even the divorce rate? Some industries could continue to benefit greatly, while others decline. The possible ramifications are many and varied and worth thinking about in these gloomy days.

Thoughts from someone stranded far from home

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