"What are you reading?"

Last time I talked to my mom she asked, “what are you reading?” twice during our conversation. Here’s the complete list, now, as I sit at my desk, having ridden my bike as dark came over Winnipeg…

I just finished Motherland by Elissa Altman. This evening I’ve been scrolling through the author’s Instagram, combing it for evidence of I don’t know what… love? survival?

I’m just about done A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, having cast aside (temporarily) Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution.

I picked up Wow No Thank You because I’d like to be funnier, but I’m not sure it’s working because serious books are taking over my desk, my time… Things like Homeland to Hinterland; The Changing Worlds of the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century or The Genealogy of the First Metis or Canada Post Offices 1755-1895, I mean, take your pick, they’re all very serious.

Motherland has this quote by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

Weekend away

Darling,

Remember that time I spontaneously booked us a weekend at whatever chalet was affordable in Manitoba? And remember looking at the pictures and finding that it felt clean and springing for the expense that was just under what the kids’ piano lessons cost in a month?

I don’t know if you felt this way too, but the week before leaving my thoughts would go to this booking I’d made and wonder why I did it… Wasn’t it just changing scenery to do the same things as at home, with the additional job of packing and unpacking?

But then, remember? We arrived on a rainy Friday afternoon and just being somewhere else seemed to trick the brain into feeling a sort of freedom. Being somewhere else was leaving behind all the things around you that remind you what to do next. The quiet and the farms around and the distant lowing cows... The list of things to do shrinks down to food and entertainment. Exploration is the new form of passing time: the country lanes, the nearby town, the pebbled beach.

Remember how the dog kept us awake the first night? The little beagle made us feel like new parents again. The kind that, smiling with tired eyes, made us catch the other’s gaze and say, “we’re in this together, eh?”

The weekend, short as it was, time distended as it was, was one of those that cemented this growing feeling I get when we’re all together and we move about like a unit, like a little cell with its mitochondria and nucleus and all those other little pieces I once memorized in grade 11 biology class.

Just thought I’d write to say thanks. And, love.

A final word on conspiracy theories

I really like this quote… it is lifted from the conclusion of a podcast mini-series by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “Wind of Change”. I wrote it down a year ago and came across it while looking for something else. I wrote it down before I could have guessed how many new conspiracy theories I would hear. It expresses why I feel so impatient with them.

That’s the nature of a conspiracy theory, it’s impossible to prove, but also impossible to disprove, so if you have the temperament and the time you can devote yourself to solving it for the rest of your life. But if you’re a person whose livelihood depends on the slow and steady accretion of provable facts then there’s a madness in chasing a story like this. And there’s something about the moment we’re living in when everyday the nature of truth is called into question that make me feel like the stakes of solving this slightly ridiculous story are greater somehow than the story itself. (…) The rabbit hole is beautiful but it is deep.

Come walk a loop with me

My walk begins at Henteleff Park, not far from our house. For the past year, I’ve walked through it every day, and less consistently but still frequently in the years before. I’ve taken pictures of pretty skies, pretty grass, strange trees, and geese within its boundary. Walks have inspired colour palettes, landscaping ideas, and blog posts. The routine of has favoured the appreciation of seasonal change and small things. It refines a sense of noticing over time, rather than the vibrant impact of new.

Since the creation of the Henteleff Foundation in 2002, an interpretive center was added, a bathroom, a parking lot, a bulletin board and summer time employees. The bulletin board featured birds this year, and the announcement of hectares added to the park.

If you leave the wood chip trail you can find, near the dried-up Normand Creek, remnants of the park’s past inhabitants. The feeling that the park once hosted a family, and probably Métis before that, before the surge of its present-day organisation and volunteer efficiency, gives me a frisson of delight. It reminds me of one of my favourite parts of the book Treed by Ariel Gordon, in which she traces the history of the trees planted in Winnipeg and along her street and concludes: “This essay isn’t my answer; it’s an attempt to think through what it means to hold land on this scale, to shape it and change it. This essay is a windbreak - like those trees outside Alverna’s kitchen window, it is a gesture, an attempt to protect something. But make no mistake, the Arksey farm is on Indigenous land. And telling the stories of this piece of land is maybe only a gesture at reconciliation.” (p 225)

In spite of the organisation, the rallying of good efforts, the park still distinguishes itself as a wild area compared to the manicured properties of the condominiums that neighbour it on either side.

This year, the presence of summer workers is revealed with a crop of new signs, the steady work of invasive plant control and new trees and shrubs that have to be watered and protected with wire until established.

You know that you have left Henteleff Park when the wood-chip path becomes the small-gravel path and those giants from the new development of Normand Park come into view. There’s this lookout, a little apart from the path, that provides a clear view of the river. I’ve taken so many pictures from this spot…

The Normand Park trail features two playgrounds: a new one and an old one. The kids have played at both and it would take very little for me to tip into nostalgia.

The near-end of its trail snakes through a small forest that was so filled with cankerworms this spring, I once left the path to forge a new one along the less-treed river bank and almost ended up worse-off, sneaking through unfenced private-properties to find the trail again. The cankerworms then became quivering white butterflies who, for a short period, transformed this section of the path into a scintillating sight.

The Normand Park path ends here, or begins here, if you want. As an entry though, it is so discreet that I wasn’t surprised one day, when a woman walking her puppy told me that in the 30 years she’d been living in the neighbourhood, it was only in the past months that she and her husband discovered the trail.

Leaving it behind, the sound of traffic rushes to your ears, and you are back in the city. You know this because of the sidewalk, with its cracks and its weeds. And then, with a view of Tim Hortons, and maybe too the smell of its coffee and sugary pastries, it’s the almost-end of your loop.

Imperfect blog posts are defiance and joy

It’s too easy for me to be serious. Named after a saint whose portrait at nine featured a furrowed brow, I’m prone to pondering. It’s an affliction that holds me back from writing here, bogged down too quickly with a preoccupation about meaning. I’m like a beaver, constantly building dams that impeded the flow of water. But then, along comes someone like George Saunders with A Swim in a Pond in The Rain and I rediscover how refreshing the movement of water is. Right from the start, I am soothed with a line that reads: “the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.” Defiance and joy!

This morning, listening to Terrible Thanks for Asking, Anne Lamott described how our desire to help can keep someone from finding the solution for themselves. Describing something she’s learned for herself, she says “I try not to get my goodness all over people because it just keeps them shut down from the only thing that ever got anybody to wake up or get sober or get therapy or learn to eat in a healthy way which is; the willingness comes from the pain and if I’m medicating their pain for them out of my own disease of co-dependence I’m keeping them from the one thing that might help them find a much much better life.”

Years ago, our friends’ baby was born into the Neo-natal intensive care unit and, being myself young at the time, my life changed and adopted a frenzied mission to help. I drove too fast on an icy road and hit a car that cut me off, I rushed every second of my lunch hour to deliver fresh scones made the night before and all this to prove I could help (nay, improve!) the lives of my friends.

Now, in my thirties, I catch myself not rushing in to help so much as needing to provide for myself and others a satisfactory explanation, only to be stumped by the futility of the exercise. Turning to art, reminding myself what art is, is a huge comfort when faced with Life Events. Borrowing from Anne Lamott, I still need to learn how “not to get my explanations all over people” and cure myself of wanting to control the discomfort. The discomfort becomes so large in my mind that I lose the ability to find joy and consequently, the ability to write freely, for fun, for no reason. I guess that is where I need the defiance: I should not pretend to myself that I can improve anything by giving up the dutiful practice of writing imperfect blog posts.

I highly recommend A Swim in a Pond in The Rain.

Squirrelling away

I’m busy reading - dissertations and books and letters from the archive, but sometimes my mind starts to wander and I begin to feel restless and the only thing to do is to go outside and deadhead flowers, find weeds to weed, or in this case, a squirrel’s thirty-some nut cache to dig up. I wouldn’t mind the nut caches if the squirrel didn’t forget them completely and leave them to sprout into what becomes a miniature oak forest.

Summer projects

Some people go camping. We change the view by taking up landscape-modification projects. These projects start innocently, a whisper of an idea, a comment in passing… I gather inspiration, we trace lines over the grass using butcher’s twine, or rope that once served as a clothesline on a camping trip West. And then Christian gets to work…

We converted an expanse of lawn into a rock garden, as it seems to be the fashion in these hot, dry years.

I organized my pantry too, and this time, I swear, it’s “once and for all”. Has that ever happened to you, where the system you put into place, which makes you glow with satisfaction, slowly gets overtaken by the creep, creep, creep of store-bought bags? Here, (I’ll proudly point) here are my newly organized spices! But then, a week or so into the pretty jars from IKEA, (labelled too!) I realize that the tablespoon doesn’t fit into the mouth of the jar, and then six months later, cinnamon stands on its own, and I’ve started a little collection of spices in bags that I’ve not emptied into their appropriate container. When bay-leaves risk falling into your pot of boiling pasta again, it’s time to consider assuaging the nagging need to do. When you can’t find whether or not you have unsweetened coconut for making granola, and each time you make couscous the items you have to remove to get to it pool on the counter, it’s time to take the ennui seriously. To this end, I’m using canning jars: large ones and small ones. If it works for sad_papi, it works for me!

Reading list: Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam

How to start: This is a memoir written by Osip Mandelstam’s wife, from the period of his arrest in 1934, to his release, and his imprisonment with descriptions of life in the USSR under the communist regime.

Favourite quotes: We never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, “What was he arrested for?” but we were exceptional. Most people, crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope: if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn’t be arrested, because they hadn’t done anything wrong. (p. 10)

In periods of violence and terror people retreat into themselves and hide their feelings, but their feelings are ineradicable and cannot be destroyed by any amount of indoctrination. Even if they are wiped out in one generation, as happened here to a considerable extent, they will burst forth again in the next one. We have seen this several times. The idea of good seems really to be inborn, and those who sin against the laws of humanity always see their error in the end - or their children do. (p. 24)

People always clutch at straws, nobody wants to part with his illusions, and it is very difficult to look life in the face. To see things as they are demands a superhuman effort. There are those who want to be blind, but even among those who think they are not, how many are left who can really see see? Or rather, who do not slightly distort what they see to keep their illusions and hopes alive? (p. 63)

The loss of mutual trust is the first sign of the atomization of society in dictatorships of our type, and this was just what our leaders wanted. (p. 95)

Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality - it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times - the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant “unmasking” of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action - all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind. (p. 134)

Tangential: The Poetry Foundation has the poet’s biography and some of his poetry online.

Statue

This is the story of how we housed a statue of Ste Thérèse for 15 years.

Fifteen years ago, my husband’s grandmother, Alice, was alive. She was a solid lady with thin white hair who pushed a walker with the determination of a person with hip-replacements who would not slow down. She befriended a lady forever referred to as Mrs. Teece. I don’t know how the name is spelled, but that is how it sounded. Mrs. Teece came into possession of a statue of Ste Thérèse. Having come from a church, the statue was four feet tall and weighed 80 pounds. At some point, maybe at Mrs Teece’s death, the statue was passed along to Alice who put it in her bedroom, or had it installed there, among other religious articles and porcelain dolls. And then one day, when one of Alice’s great grand-daughters was visiting, she noticed her effusive love of Ste Thérèse and decided that the statue should go to this great-granddaughter in Quebec next.

Death didn’t come immediately of course, not even sneakily in the night for Alice. It loitered a bit, sending her to a care home for a few months and then catching up with her in the hospital. The statue being what it was, heavy, and made of plaster, could not accompany Alice to her final bedrooms, and so found a stay in our house, being that my husband was this great-granddaughter’s uncle. We put the statue in a corner of our dining room. It felt like having a visitor, since our dining room was reserved for visitors and we normally ate in the kitchen. Seeing a giant statue in someone else’s home tour pushed me to consider Ste Thérèse a bit of unique decor.

I dusted her black veil and the crevasses in her dress folds and the creases of the roses that clustered around the crucifix she held. A visiting priest once took interest in the statue and appraised its solidity by examining the paint for hairline cracks. Meantime, she popped into pictures. Meantime we repainted the walls and changed the decor. We moved Ste Thérèse downstairs. We stopped paying attention to the angles of our picture-taking.

And then, just the other day, it was arranged that these people from Quebec, coming to Manitoba by air to pick up a vehicle bought here, could bring Ste Thérèse with them, to have her, as it was intended 15 years ago, given to this great-granddaughter. The internet recommends bubble wrap and tape. I found videos on lashing packages. Double boxing can be done for delicate things, but seemed like a step too far. Christian bought bubble wrap. He brought up the 80 pound plaster statue from downstairs. I wrapped and taped the Ste Thérèse and tied a mask to her face as a Covid precaution. Her life-size realism sometimes made us think of her as a character in our house. Would she rather stay here? Could divine events make it so that her story ended with us? Could she crumble into pieces as protest?

Christian loaded her into the car and I added bubble wrap to her base. After supper, I drove to St Boniface and found the Quebec visitors talking around the cleared dinner-table of their friendly hosts. I sat with them. As the sky darkened we eventually left the chairs, eventually also the apartment and the building for the parking lot and the statue was taken from my car to their van as rain wet the asphalt. She was seat-belted into place and I took a picture that was nothing but a blur under street-lights.

Attention please

I was an only child for six years and lived a cozy life perched on the 19th floor of an apartment building in downtown Saskatoon. At some point in that period mom paid a magazine subscription for me, to some innocuous title I don’t remember which happened to print reader submissions. My five-year old self felt inspired one day to put words into a poem shape after a rain shower with the express purpose of sending it off to see if it would be returned to me on a magazine page. It was.

Once I heard, or maybe read somewhere, some offhand comment to the effect of “if you only knew how many people send in poems about rain!” and I blushed for my five-year-old self.

The ideas we have about something are often depressingly unoriginal. At the same time, we absorb things without even knowing… I’m always worried about how much I miss. I totally forgot I read Loving by Henry Green until I opened the book and started reading the first pages. I’ve taken up drawing, in part, for its attention-capturing quality.

I’m planning a new flower bed in our front yard and returned to a book on my shelf: Perennials for Every Purpose by Larry Hodgson. I re-read an entry for Goat’s Beard, where the author’s comment: “Goat’s Beard will never disappoint you” felt so much like my own thought that it was like recognizing something familiar - my own foot, my own voice. Our yard has 4 of these plants, used like shrubs, just as Hodgson recommends. Years ago, I studied this book when looking for inspiration and here, I’ve absorbed it without realizing.

Urban observer

I’m not any good at observing nature, and if it wasn’t for my husband’s weather-watching hobby, I’d wear sweaters in summer, and uselessly carry around an umbrella when it was cloudy. But there is a thing I can observe that moves slow enough and stays large enough to follow… that is the state of urban shopping centres.

Here in the southern-most tip of Winnipeg I am five minutes from St. Vital mall which took one of its largest hits (in my subjective observation) even before the pandemic when Sears shuttered its doors and the mall eventually filled the vacancy with three new tenants: a gym, a Marshall’s and a Home Sense. I recently walked through the mall, my errands too diverse to avoid doing so, and noted the vacancies like missing teeth in a smile: no more La Senza, Thyme Maternity, Build-a-Bear or pretzel place. Gymboree has long since given up its spot to Petland.

Within less than four kilometres of my house there are two Dollarama’s - reminding me a the grim article I read a few years ago on just this subject. (It might have been this one, in Bloomberg.) The ones here replaced Pier 1 Imports and a local grocer.

Maybe less than ten years ago, a new outlet strip mall was set up on Kensaton with stores like Tommy Hilfiger, Reitman’s, and Danier. Storefronts have changed. Just recently one switched from clothing to skin care. But this string of outlet stores face their own extinction since the appearance of the Outlet Collection on Sterling Lyon Parkway. I’m not sure how retailers managed to conclude that this was a wonderful idea, two decades into the 2000’s. I tend to be of the pessimistic opinion that malls are dying or dead, but somehow developers in Winnipeg have declared otherwise. A beautiful mall with sky-high ceilings and aisles that anticipated social distancing before a single bat ever coughed, opened and became part of the landscape like a giant mushroom. It does feel like the final stages of retail, described here as a kind of canabalization.

There’s a time warp though, and I’m not sure what to think of it. You can find articles that say that retail is dying from years ago, and yet things are still being built and bought and sold here. Are we slow? Are the people who note the trend mistaken in their conclusion? Is it a kind of pessimism, or is it that old capitalist ideas are still being clung to? I don’t know… Hence the observations.

Loch Ness monster

There’s this add for a productivity app that pops into Youtube playlists. While the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist, it says, good teamwork can - thanks to Asana.

The Loch Ness monster? It exists! It left its deep murky cove and swam far, far away, and hearing of the sturgeon lying deep below the currents of the Red River came to feast on them. Then the Loch Ness monster grew fat, and one day prayed the gods to be delivered from the pursuit of Manipogo. Like in Daphne’s case, the gods took pity and turned the Loch Ness monster into a tree.

It seems content here through the change of seasons, caught, revealingly, mid stride.

In the archives

Yesterday I went to the Saint-Boniface archives. Covid protocoles make for socially-distanced desks, and yesterday my desk for reviewing documents was just outside, under the arches of a preserved wall from the Empire Hotel.

Behind me was a wooden desk, also from the Empire Hotel.

Covid protocols keep me masked. Documents are all safe from my exhalations.

Some documents are huge!

This is a land title document with an impressively huge red wax seal, covered for its protection, still bearing pretty green ribbons. Her Majesty Queen Victoria is mentioned. It is dated 1888. Not all documents are so big and land titles eventually shrunk. But I like to imagine the office where this was written, the officious people who dipped their fountain pen in an inkwell, the giant seal and the man to whom the land was granted, walking out with this massive paper, to go farm a plot in relative isolation, going to bed at night in a rudimentary wood log house.

Two moments

This morning when I walked the dog, the river was like glass.

On the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I savoured what Christiane Wolfe had to say about anger and intention:

Forgiveness is a really hard one [emotion]. And forgiveness doesn’t happen overnight. Forgiveness is not something that we decide, just like “yeah that makes sense to forgive that person, or that situation, or myself.” But the thing is that anger will turn into bitterness, if we, over time, can’t let go of it. And that’s just like a yucky feeling. (…) We have agency over our intention. We don’t have agency, as I said, we can’t decide to forgive or we can’t decide to be compassionate or we can’t decide to love, right? But what we do, is we can set the intention and then we can keep inviting these qualities in, over and over and over and just trust basic neuroscience, right, that whatever we do repeatedly, that will change us.

Foreign lands

I am deep into research, trying to wrangle information gathered from archives into a neat container that one calls a thesis. I’ve come to recognize this feeling from research projects past and my favourite metaphor is one of travel…

Craig Mod in his final picture of a pop-up newsletter called “Huh” captured the feeling in a few phrases: “what I remember most about this moment is how foreign and unknowable it all felt, an impenetrable newness, and for a second five lives (Derro just out of frame) converge and information is exchanged and, with a dollop of confidence, we take the very first steps of the long walk that starts it all.”

Burrowing into the past is much like travelling to another country… You have to find your bearings - the people and the places that were different, the organizations that existed then that don’t now, the customs that were common then but sound so unusual now.

A week in five recipes

Of all the ways one might write of hectic days, listing the things you made to eat, or ate made by others, might be the most sympathetic.

On Monday I made blueberry popsicles and discovered what a mess pureed blueberries make.

On Tuesday I hosted lunch for a friend while our puppies played together. Chickpea Pan Bagnat is the visitor-friendly kind of lunch you can prepare ahead and pick up and put down for the inevitable child and puppy interruptions.

On Wednesday, Christian found enough string beans in the garden for Salade Niçoise. The garden centre had new potatoes for sale.

On Thursday, we made our son’s birthday party lunch: grilled cheese and a strawberry-banana smoothie.

On Friday we made salmon en papillote, paired it with simple fried rice and a glass of white wine to celebrate the end of an unusually busy week.

Googly-eyes

Googly-eyes are just fun. Affixing googly-eyes to pictures of people or objects isn’t a new idea… Someone did so in 1969, out of boredom and invented Weepuls. But the objective in our was less about lessening boredom and more exercising the opportunities unleashed by a bagful of googly-eyes bought at Gale’s Wholesale.

I’d noticed that my mother'-in-law’s condo had signs with eye-less mask wearers and asked the kids if I should outfit them with googly-eyes. The kids said yes. The kids also said to take photo evidence.

I learned a new word earlier this year, when Mary Karr described herself as occasionally puckish. Puckish? Here’s the OED: “Of the nature of or characteristic of Puck; impish, mischievous, capricious.” This small act of “eyebombing”? Very puckish.

“I did this thing,” I told my mother-in-law during our visit. I brought her to the elevator and showed her the sign.
”Those signs have been there forever!” she said, the new eyeballs looking so natural…
”I added the eyes!” I said.
She looked again and started to laugh.
”Want to do the sign on the floor above?” I offered. She did!
Walking along the hallway, I felt more happiness watching her stifle her giggles than I did actually affixing the eyes. But then, isn’t that the nature of a trick? The whole anticipation we feel just imagining what reactions might be? It’s a lot more fun steering the imagination that way than it is listening to it after watching the news.

Woolly

Seeing this debris left by a giant poplar, I thought of sheep’s wool. I like the idea of sheep… They pop up on TikTok being gathered by dogs, or being shorn by Katie McRose while she chats about her job… I think I like the idea of sheep because there are so few here, much like I like the idea of living in a rainy place (is it London still?) while the grass on our front lawn looks more like hay.

But back to the poplars… Step on this white fluff and it crunches. Hidden under its soft-looking exterior are the shelf of dried out seed heads.

Reading List: A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré

How to begin: Francine Prose uses the opening scene from A Perfect Spy to demonstrate an example of how dialogue advances the plot. Indeed, the book has lots of dialogue, but often what made me smile were the broad-stroke descriptions of people and places.

Quotes: “Like many tyrants Miss Dubber was small. She was also old and powdery and lopsided, with a crooked back that rumpled her dressing-gown and made everything round her seem lopsided too.” (p 2)

“He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny. (…) It’s Pym the Saturday night juggler bounding round the table and spinning one stupid plate after another because he can’t beat to let anyone down for one second and so lose their esteem.” (p 186)

“She was gangly and wild and walked with her wrists turned inside out…” (p 273)

“It is night. It is Bern’s darkest winter. The city will never see day again.” (p 274)

“He was wounded again and sent back to Carlsbad where his mother was laid up with jaundice, so he put her on a cart with her possessions and pushed her to Dresden, a beautiful city that the Allies had recently bombed flat.” (p 278)

“Brotherhood had bathed and shaved and cut himself and put on a suit.” (p 288)

“At number 18 he paused and in the manner of a protective purchaser stood back and surveyed the house. Bach and a smell of breakfast issued from the ground-floor kitchen.” (p 289)

“He was tall but reassuringly unathletic.” (p 291)

“It’s like trying to nail a raindrop to the wall, I tell you.” (p 386)

“Sir Kenneth sat opposite him; his gaze was yellowed and unresponsive. Brotherhood had seen dead men whose eyes were more alive. His hands had fallen into his lap and one of them kept flipping like a beached fish.” (p 415)

“Syd Lemon was a tiny, thickset old man these days, dressed all in brown like a rabbit. His brown hair, without a fleck of grey, was parted down the centre of his skull. His brown tie had horses’ heads looking doubtfully at his heart. He wore a trim brown cardigan and pressed brown trousers and his brown toecaps shone like conkers. From amid a maze of sunbaked wrinkles two bright animal eyes shone merrily, though his breath came hard to him. He carried a blackthorn stick with a rubber fertile, and when he walked he swung his little hips like a skirt to get himself along.” (p 502)

“We didn’t have anybody who wasn’t himself a citizen of the secret world, blessed with the unlined innocence of privilege.” (p 528)

“What a match was celebrated! Priests of upper-class humility, the great church famed for its permanence and previous successes, the frugal reception in a tomblike Bayswater hotel, and there at the centre of the throng, our Prince Charming himself, chatting brilliantly to the crowned heads of suburbia.” (p 533)

“The countryside was Austrian and beautiful. Many barns lay beside many lakes.” (p 536)

Tangential: I read this book after listening to John Le Carré’s memoir, and somehow, I often still heard his voice in my head, narrating these passages. A Perfect Spy was made into a seven episode mini-series released in 1987 on the BBC.

The view

Toady, we took off to the beach, lunch, children and dog in tow. I burned my neck thinking my hat had a larger brim. I enjoyed taking the dog for a walk along the water’s edge, exploring to the limit of the sand, where beach ran into forest, and trees that once stood had toppled over, their roots like a great big diner-table top, stood vertical. Some of their dried tangle still held captive boulders.

Then we came back to find everyone else in the water, and, after chasing waves, I sat under our umbrella and took in the view.