In April

The collision of light and dark + April’s Book Club pick!

On Saturday 5 April I’ll be part of Canterbury Festival’s Step Into Spring with Will Skidelsky - tickets and more information here • Take out or renew an annual subscription in March, and you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win my lovely box of goodies - more details here.

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It is traditional, I think, to begin a piece about April with a quote from The Waste Land: April is the cruellest month. I don’t believe it for a moment, but I do love The Waste Land. A hundred years old, it might have been written for this moment: a scattered people reeling from trauma, steel themselves for more. They try to explain themselves in so many different ways, from so many different angles, and in so many different languages that we struggle to see what is being communicated. It’s a Tower of Babel, littered with the detritus of the war just gone, a new war scented on the breeze.

But what does that have to do with April, when the skies are blue and I have, on more than one occasion lately, gone outside without sleeves? The air is looser somehow, like something has slackened. The dog has started to paddle in the sea again, clearly sensing some atmospheric shift. The shops are full of pastel colours and chocolate. The lambs in the fields are looking sturdy. School holidays beckon.

Sturdy lambs in the spring sun (Shutterstock)

Since last month’s post - in which I shared my aversion to Crème Eggs - my son has taken to sending me recipes involving the Devil’s confectionery, the worst of all being a Crème Scotch Egg. I have to admit, I’m tickled by the thought of him scouring Mom Blogs for things to horrify me. It’s so wholesome. I will not be cooking any of it. Next week, I’m taking advantage of the school holiday to go for a long walk, free of the constraints of school days and bed times. I’m hoping to feel the season change as I walk. Maybe it will dissipate some of the rage that’s descended on me lately. I make no guarantees.

What happens when a dark year shifts towards summer? We are almost constitutionally incapable of managing the contradiction, those two clashing inputs of light and despair. Yesterday, my phone reminded me of a photo from 5th April 2020, two weeks into the first Covid lockdown. Bert is sitting on the beach, taking off his shoes and socks to get into the sea. I remember the horrifying guilt I felt as he did it, my doubts that this was allowed, but he would not be deterred. The sun was up, and he was going to get into the sea. In retrospect, I’m glad he did. Times were awful enough, and would be for some times. Instinctively, he reached for all the light he could draw in.

But that was the war just gone, no longer at the forefront of our minds, though its detritus still litters the ground. We describe it in our myriad languages. We scent a new one on the breeze.

What I’m loving in April

• Blackcurrant & Ginger Remedio

• Noema Magazine

• Pussy willows

• Bircher muesli

• Replanting the garden for summer

• Knitting while watching Severance

• Spelling Bee

• Maria Clara Eimmart, C17th astronomer

• Lithuanian ‘grass suns’

• Wondering about summer sandals

• Flare Calmer ear plugs.

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True Stories Book Club - Out of Sheer Rage

Well, the time has come for us to begin April’s (and May’s - I loved the slower pace of spreading it over two months!) Book Club pick - Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage.

I’ll dig a little more into the nature of this book when we begin our readalong next week, but suffice it to say that I wanted to provide a contrast to Braiding Sweetgrass! This is not a book of wisdom, directly given; but it is, ultimately, quite wise. It’s also chaotic, wry, occasionally self-pitying and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. While attempting to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence, Dyer does just about everything but, and yet somehow we learn a lot about Lawrence along the way. But most of all, we learn about the creative process, the strange ways it reveals itself, and the contortions we sometimes have to make to intercept it. It is often a set text on creative-writing courses.

I really hope you’ll join us!

It was first published in 1997, and is widely available. In the UK there’s a shiny new Canongate edition, and in the US it’s published by Macmillan. Hopefully it shouldn’t be hard to find in libraries, and there are plenty of second-hand copies available with all the usual suspects. The audiobook is narrated by Tom Hollander and he does a brilliant job.

Reading schedule:

N.B. it has no chapters, so hopefully the page numbers are universal! If not, we’ll muddle through…

7th - 13th April: pages 1 - 46, section ending ‘I read, looked out of the window, slept, read, or dreamed I read and looked out of the window.’

14th - 20th April: pages 46 - 88, section ending ‘And over all of this, a sky of Camus blue…’

21st - 27th April: pages 88 - 122, section ending ‘Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszatd Kapuscinski, Thomas Bernhard…’

28th April - 4th May: catchup break

5th May - 11th May: pages 122 - 162, section ending ‘I read other letters in the same spirit, obsessively, eager to see what will set him off next.’

12th May - 18th May: pages 162 - 208, section ending ‘then you can despair.’

19th May - 25th May, pages 208 - end.

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