January 02, 2005
Life, Aqueduct Press and "alt" flame wars
2nd January
....the novel turned down by both Jo Fletcher and David Hartwell six years ago (as "Differences") is getting a surprising amount of attention, I blame Timmi Duchamp and Kath Wilham's handsome production. I'd set it aside, indefinitely, but Stan Robinson had heard about my novel about the woman scientist and kept insisting he wanted a look. So in the end I sent him a copy, and the typescript got about, and that's how it happened. Cheryl Morgan says it's man-hating and male bashing. I'm glad she's the only one with that opinion! Gerard Jonas of the New York Times Review praises the kooky sensuality and the basic science; the latter pleases me a lot, because I loved the work I did for that book. I remember getting an email from a slightly bemused A.N. illustrious US writer, in the long ago tail end of the twentieth century, about a review, saying, congrats, not many people know that, and how the hell did YOU figure out the fiddly difficulties of that pattern of inheritance thing? Well, "Differences" was how...

Sexual difference, like genetic difference, is individual: society blurs it out. We are all of us sexual mosaics to some degree or other, not just psychologically, but cell by cell. You perhaps have male liver cells, dear reader, while other scraps of your system are female. It's a switch, not a dial, on every scale. The problems between men and women are not biological, they are moral. As gender roles come under closer observation, and sex-science uncovers the mindbendingly nitpicky details, this becomes more obvious, but it was always true: which is why many heterosexuals, such as myself (it's not a crime, you know) have managed to get along, and love each other, even lifelong; even in the chinks of the most repressive social systems. It's a question of gentleness: decent behaviour, fairplay and respect, not who does the cooking and who does the washing up.

There you are, Lisa, I publicised myself. Happy now? Lisa Tuttle's novel, The Mysteries, coming out in the US in March from Bantam looks like being quite an event, and sounds just up my street. Looking forward to it.

Finally got round to tidying up my webpage for Firefox today. Puzzlingly, alt texts don't come up... Why not? Google it. Whadda you know, there's a flame war. Firefox being www. purists, define alt to be the text that comes up if the image doesn't (it makes sense, you know). Those of us who like sticking amusing or informative little messages on our links, for the benefit of those indecisive people who hover, will now have to redefine these as Text attributes, and nope, Firefox is not going to change anything. Revealed scripture, you don't change the true code. So, glad to have that sorted out.
Yes, I know it's 2005. Yes, we went out on Friday night, prowling the streets of Brighton and people watching, as is our wont now our clubbing days are over, (Hi, Paul Scott and fellow Essex lads); ended up back in the Park Crescent, met Sammy, got hammered. No, it wasn't a celebration, it was just getting drunk. We didn't feel like celebrating, don't think many grown-ups did, this year. Gabriel and Livvy and Louis, on the other hand, met a friendly french bloke and were directed to a party in a student house, with ultra violet walls and dayglo posters. Did YOU take any mushroom tea? ask stern parents.
No, no no dear parents! Absolutely not!

January 09, 2005
Bold As Love weather

5th Jan: Festive Robinson Crusoe
a very nice piece of st Augur, with Nairn's Organic oatcakes

6th Jan
warm boiled eggs and artichoke hearts in herbed oil

7th Jan
Dragon fruit like dark red cardboard scattered with poppyseeds, dried white peaches like large flattened slugs, rather tasteless but good combined with freshly cracked walnuts

9th January
9 inches of rain fell over Cumbria in 36hrs. Carlisle is 2 metres underwater. I Wonder what's happened to my sister's house? The beck runs by her yard door, just across that execrable track. I think Great Overend won't drown, it's too high, but most of Cumbria is made of water and rock, upland meadows where the clear cold water stands deep as a paddy field in March, the rusty grass growing under it as if through glass; used to be full of frogspawn but now no longer, not seen any at all the last two years.
In my adopted country, the last time the floods were out in earnest (think it was 2000) they discovered, like litmus, the precise places where people did not ought to have built new houses, on the flood plains of the Ouse, the Arun, the Adur... and so, the faintest impression of what real trouble feels like comes to us, but the trouble is all the same.

10th Jan
Now there's nothing left but a rump of cake, the Christmas season is over. I did a huge cleaning blitz on the kitchen, very satisfying, now it can slide gently into ruin once more & back to work.
I've been reading volume one of Cao Xuequin's Story of the Stone (aka Romance of the Red Chamber), Christmas present. Not convinced by the philosophical gloss the translator (David Hawkes) puts on the story, to me this seems frivolous, scholarly but frivolous, in fact exactly the sort of smutty, racy bestseller one of our own blushing academics might publish, on the side. Oceans of conspicuous consumption, really frightening amounts of pearls and taels (And all oddly like the character of England's C18 classics, small world, eh?) What's most startling is the comparison with one of my favourite books of last year, Annping Chin's Four Sisters of Hofei, describing a gentry household in Republican China. Nothing had changed, nothing...
Murasaki Shikibu's Story of Genji, in the graceful E. Seidensticker translation, also: Murasaki was a genius, yet, the environment of the people she described must have been very like the Rong-Guo mansion. The enclosed world of a great household, this labyrinth of women's rooms, which they will rarely leave; these miniature mountains and rivers and streams, the reliance on alcohol as a highly necessary soma type sedative; the lack of privacy. It's a bit grublike.

....Anyone who gets past the monologue at the start of Rainbow Bridge is a hero. Awful, awful. Thereafter, it's an authentic testament of the period, I can vouch for that. I even remember making "movies" like this one. Hey, Alan, if you are out there, remember "Peaches and Cream". The scene on the top deck of the bus? The screen only comes alive when Jimi makes his weary, cameo character appearence, a beleagured god unable to protect himself from these dreadful worshippers, but the makeshift "concert" he gives for Pat Hartley is stunning. And that finale, how about that finale, it's such a strong image. Just LOOK at those smug, witless young cosmic bretheren and sisteren, tripping hand in hand across the caldera... Stop asking yourself what went wrong, why did he fall apart; why did he die. Here it is.

Gabriel says I ought to listen to more Hendrix, then spoils his sermon by purchasing the First Rays of the New Rising Sun, produced by the Hendrix family. I don't think so. I think I should listen to Hendrix, more.
Have to admit, however, that after enduring the movie, with many groans, boos, hisses, I was inspired to start practising the full lotus again, which I'd given up years ago. Hm. It's a pretty good pose.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:36 PM

January 13, 2005
a disturbing thing...
13th January, dark and blustery
a disturbing thing has happened. The silver threepence (EdwardVII) we put in the Christmas cake has not emerged from it. Gabriel pointed the situation out to me this evening, and that there is now barely enough cake left to hide a pin lengthways. The power of suggestion: I ate one of the last pieces of that rump of cake for my lunch, and now I'm sure I feel something stuck in my throat. So does Paddy, same reason. Could the threepence have pupped in there?

Mark Leyland the rat psychologist, who passed my shrew-behaviour as kosher, sends me "Slate Mountain", his latest, a juvenile thriller with enviable cover quotes, in exchange for his copy of "Siberia". Thank you Mark, for Smudging my ride! He reacts with shock to the news I'm giving Microcon a miss. Wot about those 26 pints of Old Cornish Horribly Peculiar I have lined up for you at the Mog and Muck? A peerless institution and I'll be back in 06.

January 14, 2005
Coloured dawn...
14th Jan,
coloured dawn, clearing skies, I'm up here before the sun in resurrected jeans.
On this day, 1983, it was bitterly cold, the snow frozen hard on Coldean Lane. I went up to London, and Rayner closed the deal: after much toing and froing, he would publish Divine Endurance....
You will be relieved to know that Peter had found the threepence, and not told us.
This weekend, must do links.
Posted by Gwyneth at 08:46 AM

January 16, 2005
Snowdrops and bones and Paris in the the Springtime
16th January
The badgers have been digging in King Death's Garden, with Shakesperian effect, we coaxed Ginger away b4 she could investigate, but I think she has more sense than to walk into a badgers' den anyway. Snowdrop time again, on the lime path, still sheathed in my favourite patch, where you come down the hill from the mess those bad badgers have made.
adding links, grr, what on earth have I done wrong, I look and look at the code and cannot see anything out of place.
(Ha! Got the error, and so stupid I'll keep it to myself).

15th Jan
Paris in the the Springtime, the frontispiece for Band of Gypsies/Gypsys is pencilled, the rockstars in Pere Lachaise in the snow, at Oscar Wilde's memorial, likely you'll just have to imagine the lipstick kisses. Hey, I thought I said NO Jim Morrison refs! Well, says Bryan, unrepentant, fraid he crept in... It's not too obvious. Phonecall, late night: Look, Gwyneth I have to know how to spell the title. Okay, okay, I'll see to it.
Posted by Gwyneth at 04:58 PM
Posted by Gwyneth at 07:27 PM

January 19, 2005
Fugue
19th Jan (inauguration blues)
Singularity? Don't make me laugh. The reason why sf writers "no longer dare to tackle the near future, and have fled to exotic fantasy or military space opera" is blindingly, blindingly obvious...
Fugue revisited: Nah, I'm kidding myself. Thought experiments about the future have no place in science fiction, it was an aberration, normal service has been resumed. There are no Aldous Huxleys in the Gernsback Continuum.
Gave my gloves to Gabriel, who was cycling off to a guitar lesson bare-handed in the cold, which won't do. Bet I never see them again
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:26 AM

January 23, 2005
Fair Maids of January
23rd Jan
Song-thrushes have already hatched their first brood in the Pavilion Gardens. Three little fledgelings, spotted and pictured... The song-thrush is a red list bird, which means its numbers have decreased by 50% in the last twenty five years. Lets hope those swirls in the coffee cup of global warming don't deliver a mean frost in February, which these little maids would not survive
The squirrels are nest-building too, leaping along the tops of our hedges with mouths full of dried grass.
Something needs to be done! Maybe we should just leave winter out, ignore a day or two of frost, go straight from autumn to spring.

22nd Jan,
Peter's birthday, we took the train to Balcombe and walked across the valley to the Victory at Staplefield, ate excellent steak and kidney pudding, watched Andrew Flintoff mince the South Africans (ah, well) and admired birthday boy's prowess at bar billiards. There were supposed to be blizzards heading south today, instead we got clear blue skies and brilliant sunshine.
Beyond Thunderdome
Just finished K. J. Bishop's The Etched City. Take away the richly grotesque decor and there's a rather basic noir underneath. Mr Big and his docile gun-men, mean streets, a torchsinger, good girl wearily wringing her hands on the sidelines, while bad girl orchestrates our antihero's nemesis... Dull! But that's the same as saying Neuromancer is all surface. Rich, rotting grotesque decor is the medium and the message, and very well done. Congratulations.
Posted by Gwyneth at 04:39 PM

January 24, 2005
Francois in London
24th Jan
mouse ice on the garden pool. Did I say I have been licking my Christmas sugar mice to death? I lick their bellies, dislodging their string tails, until they are thin as paper. Gabriel horrified at this slow torture. I crunched up the remains of the pink one last night, while drafting my piece on Jane Yolen.
Francois is now in London, nearly starving in a garret overlooking a cemetery on St-Mary-le-Bone Street (sic); and concealing a stint as French-language lessons schoolteacher in Suffolk under respectable scholarly disguise. The things that cause shame and the things that don't...the things that are vivid, and the things that vanish in the folds of memory... His account of the army of the princes was intense, bloody, hair-raising, piteous: the knapsack containing the rolled scripts of Atala and Rene, that survived when his shirts were stolen and kept him warm at nights; the story of the Chevalier Vert and the Dame des Grande Compagnies (whose other name is death). Their hopeless disbanding, after the news from Valmy: merciless weather, the coach and six dead horses, standing in their harness, Francois, starving, lame, covered in petit verole and stuck to the knees in a ploughed field, begging his comrades to leave him to die.
And then in Suffolk he hears that his brother, sisters, brother in law, mother have fallen victim to the Tribunal, doomed to the scaffold at least partly as the family of an emigre who has borne arms against France. He recounts how he heard this news so distantly, with such conventional expressions of grief.
Never let the truth get in the way of your instinct for what makes a good story; and what does not.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:05 AM

January 30th |2005
Legitimate Succession
28th January
Beethoven taught Czerny, and Czerny taught Theodor Leschetizky, Leschetizky, taught Mabel Lander, Mabel Lander taught James Gibb, and James Gibb taught my son's piano teacher, Tony Purkiss. Today Gabriel went up to London to have a lesson with Professor Gibb, who is 92 but still teaching.
Late at night he played for me, his Beethoven sonata and then just jamming, and that's four removes, from Beethoven's touch on the keys to the Kawai in my basement. Amazing.
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:26 PM

February 03, 2005
Sugar kisses
29th Jan
Peter's brother in Geneva emails pictures of the ice storm, cars by the lakeshore encased as if in sugar glaze. Apparently it's down to a wind called the bise... Peter and Gabriel are going out there in two weeks, for a trip to the slopes en famille; there's plenty of snow.
I don't ski.
In the same post, a copy of last minute appeal for Troy Albert Kunkle, 38, sent by Amnesty UK on my behalf (I'm on their Urgent Action programme). Will I send this to 24 Grosvenor Square, where the ambassador used to live? First I check The Hill, where I learn that final appeals delayed the Texas execution "for two hours"... The evidence is, Troy Albert killed a man, wantonly, in the course of a petty theft, when he was just over eighteen. He'd had a childhood of deprivation and abuse, and he's been diagnosed schizophrenic. He'd served a twenty year sentence on Death Row when the State killed him. Last December a Supreme Court Justice said the death sentence was imposed in violation of the Constitution, but the Supreme Court was barred, on a technicality, from remedying the violation.
I have an informal world league table, for the places where reasoned and evidence-backed appeals for justice, or for clemency, may have effect. The top of the league for absolute recalcitrance might surprise you. Or it might not.
NB, by AI rules, I'm never addressing the UK authorities.

3rd Feb
Thelma and Louise get into jolly scrapes.
Saw "Sideways" last night. I thought it was a quietly watchable, rather sentimental, formulaic dude-flic. My two companions rated it more highly. At least it makes a change from the usual, oooh we're so evil, Byronic posing of this genre. When we got back in, Peter inevitably opened the bottle of Idllywild And bought him for his birthday. Hm. Maybe the stuff in the movie had more pedigree.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:38 AM

February 05, 2005
Green Day
5th February
Green Day at the Brighton Centre
For years, if I thought about Green Day at all the thought went something like this: is that lad pretending to be Irish, or is it his adeneoids? But one of the advantages of having a certified Young Muso in the house is that if Gabriel says something is worth listening, he is right, and that includes Blink. His cousin Catherine is the same. So, anyway, Gabriel gets a crush on the LA Three, we start listening, and today brings back a wintry morning in Oregon, last October, berries and cereal, the divine Leslie What GIVER OF COATS! PROVIDER OF VITAMIN ENRICHED PILLOW SWEETIES! and a little white dog called Buster... an email from Peter saying he has bought us tickets for Green Day and asking me is he nuts?
Not at all, Peter. It is good to have something kooky to tell people, when you are on a school trip, and nervously trying to seem an interesting person.
Grey sky, thick and low: no frogs or toads have yet found the new location of the water feature. My Roger Hall Camellia is coming into luminous deep red bloom, and the bedraggled cavity where we're supposed to be building our patio reproaches. We just haven't got round to getting hold of a murdered body to bury... Well, well, I'm at Picocon in a week or two. I'm sure I'll be able to pick something up there. They say that quiz gets fairly scrappy.
Bryan sends me the original art work for Band Of Gypsys, which is magnanimous of him, after I said (of the jpeg) that he'd made Sage look like Tin Tin. The virtue of princes. The seventeen year olds are gobsmacked, knocked out, pronounce Bryan's talent to be mental, which is as good as stupid, and far outstrips wicked.
Sage does not look like Tin Tin.
Reassure the teenagers, no, they are not expected to come near us at the BC.
Posted by Gwyneth at 01:54 PM

February 07, 2005
Wake me up
7th February
Foggy morning, the sun a pale flat disc
Green Day were very good.
I spent Sunday quietly, watched Treasure Island and The Stepfather.
There's amphib action in the water feature: 2 couples, seen 6th Feb, dark male clasping lighter-coloured female. Do frogs and toads know each other apart? Sometimes I wonder, we've had a male trying to rape one of our fish before now.
World News Commentary:
Wake me up when September ends, I don't like this.
Don'tmakemesee
Posted by Gwyneth at 08:55 AM

February 08, 2005
The Goldcrest
Feb 8th
It's spring, the light has changed, the air has changed, the birds are singing. We have goldcrests in the gardens, I know that for the worst of reasons....
& I'm ill. I'm hacking away at my five pages, coughing and shivering, full of self pity. Why aren't there any lemsips in the house?
Posted by Gwyneth at 03:45 PM

February 16, 2005
Flu and a Wolf's head
Tuesday last, I realised there was something wrong about 10.30am, by the end of the day I was crawling up a steep underground passageway, dragging a cart full of lumps of rock, hands and knees, hands and knees, it was dank and dark, but not too unpleasant, and when I was very tired I could have a rest, I hauled my cart off the tracks, (worst part) & lay down beside it shivering, time didn't pass, two or three ideas went round and round in my head, colliding with each other now and then, never becoming clear, never fading out entirely, I felt I was never unconscious, just dragging my cart, resting, dragging my cart. It wasn't too bad. Picocon, oh no, can't miss Picocon AGAIN, how can I drag this cart into Imperial College?
& all the while my little goldcrest lay on my desk next door, because I had refused to let Peter put it in the compost bin. I liked thinking about my goldcrest, even though it was dead, it was very pretty, olive green and downy ochre, and that tiny dab of yellow on its brow, with a twist of orange at its heart, like a flame. Its beak was slender and fine and black. Nice to have goldcrests in Roundhill Crescent, even if there is one less. Hope there weren't just two. What can I do about these cats? Keep them indoors, I know, I know.
My goldcrest, Picocon, what was the third idea? I've forgotten. Round and round.

Sunday night I actually slept for the first time, and Monday began to feel slightly more normal. Tonight, I look up from the page proofs of Band of Gypsys, and sigh.... wish I was back on that dark track, a small world but my own, contentment in little. It wasn't a bad fever-dream. I thought of trying it out as the germ for a story, but unfortunately I know the dream itself derives from Mark Leyland's Slate Mountain, which I had just been reading (compelling adventure for children, but with politically incorrect ending: Ros and her fabulous heroic Norse girl friend put paid to interstellar baddie, but while Eyda heads off to discover Vinland, I'm afraid Ros takes her lessons home, finds she has gained the courage to make the best of her bullying new school in Wales...)
The flu is going to have cost me two weeks of work, given that my brain is still cottonwool: which is not good. Coff, coff. I haven't been so helplessly felled in a long time. I said to Peter, on Wednesday last, when deciding I should not get up (later I did, & it was a big mistake); if I had to run for my life now, I'd be in real trouble, I'd have to rely on hysterical strength.
Nyah, hysterical strength can lift cars, I'll be all right.
The goldcrest is buried wrapped in arum leaves, beside Siang's grave under the holly tree. I hope it is not having to drag anything.

February 21, 2005
Frosty cars
Frosty cars, but no ice on the water feature.
Back at my desk, and very happy to be a veteran of the Imperial College Funday. I liked the fish duel best, (the one that didn't happen, I mean); the quiz second best. The destruction of dodgy merchandise was a bit disappointing, those stolid lumps of plastic do not give good victim, not even when crisped-up with liquid nitrogen.
The interview in the library was a surprise, I'd somehow been imagining avant-garde film makers, taking shots of ears and teeth, not whither sf. Brian says he thinks it's meant for a sympathetic prog for Channel 4, and they will collect nine hundred hours and then edit down to ten minutes... I just hope my contribution ends on cutting room floor, I don't have solid opinions and always feel daft trying to cobble some together. I think there's a good chance, they had Jon Grimwood and Brian Stableford, giving much better copy.
I'm sure that the young women (a small minority), involved in university sf clubs these days, are convinced that there are very few women sf writers, and those few are all second rate, because God (old bloke waering sheet, sits on cloud) planned it that way... And why should anyone complain? What's wrong with being second rate? Many second rate books are read with great pleasure!
On a gloomier note, 7am start, midnight walk back from the station, SO tired when I got home. I must either get tough again, or give up this sort of thing.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:26 AM
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:32 PM

February 25, 2005
Chevaux de frise
A glowing red sun this morning, a grey luminous afternoon, a few difficult flakes of snow. Those weather people! They are as much fools for the white stuff as I am. Blizzards will sweep the country, we will have a grit crisis!... yeah, yeah.
I built my chevaux de frise around the water feature yesterday, out of buddleia prunings (the wood is surprisingly dense). It's meant to defend the amphibs not from cavalry but from that damned fishing cat. I regret my eye of water in the grass, it looked so nice from the ledge and from the kitchen windows, it was a good design and now it's gone, but I feel terribly responsible for the amphibs. In the cement pond they were safe, they only had to worry about Ginger hauling them indoors. Ah well, architecture is the most compromised of all the art forms, except maybe for wildlife conservation...
A bad thought. Maybe the frogs don't get fished out, maybe they get caught and ripped up when they are crossing the grass, oh no.
Gabriel's certificate arrived today. He's made it, by two marks. At the tender age of 17 he's now DipABRSM, a professional musician.
Nunc dimittis domine, as parents keep saying, from about the time baby first takes a step alone
Posted by Gwyneth at 01:28 PM

February 28th 2005
Peter Benenson
At dawn this morning a blue sweep of hills on the horizon, lasting just long enough to start me wondering where this might be, the Welsh Marches perhaps, next moment they were gone.
Peter Benenson is dead, God keep him. I've been involved with Amnesty International as an active volunteer for fifteen years or so, can't remember exactly how I got into it. I think there was a women's conference run by AIUK, and I saw it advertised. I may have gone along because I was writing White Queen, and wanted to know what was going on in the real gender wars, that puts it around 1989, 90? I was on the women's action committee for four years in the nineties, and saw the troubling time during which Amnesty (with AIUK one of the countries instrumental in the change) decided that gross violations of women's human rights, by state or non-state agencies, though in the 'private' sphere (honor killings, bride burnings, forced prostitution, Sharia stonings etc) were a suitable case for treatment...although such a huge can of worms, and so divisive. I don't do so much now, I got burned out, but I'm still onboard, writing letters, Urgent Actions, street collections, door to door with those little envelopes. Grunt work, my style. The world is so much changed since 1961, and so very dramatically changed since 2001, to think of tackling unjust political imprisonment, disappearences, illegal detention, torture, one case at a time seems almost bizarre. But we go on doing it. You can't stop.
It's still better to light a candle than curse the darkness (although must admit, I do a bit of both...)
The chevaux de frise seems to be working, in that there were at least two clasping couples in the water feature, safe from the fishing cat when it was last unfrozen. On Sunday we went out looking for snow, and ended up at Milton Street, climbed up onto Wilmington Hill in a very creditable pocket blizzard. It's been genuinely cold for a week now. That's practically a whole winter's worth, by recent standards.
Posted by Gwyneth at 08:10 PM

March 02, 2005
rain in the night
2nd March
rain the the night turning to snow this morning. At seven two bedraggled squirrels creeping towards each other along the fence, tails trailing, dark and thin. Dripping finches in the branches of Alison's sycamore tree.
Organic veg box on the doorstep: celery, tomatoes, lettuce, mushrooms, carrots potatoes onions. Rather ordinary, but that makes it more fun when something curious turns up, like a wedge of pumpkin, a celeriac root or half a swede. Yes, I said swede. I like mashed swede.
The Prince's Road development has been crushed at the first round (but this is not the end of the story). It was a deeply disingenuous proposal, sixty more households and NO provision for their parking, even if you don't care about the loss of green space what's that supposed to be about? Are Roundhill residents being NIMBY? Infill sounds good, but out of town in East Sussex there's so much barren agribusiness, degraded set-aside given up to fly-tipping, new housing and rooted up hedgerows, banishing all wildlife. That's a good reason (apart from long affection for such outlaw places) to cling to any scrap of urban weeds and wilderness.

This is how things are when the tide rises, the ice descends from the poles, or insolation burns: a dogged, slow retreat into the bunkers. The survival of life itself has depended on tiny refuges.
Bought some daffodils yesterday, in honour of the rugby. We ate last week's leeks in soup on Monday night.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:18 AM

March 18, 2005
murder on the dance floor
18th March
nine dead yesterday morning, & it's the fishing cat. It's not our two or Lyra, because it happens before they leave the houses, dawn is the killing time. I don't believe it's Cosmic, either, and besides I have seen the fishing cat with its paw in the water, scooping it like a scoop... The others just sit and watch. We did the frogs a cruel bad turn when we moved our water feature. Not only were there places to hide around the big cement pond, it was near to the house, whereas now the water is right beside the cats' highway. Alas how easily things go wrong! How thankful I am not to be the governor of an earthling colony on some hapless new world, making decisions utterly disastrous for the aboriginals. I wish the aboriginals even had the sense to KEEP THEIR HEADS DOWN, but they don't. They're frogs, what can you expect? Many plants are more intelligent.
Maybe the fittest would survive, if I left it to nature?
Nah. My kind put the cats here. Nature, c'est moi.
We've been "trying everything" this week, which means increasing the buddleia barricade, building frog-refuges from half-bricks (that was Peter); putting down pet shop cat deterrent (Lyra and Ginger watched me put it down and walked all over it, rather charmed by the smell I think); the water hose, leaping up from my desk and running down the garden yelling, creeping down there slowly and attempting to entice the fishing cat with sweet words (so I could souse it in washing up water). All pointless, because not many deaths during the day anyway. When all else fails, try thinking. The murders happen at dawn, the fishing cat likes FISHING... Cover the water feature overnight. So we put a tarp down last night, and this morning's death toll down to one, the little pool under that shelter full of croaking, clasping couples, including Red Girl the red frog. This is not proof, who knows what other factors may have intervened, but the tarp's definitely going down again tonight.
St Patrick's at the New Vic, the musicians sit around in a circle, guitars, a banjo and a silver flute, singer dancing in a green knit dress, the other singer bends over her guitar: the bare boards, the louche young landlord, these faces, Van Gogh in Roundhill. Nobody a day under sixty: it's extremely Irish. What shall we choose from the ancient heritage? Whisky In The Jar, The Streets Of London, Peter, I says, I will put money on Dirty Old Town within the next three numbers. Darn, he didn't take the bet.
And I know the frogs will just reduce the water to oxygen-free goop, & probably kill the fish again if we're not careful. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

Posted by Gwyneth at 09:23 AM

April 05, 2005
Back on line
April 5th
Blue sky, sunny morning. The scarlet tulips I rammed into the ground in a mad rush last autumn are so bright you can hardly look at them, the budding plum twigs I cut at the end of March are opening by my bedside.
Back on line after a technical hiatus and a holiday, and proud possessor of an unexpected Dick. It's Fiorinda's birthday, Kurt Cobain's anniversary again, ah, I remember this stormy day in 1999... I'm about to revise the chapters of Rainbow Bridge Peter has reviewed in draft for me. Finished reading Terry Lamsley's Conference With The Dead, excellent English nineties ghost story collection Nightshade are going to reprint later this year, good for them, and this week I need also to give "The Two Of Us", just published as an SF masterpiece with a foreword by Sarah Lefanu, a second reading. A rare outing.
Murder on the Dancefloor update: the frogwatch man should be pleased with us. We took his advice and dug another hole, which we have lined with cheap black plastic and filled with 40 litres of spawn. Gaggh. It's a sickly green, but it has tadpoles squirming around the rim. Frogwatch man you must now come and collect your toadspawn, which I'm reserving in a tank for you...
You should never prune a plum tree. That's why ours is such a weird shape.
Must also update personal webpage, and start on Band Of Gypsys pages. Arrgh.
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:25 AM

April 06, 2005
The house is infested
6th April
chill and drear, scattered showers.
The house is infested with seventeen year old boys. They get in your teeth, they get in your hair, I'm afraid to ask what they did with the waste bin from the bathroom. Ah well, it could be worse. They could be eight and I could be having to play monopoly with them.
Posted by Gwyneth at 08:07 PM

April 08, 2005
Downfall
9th April, grey skies, brilliant spring colours from my window
The lowest boughs on the brushwood sheath of my elm tree's bole are in tiny leaf...
Not much of a brushwood sheath, the tree is a sapling, only a few years' old. We transplanted to the bottom of the garden in January, from the big pot on the ledge, where it grew by chance. Our garden is small for the trees we're growing in it, holly and pine and now this, but you DON'T throw away a healthy European Elm around here. You have to pollard them, or they get Dutch Elm Disease, but that won't be for a while.
Went to see Downfall with Maude last night. Terrific film, harrowing, absorbing. Juliane Kohler was absolutely brilliant as Eva Braun, and Heino Fersch as Speer, but it was all amazing, the whole ensemble, the whole thing. Does this movie "humanize" Hitler? Depends what you mean. It shows him as a human being, isn't that the really scary part? Isn't that what people ought to be told? C/f my entry for April 5th, fascist recalibration says monsters are monsters, they are NOT like anyone one we may see making pretty speeches about patriotism, the Pope, the sanctity of womanhood, etc etc.
Back to mine, to find a half-dozen seventeen year olds in the basement, virtuously drinking hot chocolate. Chase them out and talk about being fifty, which we conclude, isn't half as bad as we thought. God bless chance and necessity: the human spirit is beautifully adapted, either our senses are dimmed or our philosophy shines, we're fine with this age.
Except for the elderly parents thing.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:28 AM

April 10, 2005
Red Girl is dying
10th April
Red Girl the red frog is dying. I am sorry. I liked that frog. Does she have red leg virus? She doesn't seem to have the symptoms ("redgirl" means she's kind of russet toned, not "red legs and anus" as in the virus...) but how would we know for sure? Pretty day out there, me stuck at my desk. In the interstices of this week's work I've been updating my personal website, it's now up and done, for a while. New Material! The paper called String Of Pearls I read at World Fantasy Con is now online, (page called The Critic) The palace of delight is very close to the pit, that one.
What music do you work by? Geoff Ryman asks for playlists... I don't. I work in silence. When I listens to music, I listens to music, when I writes, I'm somewhere else. The only sound in the room is of the author muttering frantically to self, or else a scrabbling of bored cats. On the other hand, this house is full of music. We have Bach for two violins with piano accompanist downstairs at the moment, Gabriel and Charlotte and Christine are rehearsing for their AS performance modulel
Caught the new Dr Who at last, yesterday evg. New my eye. It hasn't changed a scrap! Still, I'll have to catch the flying daleks
Posted by Gwyneth at 03:35 PM

April 14, 2005
Sea Fret
April 14th
Sea fret and rain. Red girl died yesterday. Life seeps so slowly even from a little amphib, when not dying by violence, I can see why people used to keep their dead with them, not quite sure, for days or even years. I almost have a creepy feeling there's something in it. (Cf Aleister Crowley story Fiorinda refs in Band Of Gyspys).
Two pages completed yesterday, must complete the whole site by the weekend. It's a rush job, but still a v. pleasant occupation. Also must attack laborious repetitive task of turning all the alt tags into title tags throughout boldaslove and homepage, it's okay, I like laborious repetitive tasks.
Time's a wasting! Must get back and see if Word, having had a nice little rest, will let me modify my title template now-
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:44 AM

April 18, 2005
Saucer struggle
April 18th
sun, wind & cloud
Went to see The Hives at the Dome on Saturday. Screamin' Lutheran Mods, what a great idea. Not as memorable as Green Day, but definitely worth leaving the house, even feeling as jaded as we did, having sat up until three with Lina bad-mouthing the Labour Party. Brighton in the Springtime, the budding elms, the clear skies, the primulas beds in the Steine gardens, desire paths. Yesterday evening I wasted a lot of time on my flying saucers, could not get they things to turn purple and preserve luminance, they just looked like hats. Thought of how to do it overnight, & it's only taken me an hour of bumbling to get there this morning.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:19 AM

April 30, 2005
Injured Slow-worm
30th April,
white mist at seven, warm and humid day
...doesn't get one hit on google. Care of slow worms has a uk site, however I don't intend to keep the patient in captivity. I looked down yesterday afternoon and saw my two bad cats having themselves a slow-worm cabaret, or rather Ginger jumping up and down, and Frank sitting like a sphinx, holding something between his front paws that was obviously a source of entertainment. I belted down there and it was a slow worm, pencil-length, shining metal, puncture wounds in its side. I decided I must keep it for a while, for observation. Tried to interest my household, I think Leon liked it, the rest of the lads were too cool.
Funny thing, Ginger was on top of my monitor, the slow-worm in a tank on my writing desk across the room. It started trying to climb the sides, and of course she leapt at once to find the source of the noise, but up on my desk she behaved with well nigh human stupidity, searching in nooks and crannies and behind things, the sort of places where scratching-noises ought in reason to come from; while the tank sat there right in front of her, with a slow-worm quietly watching her every move...
Today the puncture wounds have closed, my guest is active and alert. I'm going to put her in the broken wall, behind the compost bin.
Green Party knocks on the door. Sorry, says Peter, local yes, national no. Green Party takes it in good part. Gabriel says, I hate this election, everything they all say is so completely fake, you KNOW they're just saying what they think will get them votes.
He's right but he's wrong, this is exactly when they reveal their secrets, because when the chips are down you lose the power of rational thought and go with your gut instinct, we all do it. So remind me again?
The Tories are campaigning as racists, big surprise.
The Labour Party are campaigning on arrogance. I don't want the Labour Party to be arrogant. What idiots, why would anyone want arrogance?
The LibDems, er, lot of things. Higher taxes, I like the sound of that.
Posted by Gwyneth at 12:56 PM

May 03, 2005
The swifts
May 3rd
grey skies, tossing branches
Some time the beginning of May I hear them shrilling, look out of my window and see those scimitar profiles zipping like waterfleas across the blue. They should arrive this week, most likely. Last year it was 27th April, 2003 it was the 4th of May, 2002 the 9th. I think they are fewer every year, but I'm not sure.
We did some major patio work on Sunday (finally decided to go ahead without the murdered body). I have a stiff bum.
Posted by Gwyneth at 11:58 AM

May 04, 2005
One swift
May 4th grey and cool
Francis has (had) a claw sheath embedded in his scalp. Ouch! I wish I knew he sometimes won these fights.
It's quarter to five. Just spotted my first swift, flashing across the window. Got to get back to my yoga now.
Posted by Gwyneth at 05:50 PM

May 05, 2005
Election Special

Cool evening, mackerel sky
My top preferred result: Labour gets in with enough of a dent in their majority to worry them, and they know who to blame & why... Lib Dems come second, Tories die, Greens get an MP!
My second best, Labour get a big victory, sigh.
My...nah, stop there.
Exit polls are looking hopeful, on the other hand I know two people who, early this morning, deliberately misled exit polling persons, out of sheer cussedness & sorry Green lad, but how were you not going to share information with the Labour lad, hm?
Posted by Gwyneth at 07:35 PM

May 09, 2005
Think I caught a chill
9th May
It's turned very cold, is this a calendar shift for the Ice Saints? I think I caught a chill at Glyndebourne for the Brendel recital last night, very cold and rainy picnic. I heard the swifts shrilling outside my window this morning, but haven't seen them since Thursday last.
At last finished Fairbanks & Goldman New History of China. I got on better with the modern history chapters, where I often felt Fairbanks was talking about the USA, saying things I've heard from US "progressive" sf writers. It is a historian's proper duty to use the past, and the past of other nations as a means of talking about his, or her, own country in the present, that's what history is for.
Colditz-like activity surrounds patio building, with the added disadvantage that we have to sift the rocks out of our spoil, before we can smuggle it out and dump it. Advantage of not being watched over by armed guards, but I get Gabriel (he can't help, he has schoolwork and music practice) criticising the molehills I have made all over the flowerbeds. NB, must do something about the tadpole slough. If I don't build some defences its going to be like Omaha beach down there before the end of the month.
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:12 PM

May 15, 2005
Band of Gypsys
15th May
Pentecost, and still cold. I spent most of the day in bed, tired myself out on Thursday doing too much on top of that chill. Peter completed the patio! However we do not yet own a barbie or the furniture, so its not a real patio yet. I'm trying to convince my companions of the romance of classic white plastic, but they're resistant.
Band of Gypsys pages go up tonight, and the new Bold As Love frontpage. Sneaky spam advises me to re-enter my ebay a/c details, as my a/c will otherwise be suspended. Another one the same for paypal. I don't play with ebay or paypal, I have some commonsense. Why the hell?, you wonder, pick on such an unlikely profile as mine. It has to be a numbers game: the daftest spams must hit the target sometime. Parasites are very good at what they do.
The Guardian says 92% of email is now unwanted. An underestimate, by definition, because they are not counting the emails you get that are perfectly legitimate and you still don't want them.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:14 PM

May 21, 2005
Gloom and Guitars
21st May
Gloom, finding that my proof corrections did not get into Band Of Gypsys. It's a lesson to me to be absolutely careful. The arrangement of Is My Team Ploughing is Vaughan Williams, not Benjamin Britten. And a few other things, ah well. The price of liberty is constant vigilance has more applications than you would think
However, the Katona Twins, Hungarian classical guitar duo, were fabulous, and now I'm going to go and watch the match, although I could not care less what happens to Nike Stadium United.
Posted by Gwyneth at 03:05 PM

May 22, 2005
Red Campion & white
23rd May
Red campion and white, herb robert, chervil, stitchwort, the last of the violets and cowslips lingering on in the stand of woodland above the Newmarket, haunted by the ivy-drowned ghosts of the 1987 hurricane, what a racket of birdsong. Someone's planted fruit trees in this wood quite recently, apple and cherry trees, blossom trees over now, bluebells all withered but we found one patch of spotted orchids, fuschia pink spires, and a new-born orange tip butterfly, incredibly pure and delicate colours. Can't believe anyone would want to harm these places, rip them up for carparking, but they do...and they know who they are. 12 miles from Falmer to Hassocks, all the dewponds are full, larks shouting and the sky marching ranks of cloud, but though the wind was blustery, no rain. I should not be taking Sunday afternoon strolls I should be chained to my keyboard, but I needed to rest my eyes on green things and flowers.
Huge panic, files flying, stacked t/s tumbling, I can't find my Madison airtickets! I will have to search my room, which lives a hairsbreadth away from being engulfed by chaos, but it never matters until I can't find... Gwyneth, please don't bite my head off, says Peter, but did you ever have paper? Wasn't it an e-ticket? Why don't you check your inbox?
Oh.
I better print that out then.
Posted by Gwyneth at 11:04 PM

May 25, 2005
Wood Mills Nightingales
25th May
warmer day, still an underlying bite in the air, higher cloud
To Wood Mills (Sussex Wildlife Trust) last night for a nightingale seminar in the classroom, giant hawthorn berries and rosehips swinging overhead, with a paper architecture Barn Owl and touching ditto unsuspecting vole dangling beneath its talons. They have no nesting Barn Owls this year, the kestrels turfed them out of the box in Little Meadow, where (admittedly) kestrels have squatters rights. A walk in the still of evening, thrushes and a blackbird belting it out, the reed warblers muttering in the blond reeds, a heron in dark silhouette gliding over the hedge, bats flitting, but the megastar was sulky. I believe there'd been a difference of opinion about his rider, the half-pint of mayflies were from the wrong Hampshire river, the pint of Romney Marsh midges were not salt enough & it's the end of a sour, disappointing tour... The class agreed, bravely, that they now would know a nightingale when they heard one, jug jug ziz ziz, tiiiiuuu tiiiuuu, but went away (I think I speak for others) secretly muttering: the songthrush has it*. Consummate artist with a lyric, superb technique, undaunted by evil cold weather. Nightingales made Keats think of death, at length. What the thrush said (see homepage poetry archive) made him think of senseless sweet defiance in the cold dark.
In the classroom we listened to historic recordings of the immortal bird, including one from 16th May 1942, made in Surrey, I think. The singer was quality, made you understand what the fuss is about, but as he sang, a gentle hum became a distant roar, the BBC live broadcast was picking up 197 bombers, Wellingtons and Lancasters heading out to trash Mannheim... Now that was eerie.
Apparently the engineer suddenly realised they were handing out information on an open line, and pulled the plug: abrupt end of the nightingale show. It did no harm, only 11 didn't come back.
*The songthrush on the north side of Roundhill, who sings from about four til eight am this season, is even better, amazing. He's a genius.
Posted by Gwyneth at 08:55 PM

June 05, 2005
White Rose
5th June
Grey and blustery, no rain
The white rose I brought back from Hay survived remarkably. It spent seven hours unprotected, dry, in a carrier bag on a train journey, when I got back here I put it in water with food, and in the morning it had come back to life. Brave creature! Unlike Fiorinda I'm not appalled by cut flowers, but I hate to see them mistreated.
Kate and I saw two events at Hay on Wye, totally random, just the ones we could reach. The first was about "Singing Neanderthals", by someone who's written a book suggesting they had really advanced musical abilities, maybe because they didn't develop language. I'm sceptical, esp since the hypothesis seems to rest partly on the idea that in humans music is a living fossil, surviving only in "motherese", the singing tones instinctively used by mothers (mothers being primitives by nature) talking to infants... Oh and the tonal languages, (also used mainly by primitives?) and er, selling things, and er, social cohesion and oh, and singing, dancing and music generally. But all these activities are in decline, "we" don't do them much anymore...
And what planet did you say you were from, mister?
The book I bought was Ruth Padel's "Tigers in Red Weather". Brilliant, tragic, beautiful.
I read Emmanuel Carrere's biography of Philip K Dick (Bloomsbury) on the trip to Wiscon "I Am Alive And You Are Dead". Not much comfort here for sf fans, whom Carrere regards with kindly pity, but seeing the man's life laid out in order clarified my own feeling about his novels. They've always puzzled me, and I've always thought, quietly, stubbornly: this is not science fiction. This is something else. I had planned to allude to the Dick phenomenon; and to the fearsome truth about what's happening to the grey matter, when teenagers fall victim to early onset schizophrenia. But nah, and rightly so. Neuroscience is not what's wanted in an after dinner speaker.
My "travels" are not over yet, still one more day in school (tomorrow), then I can get back to my desk for a little while.
Posted by Gwyneth at 02:13 PM

Evening Mist
6th June, Sunday
The Beethoven Experience reconciles one to world capitalism: I lie in bed at going on for midnight, reading chapter 39 of Genji, where Yugiri pursues his suit with the Second Princess, listening to Alfred Brendel playing the 32nd sonata, Op 111, "simplicity as a result of complexity", says that measured, exact voice which is so like his playing; and think, my father was poor enough to die of it, my mother a Manchester publican's grand-daughter, and the Shining Prince himself never had music like this, brought to his bedside like this.
Thinking of a society where sexual access is NEVER something a woman can grant to a suitor freely, not even in exclusive marriage, because the act of "marriage" has to be a rape; where a woman openly opposing a man's wishes with so much as a harsh word is frowned upon, and it's ALWAYS her fault if she is accessed anyway. A tough set of conventions to negotiate, we live with its traces, and the whole package still applies in many places.
I hope someone proposes Chopin.
Posted by Gwyneth at 11:16 AM

June 15, 2005
Cold enough for June
16th June
Rain. The little frogs are hopping up Omaha Beach.
Incipit vita nuova. The white road.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:12 AM

June 19, 2005
A27 Southerham to Beddingham Improvement Scheme
June 19th
Warm and clear
I would have liked to get out on the Downs today. The flowers are amazing at this time of year, when the orchids stand thick as buttercups on some of the chalk slopes. And there isn't much time left for Mount Caburn (see below).
But needs must, we moved the compost cone (gaggh) into the sunny spot freed by my decision to quit growing vegetables, dealt with Omaha Beach, hosed down the slough, folded it up and put it away until next spring. Excellent innovation, that slough, but it does stink a bit.
I've spent my evening reading Clarion stories, and writing letters, such as this one here (posted for your edification, dear readers). The Local Pre-Inquiry Meeting will be held on 28th June, (At the main Conference Room, Pelham House, St Ann's Lane, Lewes, East Sussex, at 10.30 am, if you're interested). I'll be teaching Clarion East, so I've put my points in writing. The situation in the South Downs area right now reminds me of Northern California in the seventies, when the Redwood stands were just about to get protection and clear-cutting was a race against time.

19th June
Phil Barnett
Highways Agency
Dear Mr Barnett,
I would like to confirm that I still have serious objections to the A27 Southerham to Beddingham Improvement. I have read the Highways Agencys' Outline Statement of Case, and also your answer (23rd May) to the objections put forward in my original letter.
I would first like to point out that this project, undertaken in an Area Of Outstanding National Beauty, is described by the Highway Agency as having an estimated "Moderate Averse" effect on the altered landscape after fifteen years (my italics). It seems fair to assume "Seriously Destructive" would be a reasonable description, by this estimate, of the immediate effect; that is to say, the true effect on the site as it is today. The effect on the valley between Mount Caburn and Firle Beacon, one of the most magical sights in England, will be savage. The Highways Agency knows this, and freely admits that, by its own chosen standards, the project will cause terrible damage.
Meanwhile the immediate traffic and economic benefits are assessed as "significant"; but it is equally freely admitted (in line with the reasoned opinions of objectors) that there are constraints likely to render the improvement useless within ten years, as the increased flow of traffic will only shift the congestion to bottlenecks at the approaches to the projected works.
In fifteen years' time the benefits of the proposed improvement will be zero, either because the road traffic has been encouraged to increase to a new level of gridlock along the south coast trunk road; or (which is not alltogether unlikely) because more rational policies will have prevailed. But the landscape will still be destroyed. It will be gone, it won't come back.
There is a paragraph in the Outline which deserves to be quoted verabatim:
Air Quality
6.2.8 Overall the impact of the proposed scehme is positive within 200m of the centreline of the widened road. There would be a slight deterioration in air quality due to a slight increase in the volume of traffic, but this is offset by the removal of receptors as the three Railway Cottages are demolished as part of the works....

(my italics)

The receptors, you see, are the human beings who might have been living in the cottages, had they not been demolished, but they cannot be called "people", as the "removal of people", might strike a slightly negative, slightly uncomfortable note.

There is no discussion in the Outline Statement of how the National Park Authority, likely to be in place by 2007, might, or might not, have been a problem for the proposal of this improvement. In the light of the timing of the proposed works, and the openly admitted conflict between the South Downs National Park and the policy document known as the South East Plan, I find this a very significant omission.
The Railways Inspectorate's alternative plan for an enhanced level crossing is mentioned in passing, as having the detrimental effect of increasing traffic delay from 45 seconds to "some three minutes". There is no discussion of public transport, or of the drawbacks (whatever they may be) of reducing the dangerously impatient traffic on the A27 by taking positive steps to reduce the actual road traffic, a proven method of reducing congestion and accidents, as has been shown in Central London. There is, of course, a rail link already in place. The positive implementation of increased rail and bus services, by cutting down significantly on the number of private vehicles, especially at peak times, cannot help but reduce congestion.
It is impossible for the Highways Agency to make a case for works of this kind without using deceptive language, and applying one set of rules to the objections, another set of rules to the Agency's case. An even-handed treatment of the proposal would always favour the objectors, if the government and regional authorities' own publicly attested guidelines and constraints were respected. It is not possible to "encourage the people to use public transport", by building road improvements. It is not possible to "protect our fragile environment" by building works which will have a "Moderately Averse" effect on the altered landscape after fifteen years. In twenty years' time, maybe fifteen, motor traffic congestion on the south coast trunk road may well be a thing of the past, government policy makers having been forced to call a halt -as they did in 1956, with the first Clean Air Act; with dramatic effect. But the beauty of the landscape will still have been destroyed. It will be gone. It won't come back.

Yours respectfully and sincerely,
Gwyneth Jones
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:49 PM

June 23, 2005
Summertime
23rd June
Clear warm air, huge moon shows over the gardens every night this week. Our south east aspect no good for sunbathing, good for night and morning skies.
Scarlet Tiger in our kitchen last night, what a beauty. Isolated communities, it says here, most usually Scandinavia, in forests around 1500 m. We're not complaining. We sleep poorly as the heat seems to drive the herring gulls that nest on our chimneypots crazy, we wake early to another pure blue day. I sit and eat my toast on the patio, berating my cats for their attitude problem vis a vis each other, I go and sit by the pond to watch our depleted fish, scale rubbing scale where light is dim, damn, just making the cats think I like fishing too... Work hard at the Langsturm chapter; try to think hard. My pace doesn't change much, I notice. I sketch, refine, revise; go on to the next section at an even rate. Just the days are not long enough, the nights are not long enough.
In the afternoon, I get tired and go down to the basement, watch Gabriel play pro-evolution 4 and listen to The Streets, Grand Don't Come For Free. Just about perfect, that album, the beats, the vers libre (sp?) So true to the life.
New Scientist's very sfnal this week, I'm being bombarded by Clarion stories, showers of them, and they're not science fictional at all. Mostly alternate history. Favourite quote so far: climbing stairs as a snake wasn't easy
Posted by Gwyneth at 07:38 PM

June 26, 2005
MSU
26th June
Warm and humid
MSU wireless guest. Finally I have connectivity. The wifi at Kappa kappa gamma house won't recognise me, or this m/c won't recognise it, or anyway, no IP. I never realised how addicted I'd become to instant referencing. Anyway, I have now recalled the name of that novel about the Devil coming and befriending a genteel English lady (sounds so ideal for a movie plot). What the devil is it with the devil this year, anyway, asks this guest to the USA & replies to self, couldn't possibly comment...
It's very warm, nice temperature, the lime trees that shade MAC ave scent the air with honey, school starts tomorrow and I'm running out of battery.
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:09 PM

July 01, 2005
Rain at midday
30th June Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house
Rain at midday, having dismissed the class I went and looked at it from the rather ratty sundeck on the first floor, not v. good lightning, and discussed the Kilimanjaro trip with Bjorn. He says, book in-country, much better deal, well that's how we did Mount Cameroon, & it worked, but I thought I had given up holiday-making in the Poor South (aka Third World) Why am I thinking of it again? Because temperatures here are so evocative, Singapore in the monsoon, ceiling fans, that air like milk when you walk out into the evening.
California in the Sierras in August, now that was HOT.
Drought. I see on Common Dreams one in six countries of the world (can this be right?) faces famine next year, & Spain and Portugal have serious crop shortfalls. Oh, and the FBI is going to grow a huge new Homeland Security Department, for gathering internal intelligence. And the Leader's Bill on those ID cards (but my goodness of course the police won't be able to see them on demand! What a silly idea! They're just for fun...!) is through to Committee. Hold on, folks, this sort of thing is not supposed to be real, it's supposed to be a "What if?" Remember, like that nice MAD scenario? Have pity on the poor disaster-story mavins of sf writers, we can't keep up.
Kappa Kappa Gamma history book reveals... Either nobody knows what those greek letters are supposed to stand for, or it is a secret. No details of the Masonic rituals either, shame. The Fleur de Lis everywhere are meant to be irises, the young ladies a hundred years ago having believed these flowers were one and the same.
Posted by Gwyneth at 12:25 AM

July 02, 2005
Something Unpredictable
July 2nd
Cool and sunny
Hm. After dicussion with Tracy T. Traci C. and Way, I discover I am a sorority girl myself, sort of, slightly. In that I went to the same school as my mother and her sisters, and though they were scholarship girls, they were definitely daughters of Notre Dame, my mother especially, swimming champion, head of house, awesome responsibilities when the time came to evacuate. And she held office in the Notre Dame society, later on, for years and years. By the time it was my turn it was all over, yet something remained. I was an insider, I went to the dinner dances. Me and my friend Mary Curran, also daughter of Notre Dame mavin; in our first formal dresses, she in ice blue, me in pink, empire line, with a kind of dotted gauze overskirt, and silver sandals. I still have the old girls' teeshirt, with the discreet little snowdrop and fleur de lis logo. I have a pin somewhere.
I know the motto. (Not telling you: it's about duty)
No masonic rituals so far as I'm aware, and no network value, that I know of, but still, seems I have less room to talk than I thought.
They tell me this strange great big house is condemned, as it would not be worthwhile to rip out the ghastly wiring, and the city finally decided to stop turning a blind eye. They don't seem to think this is a bad thing.
Who ate all the cherries?
It was me
Who vanished the pumpkin seed granola?
I have no idea, and I wouldn't tell you if I did. So there. Doesn't matter what you do to me.
& so long, Clarion 2005.
Thanks for all the stories
Posted by Gwyneth at 05:00 PM

July 10, 2005
Qui tacet consentit
July 10th,
Warm & clear, beautiful skies.
Slience is consent. Just to make sure there's no mistake, I blame Tony Blair and George Bush for the bomb blasts in London, equally with the terrorists. I think we all know by now that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that there was no connection between "Al Qaeeda" and Iraq in 2003, and that our leaders were perfectly well aware that they were lying to us.
This is modern warfare. We are at war, Tony Blair put in this position, and this is how it feels. Non combatants get killed. Far, far more non-combatants than soldiers get killed, in the average modern war (ask any authority on the subject, such as Amnesty). These days there's no guarantee that you can go off and bomb the gooks in gookland, safe from reprisal. If you think it's intolerable for non combatants to get killed, then the answer is simple. Go to war only if you have overwhelming cause. And if you have to lie about it, that means don't.
Troops out.
A letter from the Dragon Press tells me my subscription to the New York Review of Science Fiction is about to expire. Actually I never had a subscription. I did a lot of work for them through the nineties, and notionally you got paid for writing reviews & articles for NYRSF, (I have a contract, somewhere). It wasn't worth collecting the fees, so I got the journal instead, and that drifted on, tho' I'd stopped writing for them very much. Best of luck to the NYRSF, but I don't think I'll renew, I feel we've moved apart.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:02 PM

July 22, 2005
Gloworm, full Moon, hosepipe ban
22nd July
Another warm clear day
Last night we walked to Lewes over the downs, and back under the full moon of July, a yearly ritual (not always July, some summer moon). Larks shouting in a perfect light of evening, the golden and green curves of the downs, stripped of wheat, baked dry, timothy grass and lady's bedstraw in mellow waves on the set-aside. It seems a good year for larks, and for swifts. Ate at the Royal Oak, which obligingly serves food until ten. No hedgehogs this year, but I saw a gloworm in the hedge on the way back to the road bridge, which pleased me very much, haven't seen one in Lewes in years.
Sky gazing yoga on top of Kingston hill in the warm night. What did we talk about? I can't remember. Greece. Satellites. Lina and Paddy and Gabriel got a taxi from the old bakery (Lina's butch beach sandals causing her trouble by then), Peter and I walked the whole way home, behind the houses along the field paths, horses lying down to sleep like big smooth brown boulders. Got in about two, say a ten mile round trip. What a moon!
Deleted my last entry. For why? Because I'm tired of having a bloggy opinion on the London Bombings, Muslim question etc. It seems impertinent to the people really involved, really suffering.
Coda: The wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan are terrible things, Islamic terrorism is a terrible thing. Are they connected? If you mean, did war in Iraq and Afghanistan strike a blow against the terror, then they certainly are not. Does the war in Iraq, and the way it has been conducted, give the terrorist recruiters a big fat boost? Of course it does. Continues to. And now I'll shut up.
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:29 AM

July 29, 2005
Last Day
29th July
grey, cool, humid. IRA declares peace. Rain all week, at least we leave the garden good and soaked. Val and Dave will have the plums, and the tomatoes and the basil. Hope the aubergines make it through.
Delivered the Bold As Love artwork to Orion House yesterday. Copies, alas, because the insurance was STUPID, but this means they can be on sale, should anyone want to buy. One armed policeman in a baseball cap on Brighton station, casual and chatting, with that heavy weight in his arms. I remember the last time, nineteen seventies, amber alert, when anyone coming into the Jobcentre had to be searched. The clerical grades were not required to do this job, it was us jerks of officer class. It was only bags, not body searching; didn't get exam gloves. Futile if there'd been anyone determined, but happily the IRA never got into suicide bombing as such. No one could convince the mules they would go straight to heaven, that probably helped.
The Catholic Church used to hand out what are known in the trade as plenary indulgences, at the time of the crusades: one voucher good for unlimited rape, torture, pillage, massacre, slaughter of innocents, and your immortal soul don't even lose its no claims bonus. Hey, maybe our Very Christian leader has secretly applied for one of those & this explains his bizarre confidence about the hereafter.
Packet from Random House NY, three letters cleared from Alison's desk, fan mail for Ann Halam from 2003, oh dear. Children, children, most writers have a web presence. If you want to get in touch, that's the way to go.
And tomorrow morning I'm on my holidays!
Posted by Gwyneth at 08:30 AM

August 05, 2005
Sun& Sea&Sand&Swim
5th August, Naxos town, sunny, light breeze. The meltemi blew the first couple of days of the month, but it's gone away for a while.
Not on my way to Glasgow, then; no...
From the Matrix internet cafe & having just confirmed that Jackpot's gyros pitta ranks along with the Nasi Padang at The Wheel, Bukittinggi, as one of the great meals of the world I have known, the Aussies are racking up a nice score at Edgbaston, (with some whinging about the strangeness of the setting). Bryan Talbot writes, the Bold As Love prints to go in the auction? Dunno what that means, but fine by me. Trent Walters writes, he's starting a new movement called Mundane SF. (That's sf designed to annoy sf fans, I presume) Radical. I like it!
Staying in Kastraki, in a house we've rented for the month, revising Perseus, between swimming and snorking and investigating the umbrella drinks. House is wonderful place EXCEPT for the wicked mosquito breeding hole in the sump at the back of the wellhouse. The av. person may think mosquito attack is random, but wise in their ways (in Europe and SE Asia anyway)from a lifetime of allergic reaction I know that the losmen where I get slaughtered can be right next door to the place where no mosquitoes are ever seen, and what's the difference? Stagnant, standing water. Source that, drain them out, and the "act of God" problem disappears. Dear rentiers, please take note!
&Sorry, dragonfly nymphs, it was you or me...
Just a crumpled roseleaf, now I have my little blue pills.
Posted by Gwyneth at 01:55 PM

September 11, 2005
Wake Me uP
Sept 11th
Heavy overcast, humid and warm
Back to England after a month in the country (and it was quite an idyll, apart from the bedbugs), just in time to watch the last overs of the 4th Test, from behind the sofa. What a cracking finale. We'd followed the Old Trafford Test in Naxos, but didn't actually see much of it. The Ozzie proprietors of the Matrix were showing it on a Big Screen, but that wasn't enough to tempt us into town, after all, what's a few weeks between emails in the month of August?
Immediately plunged into Gabriel's Eighteenth birthday celebrations, taken care of by the superb Festevie at Boathouse Farm. Sea breezes, bulrushes, green grass, blue sky and spiderwebs, the heavy foliage of the oaks, how mysterious the field became as the night grew younger and time & space expanded. What a brilliant effort, and thanks very much to the organisers. But we retired quite early, aged adults, it was not our place to stay up late. The guitars were fine, the weighted keyboard never worked, but the generator only died once. 7.30 am I looked out into white-out, the teenagers were still cavorting.
The Rock and Roll Reich isn't fiction you know. The books are a fantasy based on a reality. It's here there and everywhere; the way we live now.
Bush and New Orleans, how does he do it? You have to wonder what goes through the heads of the US nationals*, who seem to be letting him brush this one under the carpet along with the rest. What exactly WILL it take to wake them up? It's an interesting, chilling background muzak to Timmi Duchamp's very grim mid-future USA, in Alanya to Alanya, which I'm finally reading (I'm sorry Timmi)
I've turned in Perseus. I've approved the new idea for covers. I wonder what comes next.
* I used to have a resistance to the term "USians". I'm sorry, I used to think. Who's feelings are we sparing here? Isn't this rather mealy-mouthed? Now the case is clear. USians are those unfortunate North American folk between Canada and Mexico, with the spectacularly bad government
Posted by Gwyneth at 03:41 PM

September 14, 2005
A27 Beddingham Southerham Improvement Revisited
14th Sept
Cool, heavy overcast, why no rain?
To the public inquiry today, to make my statement. Good for you! says everyone, but it's as futile as Swampy. The real case has been decided, the project supposedly being debated has nothing to do with safety at a level crossing, and can it be possible the Inspector doesn't know this?
Nah, impossible. Which gives a sour aftertaste to all his courtesy.
Actually it's not all doom and gloom. I spent Monday afternoon watching England recover the Ashes, with my parents, in North Manchester General Hospital acute stroke ward & things could have been a lot worse than that... I don't mean he might have died. Old people are like soldiers (sensible soldiers, not the kind who joined up for the foreign travel), they aren't really afraid of death. It's the bit before, right? The nasty prospect of a long, horrible dying. But my father was moved to rehabilitation yesterday; looking good, and I zoomed back down here again. I'll be leaping up and down to Manchester for a while, courtesy of Virgin rail (only one of my trains cancelled this trip, well done!) A fine opportunity to get some reading done.
Civil Service Codes.
Weds 14th, 10 am, back in Sussex, I made my statement at the public inquiry on the issue of the A27 Southerham to Beddingham Improvement. A charming, courteous, but I'm afraid entirely cynical exercise. It was touching, in a way, I suppose. The inspector was certainly a model of Civil Service Practice. And for what?
You want to know what this is about? See the entry on 19th June.

The Highways Agency intends to build a bridge and a wider road section to replace a half-gate level crossing, in a very beautiful valley. They say this will increase safety. Really, it's part of a much larger scheme which is being introduced by stealth. Because of the awkward circumstance that building big new roads in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty is supposed to be contrary to the Agency's remit (although they do it all the time; it's cheaper), and to the government's bizarre "committment" to reducing traffic, they have to make a show of fair play. If a few rather slow-in-the-head people insist.

The Railways Inspectorate wanted to put a full level-crossing in place. That option has been rejected, as it would make drivers impatient, and then they would be tempted to do illegal things. They can't help it, bless them, and nobody should try to tell them dangerous driving is wrong. (Why does nobody in the Police understand the force of this argument when it applies to alcohol in the bloodstream, eh...? Shame). The introduction of a 40mph speedlimit on the approach to the level crossing (Aug 2004), which doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, has increased safety considerably; this is not contested. The witness for the scheme admitted, almost looking uncomfortable, that the lower speed limit did seem to have done away with the er, very serious er, safety issue. But ten months it too soon to tell, he explained, brightening. So we're going to dispense with the speed limit, and go ahead and build the new road.
I gave my statement first, by the way. It was more or less the same as the letter published in this blog 19th June. The writing is on the wall, says I. You'll be able to read it in a decade or two, but the beauty will still be gone... I could have waxed more lyrical, I contented myself with waxing mildly sarcastic. Do you want to cross-examine anyone? the nice Highways Agency man asked me, very kindly, when I walked in. Nah, says I. Why on earth would I want to do that?
Wouldn't waste my breath. The meretricious* language of the Agency's Statement of the Case for the Improvement makes it perfectly clear that the road is going through.
*There's a shorter word for this kind of work, but it's rude.
The Rt Hon Lord Baker of Dorking said he wanted more roads, bigger roads and more cars, forever and ever. He sees no reason why this shouldn't happen. He further informed us (possibly superfluously) that he didn't see that the landscape would be damaged, suppose it mattered. He has never known a road building project to damage any landscape. It all looks fine to him. (I think he felt he had to say this, as an afterthought, because he spoke right after me).
For heaven's sake. Mandy Rice Davies said it, long ago, so I won't bother.
Mr Gavin Smith demolished the argument for increased road safety, (ah, if only the Highways Agency project was about road safety!); and made exhaustive inquiries into the provision for cyclists. The Agency and other officals scurried about being very obliging, checking maps & so on.
I quit at the first break. If the case was going to be decided on evidence, or legal constraints, the improvement would have been thrown out long ago. And the Highways Agency would be devoting its time to maintaining roads, taking safety measures, discouraging increased road traffic; and implementing longer term schemes that would actively reduce traffic. As they are -notionally- obliged to do according to the Road Traffic Reduction Acts of 1997, and 1998* (National Targets). A likely story eh?
*The word for this kind of language is not rude, it is Orwellian. It's called "Newspeak". Look it up: there's a clear definition in "1984".
Tony Mouzer of the A27 Action Group says the Group has some evidence that is going to put the cat among the pigeons. I wish him luck.
I honour all those people who still believe in unbiased public inquiries; or in the rule of law itself in this country. Me, with the hideous example of New Orleans in front of me, I'm just glad things aren't much, much worse. Yet.
Posted by Gwyneth at 01:37 PM

September 19, 2005
Vivid colours
20th September
Vivid colours of late summer flowers, verbena, fuschia, California Poppy, Michaelmas Daisies, Black Prince Antirrihinum. Humming Bird moths, the last of the tomatoes getting snail-gnawed on the vine; the garden's full of spiders, can't move out there without being assailed by sticky threads.

Amnesty mailing: I don't like "Protect the Human". A catchphrase in slightly bad taste. I think it's the definite article, makes the idea kind of demeaning and whiney at the same time. Humans are not orang outans.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:28 AM

September 30, 2005
Il Duce ha sempre ragione
Rain, rain, lovely rain, and I'm unplugged
We had a broadband upgrade, and it didn't work. Is it software, is it hardware? How dissatisfied am I with NTL customer services? Nope, I won't help you to improve your services, dear internet supplier. You don't have a box on the form that I want to check. How likely am I to buy any of the services offered to me between malicious snatches of Vivaldi? Try to guess.
I just want to go back to BT. I think this relationship has gone past the point of no return. But I've a horrible feeling the divorce will be messy, and I'm going to become a regular cafe-goer (Actually, the nearest hotspot is in a pub on Preston Circus, but I'm resisting that temptation, at least for today).
Il Duce? That's a reference to the forcible ejection of eighty two year old heckler, concentration camp survivor (nice one, Tony!) from the Labour Party Conference, for saying "Nonsense". Peter says, Gwyneth get a grip, this is NOT like Germany in the thirties. No, no, I was more thinking of Italy in the twenties.
Oh well, at least we can look forward to having the trains run on time.
Jeremy Lassen sends me the cover of the US Bold As Love, it looks very handsome. I surely wish Nightshade all the luck in the world with this rather silly, yet powerful idea. Meanwhile, we're off to Newcon3, where I'll be discussing the best time travel book in the world tomorrow morning. But they've left Timescape off the short list, so where does that leave me?
Definitely won't be voting for The Time Traveller's Wife, one of those "really cool blokes can't be housetrained" novels. Ah, but never worry ladies, you can imagine torturing them, mentally and physically! Hey, why not cut his feet off, and then see how fast he can run away from committment?? Chicklit.
The devil finds work: still waiting for Fiona or Jo F to turn one or other novel around, so the update of my personal website is ready, to be posted soon as I have a connection again.
Posted by Gwyneth at 04:12 PM

October 04, 2005
Dust in the air Suspended
4th October, cool and cloudy, autumnal feel to the air
Back on line, having convinced the customer services people at ntlworld we are both axe murderers. The fun we had! How easy everything became, once they were proper horrified! How annoyed we still are, because it is only more obvious that we could have had all our problems fixed in 10 mins down the line on Wednesday afternoon. So sorry, all those people who are still being docile and polite...
To Northhamptonshire for the weekend, to attend Newcon3, meeting many old and new friends, including the ever youthful Mr Wells. We spent quite a lot of time AWOL, doing an oldfashioned motor tour, (that's the Nene, above, resting very quietly in its bed; and below, at Beckett's Park Lock, where we got to watch two people negotiating the gates in a narrow boat, doing very well until they rammed the wall on their way out) But we were around enough to admire Springheel Jack, and marvel at the promotion of Space Tourism in the the reusable spaceplane Mr Branson is even now building in his garage. A startlingly empty marketing package failed to conceal that if you sign up for this $1,000,000 fairground ride (dates tbc) you will also need to undergo some intensive training in how to be sick in zero gee, etc. Charged extra, I'm sure. Tempting!

Funny thing, I read Little Gidding again for the first time in about thirty years when we were on Naxos, in the middle of one of those white nights when I had the really ghastly bites on my throat, and before we knew it was bedbugs (I was wondering, is it a vampire? Am I allergic to vampires? Now that's something you don't come across in the fiction...) And now here I am, at the end of a long quiet lane on the Northhamptonshire, Huntingdonshire border. Not midwinter spring, but the October blackberries tasted of rainwater, tasted of summer gone. A lonely, silent place, fairly new Ford Mondeo rotting gently on its uppers in the carpark, evidently that's what you do, you drive here, you renounce the world, you seek peace, and your motor just drifts into oblivion, here, now and in England...

Other funny thing. Any time I can now remember, I'd have been spending this weekend in the heart of England collecting copy, seeing things and marking them down for future use. The clear weather of early autumn, the astoundingly hardcore nature of Northhampton's weekend nightlife. So many police units you'd think it was the Labour Party Conference; Mr Randall in the churchyard with his bedding and his plans for a new political party (England and St George); the jam, the vicar at Rothwell; the accent of an older time, conserved here in this city that was once right at the cutting edge of mediaeval history. But it's over, bar the editing. Have I been working on that story for seven years? About that. It makes sense, because it was a fairytale.
Posted by Gwyneth at 01:32 PM

October 07, 2005
Look away now...
7th October

Cloud above sun and haze, warmer than it's been-
Haha! I've filed my tax return, what a wonderful feeling. And always a surprise, as I never keep track of my income or deductible expenses during the year, just file 'em all, down to the last bus ticket, in a cardboard box, which means I only have to tackle numbers for a few hours once a year. Do I pay an accountant? Thank you, no. It's not rocket science, I'm not into avoison, I think income tax is a good idea. Why keep a dog when you can bark yourself?
Also posted my updated personal page at last, having tracked down the frog coin and given up on the white cat. Still some areas lost in limbo since 1999 but I'm getting through them. New material this time on The Critic, and Falling Leaf, tidied the Fantasy page (sad news about The Edgewood Press); some nice new links (mathematics of rainbows eg). Tempting fate as it will have to be moved again when/if we part company with NTL, but never mind.
Two movies in a week, went to see Innocence on Tuesday, how to classify? Delicate, dreamlike, faintly sinister and voyeuristic account of how a little girl is born into the house of childhood, lives intensely among other girls there until puberty and then leaves, alone, taking nothing with her on a train going she knows not where. (But when she gets there she meets a boy, bigger than she is, and they play with the fountain of life) I liked it, es the faint air of menace, but feminist? How feminist? This afternoon I'm going to see Nightwatch with Gabriel. The only review I've read says, those who have seen The Matrix may not find this movie as exciting as it seemed to the domestic i.e. Russian audience... We don't mind. As long as the poor creatures didn't slavishly copy Matrix Reloaded.

Lynne Jamneck writes, she'd been getting flak for 'excluding' male writers from her lesbian erotic anthology. Cat Eldridge, in the same post, asks me to name my favourite fairytale/slash folktale. There's got to be a bad joke in there somewhere. Slash fairytales? Boys writing "lesbian" erotica? Needs work.

Posted by Gwyneth at 02:23 PM

October 10, 2005
Don't Know What Was Wrong
10th October
Warm
So what was wrong with Nightwatch? It has subtitles, but they're good subtitles. It's bloody, grisly, gripping, and raw with social and political comment. It has a sense of humour, but it's a damn sight more serious than most bloodfest flicks. Those Russkies know a thing or two. (Look out your window, what's that unmarked van doing in the urban half-light, who are those people in the sort-of chemo-suits? Could they be Chechen terrorists, getting ready to blow up this apartment block? Or are they something much, much worse?)
Darkness At Dawn (David Satter:a journalist's account of the birth of the Russian Criminal State) could be required background reading for this "popcorn" movie.
Only one note of disquiet. It's a trilogy.
Posted by Gwyneth at 10:13 AM

October 14, 2005
Robot Uprising
14th October, grey and still
a squirrel belts across the back fence, closely followed by another. A pair of collared doves on the cross bar of Ben and Emma's swing, glance at each other and sidle closer, glance, duck heads and sidle; each approach undertaken only when the other bird is not looking...
I'm afraid for the birds.
Still stopped for bobbins. My dear editor keeps sending me inspiring e-cards (at least I'm on her list of people who need their morale boosted). Reading: How To Survive A Robot Uprising, Bloomsbury's guide for persons in danger from their domestic semi-AIs. Full of commonsense, and not missing a (groan, groan) single obvious movie ref. Plus it's been put together by Daniel H. Wilson, real cutting edge roboticist, so you know it makes sense to pay attention. Excellent resource, and just in the nick of time.
Opacity. Justina Robson's Living Next Door To The God Of Love, ah, now I get the slightly uneasy tone of Cheryl Morgan's review. This is one of those sf books (sometimes very good ones) that seriously needs to be read twice. Never mind, I do that with anything I'm reviewing at any length. You read a book once, you can react, but you're not in a position to criticise.
And then, for a treat, Sarah Singleton's Century.
Posted by Gwyneth at 09:04 AM

October 17, 2005
The Devil Finds Work #n
17th Oct
Mist deep over Brighton at seven, pearled spiderwebs on the plum tree. It's that time of the twentyfirst century year when the warmth lingers too long and the last tomatoes still glow on the vine, but when you reach to pick one, you find a slug ensconced in the capacious chamber it has gnawed out in the other side.
The devil finds work: So desperate I've even been trying to renew my Norton Anti-Virus sub, with zip success. Amazingly unhelpful "renewal center". The colleen on the customer service helpdesk (James Taylor, makes a change from Vivaldi) a real hard case: so bad it wasn't even funny. Ah, I think I get it. Symantec tries to get you to renew early, so it can chisel a month or so off your 'yearly' sub. If you don't, you have to pay them £100 or (more likely) you go and buy the product you actually want much more cheaply elsewhere...
Last night, reading Living Next Door To The God Of Love for the second time, I started painting my fingernails cream (ended up not all that happy with Living Next Door: shame); just for something to do. I made a terrible job of it. Oh well, now I can pick it all off again.
Human Rights Watch. Today the highest court in the UK convenes to decide if evidence procured by torture in a third-party country can be used in British Law "provided the UK neither procured nor connived at the torture". The use of evidence obtained by torture or ill-treatment is prohibited by international law at the moment... Not that it makes much difference, but it's something.
How exactly can you use the evidence without conniving at the torture?
This is a landmark case. The UK wants to make getting mediaeval on those terrorists officially acceptable practice. The devil indeed. And I wonder how many of you out there just can't understand what the fuss is about?
Posted by Gwyneth at 11:18 AM

October 20, 2005
The Ages
19th October
The ages on the stones of the long-lived dead are twenty years closer to my own than when I first walked in King Death's Garden. And here's Lucinda Barnes with her beloved husband Stephen, dead within days of each other, aged twenty nine and thirty, in February 1919. Well, we know what that was about.
Ginger's short sighted little blue eyes lose me quickly in the leaf-shadows and she sits and cries. I should wear yellow, a colour she seems to see and admire, but it doesn't suit my complexion. She only really likes these outings when I'll play with her. She likes to jump from the top of one gravestone to the next, me coaxing like a circus trainer, and lavishing praise. Unlike my Siang, doesn't have the concept of going for a walk, thinking her own thoughts.
My blood fills up with calm melancholy, autumn leaves underfoot. The squirrels, the jays, scent-runs of foxes like a wi-fi network, and here's the place where the badgers' sett runs through the undercrofts and turns up bones. It looks rather deserted, and the bones are gone. I hope the badgers didn't get into trouble.
ghosts
the cherry blossom way
Rain. Finished drafting "Food". Read a graphic novel posted by Ulises Sarry about the walls of Lugo, a roman city in Galicia, washed up untouched from fifteen hundred years ago, ever wondered why? Standard plot, treatment funny, daft and slick, I'll go back to that site.
Also surfed up a livejournal entry on Gwyneth Jones's "Life" which I must snag and link. Remarkably exhaustive and even sympathetic treatment. (There must be some mistake, livejournal is usually where I go to get tarred and feathered.)
I wonder why Anna gets called a wimp for failing to report a "date rape". I thought that was a painful, hardheaded commonsense decision (and the same decision most young women make in that situation). She hates herself for not blowing the whistle, but she has no proof, the successful prosecution rate for such cases is abysmal, and Charles certainly isn't going to break down and confess, he's convinced she was gagging for it.

One correction, the research book was not called "The Differences Between Men and Women". Nah, not the sort of title that wd have caught my eye. It was "The Differences Between The Sexes", ed. Short & Balaban, papers from a conference on the animal physiology and molecular biology of sexual difference. Now that's interesting.

Posted by Gwyneth at 10:37 AM

October 30, 2005
Fall Back
30th October
Sickeningly warm
Manchester did us proud last week, splendid downpours, nice drop er Holts in the Golden. Affleck's Palace has probably seen me and my child for the last time, but I anticipate further peaceful hours flirting with Oldham Street's older chic, and reading the reviews in Picadilly Records (Delicately angular and dark post-rock, glides over a melodious ramping bass line, perfectly complemented by XXXXX's silver-wire-around-my-throat agonised vocals). Who's that? Can you eat it?
Sarah Singleton's Century is lovely . I found Bali Rai's The Whisper a bit slow at first, but it's really good once you get into it. How great! Found another children's story by Adeline Yen Mah. And it's a kung fu fantasy set in WWII. Ex.
This blog is going to go very quiet for a while. I'm dead busy.
Posted by Gwyneth at 11:06 AM
November 22, 2005
Frost on the Grass
22nd November
Frost on the grass and ice on the little pool five mornings in a row, grey mist today.
My bare feet in the dawn bruised the frosted grass to green
How long ago!
How weather patterns persist: I've seen frost, even snow flurries, around 20th November for as long as I can remember, and we say oooh, maybe a cold winter! But then the cold goes away. The date's fixed in my mind as the day it started snowing in 1962, and it was a Wednesday. I remember watching the goose feather flakes, pouring from a grey sky, the scratchy brown serge of my convent school uniform. I wonder if that's what really happened? Doubt it.
Plague of cactus-eating slugs in the kitchen. Gabriel and Peter's cacti spent the summer outdoors, as advised in Cactus-care handbooks, and got chewed to bits by our well-hard slug population. Worse! The second generation are now creeping out in the pots, and we find the tiny slimy infants clinging to spikes, munching, they look up at us, waving curious little eyes. Oh, hello, thanks for the nice food... It fills one with a kind of dread, such things should not be.
Our kitchen is now extremely fine, but the new microwave doesn't work.
email from Marissa Lingen, approving of Castles Made of Sand. Not sure if we've met, I google her. What a pretty young lady!
Grindstone, nose to, update: I'm not really here. I'm on the Water Margin, long way from home...
Posted by Gwyneth at 08:45 AM

December 01, 2005
A Game Of Risk
1st December,
dark morning, no frost
Francois Chateaubriand, crossing the Alps to take up his post as Ambassador in Rome, stayed the night at a musty old castle. Chateaubriand and his wife had an amicable alliance, but he slept alone (he was, by this time, very close friends w. Mme Recamier). In the middle of the night he was woken by candlelight. A minor official had crept into the ambassador's vast dusty chamber, accompanied by a young girl in white, her eyes modestly lowered. The official explained that he was a widower, he could not give the child a dowry, would His Excellency like to help out? Gobsmacked says Francis (in C19 french) I didn't inquire if the motherless girl was in fact a virgin. I just grabbed some money from the bedstand and sent them away... It says here, but I believe him. He has his faults (and he really doesn't like the English), but I don't believe he'd go for droit de seigneur as a tourist attraction.
It's fascinating to read his "Note" on the situation in Europe, which I first heard about in the sixth form at Notre Dame. The Turks, the Russians, the Austrians, the Prussians, rumbling towards the Crimea. The cause of Greek Independence, the English, their economy wrecked by the Napoleonic Wars... It's a game of Risk.
Our Frank has lost his collar, bad cat. He's also been owned by feline unknown, awful rent across his ribs, other crusted wounds. Maybe we should have seen the other cat, but I think maybe our boy better learn to run faster-
Posted by Gwyneth at 08:46 AM

December 13, 2005
Feat of St Lucy
13th December, dark and chilly
If you could see me now. I look like I on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise, it's not a good look. You'd better draw a circle round me thrice, I am googly eyed and I want to know who's hidden my opium. It seems I can't do rewrites any other way but at full stretch, maniac hours, and there's the mince pies to bake, the parcels to wrap, the flour paste decorations to be punched out, it's been uncannily the same for years, like a weather pattern.
But today or tomorrow, I break out of this attractor. Wonder what happens next.
Happy birthday Lucy!

December 19, 2005
Rainbow Bridge
19th December
It's dark out there. Wonder what's been going on in the world...
The ice didn't melt all day yesterday, but then it rained hard in the night.
Finished, printed, zipped. And that's that. Post the solid stuff tomorrow. Last words from 'Hard', a Reich lyric. (At first I resisted putting invented lyrics in the books, I thought it was a daft idea. Eventually I realised, take a leaf from Tolkien. Cod-verse when your fiction is about a versifying culture is like those carved radishes on fancy salad plates, you can eat them if you like but they are meant for decor; the little splashes of italic just break up the page nicely.)

And I don't believe that anyone is ever going to pay me
I don't believe in anything but the cold and the equations...
But I don't mind, I'm satisfied

December 31, 2005
There's a man on the corner of the street
31st December
Rain, rain, grey low skies. One of the miniature roses a casualty of Gabriel's gathering on Thursday night, no other serious damage.
Best festive dish: Gabriel's exquisite pear sorbet, by a mile.
Worst festive dish: The goose. Not improved by its skating trip around the kitchen floor on a lake of hot grease... Lentil burgers next year, by common consent (I'm joking, but a nice ordinary free range chicken will be fine)
Best present: Tough one. I'm going for the yellow climbing rose (called Chris) which Peter liked so much we had to go out and plant it, in an interval of the goose struggle, in the freeezing cold. And has several times visited since, coming in to report, the rose is looking good... But the beautiful black pen must have a mention, likewise my new dressing gown and the Coco (only took me four of five years of hinting...) And the Whacky Weasel, until the battery ran out.
Best Music (as in, most plays): the studies on Chopin's studies, Godowsky (sp?) My Mitsuko Uchida Schubert piano sonatas, and The Kinks.
Best tv: Got to be The Shipping News followed by the Mabinogion, on Thursday night. Best movie, (unless you count the glorious Muppets' Christmas Carol, which we always watch) Asda Santa from Manchester's choice: David Lynch's Wild At Heart, v.cool, not something you could take seriously and the women get a pasting of course but the young Nicolas Cage singing Love Me, worth the price of admission. Wouldn't like to meet those legs on a dancefloor mind you
Best Party: the ham party on Christmas Eve, even if we didn't get round to the musical crackers.
At a loss for something to read, as my dear friends and relations, who never buy me anything but books, had decided to buy me anything but, I picked up The Red and The Black, & got myself thoroughly fascinated (more of this later). Once you take on board this way of looking at the world you wonder WHAT kind of human society would be anything other than a tissue of hypocrisy...? Goes well with Chateaubriand's memoirs. Peter Duck, however, which I was mining for sailing ships I could copy for a colophon, was unexpectedly excellent .
On Wednesday we walked from Lewes down the river towards the sea, over Rodmell bridge and up over the downs to Bishopstone in a hard white frost, two intrepid hang-gliders, yelping oystercatchers and very likely looking MR James ghosts trailing us along the banks of the Ouse, plus one lonely mistlethrush; and got bitterly chilled walking around Seaford in the dark, searching for a pub that would serve us some food. (Calamity! Our beloved Beachcomber had stopped feeding people, and a couple of packets of crisps isn't much use after a ten mile winter walk)
Imagine... We never get much snow, but I have been paying attention, and I know that the little cold snaps in a lukewarm backdrop, the pattern of Sussex winter weather for at least the last decade, have been quietly getting longer and colder. Imagine if the cold equations really are past the tipping point. You know, that cannot happen, it is fiction . It wd be tantamount to aliens landing.
Scan the wood anemone, scan the schooner, send them downstairs to my colleague who can do those things with Adobe to my inked drawings. Think about the Fenland Lighter... And go downstairs to cook goose and ham pie with Corfiote greens stew.
There's a man on the corner of the street with as many noses as there are days in the year. Go on children, run and see him... (old Lancashire saying)
Posted by Gwyneth at 03:59 PM

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