Secrets of the Sea

“We live in one envelope with a multitude of voices…”

In a marvellous blog post on a marvellous book, Mat Tobin explores the role of the sea as it affects the psychological landscape of the book Town is By the Sea. It raises a challenge for me about how I understand and select what I mean by “landscape.” Of course the very syllables of landscape tell us about the shaping of the “dry land” and mirrors the foundation text of the opening of Genesis “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas” (1:10). Who shapes the sea? Genesis and Job give the Judeao-Christian response. Job, full of glimpses of nature and acute turns of phrase, is of course worth a look, but is clear who shapes the sea:

He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not rent under them.
He holdeth back the face of his throne, and spreadeth his cloud upon it.
He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end.
The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at his reproof.
He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he smiteth through the proud… (Job 26)

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?
When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it,
And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors,
And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed? (Job 38)

We are left in no doubt about the beauty and terror of the sea, and the descendants of these passages are Melville’s Ishmael in Moby Dick and R S Thomas in the religious meditation Sea Watching

You must wear your eyes out
as others their knees…

In contrast, Richard Greene sets his own journey from his native Newfoundland resolutely as a people study. In “Islands in Memory,” in Crossing the Straits, he does talk (as I think Schwartz and Smith do, at one level) of

Grey stones and poverty
engendering a discontent
that is hospitable, quaint
in the tourist’s eye…
ledgers of seasonal obligation,
tricks of credit,
lies over what a fish was worth,
but more so
the sea that stood outside
all resentment…

but in the eponymous poem, Greene centres on the people, the solid, repeating practices of crossing by ferry from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia

and Newfoundlanders crossing
the Straits see water enough in warmer times
to forego the prospect now, but this moment
of pent chances, between home and home,
is not mine alone, and for most who travel
there is some tear in memory between
the longed for and the given, what they left
and what they are. Nova Scotia looms…

The sea is a highway to a new place, just as in Town is By the Sea it offers beauty and rest, a wider horizon of light – but it is an ambiguous offering, since the town also offers (?or maybe demands) stability…

Mat also mentions the

desire for change and new opportunities. Small, tight communities have a way of holding on to you and not letting go. Their comforting sense of familiarity, of friends and their families, homes and play spaces or shops, sea fronts and country lanes beguile you in believing you cannot live without them.

A multitude of voices – a multitude of views, The visuals of the sea are fascinating in Town is By the Sea (Simon Smith has a subtly animated version here in his own review), where the sea is often “all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen” as Montgomery says in Anne of Green Gables. The play of light in Town is By the Sea immediately makes me think of this model, as it were, of light and beauty, although Martin Galway does wisely point out that there is a lot to be said about line and colour in this book – as Thomas puts it “Light’s peculiar grace/In cold splendour” (Song at the Year’s Turning). In Town is By the Sea the wide sweep of light is in opposition to the claustrophobic mine under the sea…

But there is still more to think about when we look at sea and seaside. Here, in what is proudly announced as Allan Ahlberg’s 137th book, a mum takes the children and the dog shopping, and – a bit like Bear Hunt – they encounter a seaside with buildings – Fife or Dorset, Cellardyke or Lyme… It is not all that different from the Nova Scotia mining town in Town is By the Sea in that we seem to need to define sea by where it isn’t… With the poet of Job, we are depicting sea as boundaried and measured by human experience.

The structure and conventions William Grill employs in Shackleton’s Journey mean he is able to be bolder, so that the ship is almost there just for scale in one picture

From William Grill’s “Shackleton’s Journey”

and not there at all in the other.

This is a different sea again: almost as inhospitable as it can be.

Iain Sinclair, who begins this post, deserves a fuller quotation here, from his Edge of the Orison:

He (John Clare) had to learn the difficult thing, in different places we are different people. We live in one envelope with a multitude of voices, lulling us by regular habits, of rising, labouring, eating, taking pleasure and exercise: other selves, in suspension, slumber but remain wakeful.

Picturebook artists are as aware of this as Sinclair, I think, and share the insights too of Philip Hoare whose work on sea and culture in The Sea Inside could be seen as running alongside Peter Fiennes’ Oak and Ash and Thorn, dealing with marine rather than arboreal culture(s) we encounter and shape. Hoare gets is right when he says that the coastal terrain

may be managed by man [sic], but it has been edited by the wind.

Edited by wind and wave and light and bird and… all of these editorial hands, or debating voices, whichever metaphor we choose. The woods in Fiennes’ book likewise are cleared, colonised, full of missed histories and unknowable opportunities; his scale is time, where Hoare’s is spatial. Hoare is right when he challenges his reader

Take out your atlas and look at it.

You can’t. Just as no two-dimensional map of the world represents the true proportions of its continental masses, so no chart represents the reality of its greatest ocean.

Maybe this is a place for fiction. Town is by the Sea gives us a beautiful but threatening presence, and the threat – and something of the scale – is in William Grill. There is an attempt to domesticate in much of the seaside of children’s literature, but all of these give different faces to a goddess with many personas. Maybe we are better off in the richness of poetry and fiction and picture, back in the pagan mysteries of Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch instead? Or maybe we admire and classify but cannot fully comprehend this vast presence in the world we crawl about on?

The facts defy that paltry layer of land which we call home.

This is just a blog post, and can’t approach the work of Hoare and Fiennes, but the danger is that the openness of the sea (like the Great Wood where the unwary can get lost) is that the “multitude of voices” means “There is no such place as home” as Hoare reminds us in his bleak final pages.

Vocation I: thoughts in a bleak time.

A first thought on what makes me do what I do – or rather to voice something much deeper than curmudgeonly impatience at the world of work we face as the new year starts.

It comes in response to a sense that the world around me has changed so much, so quickly and in such ways, that I seem to have fallen out of it, to misuse Tolkien’s phrase about the fall of Gandalf. Higher Education is subject to market scrutiny and handed over to hugely paid leaders and people frankly unsuitable not because of past misdemeanours but because of attitudes that seem at their heart a monstrous parody of past views of class and merit. Early Years is again subject to the kind of battlegrounds I thought we had left bloodied but unbowed. Literacy will get some bits of funding to make hubs but schools continue to be short of money to do the everyday job which really would improve social mobility. It is acceptable for the pedagogologues who enjoy the attention to characterise children as “in need of a good slap” (this post so disgusted me I can only link to it obliquely: why give such stuff the satisfaction of hits?) and a young person who seeks inclusion as a “functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six.” This is painfully and angrily expounded in the heartfelt blog “Troglodytes in the chocolate factory: the disabled child as rhetoric” linked here. So to go back to that sense in fantasy – in Le Guin’s Earthsea, in Garner’s Elidor, in the elves in Tolkien’s Middle Earth – the glory has departed, my time seems to be past.

And if this gloom and doom were all there was, any sense of vocation would seem lost. What is the point – other than the salary – of going in tomorrow? I sound like Fungus the Bogeyman, rather than Elrond.

And what can I say to my students? Dispassionately I can observe we have been here before. Personally I can go back – as I did in a previous blog post – to the teachers and leaders who inspired me or spurred me on. I look at them with gratitude.

What about the longer view, however? I find my answers – and I don’t presume to say they are anybody else’s – in literature, especially in the heady punch of Alan Garner and the clear waters of children’s literature. As Cooper works to “unriddle” the world,” Garner too talks about the truth of story. His despair at the collapse of the culture of the Man in Boneland captures it in mythic form:

I have a Story.

Tell me your Story, said the other.

The world was full, and the people hunted, and the sun was young. Then two people of the Crow held each other, and the Stone Spirit wept and the sun moved its face. Then came cold, and the herds went. The Hunter and the people followed them and the world was empty; but the Bull stayed. And every night of winter he comes above the hills, watching to see that there is life; and the Stone Spirit looks to send out eagles from its head to feed the stars.

And because the Crow flesh brought the cold they stayed to dance and cut and sing in Ludcruck to make new the Bull and the beasts on the wall of the sky cave above the waters for the time when all will be again, with the Hunter striding. But if we do not dance and cut and sing and make the beasts new on the sky wall the Stone Spirit will not send eagles.

And who is it that you hold? said the other.

No one. She and the child went to the ice. No one is left to hold. No child to teach. I am alone. After me, no one will give my flesh to the sky, take my bones to the nooks of the dead. The sun will not come back. The Stone Spirit will not send eagles. The world will end.

That is a true Story, said the other.

Garner (and Cooper, and Pullman) are explicit about how storytelling takes you back to the universal, a window into truth.” This particular storytelling shows a man, The Man, despairing as his world closes around him: some hope is also coming, however, as we read on, but it is longer term than we could possibly imagine.
If fantasy provides a heady mix of images and hopes and fears, I would also choose the clear stream of children’s literature because – well, at one level the lampoon of adult nostalgia that is Moomipappa is enough to prick any bubble of self importance and regret.

Biblioparakolouthesis

This is a quick post, prompted by the observation of people’s behaviour on Twitter – no, not the self-righteous “I’m right because I know everything” stuff about phonics or why Early Years has it wrong or why Secondary Schools are something out of Dickens: all of this is getting tired and lacklustre, ossified opinions led by mansplainers. And since I am given to mansplaining myself, I am avoiding it here in particular. Or trying to.

No, the practice I’m picking up on is following other people’s reading – bookstalking, if we want something more anglosaxon than the title of this post. At the moment I am watching Mat read through The Dark is Rising and report inspirational phrase by inspirational phrase on Twitter; I have similarly seen other people’s reading on Goodreads. Some of them are “my” Brookes Education students and honestly it fills my heart with joy.

I love this ambiguous relationship between text, reader and the community of readers. In many periods, reading has been a communal activity, either through reading out loud or through the distribution of books in a community; it must have helped create a sense of common enthusiasm, or at least a ground for debate and opinion. It is wonderful to watch this happening in a Primary class; it was inspiring at the Oxford Reading Spree – and continues to be so, since the event was such a springboard for people to talk to one another; it is great to see people challenging, suggesting and discussing, too, at the Spree and the afterwards – but perhaps what I’m enjoying is simply watching the steps through the forest, seeing phrases I had missed in previous reading or thinking “that looks worth reading.” Not so much “Booktalk” and “Book-stalk.”

Reading, I often forget, is essentially community-based communicative activity, and the community around children’s literature is generous, committed, patient. We are not so far from the communal reading of the middle ages after all.

Partnership, Obedience and Trust

I think the Oxford Reading Spree went well. There were notable stars, of course, and followed some way behind by a man looking like a grizzled version of Basil Brush, rabble-rousing rather than really presenting a case on parents and partnerships and how that might sometimes involve a loss of power for the professional. Me voila, along with many – but alas, not all – the speakers. It has been immensely gratifying to read praise from serving teachers such as Kiran, here. Yes, it really does mean a lot.

What I want to return to is the notion of parents as school agents. I know I was pressing my case too hard in my talk on Saturday – but equally I now see there were people in the audience who do, in fact, keep children in at playtime if the child’s reading record has not been filled in. All I think I could do is point out the ambiguities in both doing this and not doing it – something I had been planning to do until I read Sue Cowley’s reflections on school absence. She has moved the argument on from my moans about whether this action or that in the teaching of reading is in the best interests of the child, in the light of the news that Jon Platt, who in effect queried the use of the word “regular” in “regular attendance,” and whether a school has a right to determine what “regular” means.

I find myself caught. Head teachers sometimes seem like dreadful killjoys – “You know it’s a trend, the Head’s thinking of banning it” – and maybe sometimes they are, seeking an even sailing rather than any choppiness, conformity and compliance rather than real partnership. However, does the perceived need for a big holiday somehow overrule the professional judgement as to what why a child might be in school – still less the organisational complexity of a curriculum in which children may or may not be there for this or that piece of learning? The tensions are – or seem – very either/or in the matter of term-time holidays. As Sue acerbically sums it up, ” your personal circumstances have ceased to matter.” Holidays, healthy packed lunches, uniform, whether you have the time to fill in a reading record, whether your shared reading with a child is about Charlie and Lola, or Smash Hits, or Biff and Chip, whether… Oh, enough. It comes down to the idea that somehow the parents (“the most important job in the world, and it’s left to amateurs”) can have a right to disagree with a professional. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the school makes a mess of the message the team is trying to convey. Been there, on both “sides,” and am always struck, as I look back at the highs and lows of parent-teacher relationships by the dilemma: Does a school demand obedience, or does it inspire (or work to inspire) trust?

In this case, tonight, I think Sue is right: this parent and teacher playground bundle is the wrong battle. Fighting about school term holidays or absenteeism during SATs seems a bit of a distract-and-redirect, if the stories are to be believed (I’m not doubting them) about teacher recruitment, low morale, chronic funding. There are worse ogres to fight than a (perhaps) over zealous head or (perhaps) a belligerent parent. These everyday squabbles need to be seen for what they are, or at least could be: the school-by-school, sometimes family-by-family storming and forming of relationships. We have other dragons hatching, and we will need all the strength we can muster, all the friends we can get.

Come and Join the Dance

This weekend I will be doing something – I am so nervous I can’t really talk it up, although the event itself will be marvellous – at the Oxford Reading Spree about reading in the EYFS. I could

fulminate about phonics
chide people on child-initiated learning
do other things on how to share books in group time that could have an alliterative title, but I can’t be bothered.

but in fact what I’m going to talk about is parental partnership and particularly about books.

Gillian Morrow and Nigel Malin, in the heady days of reasonably funded Early Years, proposed a model of parents and professionals working together. They suggested that partnership “which is often depicted in terms of a hierarchy of levels, for example from non-participation to partnership and control” can sometimes be seen by professionals “as a matter of ‘giving’” – and I wonder whether this means a giving but with the right to take back. Power really remains with the setting, and the role of the educator is to make up for parental deficiencies. In Morrow and Malin’s more dynamic model, we see this undergoing changes. Most teachers will, I think, recognise that changes in relationship between parent and professional are not necessarily easy, but their research is primarily into parents’ decision-making through committees, and one of the workers’ responses to the increased empowerment is telling:

…one of the good things has been becoming a lot less precious about your professional status. People on the Parents’ Committee respect you not because of your job role but because of their relationship with you

I return to this as I think about reading.

How well do we act as advocates for reading? How easy is it to fall back on institutional lines of power?

I have recently heard (but now cannot trace) the story of the school that threatened a child with detention if the parents didn’t read with the child three times in a week; I remember a parent’s anger at reading in the child’s reading record a telling-off for not keeping the reading record up-to-date… These are indicative of a power relationship in which a home-school agreement is for the parents to agree to comply. They/we comply with what the school deems fitting. This is, I think assumed in the legislation, which states that a home-school agreement must contain “the responsibilities which the parents of such pupils are expected to discharge in connection with the education of their children” – assumed, I think, that it is the school that sets those expectations. This seems to me a far cry from the EYFS statement that

[c]hildren learn and develop well in enabling environments, in which their experiences respond to their individual needs and there is a strong partnership between practitioners and parents and/or carers…

So what is this strong partnership – and especially when we are talking about fostering literacy in EYFS – what does the professional have to do? Assume or require compliance? Or become the dancer, inviting parent and child to join? And if the latter, how much does the professional need to understand that long story from the first, cuddly book-sharing to the child making their own choices in a library?

This is what I will be exploring, all in 20 mins, on Saturday. No pressure, then.

Gillian Morrow & Nigel Malin, (2004) Parents and professionals working together: turning the rhetoric into reality Early Years Volume 24, 2004 – Issue 2, Pages 163-177 http://dx.doi.org.oxfordbrookes.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/0957514032000733019)

Memory, Narrative and a Reader

First off, note the title, gentle reader: I am going to avoid the notion of “the Reader.” I simply don’t know what those words mean, although I can see they are a convention for “anyone who picks words off a page, screen, clay tablet, &c.” And I am not talking about the named and nameless writers and readers who have gone before me over 8000 and more years, from unnamed composers of lists and spells through Aeschylus (neatly explored here) to Baudelaire (“Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!”). This is a blog post – as I’m afraid they all are these days – about me, a personal snippet of a pale reflection of Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built. I have begun this sketchy narrative before.

A reader. Nine, ten, as I said before. His first read of Narnia is still in his mind, as is Batman. He is read Clive King at school (22 Letters) and on TV (Stig of the Dump), likewise Rosemary Sutcliff, and Moomins, Green Knowe, Elidor come into his reading life (enough of the third person: it’s getting tedious), sorry. The children’s librarian in Harlow suggests I try The Hobbit after one of the Sutcliff books – possibly The Shield Ring. She gets special permission, when I finish Lord of the Rings, for me to borrow the LPs of Wagner from the adult library. This much, at least, is in praise of a woman whose name I do not know, whose task was to take an interest in young people’s reading.

I suggested in an earlier post that the rupture of my reading brought me to read and re-read Tolkien because he represented something bookish, grown-up and at the same time a continuation of my “top Junior” reading. Hollindale’s keen eye spots, in Catherine Storr’s use of “childish” a word that makes her sound apologetic. Perhaps when I got to secondary school in Burnley I was apologetic for my earlier childhood, unable to frame myself as a reader as convincingly as I had in Harlow. My reading was wide, or at least quirky, and my clumsy medievalism, founded on a family view of English Catholicism, starts here, as does my reading of Buddhism through the seriously strange writings of Lobsang Rampa: my dad’s influence both times. My mum bought me adult C S Lewis and we read Daphne du Maurier or listened to dramatisations on the radio. I read her Dennis Wheatley stories of demonic rituals and posh people – and the appendices to Lord of the Rings. So I was still reading new stuff when we moved again, back to North London. So much for story, now to some thinking.

What has often struck me is the fact that I had big pockets of my childhood that appear fragmented or unrecognised. Burnley is vivid, with Gilbert and Sullivan, lots of Church, wild countryside and (at the time) troubling explorations of sex. Harlow had retreated into a time I couldn’t quite remember. It was as if I had lost the thread of the narrative, skipped a chapter so that it didn’t make sense. I loved the windy hills, I ogled the harp in a music shop in Blackburn, but as an adult couldn’t quite put these into place. This is where I am struggling at the moment: not the very idea of why I love children’s literature, but why the rediscovery of books from my own past reading are such a revelation. What memories return.

The Shield Ring gives me a clue to harps and wild hills: what astonished me is that I had forgotten my love for the heroes Bjorn the Harper and Frytha through whose eyes we see so much of Lake Land. So – although this really does need to go on and on – I’ll stop with Hollindale’s idea of what childness might do in an author’s purpose. “The past child as a living agent in the adult self” is acknowledged in some authors as part of why they write. Authors from Garner and Sutcliff are explicit about this; it can be guessed (only guessed, I think) in a wistfulness for a past time in Tolkien. I wonder however whether this is also present me for as I read again books I loved before we moved north: they awake for me a real and steady set of pictures of my “middle childhood,” brief years from eight to ten, and they do so because the literature, the text (not the interpretation) remain constant, there for me to discover, at an opportune moment, ideas, story lines, phrases, characters “that I had loved long since and lost awhile.”

What gives me pleasure in reading?

This post, as I begin it, is an instant “Save Draft,” since it will take a lot of unpicking. Even as I write I see the CLIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway list is out with Tidy, Wolves of Currumpaw and Wild Animals of the North in there. Popularity, pleasure, professional judgement come together. Complex stuff.

Do I read because something is popular?

Not always, but sometimes I have to, if only to keep up to date with other people’s ideas or trends in production. A Hello Kitty version of Red Riding Hood recently stands out as a low point. I persevered with Harry Potter because I thought I should, and was glad I did.

Do I read children’s books for pleasure?

For my own pleasure, as well as the pleasure of sharing? I get pleasure from the innocence – whether knowing or otherwise on the author’s part – which I can see even if I don’t really participate in it. Granted , as Hollindale so gnomically says “ours is the age of Lord of the Flies,” where even the bear-protagonist of Jon Klassen is vengeful and murderous, there is in much children’s literature a lightness that is engaging.

I like the simplicity, whether (again) knowing or unknowing. The foxy-looking gentleman leading Jemima Puddleduck astray; the bromance (an anachronistic term) of Esca and Marcus Flavius Aquila; the inversion of roles in the Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig: they are tricksy, or challenging, funny and poignant but simple in the storytelling in some way I haven’t yet teased out, somehow. I know I am in danger here of seeming as if I like the descent into liking the easy read, and I will only protest (using Julien Benda’s phrase (revisited by Hollindale) Le Trahison Des Clercs, the way that intellectuals do not stay true to their “calling”) that it is the subtlety and playfulness of the design and language that I find attractive, not the easiness. There’s so much more to say on this, but this will do for now.

I get pleasure from good design, from inventive use of colour, interesting cadences in prose, from irony and jokiness. I get pleasure – and did as a child – at the knowing wink towards the world of the adult in the Moomins (I like it less in Dahl). I suppose I get pleasure in the play of ideas: it’s a bit like reading poetry, where rhythm and cadence and imagery and word choice and the appreciation of all of them together makes for the biggest part of my pleasure in reading. Look at these lines from R S Thomas for example:

What is the Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim

our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity’s
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.

My pleasure comes from appreciation of the shared experiences, but also from the way the words are placed, with care and attention, the slipperiness of simile and metaphor, of sacrament and observation.

And I get pleasure from the debate I have with colleagues about something we delight in together. Children’s literature is one of the reasons I came to Brookes, with my original work title of “Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies, Communication, Language and Literacy. ” It is a joy to find that discussion still alive in the last years of my work.

Professional Judgment comes in somewhere?

Because of my job and my chosen area of research (now here’s a circular argument bowling down the hill of criticism!) , yes.

I can cite two voices in announcing the prize lists today :

There are journeys to be made, friendships to discover, characters to fall in love with and worlds to truly immerse oneself in.
Questions of identity, friendship and responsibility, both to others and to the natural world, are key themes this year. It is also hugely heartening to see our shortlisted writers and illustrators tackling potentially difficult and big ideas…

And I like those descriptions of the values that professionals see in books. I’d like my students to appreciate these views.

Who is the Reader?

I have been reminded today (yesterday as I end this) a couple of times of the ways in which I read and the things I read before I discovered Tolkien. I met Superman, the Fantastic Four in comics, I watched Top Cat… But it was also the time of Jackanory, event television for me often, and (whether these fit chronologically I haven’t checked), hearing Mai Zetterling present the Moomins, or John Grant tell Little Nose, or Kenneth Williams camp gloriously through The Land of Green Ginger suggested to me this book or that to read, to find sequels, follow authors and so on. Lucy Boston came my way because of Jackanory; Elidor remains with me as perhaps the scariest telly I saw as a child. This supplemented the end-of-day class story in the Downs Primary in Essex, the teacher reading to the whole class that still happened in Top Juniors, where I met Clive King’s meticulously researched and exciting Twenty-Two Letters, and Rosemary Sutcliff and, particularly memorably for me, her Shield Wall. I would like to ask Antonio and Elaine and the two Martins what they remember of them: was it just me? Reading was powerful for me: a motivator to do more, an enrichment of my world.

And so I’m nine, then ten. I don’t make it to the end of Top Juniors at the Downs because just as I turn eleven we move to Burnley. I’ve mentioned this rupture before; it comes here again because it marked such an end, and such a beginning, in so many things, not least my obsession with the Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings. Did I stick with the vaguely erudite known because so much, so quickly became unfamiliar? Burnley wasn’t Sutcliff’s Buttermere, and a trip to Manchester brought me no closer to Elidor, although I did look. Tolkien it was, then.

Those authors I loved sustained me, and did, I suppose, help me make sense of my world, before the move: I am sharply reminded of my summer of being ten by Raymie Nightingale, all scrapes and freedom on my bike and friendships made and lost. David Benjamin, whose depiction of growing up in the US is framed by his sport, talks of the segregation between adults and children that was part of that life. I recognised it at once in his Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked as well as in Raymie Nightingale.

But this is my challenge. The writer, writing about the child (and, crudely put, for the child: I know the debate is huge) writes about what Hollindale calls “childness.” The child is encouraged, motivated, to make sense of the narrative by interpreting it in terms of their own lives, and vice versa, to make sense of their lives through what they see in the story. A sort of hermeneutic mutuality. But – but – but where do I fit in, the adult reader of the “children’s book”? Is recognition of past experience enough? Am I a mere intruder? Does the writer “writing back” into their childness somehow expect me to come with them? Possibly: reading Samira and the Skeketons recently reminded me of the horrid thrill of recognising I have a skeleton – so much so, I bought it and shared it with the grandchildren, who love it. Dual audience, where the adult and child are both addressed. But if I am not sharing the story with a child at all, is there any point in talking about dual audience? To push this further, am I a reader or simply a critic? And is there a difference? I feel like my best image tonight is one of the theologian reading the texts of another religion: a set of maybe enlightening encounters, but also a treading on holy ground. I am encouraged by this, but also warned and full of questions of the position of the researcher.

Well, thanks to Peter Hollindale and Mat Tobin and all the other people whose ideas are running round in my head, it’s nearly 01:15. I still am no nearer a solution.

Maps

I have spent time looking closely at another of my Christmas acquisitions, the OS Great British Colouring Map this morning. Engrossing. It strikes me that, like any book, it is capable of a range of responses, from the “Meh” when a nephew or goddaughter receives it from a well-meaning adult because said young person is doing geography GCSE (the aunt or godfather possibly displaying the fact that they do not understand geography or GCSEs) to the more exacting interaction. In the latter, it would be possible to get out the colouring pencils in the precise colour range for A Roads, buildings, &c in the correct scale series, or, more iconoclastically, in purples and fluorescent oranges, to redraw OS Britain in some sort of “mindful colouring” activity. Either would take ages.

I don’t know if I will ever put pencil to the beautiful, thick pages. This quick snap cannot do justice to this detailed and thoughtful book production.

Did I say “detailed”? What I love most is the lack of some details I might normally come to rely on: no words, no contour lines disturb the clinical outlines. Is that York Minster, so small? Where are the city walls? And in Conwy – which I have visited once, in 1976 – what do I make of this detail, or that? What is that structure just along from what I think must be the station, opposite the castle, across the estuary? Or what can I see in a flat, monochrome Wensleydale that I might miss on the coloured and labelled “full” map? I would never find huge Shining Tor if it had been included, much less the hidden Thursbitch or Ludchurch. I realise (at a deeper level than I had already understood) how much an OS map is an interpretation tool, an artefact that suggests and guides. Perhaps when I struggled with Digimaps in the summer that this was my basic problem: I was looking for answers when all I could hope for was signs.

Manuscripts: a brief thought on autoethnography

I’ve been given Christopher de Hamel’s beauty of a book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts for Christmas, and today I sat in bed listening to de Hamel and Andrew Marr enthusing about the more notable MSS de Hamel discusses.

The greater part of me is enthralled by the book, by the challenge of a not insignificant work, and by coming back to something I used to know well. Part of me, however, is a little wistful: I have had late medieval Books of Hours, chant books, portiforia in my hands, known or guessed their provenance, struggled with their handwriting. It was a world I loved, playing M R James as I looked at the Bridgettines of Syon Abbey- although I knew it a bit even at the time, I was without the obsessive commitment needed for the role. I describe myself as a “lapsed medievalist,” and I guess this will have to do.

So now, for the most part, I am the kid outside the sweet shop, looking at the barley sugars through the window…

…with the exception of the work on Gawain that’s come my way this year. I find that the past stuff on late medieval literature and spirituality is carrying me a long way into the sentient landscape project, picking up the crumbs that Alan Garner has dropped with a sharper eye than I would have done if I had not had those years of experience with the Syon MSS.

A final thought (for now) on making sense of my stumbling study: the way I looked at “my” manuscript (MS Rawl D 403) [when I finally packed away the reproduction I have and got on with training to be a teacher] was that I might come back to it. However, I wonder if that confuses scholarship in its widest sense with doctoral study, which is a a part of the scholarly project. Maybe the Liber Mortis et Vite never really left me; maybe I can dredge from those twenty-something enthusiasms skills and understanding I can still use. I used to dream in Syon; now I belong as much to the myths of quest and learning from my mistakes that are in Boneland, and Ludchurch. It feels all about synthesis of these different parts tonight.

Maybe a thought for my study in 2017…

Maybe