Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

War Horse - the Film

2012-01-30T14:06:00.002Z

Tax bill duly paid (and oh the pain of sending off that much money in one go, but at least it's done now), the Badger Exchequer felt it could handle Going Out. I have reviewed War Horse - the book; War Horse - the play and War Horse - the Exhibition, so felt duty bound to complete the set by reviewing the film. Actually getting to the film was the usual pell-mell rush, complicated by family taxi duties, and in the kerfuffle, forgot to ensure I had stuffed my pockets full of tissues. Bad move, I thought, as this movie has been billed as the ultimate weepie, and I am notorious in my family for crying at anything. I cry at happy; I cry at sad. Babies being born reduces me to floods every time. It is amazing that my copies of Black Beauty, The Ten Pound Pony and The Railway Children are not warped and tear stained. Fortunately OH had an unused handkerchief he was prepared to hand over.

Totally unnecessarily as it turned out. I remained stony hearted and dry-eyed throughout, only thinking of welling up at the reunion between the returning hero Albert and his mother. My husband, who is more used to having to deliver sympathetic pats to his sobbing wife, was instead more worried about restraining me as I bounced up and down in fury beside him, hissing about the arrival of yet another horse playing the part of Joey. Fair enough, one can't necessarily expect to use the same horse, particularly at the end, when Joey needs to appear a bit ragged, having been mired in wire. It's like using vintage cars: you need them in a period film, but no owner of a loved and slaved over vintage car wants it smeared in mud, and likewise no one in their right minds would starve a horse for the sake of cinematic verisimilitude. For the same reason, the horror of what horses when through in the First World War is only suggested.

So letting that one pass, the noise. The horse noise. All that whinnying. It's as if Spielberg was aware that the movie was supposed to be about a horse's point of view, and as horses can't act, nor portray subtleties of emotion, that gap had better be filled by whinnying. And harrumphing, and general horse noise, which horses actually don't generally do. They're usually pretty silent creatures (as you are when you are a prey species as the last thing you want to do is alert those hunting you to your presence). The audience obviously needed to have the horsiness rammed down their throats in case they forgot what the film was nominally about.

What the film was about, as the soupiness of the John Williams score constantly reminded you, was emotion. But the score and the film seemed strangely at odds: without the horrible relationship between Albert and his father being better delineated, and the cruelty of Mr Narracott's behaviour to Joey being as explicit as it is in the book, Albert's fascination with Joey becomes just another teenage horse obsession, rather than a combination of rebellion and desperation to find something meaningful in an otherwise grim existence.

The film itself felt episodic; with the removal of Joey as the narrator, the story lost the coherence it has in the book; and to some extent in the play. It was simply a trot round different people one might meet in a war, which therefore lost something the book stresses; the neutrality of a horse. They don't care who looks after them as long as it's done well. Humanity was also blanded out; Albert is not a character I enjoyed particularly in any of his incarnations, but even less so here. The softening of Albert's father from the brute he is in the book, and the sidelining of characters like the German officer who ordered the horses to be shot lessened the emotional impact of the film. Had one never read anything about World War One, the over-riding impression left by the film was of a collection of rather nice people suffering a bit. The actors did their best with what they were given to do, but for me the best performances occurred outside the war section. David Thewlis and Emily Watson were great.

Having read several reviews praising the film once it entered the War, I was expecting the film to move up several gears once war started, but was disappointed again. The war section did provide the two scenes I really did think well done: Joey's entanglement and subsequent cutting free from wire in No Man's land, which was wittily done (the wire cutters being thrown from the German trench was a particularly good touch) and the awful tension in the trenches before the men went over the top.

The film looks tremendously lush while it's in Devon; rather more so than it ought. The artfully applied neglect didn't convince; the layer of tattiness applied to what was obviously a good thick layer of recently applied thatch on the Narracott farmhouse (again I can see that you wouldn't want that removing if it was your house but still...) and the overly tidy barns. There was plenty of clutter, but none of it had that slightly sordid air you get from decades of undisturbed junk slowly mouldering away. It was just too clean. So unlike the homelife of my own dear outbuildings. And I know it's yet more nitpicking; but the farm is supposed to be grindingly poor, and the area not wealthy; but the village looked polished and rather twee; acres of beautifully painted pastel windowframes and lovely pointing.

I could have forgiven the extraneous horse noise and the lush prettiness, and even the soupy score if the film had done even half the job the book does of explaining the horror of war from a horse's point of view. I must admit I cannot think of any way that the film could have been done by relying on real horses; they just can't act, and as with the excruciating scene where Joey "shows" Topthorn accepting the driving collar is ok, it is obvious the horse is simply doing a trick it has been trained to perform. In the play (of which I am not a wholehearted fan either) the use of puppets obviously manipulated by man does at least enable the portrayal of emotion. Maybe I failed as a viewer; failed to be able to overlay the horses with emotion. Whatever, my over-riding emotions once the credits rolled were irritation and disappointment.

Consternation

2012-01-27T12:31:00.002Z

Cast into transports of horror at the weekend when an email arrived from Books for Keeps, for whom I've written an article. Can they have a photograph to illustrate the article, they say - of me. The only recent one involves a green, sparkly hat. Probably not quite the thing for a sensible author photo. There are no other photos, as I am generally behind the camera rather than in front of it and I loathe having my picture taken. When confronted with a camera my face seems to grow a thousand different muscles it didn't have before, and none of them want anything to do with the others. Discuss this with son, famed for years of having an ear or an elbow photographed as he fled the camera lens. "They take your soul, you know, photographs," he says. Agree, but reflect that going on his Facebook page, quite a lot of his soul must now be absent.

Anyway, I have thought uneasily over the last few months that I would probably have to provide an author photo for my book, when it eventually emerges, but managed each time the thought popped up to suppress it firmly. Now I must face it. I mutter to my husband, after seeing the email, that perhaps he needs to pick up the camera. "Um," he says, and then wisely forgets all about it. Monday arrives. "Here," I say to daughter. "We have five minutes before we have to leave for your orthodontist's appointment. Just take as many photographs of me as you can. Hopefully one of them will make me look at least human."

Daughter, also fully paid up member of the Facebook generation, picks up camera. There is a pause.

"Don't look so worried, Mum."

"Try raising an eyebrow and looking sideways. That's what I do."

I try this. There is a short and charged pause.

"No, Mum. Just.... no. Mum, it's not that hard. Just try and look.... normal."

"No, don't look above my head. Why are you looking above my head?"

I am very conscious at this point that we have only a couple of minutes before we absolutely must head off to the orthodontist. Attempt to relax. Attempt to look... normal. HOW DO I LOOK NORMAL? Want to whimper.

"No, try SMILING Mum."

Try. I really do. Daughter puts camera down and attempts to smooth my hair down. Do not feel that it is my hair that is the problem but my face is beyond smoothing. Daughter takes a series of rapid shots. We inspect them.

It is just vanity, isn't it, this horror of being photographed? I am still vain enough to want to present a half-way decent image to the world, but I do know what son means when he says photographs take your soul. It's a little chunk of yourself that you no longer have any control over, once your image is out there. I suppose I think the essential me is the one that writes and thinks; what I look like is incidental. So much harder for daughter's generation, when the pressure to have endless pictures of yourself, TAKEN by yourself, natch, seems impossible to resist. At least I can generally hide behind black and white 1930s equine photos.

Do think it sad that appropriate author photo is probably not the green sparkly hat.

And the sale continues...

2012-01-24T09:48:00.000Z

There's an extra 10% off the original price on my horse and pony sale stock, and now 30% off all non-pony children's books too.

Challenge at the Chalet School - down to £24.50 from £36.00

A lovely Picture Puffin - Plant Life, now £3.50, down from £5.00.

Sunrise

2012-01-17T09:51:00.000Z

The peg horse

2012-01-16T11:33:00.000Z

Inspired by Susanna's comment on the last post on card horses - she'd bought the stuff but not actually made one yet - I give you the five minute peg horse. I have a fantasy world I inhabit from time to time where I waft about making stuff, without it going disastrously wrong; a dog running off with something or me getting bored. Getting over all of those problems, here is the ultimate in re-useable creativity. I may have more. The tea towels may not escape.

Moving on from coloured horses,

2012-01-14T12:39:00.004Z

these ones are cardboard.

Thanks to Val for this.

The unknown ways of the coloured horse

2012-01-10T13:48:00.003Z

Why would the younger person have to be fond of children? Were they supposed to act as child-catcher for a skewbald who liked to eat them?

From Riding, July-August, 1948

Sale now on

2012-01-10T10:19:00.000Z

There's 30% off over 140 titles on my sales website, including Monica Edwards, Joanna Cannan and Primrose Cumming, and a whole variety of other stuff. You can find the sale here.

Caroline Akrill - Stars Don't Cry ~~£3.50~~ £2.45

Joanna Cannan - London Pride ~~£30.00~~ £21.00

Primrose Cumming - The Wednesday Pony ~~£15.00~~ £10.50

Monica Edwards - Hidden in a Dream ~~£20.00~~ £14.00

Hard work

2012-01-09T13:47:00.000Z

I wrote myself an enormous to-do list today, and having worked down a reasonable amount of it, stumped off downstairs to let the dogs out and have some lunch. No such luxury for the farm horseman in the 1700s, as these instructions to a farm foreman make clear: (the word cattle was used at the time to describe farm animals generally, or horses in particular, rather than just cows)

He is to rise at four in the morning, feed his cattle and clean his stable.

While the cattle are feeding he will get his harness ready, for which he will take two hours.
For his breakfast you shall allow him half an hour.

Then thou shall watch him put the harness on his cattle and start by seven at his work and keep at it till three in the afternoon.

He shall then bring his team home, clean them and give them their food, dine himself and at four go back to his cattle and give them more fodder, and getting into his barn, make ready their food for the morrow, and see the cattle again before going to his own supper at six.

After his supper he will mend his shoes by his fireside for himself and his family, or beat and knock hemp or flax, or pitch and stamp apples or crabs for cider or verjuice, or else grind malt, pick candle rushes or do some husbandry office within doors till it befall eight o'clock. Then shall he take his lantern, visit his cattle once more, and go with his household to rest."

This carter earned 10d a day (4p); had with the job a cottage with some outbuildings, and two acres of land, which his wife tilled. The timetable doesn't make clear whether the beating and knocking etc was for the carter's benefit, or for his employer's, though I suspect the specificity of it meant it was for the employer's.

I was intrigued by the fact the foreman was specifically required to oversee the harnessing, and the amount of time that was to be devoted to its care. No harness, no work.

Happy Christmas 2011

2011-12-25T07:00:00.004Z

Happy Christmas!

Christmas

2011-12-15T10:41:00.001Z

For years I've adopted a distinctly Scrooge-ish attitude to elaborate displays of outdoor Christmas lights, but this year it's different. This year they seem to have taken on a sort of brave defiance. If we're all going to hell in a handcart, why not do it with lots of twinkly lights? Haven't actually gone as far as putting any out myself. We lurk behind great swathes of unclipped shrubbery and trees, the sort of thing that any new person moving in would lay waste to within seconds. Any lights we put up would be completely invisible. The house itself is dour and louring, and splashing it with Christmas lights would be a bit like swathing a black clad Victorian matron with tinsel. Or worse.

We don't have a tree yet either. Well, we do, but it's stowed away in the barn, waiting for end of term when daughter and I (and her boyfriend this year) will decorate the tree. This will not take us long, the size of the tree reflecting the falling fortunes of the House of Badger. I spent some time wondering what I could do as a tree substitute, but decided that wrestling a dead elder out of the field and daubing it with decorations was an ironic statement too far, even for me.

So, we went and got a tree. It will need to be stood on a blanket box. If we carry on this way, next year's will be on a chest of drawers.

Anyway, I have been spending my evenings in a whirl of crafting activity, which is most unlike me, as any crafting I do generally goes wrong. If I have time off, I read. Or walk round in a dream. However, this year, I've started reading Cherry Menlove's blog, fully expecting that I was going to do lots of ironic and superior sniggering, but no. She's great, Cherry. She does craft and also cooking, and writes about her life brilliantly, and inspired purely by her (really, I would never have done this if I hadn't read the recipe on her blog) I made mincemeat. Now my version of doing this was not Cherry's because she doesn't have dogs and I do.

What you need when you do any sort of cooking is the very close and supportive attention only a Sprocker can give you. (This is Tarka, who we have for six months or so while my sister-in-law's away).

Perhaps I might drop something over this side. (The shoe was left there earlier by the labrador. I don't keep them in the middle of the floor.)

Labrador now back from re-arranging shoes and ready to lend her support.

Daughter stirring the mix. Note the speed of her whirling spatula. Who says teenagers are lazy?

I couldn't photograph both dogs at this point, but the labrador is behind me, willing me to drop something. I am about to deal with a lemon. What dog would not sell its soul for a lemon?

Here's the mix. It smelled beyond amazing, but I haven't actually cooked with it yet, which might be an idea before I give the results to my unsuspecting friends.

Here's a link to the recipe. I didn't have Amaretto, and when I went to buy ingredients and found out the price of Amaretto, I still didn't. I plundered the drinks cupboard, and substituted Marsala. Not quite sure why we have Marsala, but there you go.

War Horse - the Exhibition

2011-12-08T11:52:00.002Z

The mark of a good exhibition is learning things, and being made to think about things you had previously not considered. I freely admit military history is not something I spend a lot of time over. Sharpe and all Bernard Cornwell's fighting creations I love, but the minutiae of military manoeuvring generally leaves me cold. In that all of it impacts on living creatures; human and animal, it shouldn't, but it does.

The War Horse exhibition is right up my street, being about the effects of war on skin and bone; equine skin and bone. A fair chunk of the exhibition is taken up with Michael Morpurgo and War Horse, the book, play and movie. That section of the exhibition is worth it if only to see the original of Victor Ambrus' illustration for the first edition of war horse. The original cover wasn't helped by the overall cover design. The illustration on its own, framed (and now owned by Michael Morpurgo) is stunning.

The rest of the exhibition is well done. I had expected to come out of it with a broad sense of the part the horse played in war, and I did, but rather to my surprise, it was individual artefacts that made the most impression - the farrier's axe, for one. It was the stern practicality of it that got me: horses die in war, as we all know, but they are also terribly injured. I had assumed that seriously injured horses were shot, but for most of humanity's history, the bullet didn't exist, so what happened to the horse then?

What was used to deal with the situation was a farrier's axe. This had a spike on one part of the head, used to put the horse out of its misery, and an axe on the other, used to take off a hoof. Each horse would have had a numbered hoof, and what had happened to each horse could therefore be recorded.

When I think of war, I tend to think of the death-or-glory moments, and certainly not the clearing up. All credit to the National Army Museum for including a section on the Brooke Hospital's work in Egypt. After, rather confusingly, stating that "The War Office promised that unwanted horses in Egypt and the Middle East were to be destroyed rather than sold on to cruel owners..." the next display talks about the miserable wrecks of army horses which Dorothy Brooke found when she moved to Egypt with her husband in 1930, without explaining how the horses got into that state, as they were obviously not destroyed.

When Dorothy Brooke found these horses, and there were thousands of them, not just a few, she organised an appeal through the Morning Post. It raised over £20,000 and the Brooke Hospital for Animals was born in Cairo. The Brooke Hospital did, and does, amazing work. There are still many, many working horses in the world, and the Brooke is dedicated to improving their lot through veterinary treatment and community education. It is out of print now, but if you can find a copy of For Love of Horses - Dorothy Brooke's Diaries, now sadly out of print, it is a fine read. She saw some truly terrible things. Most of the photographs following are not in the exhibition: some are graphic and upsetting, so please click away now if you are feeling fragile. The National Army Museum presumably has not included the worst lest they upset, but the end result of war for many horses was painful death, and for some unfortunates, years of suffering.

Old Bill - one of the first war horses rescued by Dorothy Brooke in 1931. His photo featured in her original appeal to the Morning Post (now Daily Telegraph) in 1931.

Dorothy Brooke

One of the first horses rescued

An emaciated horse in Cairo

Emaciated and suffering horse collapsed in a Cairo street

One of the first horses rescued by Dorothy Brooke

Buying day

Dorothy Brooke in the yard of the SPCA in Cairo with some of the war horses she rescued

I can highly recommend the rest of the museum. If military strategy is not your thing that does not matter. The exhibits are wide ranging, and I had a thoroughly fascinating couple of hours fossicking about in what were not quite deserted galleries, but certainly not brimming with visitors. This is sad, as the museum's focus is on humanity, not tactics. I'm not entirely sure which of those categories the skeleton of Napoleon's war horse, Marengo's, skeleton comes into, but that's there too.

Thank you very much to the Brooke Hospital for supplying me with photographs from their collection. All photographs © The Brooke

100 Poem Challenge

2011-12-07T10:16:00.002Z

I love the poems you can see on London tube trains, which you can read as you strap hang mindlessly, tuning out humanity. Poems you don't know are like little nuggets which you might, or might not, have time to have got to the bottom of before you get off the train. After a brief, florid and unsuccessful excursion into poetry when I was 17, I settled to loving what other people do, and I do love Jen Campbell's poems. Recently she completed a 100 poem challenge, in which she wrote 100 poems in a weekend, and raised over £3,000 for EEC Syndrome. Jen wrote each of the poems on a postcard, and here's mine:

and what I like to think of as my poem; particularly as when writing I like to drift off with the dogs along the hedgerows, telling myself I'm crafting, and not prevaricating.

Jen has collected all the poems together and published them. You can read more of the poems here.

Updated to say that one of Jen's poems will indeed be in a tube train near you (well, if you travel in London it will) as part of Words in Motion. The poem will be up in January.

Fancy dress

2011-11-26T10:47:00.000Z

Wow. Just wow. Thanks very much to Sue Howes for this:

10% off all stock until 31st December

2011-11-26T10:39:00.000Z

As it says, really - click here! And here's some new stock:

Riding equipment

2011-11-24T17:41:00.000Z

This advertisement, and variations of it, appeared regularly in Riding magazine in the 1940s and 1950s. I had a quick check through this week's Horse and Hound to see if anything similar appeared, but either the modern man has no such need, or we have gone all coy.

Gardening on the edge has gone completely bung

2011-11-23T11:48:00.002Z

As has this blog. If you are a regular reader, I am very sorry I haven't been about. All my writing efforts have been directed at my pony book book, which I really, really need to find a title for. The only things I can think of are the really corny, taking a swipe sort like Galloping Hooves - The Pony Book Obsession, or things like It's Awfully Bad Luck on Diana, which my editor tells me means nothing to most people. Well, I say, most people who are going to buy this book will know that poem. Did they not read their Pony Club Annual, for goodness' sake? But I expect she is right, as she certainly has been so far as she has dissuaded me from my besetting sin, which is assuming what I know, everyone else does too. And my second besetting writing sin, which is digressing. Which I am doing now.

So, hauling myself back to the point, which is gardening, or actually not gardening. Slugs.

Slugs are one of those things that continue regardless of what you do in the garden, which is fair enough, as they are after all living creatures and the general point of a species is to survive. Do not fight the slugs - you will not win. Not unless you have unlimited time and funds anyway, in my experience. The wool stuff works, but it costs a bomb, and I can't afford it. Slug pellets my slugs eat as a first course, and then move on to devour my plants. I don't like putting pellets of any sort down anyway, even organic ones, as I like to preserve my hedgehogs and thrushes, and I'm just not consistent enough. I bought some organic slug pellets last year, but only managed to put them down once. I guess you have to be a bit more persistent than this for it to work, and persistence is not in the armoury of the gardener on the edge.

Coffee grounds don't appear to stop slugs in their tracks either. I am simply not going to go out at night with a torch and pick up slugs, or cut them up, or bung them in salt water or whatever else people do. By the time night comes, I have had enough and just want to sit for a bit. I also have a sneaking admiration for a species that's so successful despite all that humanity can throw at it. Attempting to live in harmony with the slugs suits the mixture of laziness and opportunism that is me and the garden. I therefore let seed stuff I don't have to fight the slugs and snails for, and in the winter salad department, that's rocket (preferably wild); american land cress; chervil, and lamb's lettuce. The one thing I do try in an effort to preserve from slugs is ash from the fire, but this only works as long as the weather's not too wet. Here is a chard plant, which, rather to my surprise, came up in a flower bed. This I think could go either way but the slugs have the edge at the moment.

I did one year grow some other sort of mustard, but that was a complete disaster. Not because the slugs didn't like it - they didn't, but it was so hot, we couldn't get it down either. I have just remembered my one other anti-snail technique - I sling them over the wall into the graveyard next door. I'm quite sure they all just come back again but it makes me feel better temporarily.

New stock

2011-11-17T10:50:00.000Z

I'm doing an offer until 20th November - 10% off all new stock. Here's a couple of examples:

A lovely copy of the GGB edition of one of Monica Edwards' best, once again hard to find - £70, and below a very good early Puffin ponies plus adventure story, £4.00.

11.11.11

2011-11-11T09:06:00.000Z

Gardening on the edge: lamb's lettuce

2011-11-10T13:58:00.000Z

It is with a huge phew that I write this post, waving to the other gardeners on the edge out there. I had visions when I wrote the post of some dismissive comments about my efforts - though actually, I suppose if you were any good, you would move swiftly on and ignore, and that suits me fine.

I've been thinking a lot about my gardening efforts since my first post, and I do have a few principles. Earlier today I went and photographed my vegetable patch so I could show you what I do, and my first thought was that I should trim the flowers off my rocket plants, but then I thought, heck, if it weren't for the photos I just wouldn't, so I left them. Who am I trying to kid? This is my patch:

There is an awful lot of green, but that is because a lot of it is weed. It's not that large (I have to confess that I have a couple of other patches but they are even worse and I am going to have to work up to showing the full horror on screen).

At first, I thought I'd mention the general principles on which I garden, because there actually are some. I have of course tried to succeed without them, and no doubt still will. Quite often with me hope triumphs over experience, as you will probably see a. if you follow what I'm up to, and b. I keep on telling you about it.

Something on which I batten quite a bit of hope is the generosity of other gardeners.

Principle 1. Acquire some local friends who really can garden. I am lucky in that I have several of these. They have beautiful gardens, and years of experience (so do I have years, but my years have not been useful years as theirs have). They know what I am up against in terms of climate and soil conditions as theirs are thereabouts the same. They do not mind when I moan about my gardening disasters, and they give me the benefit of their years of experience. One of the most useful things I learned was from a brilliant gardener (I mean really brilliant - he propagated auriculas). Shortly after we moved in I was complaining that not one of my lambs' lettuce seedlings had germinated. This, he said, was because I planted it in May. But that's what it said on the packet, I said. Makes no difference, he said. Lamb's lettuce is a short daylight crop, and it germinates only when the days get shorter. He was absolutely right. I sowed lamb's lettuce in August; it came up in August, and it has been with me ever since. I let it self seed and it comes up on its own every year. It comes up in some odd places, and I have been known to pick our winter salad out of the gravel path in the front of the house, but it's salad, and it's there.

Here's a horribly congested collection of seedlings (as well as a few other things I can't identify) and which I really should thin out, but haven't.

None of my gardening friends, and my sister, who have kindly provided me with numerous raspberry plants, have been able to help with my efforts there, alas. More on those soon.

Reviews: Sheena Wilkinson, Mary Finn and Emily Edwards

2011-11-08T14:52:00.004Z

Emily Edwards - The Trouble with Being a Horse
Single Stride Publishing
Around £4.00 on Amazon
Emily Edwards' website

I tend to shy away from reviewing self-published books, after a particularly bad experience with one, and so when the author of this one got in touch with me my first reaction was to think thanks, but no. However, the author sent me a link to her first chapter, and I read it and was intrigued. Yes, I said. Please do send me a copy. So, a week or so later the book, arrived, fresh from Canada.

The common theme with all the books I'm reviewing today is that the authors have managed to find a new angle on the pony story. The Trouble with Being a Horse is Emily Edwards' first novel, and it is the story of Olivia, forbidden to ride. After a fall from her favourite horse at the local riding stables, she loses consciousness, and when she wakes up, finds that she has turned into a horse: a chestnut mare. When a child (and occasionally, I admit it, even now) I often used to pretend to be a horse, and would half pass my way across the playground, or do a fine extended trot along the street. (For those who are worried about the spectacle of someone nearly 50 doing this, I now restrict myself to an extended walk). Most children with a pony obsession pretend to be a horse, but it really happens to Olivia.

Emily Edwards does a good job of exploring what it would be like if this really, and truly happened to you. Olivia still has fully human reactions still, and so we see her battling with attempting to fit in with her new equine world. She is a horse, but doesn't know how to be one; but as a human she was struggling to fit in with her family. She doesn't really fit in anywhere, and it is Olivia's growing awareness of this, and attempts to deal with it, that lend the book a real spark. Some of the language is occasionally a little awkward, but overall, this is an intriguing first novel.

Mary Finn - The Horse Girl
Walker Books, £6.99

The Horse Girl is set in 18^th century Lincolnshire, and is the story of wheelwright's son, Thomas, the girl Ling, and Stubbs. Stubbs is one of the main reasons this book leapfrogged others to the top of the to be reviewed pile. I have been a Stubbs fan since the day I found a very used copy of his Mares and Foals as a stamp. Thomas is a failure at the local grammar school: he is, as we now know with 21st century hindsight, dyslexic. Thomas meets Ling, desperate to find a horse she knows Stubbs has bought, and which she thinks he will butcher in order to study its anatomy. They discover that Stubbs is not the brute they had imagined, and Stubbs looks set to become part of Thomas' future, employing him as an apprentice. Ling, however, is set on finding her horse, Belladonna.

I found this a deeply frustrating book. The first half, I lapped up. It is when the book is dealing with Stubbs, and with Thomas and his family, that it is at its most impressive. The description of how Stubbs goes about his work is enthralling, together with the gradual flowering of Thomas' abilities as he begins to discover how he can use his talents.

It was when the book took off in a pell mell charge after Ling and her desire to find the horse Belladonna, after finding that she has been sold on, that the book lost me. Ling is the almost obligatory feisty teenage girl, determined to cast off the shackles that confine the 18^th century woman, and go her own way. Ling I simply didn’t find as fascinating as Thomas. I enjoyed the small things the book focussed on in the first half; Thomas’ sister Nan; the family’s meals, and the details of how a wheelwright worked.

Mary Finn has written two books: an excellent exploration of Stubbs, and the problems of being dyslexic in a time when your condition was condemned as stupidity, and a love and adventure story which lacks the sure touch of the first half. If Mary Finn had concentrated throughout the book on Stubbs and Tom, I would I am quite sure have been recommending this book as one of my reads of the year. She has the atmosphere off incredibly well; Tom is is an absolutely believable character. The detail about Stubbs is fascinating, and that is what I wanted more of. [The sensitive should beware: Finn goes into reasonably graphic detail about Stubbs' methods of discovering the horse's anatomy, which involved peeling a horse's dead body back layer by layer].

Ling I found almost an irrelevance: I could quite see that she would seek desperately for her horse, but her career as an instructor to the wealthy I found harder to credit, and it is difficult to feel much sympathy for a character when you are heartily wishing the hero would dump her and get back to Stubbs and something genuinely fascinating. Teenage love stories are ten a penny, but an exploration of an artist's methods and psyche are not. So, please buy this book, and read the first half, because it is very, very good. I do not normally go off the deep end, and rave, but about the first half of this book, I do. It is fantastic. Approach the second half, however, with caution.

Sheena Wilkinson: Taking Flight
Little Island, £8.99
An interview with Sheena Wilkinson

Taking Flight is set in Belfast; rare for a pony book, and has a male and a female heroine, also rare. Vicky is the daughter of divorced parents, and she is a tad entitled. Her parents to a certain extent tiptoe around her and her wants, though she is lucky in that the divorce seems amicable, and that she gets on with her stepmother. Vicky has a cousin, Declan, for whom life is radically different. His father is dead, and his mother is an alcoholic. Declan's school career is disastrous. Vicky and Declan's paths finally cross when his mother is hospitalised after a particularly grim alcoholic episode, and Declan goes to stay with Vicky. Vicky is a keen rider, and is determined to win on her expensive show jumper, Flight. Declan, at first, wants nothing to do with Vicky or her horse, but finds himself falling under the spell of the horse.

It is very unusual that in pony book world a boy falls under the spell of a horse. Sheena Wilkinson does a fine job of showing Declan's ambivalence about this skill he suddenly finds he possesses. From a boy with no future other than a rapid descent into crime, Declan is presented with a way forward, but it is not one he is necessarily eager to take. It would be too simplistic a fairy tale were Declan to progress effortlessly to horsy success, and he does not. Vicky is furiously jealous of Declan's abilities, and resentful of his arrival into her life, and takes action on her dislike. Sheena Wilkinson succeeds in making Vicky's very brattish behaviour believable, but still keeps you on her side. Indeed the strength of this very good book is that you are on both characters' sides: however horrible their behaviour is.

Declan's school is very well done too: both the teachers who have written Declan off, and those who keep on and on trying with him, convinced that he can be set on a better path. The other adults convince. This is a real world.

My only very minor quibble with this book was wondering if the ending was just a little too pat: the characters have been redeemed, and their efforts rewarded. I wonder if Vicky's boyfriend would have been quite so ready to take her back ; I think she was lucky there. But this is a minor quibble. Taking Flight is a fine read, and one which will be swallowed in a sitting by any teenager who is even remotely interested in the horse.

Gardening on the edge

2011-11-05T14:38:00.001Z

I haven't done a gardening post for ages, mainly because I haven't done any gardening. That is not to say my world has been entirely garden-free. I do like watching gardening programmes, and I do like the gardening articles in the weekend press. They show an ordered and productive world which I wish was mine. All those lovely neat rows of vegetables, and pruned and cared for herbaceous borders.

When we first moved here 12 years ago, I had masses of time. I worked three days a week for what then was a pretty fair sum of money, and the other two days were mine to do as my daughter and I wished. She was young and eager then, so we did a lot together, and we did a lot of gardening. The pride and joy of my life was my vegetable garden, carved out of what used to be a dog yard. It was just like all those ones you see on television programmes. When I put my fork in to dig out my potatoes, it was a profoundly satisfying time: masses of them. Just masses.

Life is no longer as it was 12 years ago. I now work for a lot less than the minimum wage as a bookdealer, and although I've been commissioned to write a book, it is not going to make me shedloads of money. My daughter is not, these days, much of a help in the garden. The garden now is simply a transit area between the house and her next social engagement.

I do still garden. Growing our own is now a vital part of keeping going. Growing your own though, as the gardening programmes and books would have you do it, takes shedloads of time. In order to keep my not quite minimum wage going, and write aforesaid book, I need time, and the garden therefore doesn't get it. I can't say that I've worked out an ideal solution to this, because I haven't, but I have sort of got one.

A while back my sister and her other half came to visit, and I took them for a wander through the nettles to see my onions and garlic, which meant a dodge through the parsnip forest. Tim looked at the forest and said, "Gardening on the edge is what you do, isn't it?"

Well, yes it is. Gardening the way I have to do it is a combination of doing as little as you possibly can, and working with what you've got. It is being relentlessly opportunist and putting up with things that are less than ideal. I did hope that maybe there were other gardeners out there who also gardened on the edge, but when I googled, to the proper gardener, gardening on the edge appears to be making a success out of a hostile growing environment (which I suppose is what I do, in a way, only the hostile bit is me), or growing plants that aren't really suited to your climate.

I am hoping that there actually are other gardeners out there like me: doing everything really rather badly but somehow managing to produce something at the end of it. It would be lovely to share experiences.

I won't do an incredibly regular series of blogs on this subject, for the reasons above, but I think I can manage to do one on the gardening on the edge approach to winter salad within the next couple of days.

Janet Rising on What Not to Wear

2011-11-02T10:22:00.000Z

Welcome to Janet Rising, editor of PONY magazine, with a guest post.

What do you wear when you ride? Sounds a silly question, perhaps. Upon writing this it became clear that planning my riding attire has, throughout my life, occupied far too much of my time.

When I first started to ride at the tender age of nine I was desperate to wear the right clothes. Problem? I couldn’t afford any. I can remember the excitement of buying a riding hat – black velvet, elastic chin strap, probably got change from thirty bob – from a sports shop, and I know I didn’t sleep for excitement the night before. We’re talking the time when jodhpurs were slimming down from the Bedford cord, elephant-ear design, and riding slacks were all the go. Jacatex adverts were poured over and outfits planned. No matter that the jackets – a fraction of what you would pay elsewhere for the same quality – were too short to be elegant and dropped vertically from under the sleeves, disguising any imagined waist you might have. Pile on the black and navy show jackets inconveniently receded before going completely bald. I know this because my friend Jan wore hers to the stables practically on a daily basis and everyone in our riding gang observed warps and wefts coming to the fore as the seasons passed, the cloth flecked by white hair shed from the school ponies. I think that was why I plumped for tweed. No wonder the adverts only ever featured an artist’s impression.

One very smart livery owner at the stables turned up one day in the height of equestrian fashion, a belted hacking jacket in rather loud tweed, pleated front and back, an experiment in riding design which was outside my budget and didn’t last for long. We all looked on enviously, oblivious to the sad fact that had we been so clad, we would resemble something the feed merchant would dump by the oat bins. Oooo, but I did buy one of those gorgeous Harry Hall black show jackets, with a velvet collar and piping up and down the back. Years later I sold it to a friend, just prior to spotting someone far more stylish than I wearing the very same over a basque whilst out clubbing, and I instantly regretted not having had the imagination to keep it to wear with jeans and a frilly blouse, a la Spandau Ballet.

Aaaaaanyway, as a teenager things changed. Correctness was recklessly overtaken on the outside by cool. At least, our definition of cool. Levis replaced jodhpurs and, as this was the seventies, they were straight-legged. This wouldn’t do. Reluctant to spend riding money we cut triangles from discarded curtains to insert into the outside seams from the knees down, transforming them into bell-bottoms, and many a happy evening was spent painstakingly tweezering out horizontal threads to fringe the ends. This was after you’d worn your Levis was in the bath, shrinking them to fit, to the disgust of your parents. These were then topped by the dubious fashion of a smock top, adorned with badges of whichever pop star was currently favoured – Alice Cooper, in my case. Excuse my misty (blackened) eyes.

What an absolute sight we must have looked.

When I left school and worked with horses I wanted to look the part. Shirts, ties, hats – even when dismounted and teaching – became my uniform. Everyone knows that the football manager look never suited anyone, not even football managers, but even so sheepskin coats and long leather boots were de rigueur, simply because quilted clothing hadn’t been invented. Except for those paper-thin, cord collared Husky jackets in green or navy. That was your choice – country tones of green or navy. No pink. No purple. Brown was considered racy, the equestrian equivalent of an ankle bracelet. I led winter rides in my hacking jacket and yellow string gloves, froze at the back of rides, sandwiched between blue-faced children atop fluffy, lead-reined ponies on either side, unable to tell whether I was holding the reins or a discarded, frostbitten finger, icy winds whipping my hair and my horse’s tail, rising to the trot without stirrups just to coax some feeling back in the blocks of ice I called my feet.

Then, suddenly, the horsey world discovered colour. Whoopie dah! Instantly I purchased a maroon show jacket and got my hat covered in matching cloth – you can’t teach this girl anything about sartorial elegance (obviously). Matching jackets and hats in plum, brown, grey and green were IT, and the only colour for jodhpurs, darling, was what could only be described as butter.

I got a bit carried away. When the washing machine transformed my soft suede strappings into Pringles I unpicked them and replaced them with some grey fabric I had handy (once I’d dried my tears and pulled myself together). Then, when the joddies themselves started to look like the before-whites in the Persil ads I dyed them black. Only they came out charcoal, and the home-made strappings didn’t take the dye but they still looked okay. Well, passable. So I did the same with another pair, only in green. This was when jodhpurs only existed in various shades of white/buff/yellow. I know, I’m such a rebel.

Now there is no need for the Dylon – there are hundreds, if not thousands of clothing items on which to spend our money. We have Gore-tex and breathable fabrics and lightweight quilts. Everyway-stretch Cath Kidson jodhpurs, down coats and storm-proof collars. Lined boots with zips up the back so you can get them on and off without giving yourself a hernia, and reinforced socks. The only hardship is making up your mind which ones to go for.

It’s exhausting, it really is. Excuse me, I’m just off to fringe a pair of jeans because some things don’t change, even when they should.

Show jumping nostalgia

2011-10-25T15:49:00.000+01:00

Stroller, Raimondo d'Inzeo, Vibart...

ROYAL INTERNATIONAL HORSE SHOW

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The ideal Christmas gift

2011-10-24T12:29:00.002+01:00

always providing you're not buying a book, of course.

I am weak

2011-10-21T10:29:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by someone who wanted to sell me their old Riding magazines. Any email like that is always two edged: hurrah, because there are still plenty I lack, particularly from the 1950s, and wince, because of recent months, what with writing the book and all, I haven't been very good in keeping on top of what I've bought. There were piles of elderly equestrian magazines all over the place in my office.

So, I screwed my courage to the sticking place, and sorted.

I now know what I've got, and what I haven't. There are duplicates, which in one way is good, as now when people ask me if I have any for sale I can say yes. As long as they don't want the duplicates I want, that is. I've had a pile of magazines from the 1930s sitting in a thoughtful pile since the sort out. They are duplicates, because I have bound copies of all the 1930s editions. The thing with bound copies though, is that they don't have the front covers. And I like the front covers. How could I get rid of these? How?

They're so pretty. Look at the lovely typography, and those gorgeous period photographs. For the sake of completeness and historical accuracy I do need them, of course. I do. The covers are an intrinsic part of the magazines. Quite where I'm going to put them, now I've decided I do need duplicates, is another matter.

War Horse - Fact and Fiction

2011-10-19T12:51:00.002+01:00

The National Army Museum has an exhibition opening on 22nd October (and running until August 2012): War Horse, Fact and Fiction. It takes Michael Morpurgo's War Horse as a hook on which to hang the rest of the exhibition, which is illustrated with artefacts from the Museum's collection, "encouraging visitors to think about the millions of War Horses who have supported the British Army across time".

Entry is free.

If you've read the book, you'll know that it opens with a description of a picture hanging in a village hall, which shows Joey, as painted by the man who rode him into war. Although Iddesleigh, the village, exists, as does the village hall, the picture up until now has been a complete fiction. Equine artist Ali Bannister has now made fiction fact. Michael Morpurgo has commissioned her to do two portraits, and one will hang in the village hall. There's an example of the picture on The Times site - sadly it's behind a paywall. If I can find a copy which is a bit more accessible I will post a link.

Edited to add: the picture will be on Ali Bannister's website within the next 4 weeks, and will also be appearing at the War Horse exhibition.

Miscarriage - why is treatment sometimes so bad?

2011-10-14T11:56:00.002+01:00

When things go wrong, my first instinct is to come out fighting, generally in a loud and ranty way which I have had to learn to tone down over the years. A soft answer turneth away wrath, or at any rate is often more likely to get you what you want. That sort of thing.

So why didn't I protest after my first miscarriage; when the care I received was variable, and certainly in the case of my GP, incredibly insensitive? Who decided it "not relevant" for me to be told the sex of my baby (which, after a baby is born whole at 16 weeks is completely obvious), nor "relevant" for me to be told the results of the post mortem. Why, when basically told to go away and shut up, did I do precisely that? When told by friends and relations to complain, shrivel up and say no?

Because I quite simply couldn't, is the answer. I was wracked by guilt and grief. During my stay in hospital, I'd made several (unsuccessful) attempts to find out about the baby I'd had. When I came out, I girded myself to have another go with the GP, and it failed. I retreated into a dark cave of misery and loss, and there I stayed for quite some time. Neither my husband nor I had the mental energy to complain about the GP or any of our other treatment. We wanted to try and look forward, not back. There was no support; we had to find our own way back to a life of relative normality.

When I was pregnant again, it was very hard to look back at what had happened before. I wanted to concentrate all my energies and hope on the new life. Allied to the day-to-day fear, every single day of my new pregnancy, about what might happen (and I was an early and frequent bleeder in all my pregnancies, which kept me teetering and on edge for months on end), I found it impossible to summon up the mental energy to try and put right what had happened to me before.

Many of my friends were trying to get pregnant, or pregnant themselves. How many of them mentioned miscarriage? Did I? People don't want to talk about it: most especially those to whom it might happen. There's a sort of sympathetic magic at work here, I think: if you even mention the word, it might happen to you. In the cold light of day, this is a completely ludicrous fear. Why would even mentioning the word make you miscarry? But it doesn't mean you don't think that way.

When I was asked to chair a conference by the Miscarriage Society, I was just pregnant for the fifth time, and I remember my first reaction was to panic and want to say no, just in case the very fact I was there made me miscarry.

I got over it, but it was a bit of a battle. Even when I was there, on the platform, introducing people and listening to the presentations, every now and then that little thought would creep in. "You could be making the worst happen by being here." And I am supposed to be a sane and sensible woman, educated to be rational.

Needless to say, nothing happened. My daughter survived her mother's fears, and arrived hale, hearty and with an obvious and steely determination right from day one.

I am particularly struck, with the Care Quality Commission's report on the treatment of the elderly in hospital in the news, with the similarities in what is experienced. The elderly can't fight their corner; neither, for different reasons, can miscarrying women and their partners. In both cases, what rushes in to fill that vacuum is not necessarily good.

Kindness doesn't cost anything. The good things I remember about my miscarriages are the people who found a few minutes to be kind. It doesn't cost anything for someone to say they're sorry. It only takes a little time. Whilst how nurses are trained is being examined, compassion for all should be at the heart of it, not just those who are young and able to fight their corner. The grief-stricken generally can't fight theirs. That's why the Mumsnet Code of Care for Miscarriage is so important.

As Salt & Caramel said:

It is becoming clear what the most important thing for these women is, and it is not immediate access to expensive scanning equipment (although that would be jolly nice) nor is it purpose built “miscarriage wards” as some commentators seem to think we want.

It is kindness. From the nurses, doctors and other health care workers.

Care doesn't have to be bad. The NHS can get it right, and did, for Kirsty. There are good models of care, like the one experienced here, which I've read several times with awe, and thankfulness that it can be got right.

Please, support the Mumsnet Campaign for Better Miscarriage Care.

Lobby your MP to support the Early Day motion.
If you're on Facebook or Twitter, link to this blog or any of the others on the bloghop below
Tweet using the #miscarriagecare hashtag. Follow @mumsnettowers
Add your blog to the blog hop.

And talk about it.

Horses wear leg warmers

2011-10-13T18:46:00.001+01:00

Look! Here! This is a yarn bomb - here is the deed in progress. (And any time Dilly Tante wants to yarn bomb my hen house, she is welcome). Through the graveyard, over the electric fence. No problem.

Fancy dress. Sort of. With dogs.

2011-10-13T10:27:00.001+01:00

Here is my dog, styled as a dog. A spoiled dog, who is allowed on the sofa, but a dog.

Here is a dog which is well, not.

Morning walk

2011-10-12T09:58:00.000+01:00

The deep dark bits: miscarriage

2011-10-10T10:49:00.001+01:00

I don’t generally blog about me; well, I do, but in the I did this sense, rather than I felt this, or here are the deep, dark bits of my life sense. This blog is going to be an exception. Once I was editor of the newsletter of my local NCT branch. The first issue I did was on miscarriage. I wrote about mine; a friend wrote about hers, and the Miscarriage Association wrote about what needed to be done by the NHS to improve how women and their partners were treated during and after miscarriage.

We said things like: don’t put miscarrying women in wards with women having terminations, or worse still in ante natal wards. Treat women sensitively.

That was 17 years ago. Mumsnet is starting a campaign on how the medical service should treat miscarriage, and I’m sure you can work out what they’re asking for. 17 years later, not a lot has changed. What happened to me is still being repeated, and what we asked for then still has to be asked for now.

Miscarriage is still not something that is talked about. Growing up, I was dimly aware it happened, but as far as I was concerned, people got pregnant, and they had babies. That was generally that. I thought I’d have a large family, and was also quite hoping for large amounts of dogs and ponies. Too much Pullein-Thompson. Getting pregnant often enough to achieve part of that aim certainly wasn’t a problem: I got pregnant just like that. Holding on to the baby afterwards, however, was a problem. I have two children: five pregnancies, but two children.

After getting over the initial shock of being pregnant the first time, which wasn’t exactly planned, I settled down, and did what I always do when facing something new: I bought a book. Up to 13 weeks is the danger period, it said. After that, you are probably alright. Late miscarriage is quite rare.

13 weeks came and went. I relaxed a bit. By 15 weeks, I was starting to need to pee a lot. I consulted the book, which said that this did happen. Mmm, I thought. I had a feeling that what was going on with me was possibly not what the book meant. Give it a few days, I thought, and then off to the doctor if there’s no improvement. That weekend, we went into town on the train. I sat there, feeling more and more ill, and by the time we got to Waterloo East, told Jonathan I had to get off the train. We ended up in St Thomas’s, who diagnosed a urinary tract infection, and packed us off back home to South East London, loaded with antibiotics. I made it home, and then collapsed with violent shakes and vomiting. The on call doctor came out, by which point I’d stopped shaking. He told me to carry on with the antibiotics, and take the week off work.

No one could tell me whether the baby would be alright. I had my first ante-natal appointment due at the end of that week. I rang the hospital (Greenwich) and asked them what I should do. Just come to the appointment, they said. So, I spent the week in bed, glugging water frantically, swigging antibiotics, and seeing various on-call doctors (never actually my own) as I threw up and generally was not well. We went to the antenatal appointment with a university friend of mine who was also pregnant, and whose appointment was at the same time. Poor things. It was their first baby, and their first appointment, and there they were, obviously excited but trying not to show it too much, as we sat there, faces drawn and not really expecting the best. We saw various nurses. “Oh, you’ll be fine,” they all said. One of them hooked me up to listen to the baby’s heart, and there it was. A regular whoosh and boom. It was alive. Even now, over twenty years, later, the thought still reduces me to tears. Poor little baby. It did fight hard.

We saw the consultant. The thing was, by that stage I was fairly certain the outcome was not going to be good. Heartbeat and all. I described everything that happened. I thought that my waters had actually gone, and the consultant said he thought I was right. He couldn’t say exactly what would happen, but the outlook wasn’t good, especially as my lovely urinary tract infection was still raging along, antibiotics and frantic drinking notwithstanding. All we could do was go back home and wait. Nothing we could do was going to make much difference. By that point we were both relieved someone was prepared to be honest. All medical staff up until that point had simply not listened, once they’d worked out I was beyond the magic 13 weeks; and anyway, there I was in the antenatal clinic, full of lots of pregnant people. Going wrong didn’t seem to be an option.

Back home we went. During that week, I’d felt the baby move, but the day after the antenatal appointment, it stopped. I knew what this meant, but lay there hoping the flutter would start up again. It didn’t. The next day I was gripped by the most almighty pain. I took two paracetamol and screamed for Jonathan, the second of these two being I now realise the more sensible thing to do. After some drama, and a lot of blood, Jonathan rang the ambulance. One appeared fairly swiftly. They couldn’t, they said, take me anywhere, as I needed a transfusion, and they couldn’t do that. No ambulances that could were available. They rang for a doctor who could do transfusions. He got stuck in the Blackwall Tunnel. I lay there, aware of a rising air of panic amongst the paramedics, wondering if I might not survive, in 20^th century Britain with a large hospital 5 minutes down the road.

This next bit is the hardest thing to write, and I have had to have a few goes at it over the weeks since I knew I would be writing this piece. Our baby was still there; it has been born and I had seen it fleetingly. I wanted to see it properly. I was also, in the midst of the chaos, scared, desperate, and wanting to survive. I thought I needed to stay in control. If I saw the baby, I wouldn’t, so I didn’t. I have bitterly regretted that decision ever since. I know nothing would have changed; the baby was still dead, but the least I could have done for it was looked at it, and I didn’t.

At last the doctor appeared and gave me a plasma transfusion, thereby rendering me completely useless for blood donating purposes in years to come, though none of us knew that at the time.

I was shifted off to Greenwich District Hospital, and an ERPC – the snappily named Evacuation of Retained Products of Conception: making sure the womb was properly empty, in fact. When I came round, I was aware of the most extraordinary feeling of physical relief: my body was simply thankful it didn’t have to struggle any more. My mind didn’t feel like that though. I wanted my baby. I lay there in the dark, trying to cry quietly. A sympathetic nurse appeared and asked me what was wrong, and I told her I’d just lost a baby. All sympathy promptly vanished. “Oh, is that all,” she said. “It’s very common. Be quiet now, or you’ll wake everyone else up, and they need their sleep.”

If I could have got out of the hospital then and there I would have, but I was attached to a drip; on intravenous antibiotics, and both hands were bandaged after numerous failed attempts to insert a canula. What I wanted to do was grieve; bawl and weep, but instead I mentally shoved it all away. Hospital obviously wasn’t the right place for any of that to happen. Grieving would have to wait until I got out. I had a long time to sit and think, so I worked out what I thought I could cope with without giving way completely. A couple of days into my hospital stay, I asked a nurse if I could see the baby. Even as I was explaining that I knew it had been born complete because I had seen it, she was whisking out of the ward, saying over her shoulder as she went that all there would have been was bits so there wouldn’t have been anything to see.

The kind nurse who did sit with me, and who I asked again, told me the baby would have gone for a post-mortem by now, so there wasn’t much that could be done.

What I did not know until much, much later, was that the baby had been left behind when I was carted off in the ambulance. Jonathan got back home from a traumatic time at the hospital, to find the baby still there on the floor. He sat with him all night until a midwife arrived to pick him up the next day. I didn’t know for years that the baby had been a boy; not until I went for investigations with a consultant, now being a recurrent miscarrier and therefore entitled to treatment. Jonathan was told not to tell me the baby’s sex as this might apparently make me disintegrate altogether mentally. I asked my GP out right about the baby’s sex when I went for a follow up appointment, and he refused to tell me. It wasn’t relevant, he said. I pressed the point, but he wouldn’t tell me. He refused to tell me the sex. He refused to tell me the results of the post-mortem, which I knew there had been. They weren’t relevant either, apparently.

As I also found out years later, there was nothing wrong with the baby. I’d simply been too ill. My body couldn’t cope with being pregnant and being ill at the same time, and had chosen not to be pregnant.

My next two miscarriages were not such events. Miscarriage two was early – about 7 weeks, and happened while I was at work. I’d not felt from the start that the pregnancy was ok, so wasn’t surprised, and wasn’t particularly upset. Miscarriage three was later – 12 weeks. By now, I knew my way around the sytem. I was desperate to see the baby, if baby there was. There wasn’t anything to see, but at least I knew that, because I had looked. I knew I’d have to have another ERPC, as yet again, the placenta hadn’t detached properly. I knew that after three miscarriages I could have investigations into why, so made sure the unsympathetic doctor whirling in and out of my room in A&E at lightning speed knew that.

I had the investigations, which turned up nothing. Just bad luck, said the consultant. It happens. I got pregnant again, for the fifth time, and had the slightly surreal experience of chairing a conference for the Miscarriage Society whilst being pregnant, in the pre 13 week danger zone, and not having told anyone save for Jonathan that I was pregnant. Miranda made it. We’d decided that if she didn’t, we’d stop. It was just too wracking to go through the possibility of more miscarriages, and Fred was old enough by now to know I was disappearing off to hospital, and to want to know why, and to know why Mummy and Daddy were sad. We were lucky, and we have our two children.

I have massive respect for anyone who can go through miscarriage after miscarriage as they try to have children. I certainly couldn’t have gone through any more. All these years later, what I remember best is the people who were kind. I remember the nurse who sat and talked with me whenever she was on shift. I remember the women on the ward with me, mostly hysterectomy patients, who made the unspoken but universal decision not to mention the loud, happy, woman who’d had the termination and left on the first day I was there, and who were quietly sympathetic. The ward sister who let Jonathan come in in defiance of visiting regulations for days on end. The anaesthetist and nurse who held my hands as I cried and cried before going into theatre for the second ERPC, having held it together up until then. The consultants who were honest. The woman I’d not got on with terribly well with at work up until that point, who sat in my office, and was so lovely I cry again to think about it now. And my beloved husband, who held his wrecked partner together despite being prostrate with grief himself. Lost babies belong to their fathers as well; but it’s the mothers who tend to get what sympathy is going. Everyone asked him how I was: very few, if any, how he was.

A lot of the care I got was excellent; but some was almost catastrophically bad, and certainly crashingly insensitive. Being sent the appointment card for my next ante natal appointment a couple of weeks after the first miscarriage was a particular high spot. Greenwich District Hospital must have thought I was a very stroppy mare when I was in there after miscarriage 3. By that time I knew what they were likely to get wrong, and snarled and snapped until I was certain I’d been removed from the antenatal lists; that I’d seen any possible baby there might have been, and that I was referred. It’s a pity it had to be like that. What I wanted was care, not to have to protect myself from an imperfect system.

Here’s the Mumsnet code, for all those women still needing care, and protection:

1. Supportive Staff

GPs, Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit (EPAY) and A&E staff should be trained in communication techniques (including things NOT to say to women who are miscarrying), basic counselling skills and the psychological effects of miscarriage. Follow-up appointments and/or counselling for those who feel they need it should be routinely offered after miscarriage.

2. Access to scanning
Access to scanning facilities in the case of suspected miscarriage should be easier. This could mean Early Pregnancy Assessment Units (EPAUs) opening seven days a week and/or portable ultrasound and trained medical staff being available in A&E and gynaecological units at all times as standard. Those who are miscarrying naturally at home should have the option of a scan to check that there are no ongoing complications.

3. Safe and appropriate places for treatment
Women undergoing miscarriage or suspected miscarriage should be separated from women having routine antenatal and postnatal care, or women terminating an unwanted pregnancy. EPAUs should be sited in hospitals' gynaecology, rather than antenatal, departments or next to A&E departments, to ease women's referral route. Waiting times in confirmed as well as threatened pregnancy loss, but, in particular, for women who need surgery, should be kept to a minimum and not be spent in antenatal or labour ward settings.

4. Good information and effective treatment
Everyone who has a miscarriage confirmed should have the three options explained to them: 'natural' miscarriage; medication to speed up the natural process; and surgery. What each option involves, the amount of pain and discomfort that might be experienced, and the likely timescales for each should be explained clearly, sympathetically and honestly either by trained medical professionals or in a leaflet. Women miscarrying at home should be offered appropriate prescription pain relief. In the case of miscarriage occurring in hospital, doctors should discuss with the parents what they wish to happen to the foetus (i.e. it should not be disposed of routinely without prior consultation). Consideration should be given to renaming the surgical procedure Evacuation of Retained Products of Conception (ERPC), as many parents find this confusing and upsetting.

5. Joined-up care
Community midwife teams and GPs should be informed immediately when miscarriage has occurred, and subsequent bookings and scans cancelled, to avoid women who have miscarried being chased by HCPs for 'missing' pregnancy appointments.

How do you tell when a camel's overbent?

2011-10-07T18:37:00.000+01:00

Round up

2011-10-07T15:08:00.000+01:00

Here is the cover for Susanna Forrest's long awaited book:

It's out in March 2012, and you can read more about it here: Susanna says it far better than I ever could so have wimpishly not attempted to summarise.

Linda Newbery has written about the danger of horses, and some of what was going on in her mind when she wrote The Damage Done.

And if you like commercials, there are some gems here at Fran Jurga's The Jurga Report.

And at Piccalilli Pie, the purples of a North Western American autumn.

Harvest

2011-10-06T19:49:00.001+01:00

I'm decorating the house for autumn. Ha ha. Of course I'm not. It had never even occurred to me, I must admit, but I do every now and then read blogs where people do this. I'm actually very glad that they do, as I like to look on at those wonderfully decorative lives that are completely, utterly and absolutely unlike mine, which is frankly rather pants at the moment, for one reason and another.

Even if I had the time, I know I wouldn't fill it with craft projects and decorating stuff, as what I do when I have any spare time is take the dog out and charge around the fields, or dive into a slowly rotting pile of ancient horse literature, seeking what I might find. Because that is my idea of a good time. But I like to look at other people's crafts and decorative lives and appreciate what they do. Just as well we're all different, as I'd hate it if there was more competition than there already is when it comes to acquiring ancient and slightly smelly horse related ephemera.

Anyway. Stick with me, because there is some sort of a point to my ramblings. I get roped in to decorating our church at major festivals. Not because I can do flower arranging, because I can't. I am, however, younger than 80 and am well known for my inability to say no when asked to volunteer.

This usually leads to some strenuous brain work as I try and work out a way of decorating without actually arranging a flower. I have only to see oasis and buckets of shop bought flowers and I panic. So, this year's effort involved my trusty vegetable boxes and a lot of windfalls. As ever with my efforts, what is in my head bears no relation at all to what actually emerges. I had visions of evenly spaced hop garlands, twining amongst the boxes, but couldn't make the hops, or my fingers, form my plan. The dog, who accompanied me into church, had a fine time rescuing the apples that hurtled from above as I balanced on my step ladder. She eventually retreated underneath the ladder, which was sensible, as it was safer there, though no quieter, as my unchurchly swearing could still pollute her innocent labrador ears.

My other window involved even more swearing (I am ashamed) and some quite emotional deep breathing. I had visions of a wreath of hops surrounding my charming apple-filled basket. (I am not obsessed with hops - it's just we have an awful lot in the garden, and as I loathe the idea of spending money on flowers which I will wreck, my efforts are centred on what I can find at home.) I was completely incapable of making my mental picture become reality, and ended up with hops strewn all around the altar after I had ripped them off in despair. The hops were pretty heady, and I was beginning to have severe doubts over whether having as many of them as I'd got was such a good idea, bearing in mind the bishop was coming to take the service, and was going to be taking it from my end of the church which by that point reeked of hop.

Ah well.

Other people do very much better than me, fortunately. I love the more is more school, and particularly like this one, which is a triumph of abundance.

And these, particularly the vegetables, which are all home-grown. Proper harvest.

Happy Harvest.

Even the walls

2011-10-03T10:56:00.002+01:00

My parents didn't really do wallpaper - at least in the sense of applying any more. Our house had elderly and dodgy plasterwork, and my parents took the view that removing the wallpaper covering it would only cause a lot of problems no one really needed, and what was wrong with paint, after all?

This did mean I didn't get horsy wallpaper.

Riding, August 1960

I would have liked horsy wallpaper. Our playroom had a field sports wallpaper with pheasants on it that I was very fond of. Shooting was a field sport, as was hunting, and hunting had horses, and that I knew was as close as I was going to get to wallpaper with horses on, so that pretty loose association satisfied me.

Fortunately for my parents, I had no idea the examples above existed. And in all those colour ways too. It is incredibly frustrating to have no idea at all of what the wallpapers would have looked like in the full colour flesh. Well, two colour flesh if I have read the copy correctly. Imagine the sunshine yellow! Are there any walls out there with them on? Still? Or have they been Farrow and Balled out of existence?

A few years ago I saw a more glamorous and upmarket example of a wallpaper aimed at the adult market. On the Saddle Up forum pictures appeared from a house in (from memory) Aberdeen that had a Cecil Aldin hunting frieze. Alas I don't have any photographs of that frieze, which I remember as being a cracker, but here's an advertisement for the nursery friezes Aldin also did.

The V&A have an article on children's wallpaper which has an illustration of a scaled down Aldin frieze in a doll's house.

I haven't been able to find an example of the Aldin hunting frieze. The V&A article mentions a hunting frieze designed by H Watkins Wild for Sanderson, and issued in 1904, and Sanderson still do a hunting wallpaper. I wondered if there would be anything available showing hunting in full modern cry, bearing in mind the current situation hunting is in. I dug up another period one: Alken this time. Presumably a modern day hunt is too strong meat these days.

Today's child, however, is spoiled. You can live in your own stable. I'm sure you must be able to get My Little Pony wallpaper, but I couldn't face the thought of actually having to look at it once I'd found it. Pony book children used to make their own murals, carefully cutting out pictures from magazines; begging them from friends, and then sticking them on a green line lovingly painted on the wall by their mother. No need to do that these days.

Am I being completely unreasonable

2011-09-26T20:57:00.000+01:00

to use my own version of the Royal Mail's certificate of posting until they have sorted out their punctuation? Reading this:

This form must be validated by Post Office Limited, please ensure that it is stamped at the time of posting, without this it will not be valid.

makes me just .... rage. Boil. Ferment. My inner pedant has risen up and she is not happy.

What is even more depressing is that this form is copyright 2010, so it's been around in this happy state for a while now.

Can hens do agility?

2011-09-26T11:26:00.000+01:00

It would appear from this that yes, they can. If there is something in it for them, of course. I like the way Hester has trained her owner. Hester advances quickly enough not to discourage her owner, but still slowly enough to allow time to dig in to worms along the way. Nicely done, Hester.

Tiddly om pom pom

2011-09-22T07:43:00.000+01:00

Joan Lambourn's The Mushroom Pony is one of those truly bonkers stories. It's about a foal whose mother has eaten a magic mushroom (yes, really), and as a result the foal can fly. The book was published in the 1940s, so I guess that magic mushroom didn't have quite the connotation that it does now - or perhaps it did, to a select few, and Joan Lambourn was incredibly subversive. It is impossible for me, at any rate, to read the book without having the alternative meanings hovering about, particularly when I read the dedication:

To Alyse... and Harry... Who know how Magic Mushrooms grow

Which makes me want to rush out and find them and ask what exactly their familiarity with mind altering substances was.

The book is about Pansy, a mare who eats a magic mushroom. She then has a foal (Joan, whilst subversive, holds to 1940s views on the process of mating: it is simply not mentioned. Pansy has three foals, but there is no mention of any stallion. I did wonder if the magic mushroom was responsible, but it is not. P has two foals before she spots the MM.) Pansy's next foal, Clippety Clop, has wings on his feet: rather sweet little wings, as drawn by Phyllis Ginger:

Pansy is sad as her foals keep being taken away from her, but Clippety Clop's wings are a big help in keeping him around. Pansy of course can talk, and not only that, sing. There is a lullaby quite early on in the book, complete with music. I've never thought of horses as having any particular singing voice (though Alan Garner's unicorn Elidor does, and I've always thought of that as more a high sort of keening rather than a particular voice). If they do, then Pansy was a soprano. Gosh, this piece is high. I have had a couple of quick goes at singing it, which was not a thing for the faint hearted to listen to as I need time to warm up to get above an E these days. It's a sweet tune, though in neither go so far have I been able to make a sensible fitting in of the words on the last line.

One last oddity: the book doesn't have a dustjacket, but it does have the front flap. Why? Why on earth would you keep just that bit?

New books for September

2011-09-06T15:39:00.001+01:00

There’s a lot out this month, as publishers get ready for Christmas. In particular, there’s a lot aimed at the picture book/really young reader market, but to start, here are a couple emphatically not for the infant reader.

Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War - General Jack Seely

Racing Post is re-publishing this story of a real war horse, to coincide with the release of the film. Brough Scott is the editor, and Peter O’Sullevan has written a foreword. Some of the proceeds will go to Peter Sullevan’s charitable foundation. £14.00, out on 23rd September.

Gamble - Felix Francis

The first solo effort by Felix Francis, who is continuing the Dick Francis brand. Michael Joseph, £18.99. In this one, our hero is no longer able to race because of an accident (sound familiar?) and is staggered when a friend is shot very, very early in the book. Which also sounds familiar: but Felix has a few books under his belt now, and revisiting the same basic plotlines didn’t do his father any harm.

Monica Edwards - Punchbowl Midnight

Latest in Girls Gone By’s reprints is Punchbowl Midnight, which can be a tricky title to track down. It’s one of the Punchbowl Farm series, in which Dion’s hopes to found his new Jersey herd with the calf Midnight look doomed once the calf escapes. She ends up running with the deer, and proves nearly as difficult as them to catch. There are the usual GGB extras: an introduction by Monica’s daughter, Shelley, and introductions by Brian Parks.

Stacy Gregg - The Prize

The fourth episode of Stacy Gregg’s Pony Club Rivals series, set in an American equestrian academy, is out at the end of this month. It’s £5.99.

Jenny Oldfield - Stormcloud & Miss Molly

Jenny Oldfield has two more episodes of her new Black Pearl Ponies series out on 1st September, in
which she continues her latest ranch series.

Pippa Funnell - Rusty, the Trustworthy Pony

Out on 1st September is the fifteenth episode of Tilly’s Pony Tails. Orion, £3.99, and available in
Kindle, £3.39

Sarah Kilbride & Sophie Tilly - Shimmer the Magic Ice Pony

This title is part of the Princess Evie’s Ponies series, which so far has passed me by completely. Out
at the end of the month (29th September) for £5.99, it’s a picture book, which comes with a free pony
(not a real one. Darn.)

Michael Dahl - Pony Brushes His Teeth (Hello Genius)

A new take on equine dentistry? No, it’s an encourage-your-toddler book for good human dental health.
Out on 15th September in hardback, £5.99, this is the first British publication of this American book.

L Rigo - Little Pony (Look at Me Books)

Aimed at the really young, this is a board book: ie one your toddler can chew but it will still survive.
Just about. I wonder if this would have encouraged my two if it had been about when they were babies?
Probably not. It’s out on the 1st September. £4.99.

Dandi Daley Mackall - Horse Dreams & Cowboy Colt

Dandy Daley Mackall has the first two episodes of her new series Backyard Horses out on
1st September. £3.99. It’s written as a counter-balance to the vogue for having show horses and
grand competition efforts, and it features exactly what it says: backyard horses. Ones with no
pedigree; not at all smart - just normal horses enjoyed by normal girls.

Chris Platt - Star Gazer

This American book appears here in September for £9.23. It’s a hardcover: a vanishingly rare thing for a book aimed at the older reader, and it’s the story of Jordan Mackenzie, who longs to have a Black Percheron. She gets one, but finds out the horse has been abused.

Michael Morpurgo - Farm Boy

Out on 29 Sep, £4.99, is a new edition of the sequel to War Horse.

KINDLE:

Linda Newbery's The Damage Done, which I recently reviewed, is out soon on Kindle.

Walter Farley: The Black Stallion’s Ghost, The Black Stallion and Flame, The Black Stallion’s Blood Bay Colt, The Island Stallion, The Horse Tamer - all 28 September

The Pullein-Thompsons: Black Beauty’s Family - end of September

Cottesbrooke

2011-09-02T16:15:00.001+01:00

I can't show you, unfortunately, any of the Woolavington collection of sporting art, which lives at Cottesbrooke House. In common with most country houses, the camera is banned. In addition, you are escorted round the house on a tour, and cannot therefore plonk yourself in front of the Marshalls/Edwards/Munnings and gawp for hours. The tour is frustrating when you are on a mission to cram as much equine art into your brain as you can manage, more so because it is actually very well done, and you are therefore trying not to get distracted by fascinating FACTS but concentrate on the horses. (Did you know one room in Cottesbrooke has had the same paint colour for over three centuries? Puts us repainting the kitchen the same colour over the last 12 years into perspective).

Still, by dint of only looking very quickly at the porcelain and furniture, I did manage to enlarge my experience of sporting art, which has so far been concentrated on the 20th century, as that's what I've needed to write about. Ben Marshall in particular was a revelation. There are some lovely Lionel Edwards studies of a Woolavington racehorse, which I preferred to his hunting scenes, of which Cottesbrooke has several. Cecil Aldin is relegated to the small entrance hall, but at least you can look at those at your leisure.

The gardens are also open. As my experience of those has been just when having my annual garden spend at the Cottesbrooke Plant Finders' Fair, when the gardens can get a tad full, it was lovely to see the structure of the gardens with a little less humanity about it. And yes, I did find a horse. And coffee cake afterwards. In our coffee cake holiday sweepstake, Cottesbrooke I'm afraid comes second to Boughton House.

A precarious life

2011-09-02T12:40:00.001+01:00

Whilst I might at times live on a financial knife edge, making your living as a bookdealer not being the most financially rewarding of occupations, I am blessed. I am not a tenant farmer in Scotland. I do not have a landlord. I am not subject to land laws which are not on my side.

Just 500 people own half of Scotland. One of those who do not own anything of Scotland whatsoever is tenant farmer Gentle Otter. She lives in 21st century Scotland, but does not have a water supply that is fit to drink. When a sample of her water supply was sent to the Netherlands for testing, she was asked if it came from a sewage farm. Although Gentle Otter has a farmhouse, it is not fit to live in, so she, her husband (recovering from a heart attack) and her three small children, live in a caravan. The landlord has ignored all pleas to replace the roof, which it is his legal duty to do. So bad has the house's condition now become that the local council will serve a demolition notice on it. Once the notice has been served, the family have 28 days to get out.

Read about Gentle Otter's situation here; about Scottish land laws here; and about the plight of tenant farmers here - scroll down to read the Farming Comment from Rog Wood.

Holidays

2011-09-01T15:07:00.028+01:00

I've been near Lincoln many, many times, and hummed and hawed about whether I could manage a quick dash in before having to be elsewhere. The call of duty has always won, which I am in retrospect glad about, as Lincoln wouldn't really repay a quick dash. Other than being vaguely aware it had a cathedral I had no idea of what Lincoln was actually like at all. It is beautiful. Enchanting. The centre has proved mostly immune to the hide bound brutalism of town planners and architects, unlike its relatively near neighbour Peterborough.

Lincoln Cathedral has had numerous major changes in form over the centuries, but a thousand years of change have none of them resulted in concrete or brutalism. Had the Church of England had control over the planning processes of England over the last century, I wonder what might have resulted. As I know, obtaining a faculty (planning permission from the church to alter any of its buildings or grounds) is a teeth-grindingly slow process, with success not even remotely guaranteed. England I suspect would look radically different; quite possibly because large numbers of the populace would have expired from apoplexy dealing with diocesan planning and therefore not needed housing. What was allowed however would no doubt have been beautiful.

I don't imagine that some of the more experimental elements of Gothic architecture Lincoln experienced were subject to a faculty: the main tower collapsed in 1237. Even this was several incarnations in. The original Norman cathedral was destroyed by an earthquake in 1185. What is now there is, quite simply, spectacular.

I love a good flying buttress. And a good choir: Lincoln's Angel Choir is stupendous.

Repair is a constant process. I was particularly struck by the figure below, part of the latest round of repairs. It's a wonderfully vivid face - surely a portrait.

I don't actively look for horses everywhere I go, really I don't. A donkey in heraldry symbolises patience and humility. I'm not sure whether having three of them on your shield constitutes humility or pride.

And outside Lincoln Cathedral was this:

and also this, which is not even remotely equine. It's the door to a B&B, and I like it.

Amazon news

2011-08-31T16:50:00.000+01:00

The OFT has postponed its decision on Amazon's proposed acquisition of The Book Depository until 2nd September. I presume that means the decision has not been straightforward.

Guest blogger - Hannah Merson, artist

2011-08-31T15:10:00.004+01:00

One of the artists exhibiting at the Society of Equestrian Artists' exhibition in Nottingham from 18th September is Hannah Merson. Hannah's my guest blogger today, talking about trying to doing something that is certainly less complicated to do when you don't have children.

My Addiction

I've never been particularly maternal. Even as a little girl I shunned dolls in favour of farms and all the exciting things that came with them like tractors, cows and horses. So, it was with some surprise in 2004 when I was working as a Senior Finance Manager for the Alliance & Leicester banking group that I fell pregnant with my son Thomas.

Now, much as I love my children, and would do anything for them, I was completely unprepared for motherhood: the lack of sleep, the crying, the dirty nappies, the vomiting, the tantrums. Life as I knew it was well and truly over. My daughter Gemma followed on 17 months after Thomas. I will never forget one particularly bad night. It was 3 am, and I'd been up for hours with Gemma as she'd been sick. I was exhausted, covered in sick, and still had to get up at 6 am to cope with a hyper toddler. I'm not really sure why, but the very next day, I dug out some pencils and started drawing. From then on, drawing and painting became my means of coping and preserving my sense of self worth.

People often ask me how I make time for painting when looking after two children. It's easy. I make time for it! There is always something that needs doing: cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, school runs. But chores really are only as important as you make them. I spend the day with the children and then every evening after I've put them to bed I paint. I can normally get two to three hours in a night. If I have a spare hour during the day when they're at school or pre-school I'll go to our local park and do a small 6 x 8 inch painting.

Thomas started school last year and this September Gemma will be off. Like most mums, it's not a day I'm looking forward to. Not because I'm sad to wave her off (we're both more than ready for that) but because it means I have to make a decision about my future - go back into finance, or consider trying to make a living from painting, if that's even possible? My heart says one thing, and my head another. So, this really does feel like a crunch year for me, and I know I need to focus everything I have on improving my painting if I'm to stand any chance at all. But unlike housework, painting is an absolute joy for me, not a chore, and whatever I decide to do, I'll never give it up. I'm not sure I could if I wanted to. I'm addicted.

Hannah won the prize for the best sporting painting at the recent Society of Equestrian Artists' annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London, with Huntsman & Hounds.

You can follow what Hannah is up to on her blog, and see more of her paintings on her website.

Society of Equestrian Artists' Exhibition

2011-08-12T14:33:00.002+01:00

I wouldn't have a proper horse obsession if the horse in art didn't also make me ridiculously excited. Just up the railway line from me in Nottinghamshire is the Sally Mitchell Gallery, which will be putting on the East Midlands Open Exhibition of Equestrian Art, in conjunction with the Society of Equestrian Artists.

The SEA is a charity that "promotes the best in contemporary equestrian art and supports and encourages artists who share that passion." Their website is very well worth a look. I have a Christmas present list filled up for years now.

If you're an artist, you have until 2nd September to submit works for the exhibition; if you're just interested in looking, then the exhibition is open online from 18th September to 22nd October, and at the Gallery itself from 25th September to 8th October. Although the chances of me, or my nearest and dearest coming up with any major money making scheme any time soon is remote, I will not lose heart. Pieces are on sale for under £100. You can of course, spend considerably more, but my, it will be worth it.

The piece above is One Day, by Michelle McCullagh, which is appearing in the exhibition. When Jennifer Bell, pony book illustrator as well as an artist in her own right, told me about this exhibition, I went and had a look at the SEA site, and told Jennifer that were I to be put up a wall, and forced to take a painting, it would be Michelle McCullagh's Reverie.

Artists wanting to submit:
See www.equestrianartists.co.uk for entry forms. You do not have to be a member to submit. Handing in day is 11th September.

Fancy Dress

2011-08-12T11:00:00.001+01:00

I've just bought another set of vintage Pony magazines, which has an article on a perennial favourite of mine, the dressing up class. Alas the quality of the photographs is pretty basic so it's not always easy to tell what's going on. I think a better photograph would have done justice to the splendour of Miss Middleton's Panshanger Riding School doing A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Pamela Templeton at Ayr got her man...

The hounds were ready for the hunt,

But to no avail, as the fox got there first, in the Bucknall family's Fox's Frolic.

Guest blogger - Linda Newbery on Monica Edwards

2011-08-10T12:09:00.000+01:00

Linda Newbery, Carnegie Medal nominee for The Shell House, Sisterland, At the Firefly Gate, silver medal winner, Nestlé Children's Book Prize for Catcall, and Costa Children’s Book winner of 2006 for Set in Stone, is today's guest blogger. Linda was a fan of the Romney Marsh and Punchbowl Farm books of Monica Edwards, and this piece, which first appeared in The Martello Magazine in 2007, explains why.

I can say without doubt that Monica Edwards made me want to be a writer from an early age.

Wish for a Pony was my first encounter, at the age of eight. There’s something special about the books we love as children, something I don’t think we can experience as adults. I read and re-read Wish for a Pony so many times that I could recite chunks now, smell the paper, and see the Anne Bullen illustrations. I virtually inhabited Westling; wanted Tamzin and Rissa for my friends and Jim Decks to confide in. At that age I was taken with the wish-fulfilment of the plot, but what has lingered most is the warmth and solidity of the characters and the setting.

No Mistaking Corker came next; then Armada paperbacks appeared, and I was delighted to discover how many books there were; I felt they’d been written just for me. I was addicted, buying Armadas, requesting hardbacks from the library, growing up with Tamzin and Lindsey. Punchbowl Midnight and The Spirit of Punchbowl Farm were my favourites, together with Hidden in a Dream. I pored over the maps; identified strongly with Lindsey (more than with Tamzin; I wasn’t brave or beautiful enough, and would certainly never have attracted a Meryon); agonized with her over the fate of the yew tree, the dehorning of cattle, the shooting of deer. Monica Edwards was a pioneer environmentalist, writing about such things as the capture of dolphins, the destruction of habitats and the oiling of seabirds long before these were the familiar topics they are now. Elaine, the main character in my first published book, Run with the Hare, who becomes involved in an animal rights group, surely owes something to Lindsey. (And I couldn’t resist using the name Tamsin – with this more common spelling – for the heroine of A Fear of Heights.)

From the age of ten I was trying to write novels, hiding them in my wardrobe. Of course, I wanted to be Monica Edwards; later, other writers exerted their influence. But what has always stayed with me is her evocation of place. I knew Romney Marsh and Punchbowl Farm in all seasons and all weathers; I saw them with Monica Edwards’ painterly eye. This sense of place is important to my own books. I don’t write series fiction, but several of my novels (The Shell House, Set in Stone, The Sandfather, Nevermore – well, nearly all of them) have started with a particular place and atmosphere. Like Monica Edwards, I want to take my readers there, make the places real in their imaginations. Most are set in the countryside, several featuring a central character who has moved there from town or city.

I met Monica Edwards through an act of what now seems colossal cheek. Returning from a Sussex holiday, I made my parents take me to Punchbowl Farm, overruling their protests that it was just a place in a story. I marched up to the kitchen door and was astonished when Monica Edwards herself opened it. She didn’t mind us arriving on her doorstep. She spent two or more hours with us, inviting us into that kitchen, taking us down to the woods, showing us the badger setts. She was the first author I’d met, and I couldn’t believe that she was so ordinary and so friendly.

I’m sorry that I didn’t send her one of my books before it was too late, thanking her for my enormous enjoyment of her work, and for making me a writer. I know now how much it would mean to me if I could be someone else’s Monica Edwards. Maybe …

You can find more information on Linda Newbery on her website, and more information on the books she's written which involve horses here.

New hens

2011-08-08T16:10:00.000+01:00

I've put off getting new hens for months; mainly because neither of us could face the thought of more months trying to prevent our Black Rocks, who are the Al Capones of the hen world, making determined efforts to keep the hen population at what they considered an acceptable level: them, and their hench hen. Last time we got new hens it took months of keeping the hens separately, Black Rocks patrolling the dividing fence like sharks hoping for seals, before peace finally broke out.

It's not as if our hens lack space. Here is the hen area at Badger Towers, all surrounded by electric fence.

They have a large bramble hedge that they spend hours and hours in. "What do they do in there?" I asked my husband. "Just chill, like teenagers," he said. I think that's pretty much it, though now it is blackberry time, they do make the occasional foray out to snaffle any blackberries which have ripened since the last time they looked. Or have a sandbath in any one of many they have dug out in their time with us. Here's one:

They are not short of things to do, or of space, both supposed to be contributors to violence. My Black Rocks are just thugs. Born mean, and carried on mean. Here is Tiger, chief hench hen of Queen Hen, Bess.

Tiger and I had just had words when this picture was taken. We have two new hens, Scrabbles II and Pandora II, a Bluebelle and Light Sussex respectively. Yesterday we carefully fenced off an area of the field for the new hens. They loved it. The Black Rocks clocked the fact they were there, but did not seem too bothered. Result, we thought. I went back a couple of hours later, to find the enclosure empty as the new hens had flown out and into the main field. The others were still not too bothered.

Today of course they have remembered that gang violence is quite fun.

I don't know if it's because their horrible natures are sweetened by the huge intake of blackberries, or whether because the yarrow's quite high at the moment they can't see the new hens so easily, but the violence is more what I'd expect from normal hens, so I've left them to it. The poor new hens do have quite a bit to contend with besides the Black Rocks and finding their way around; the wind for one, as Badger Towers is always up there at the front of the queue for any wind that's going. It must be like negotiating a prairie for them.

And then there's me, probably first cousin to a known hen killer. I am slowly, with the aid of mealworms, persuading them that I am a good thing. At least the face below is an interested one (if a little mad) rather than one fleeing in horror.

Fingers crossed.

Review: Linda Newbery - The Damage Done and The Nowhere Girl

2011-08-05T17:57:00.005+01:00

Linda Newbery - The Damage Done
Linda Newbery - The Nowhere Girl
not in print but easily available secondhand

I usually review books which are in print, as there's not a great deal of point going completely overboard about something brilliant but so gallopingly obscure and out of print it is obtainable only for a small mortgage and the gleaming locks of your first born child. These two books have made me make an exception. A while back I reviewed Linda Newbery's Barney the Boat Dog, and the author got in touch with me suggesting another couple of her books she thought I might like. She was right.

The Damage Done and The Nowhere Girl are both YA books. They both became my car books. I don't know if anyone else does this, but I have a car book. In fact, I have several car books. I get panicky, fretful and generally not nice to know if I am faced with having to wait somewhere without a book. Who knows when you might be stuck, stationary on the M1? Condemned to wait for the RAC by your dodgy battery? Stuck at the station waiting for a late train? So, I have a car book. I have a long term resident, which I can pick up and put down and not worry too much about finishing (currently Dombey and Son). And then I have others I will grab on the way out.

I have noticed that if the book is particularly good, my station run gets earlier and earlier. Instead of arriving with a few minutes to spare, I arrive with more time than even the most obsessive time keeper (and I am an obsessive time keeper) could possibly need.

The Damage Done involved some very early runs to the Station indeed. The teenage heroine, Kirsty, is surrounded by people whose focus is not her. Anything, really, but not her. Her mother has moved out, has a new partner and a new life and very firm ideas on what Kirsty should do. Kirsty's father had a long ago successful novel and spends his days being waited on by her, and not writing his next novel. Her brother is in America, having left Kirsty to run the livery stable he's started. Kirsty has a lot on her plate, not least of which is a paralysing fear of going anywhere that isn't home, and an equally paralysing determination not to tell anyone why she won't go out.

Kirsty spends her days working with the horses, and trying to keep the stables going, waiting for the great day when her brother returns from America and they can work on the stables together and make it a success. One day, she meets the new gardener at the estate where one of the livery horses lives. He is a skinny teenage boy, utterly self contained. Kirsty is not sure whether he's a good thing or a bad thing, and neither are we for a good part of the novel.

The novel sees Kirsty gradually finding a way out of her misery: there's no blinding, Damascene moment, but little movements; some forward, some back. The boy, Dally, is certainly a part of it, but I think the strength of the book lies in Kirsty's character: you feel she would have found a way to peace herself without him; it just would have taken a different course. I had exactly the same opinion about this book after I'd read it the second time. It is a fine read.

The Nowhere Girl is also a fine read. Cass Sutherland is, like Kirsty, a teenage girl at the point of making major decisions about her life. She is making a long, slow recovery from glandular fever. As part of it, she is going to stay with her French great aunt and uncle, to work for them during the summer. Some of her job is helping out on their stud farm, but after an accident fells the stud groom, Pascal comes to help. His arrival instantly complicates matters, as Cass falls for him. Pascal is not, however, the only complicating factor. Something happened in the area during World War II. Cass's great-grandfather shot himself, and her great-aunt suddenly disappeared. Cass becomes convinced both incidents are connected with the betrayal of a Jewish family who hid in a cottage belonging to her great-grandfather during the war.

What she discovers sends Cass's already fragile balance into freefall, and for a while it is not clear whether she will survive it.

Although the book has moments of intense drama, they are always believable, as is Cass's reaction to them. The sense of sunlit, summer France is almost tangible throughout the novel, and the community Linda Newbery creates is intensely real. It is a beautifully created world.

If you're looking for intelligent, YA, writing with an element of horse, these books are an excellent place to start.

Re-use, recycle, restore

2011-08-04T12:06:00.000+01:00

In the 1980s, there was this:

and now, there's this:

Thank goodness for Photoshop.

Thanks to Hannah Fleetwood for this.

Morning walk

2011-08-03T11:35:00.002+01:00

Until I get my dragon

2011-08-02T11:07:00.000+01:00

this pony will do instead.

Unless the Apocalypse intervenes, of course.

Thanks to boing-boing for the first, and Susanna Forrest for the second. And apologies for repeating myself if you follow me on Twitter.

Guest blogger - Janet Rising: The Observation of Horses

2011-08-02T10:27:00.000+01:00

I'm delighted to welcome my latest guest blogger, editor of PONY Magazine, and author of the Pony Whisperer series, Janet Rising.

The observation of horses

Car journey boredom is not something from which I suffer, for there are always horses to see! As a young child, even before I swapped a shilling for I-Spy Horses & Ponies, my head would swivel from right to left on any car journey. I was, and still am, an equine-seeking missile.

On the route from the family home to my grandparents’ holiday caravan on the Essex coast every field containing horses was imprinted on my memory like a brand. The cobs on the right, the lone grey on the left, the palomino and bay on the weed-ridden paddock by the mobile home – even the tree-lined lane leading to the riding school advertised in the horsey press, too far away and expensive to attend, caused my pulse to quicken. It was a matter of honour never to miss a pony field. The excitement of any family holiday started the moment the car hit unfamiliar roads. What ponies would I see today?

And nothing has changed. The familiar shapes still distract my gaze from travelling companions and the road ahead. What are their stories? Are they loved, cared for, neglected? Secure, or confused by their owner’s demands? Their shapes, their colours, their markings, prick the dark recesses of my memory, reminding me of horses I have known and ridden, too soon passed to name them, to remember the yard at which we met.

Even on unfamiliar routes I’ve a sixth sense of where to look. There’s something about a field that promises not to disappoint: the way it is grazed, a water trough, the fencing. Even suburban opportunities present themselves: a rare stable yard still used for its original purpose, a paddock squeezed between houses or patchwork gypsy horses mowing tethered circles on a roundabout. The hairy, coloured ponies shadowed by the motorway bridges criss-crossing the M25 at Dartford, scared and stranded on the highest and last dry part of their field, the river swollen after the rains, prompting a call to the horse charities to ensure that someone cared about them. There is no snobbery in this hobby, this addiction I can’t ignore. All horses command equal interest.

And there are riders, indulging their passion while I drive or am driven, cantering by the side of golden and rippling crops or chocolate-coloured plough. Is the pace their choice, or that of their mounts? With such fleeting glimpses it’s impossible to tell. Horses and riders on motorway bridges, centaur silhouettes against the sky, their riders unaware of my thoughts as I hurtle beneath them, my eyes flicking to the mirror for a second glance. Are they heading out for a ride, or returning? Will the jogging horse calm once he is away from the road? Will the dismounted rider be able to mount once again?

There are glimpses and promises of routes I’ll never ride. Where does that avenue of trees, disappearing over the hill with such mystery, lead, that beautiful stretch of perfect grassland, just begging to be galloped on? The rolling fields and moorland – perfect from the car, any poor going disguised by distance and speed. I have ridden in some beautiful places all over the world, on wonderful horses, but like an explorer unable to resist the lure of an unmarked map there are always horses yet to ride, places I shall never observe from the saddle. I am greedy, and every journey offers rich temptation.

And so it continues on my travels. Behind my husband on our motorbike there are horses and donkeys to behold as we speed through France. And when horses are in short supply I switch, from necessity, to beautiful wide-eyed French cows, grazing with the sire of their calves, both present and future. Cows more fortunate than our own, not forced into a celibate existence with their sisters, denied the company of their own offspring, their suitor replaced by a dispassionate, white-coated inseminator.

Such thoughts are an indulgence when one does not have the responsibility of the vehicle and they ramble on unchecked as we traverse the miles, as thoughts do, reaching a point at their conclusion far from their beginning and impossible to retrace. But always it comes back to the horses. Horses – the very sight of them after so many years of observation still quickens my pulse and commands my interest. There’s no getting away from them. There is no boredom when there are horses to see, and I’m thankful for that.

The pictures are used under Creative Commons Licence, and come from Freefoto.com. They were taken by Ian Britton.

Moorland Mousie rides again

2011-08-01T12:30:00.004+01:00

The Moorland Mousie Trust has re-released Golden Gorse's Moorland Mousie: the quintessential Exmoor pony book, and one of the forerunners of the modern day pony book. The book is, I am delighted to say, is hardback, oh joy. So, not only can you support the endangered Exmoor pony, you can support the survival of what looks like an endangered book form too. The book contains all the original Lionel Edwards illustrations, and the Trust have tried to stick to the original in format and style as closely as possible.

Moorland Mousie costs £11.99, plus p&p (which is £3 for a single book in the UK - please contact them for postage on overseas orders or large UK orders). All profits go to the Moorland Mousie Trust, to conserve and promote the rare-breed Exmoor pony. Since the charity was founded, it has helped more than 400 ponies, most of them foals, to find new homes. In Autumn each year the Trust takes on the surplus unbought ponies from the moor, and domesticates and trains them so they can have a secure future. You can read more about their work here.

You can order directly from the Trust on 01398 323093 and pay via debit/credit card or by cheque made payable to The Moorland Mousie Trust. They don't have an online ordering system, but you can email your order here: info@exmoorponycentre.org.uk.

Many thanks to the Moorland Mousie Trust for the information.

New books for August

2011-08-01T11:11:00.000+01:00

Here's this month's releases.

Patricia Leitch - Horse in a Million

Out today (1st August) is the latest in Catnip’s Jinny series is Horse in a Million (£5.99). In this episode, the sixth in the series, Jinny and Sue are organising the Finmory Gymkhana, but Clare Burnley, pot hunter supreme, decides to compete. After that, two of Miss Tuke’s ponies disappear, and then Shantih disappears...

A few weeks ago Catnip's commisioning editor wrote a piece on why she commisioned the reprints.

Kelly McKain - Daisy and Dancer

Also out today (Stripes Publishing, £4.99) is the latest in this long running series. I keep thinking that I really must read another, as I haven't read one since the first, about which my feelings were ambivalent. The series is a popular one, and more new titles are planned. In this latest, Daisy is the latest attendee at Sunnyside Stables, and her pony for the week is going to be Dancer. Daisy isn’t quite up to the gymnastic brilliance displayed by her fellow residents, and struggles to make her own contribution to the display ride.

Diana Kimpton and Garry Parsons - Doctor Hoof

It’s been a while since Diana Kimpton, author of the Pony Mad Princess series, of which I am very
fond, has done a pony title. Out on 1st August is her picture book Doctor Hoof. Doctor Hoof is a
horse, and a doctor. He only treats horses, which proves a problem when he moves to a new area
and the only horse around is him. Scholastic, £6.99.

Linda Chapman - Hopes

Out on 4th August (£5.99, and as a Kindle edition, £2.99) is the latest episode in Linda Chapman’s series about a showing stable. I’m intrigued to see what she does with her heroine this time round, as the first two books haven’t been particularly predictable.

Elizabeth Letts - The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation

A piece of non-fiction: out on 23 August is Elizabeth Letts’ account of how a horse bound for the slaughterhouse, and bought for eighty dollars, became a winner at Madison Square Gardens. Snowman isn’t an iconic horse here in the UK, but he certainly is in America, and has already spawned a book by Rutherford Montgomery, which is difficult to find and expensive when you do track it down.

Jeanne Betancourt - The Clue in the Clubhouse

The second in the Pony Mysteries series published by Cartwheel is out this month. £2.46.

Andrea M Hale: Skye and Lilly’s French Gymkhana

On the self-published front, here’s the first in what is intended to be a series. It’s out on 5th August,
and is illustrated throughout. The author runs Millfields Rare Breeds in Essex, and the book is based
on the adventures of her Welsh Section A mare Skye, and Skye’s friend Lilly, a Hebridean sheep with
“big black horns and lots of attitude.”

Wartime recycling

2011-07-30T16:28:00.002+01:00

I took the dustjacket off the 1941 edition of Primrose Cumming's The Silver Eagle Riding School, so I could put it in a protective cover, which as you can see it was in dire need of, and lo!

this was on the other side.

I've never actually seen the dustjacket for Khyberie, so this was a double treat. What a shame it is to have to cover it up, but you can't have both sides of a bookjacket on display at once. This isn't the only double-sided dustjacket I've found, but it's the only one I've managed to photograph. I'm not sure whether this was strictly a wartime practice.

Morning walk

2011-07-29T15:59:00.000+01:00

It's harvest time, as I realised when I emerged from my work-induced fug and took the dog for her afternoon walk. Quite how I had missed the characteristic combine hum I do not know. Obviously I was much more into the cataloguing than I thought. I hoped that the contactors wouldn't have started again by the time I did my early morning walk the next day so I'd have chance to photograph the half done bits. If I were a really good writer, I would now be telling you why I find the half doneness so intriguing but I can't actually think of anything momentous. On that profound note, on to the photos.

Harvest time is one of the dog's best things. For months, she has not been able to go into the crops, as I had it hammered into me by my farming relations from the time I was able to move on my own that one went ROUND the growing field, not THROUGH it. Oh the horror when one day my sister and I, having done what we thought was a very careful recce went straight through the riverside field (planted with something) instead of round the edge. We were seen, and our sin was reported to our grandparents. It was quite a formative experience.

Once the harvest's done I cast off the dog's shackles and let her go off footpath briefly before it is sown again and we go back to the straight and narrow.

Further on in the walk, I try to count the pigs. I know there is at least one fewer as there is a notice on the farm gate offering half of one for sale. Regret again that I have not got round to buying a chest freezer, for at least the tenth year running. The pigs do not help in my quest to count them, as they are still fast asleep. There should be new pigs soon as the boar's been and spent his time with Mrs Pig.

Right at the end of the walk, in the field the pigs aren't using, are these runner beans. Not sure if they were planted deliberately. I hope they survive. There are certainly human foxes around. Our pear tree lolls over into the churchyard, and every single pear that side has been stripped: pointlessly as they are nowhere near ripe, so the thieves, having taken a few experimental bites and found the pears still rock hard, ended up dumping the chewed remains on the path.

Latest on Amazon

2011-07-27T16:17:00.001+01:00

Amazon's acquisition of The Book Depository has been submitted to Ireland's Irish Competition Authority, which has just reported back on the proposed acquisition after a three week investigation. They've cleared it, saying that the acquisition "will not lead to a substantial lessening of competition in any markets for goods or services in the state." Full details on the decision will be released next month.

The decision by the UK's equivalent body, the Office of Fair Trading, should be released by 30th August, at which point the OFT will state whether or not it will refer the takeover to the Competition Commission.

The Irish decision blows something of a cold wind over at least this bookseller, though of course it's no guarantee of what will or what will not happen.

I am not hugely convinced by the combined submission by the Publishers' Association and the Independent Publisher's Guild to the OFT, which states that Amazon acquiring the Book Depository will lead to a supermarket-like choice of only bestsellers, as well as decreasing competition. I'm not certain that this will be the case: the consumer, I believe, will not initially be the one to suffer. The consumer generally does very nicely thank you out of nice Amazon: oddles of choice, and the opportunity to make a little money yourself selling off what you've read. If Amazon doesn't have the choice from its own warehouses, it more than makes up for it with Marketplace.

It's the book sellers who will suffer: the independent bookshops; the chains; and the publishers. Amazon is not above throwing its corporate weight around (as I've written in earlier blog posts). With Amazon's increasing acquisitions, and its increasing forays into being a publisher itself, comes the need to make sure its considerable power is exercised to the good.

Clive Keeble, in his reaction to the news piece in Bookseller.com, says:

"The launch of Marketplace in 2001 (April 2002 in UK) was the rocket that launched Amazon into dominance.

Book listings were the gatekeeper to the Amazon website ; however Amazon ensured that they were responsible for minimal stocking liabilities via such as the Advantage programme. At the same time Amazon further squeezed the large publishers for preferrential terms.

Amazon quickly realised that Marketplace was akin to 'slots'(fruit machines) for revenue ; assured percentage commission plus the monthly listing fee from millions of third party sellers.
Nowadays, I believe that Amazon will happily subsidise any losses on their own direct sales of new books from their massive revenue from third party sellers such as TBD. If large publishers are willing and weak then Amazon will happily turn the screw on terms.

I could give numerous instances where Amazon has deliberately predatory priced recently published titles without the assistance of additional discount from publishers. Refuse to supply Amazon and they will source from the wholesale network (if the publishers do not supply the general wholesale network then they would lose sales to many smaller booksellers).

I believe that the objections to the takeover of TBD by Amazon are on very weak grounds : however, I desperately hope that they are reined back. Without the power of strong legislation there will be no control over Amazon ; the various trade bodies should have been petitioning political movers and shakers at least seven or eight years ago."

True. We must now hope the OFT does not follow Ireland's lead.

What holiday?

2011-07-26T19:46:00.002+01:00

Last week I spent the holiday money. Business has been up and down of late (though I seemed spectacularly unaffected by the Royal Wedding - it's school holidays as does me down) so I was mulling on whether or not to invest in the business, which is still making a profit, just about, or hang on and have a couple of days away, though even this might have come to naught anyway because of other family pressures.

Anyway, when the chance of new stock came up; and a lot of it at that, I took it. We will be having family days out. New stock doesn't always come along when you want it to in my line of business: once I knew I was going to buy this, of course someone else contacted me with another large collection they thought I might be interested in. It was mostly children's books, rather than horse, so I didn't feel as bad as I might have done at turning it down, but I felt a pang.

So, off I went last week to the deepest Midlands. Here's some pictures of what I bought - 261 horse and pony books. I am now barricaded into my desk by piles of books, and anyone who wants to use the computer other than me does so with threats of death ringing in their ears lest they disturb a pile in any way. The family are used to this. If anyone struggles, it is me, as I build up large piles of books next to my chair without giving any thought about how I am going to get out. It's a new slant on painting yourself into a corner, I suppose.

I felt quite pleased with myself today as I have catalogued 40 books, though having worked out that that still leaves 221, I felt less buoyant.

Movement is very slightly easier, as I have tried to catalogue by area: I've identified a small rectangle of rug which if I clear, I can get out without either breaking an ankle or worse, kicking a book. Some people catalogue alphabetically and in order. I catalogue so I can get out and eat.

Guest blogger - Meg Rosoff

2011-07-22T12:57:00.001+01:00

I have a guest blogger - the wonderful Meg Rosoff (and I have a couple more guest bloggers waiting in the wings too). Meg is a prize winning author. She's won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize 2004 for How We Live Now, and the CLIP Carnegie Medal in 2007 for Just in Case. And she likes pony books.

Over to Meg...

I grew up in the wrong country. I know this because there weren’t enough pony books in America. By the time I turned eleven, I’d read eighteen Black Stallion books, twelve Marguerite Henrys, Black Beauty, Taffy’s Foal, Blaze Finds the Trail, and even (though reluctantly) a bunch of vaguely horsey cowboy books -- though I was decidedly not interested in anything other than the ponies. Desperate, I moved on to The Yearling (a deer book -- what a cheat), The Red Pony (too sad even to think about), Strider by Leon Tolstoy (I think it’s fair to say that I entirely missed the communist metaphor), Dapple Grey in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book. All very literary, but not what I was after.

The pickings became increasingly slim as I moved up in my teens and then twenties. Anything by Molly Keane was likely to feature fox hunting. Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man was bliss. Later there was Hound Music by Rosalind Belben. And then I moved to England at the age of thirty-two and found myself in retro-pony book heaven. Despite my advanced age, I read all the books I’d missed growing up. KM Peyton and Ruby Ferguson were top favourites, but anything with a gymkhana and a handsome older brother kept me happy for days.

Then I ran out again. The Horse Whisperer? Surely not. Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses wasn’t really about horses. I couldn’t face Jilly Cooper’s Riders, though I’m still tempted occasionally. Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven was perfect, despite being about racing, but what I really wanted was an endless supply of pony books. For grown-ups.

So I did what any other self-respecting frustrated pony book lover would have done in my place. I wrote one. It was called Horse Therapy and it wasn’t very good (I’d never owned a horse, and hadn’t ridden in 25 years) but it had a certain energy and it probably made up in relationships what it lacked in yard-lore. And when I say relationships, I mean sex.

“I don’t think I can sell a pony book with quite so much sex in it,” said my new agent politely. So I threw it away and wrote another book. And then two more, and then my answer to Tess of the D’urbervilles, a pony book for teens and grown-ups called The Bride’s Farewell. My pony-loving friends loved it. My mother thought it would read better without all the pony rubbish.

I still hanker after pony stories. I read them secretly, hiding them from my uncomprehending husband and daughter like pony porn, and I’d still love to write them. But I’ve come to terms with the fact that Kathy Peyton has written all the books I wanted to write, and written them with more elegance, wit, and first hand knowledge than I’ll never have. Unable to better that, it’s back to more mundane subjects – adolescence, love, war, depression, family, identity – minus the pony. Which, if you ask me, doesn’t help the finished product at all.

Thank you Meg. I now want to read Horse Therapy. If anyone out there hasn't read The Bride’s Farewell, I can highly recommend it. Meg's latest book has moved away from horseworld. It's called There is No Dog.

It's a rough life being a vet

2011-07-20T14:53:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Chronicle of the Horse for this.

Coping with repellent books

2011-07-19T12:50:00.003+01:00

By which I mean physically repellent, rather than the content: a subject for a whole new blog post.

Bookdealers come across some rare delights in their efforts to find stock. I suppose that's true of dealers in secondhand anything, though I'm glad my days of doing NCT Nearly New sales, and finding baby clothes for sale with the baby sick still on them, are now past. (I used to run these, and we instituted a ruthlessly efficient quality control system to root out this wickedness...)

I also used to sort books for a local Cancer Research shop, and never ceased to be amazed by what people thought we could sell: colouring books already coloured in; books with half the pages missing; books which had obviously been in the bath; books which had spent a long time in a dusty attic, and my particular favourites, books which had spent some time in a damp garden shed. There is nothing like sorting through a box of slightly damp, mould ridden and reeking books, to cheer your day. Wait, yes there is. There was the box of books which contained a mummified mouse corpse.

And how do you describe these book gems? If I ever ran an estate agency (unlikely but I have done quite a bit in my nearly 50 years, and you never know) I would like my property descriptions to be along the Roy Brooks line. Famous in the 1960s for his honest, nay fearless descriptions of what he was trying to sell - he would never have described the utterly bijou broom cupboard sold near Harrods as an opportunity - I feel that he could still teach the book world a thing or two.

Lacking properties to describe, though I am open to offers from any estate agency willing to give me a go, I expend my efforts on books. I don't usually sell books which smell bad, but after dithering with the following book for sometime, I decided to give it a go. If no one buys it, which is, I suppose, given the write-up, more likely than not, I think I will do an Unlucky Dip. I haven't yet decided whether to do this on an opt-in or opt-out basis, but am open to persuasion either way.

Here is the book in question: it's Patience McElwee's Dark Horse:

"Reading copy only and not for the faint hearted even then; ex library and still reeks of smoke despite lengthy exposure to odour removing granules. The dustjacket is laminated to the boards; is faded to the spine, and chipped. The fep has been removed, and the front hinge mended. The pages are reasonably clean. Excellent read by a now sadly under rated author, in which the orphan Hardcastles are caught between their grandmother's almighty snobbery and wish to outdo her "friend", and the casual shenanigans of the grand but incredibly scruffy O'Briens. I can supply a clothes peg with the book should you wish."

So, what do you do if you, all unwary, buy a book which turns out to reek of smoke/cooking fat/mould? There are things you can try, besides the odour removing granules I occasionally use, with occasional success.

Most importantly, if a book has that mouldy reek, it needs a period of at least a month in the freezer to kill the mould spores. If left to its own devices, the mould can infect your other books. When the book emerges from the freezer, it will be delightfully odour free for around 5 minutes. Once it starts to approach room temperature, the mouldy stench will re-emerge. So, now that you have a (you hope) non infectious, but still smelly book, what can you do?

You can try the heat treatment; at least if you live somewhere consistently sunny. I have read a bookseller's lyrical description of putting a book out in the sun for the whole day, turning a few pages at a time to cook. And then repeating that, day after day. If I add that the seller lived in America (and I assume somewhere like California) you will see why that might be a legitimate choice. Doing that in the joy that is the English summer would only lead to damp ruin.

Fuller's Earth (obtainable from a pet shop near you) is supposed to work. Wrap the book in paper and then bury it in a bag of Fuller's Earth. This is supposed to absorb the smell, and does as long as the book is not too bad to start with.

I have also heard that putting the book into a sealed plastic bag with one of those freshener things you put in with the tumble drying is supposed to work. I've never tried it, as I can't bear the smell of the freshener things, and the thought of that, not quite overlaying the mould reek, turns my stomach.

My own take on this is that if a book smells really bad, it will go on doing so, no matter what you do. If a book is, on a scale of 1-5, 1 or 2, then it's worth trying remedies.

If you have any patent remedies, particularly for anything you've tried on the upper end of the scale, please add to the comments.

Update: Dark Horse is now sold. It's the only book I have sold out of the current crop of new stock, so maybe that's telling me something.

My Little Pony?

2011-07-15T09:28:00.001+01:00

I was going to post about a DIY My Little Pony program I found, because I was quite proud of librarian pony, but then via Troton TV on Twitter came the glorious news that the bling heavy primping that infests the beauty pageant scene has now spread to ponies. At the Calgary Stampede, no less, which I'd always thought was quite tough and rodeo-ish. Pics and story here. Eyeliner. Eye shadow. Sparkly hair gel. They shave their muzzles, for goodness' sake. Horses have hairs there because they need them.

If primping is what floats your boat, then why not stick to My Little Pony, who frankly won't really care if you daub it with eyeshadow?

Grow, grow the lightning tree

2011-07-14T13:14:00.002+01:00

We are a television-rich household, I admit it. My children simply can't conceive a world where television was not. When I was a child, we had a television, which received all of, ooh, one, chanel. BBC1. I knew Playschool existed, but it was on BBC 2, and we didn't have BBC 2, so Playschool remained a dim and wistful fantasy for me. We lurched into the modern age with a bang after the science programme Tomorrow's World "experimented" with colour television, which had hoards of people rushing home to see if they could see this attempt at getting us to see colour through our black and white screens. Yes well. I couldn't see anything myself, and frankly didn't believe anyone who said they could at school the next day.

My stepfather had a similarly robust view, and rather than squint and attempt to "see" colour, he simply went out and bought a new television. Not only was it colour, but, almost more exciting, it had more than one channel. THREE! BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV. Not that this panorama of richness was opened up to us, because my mother had (and still has) a deep and abiding suspicion of ITV, which she thought was low. We were not supposed to watch ITV. We were particularly not supposed to watch Magpie, ITV's equivalent of Blue Peter. We were lucky enough to live in a house large enough for the kitchen to be a good distance away from the television room, and so my sister and I would take turns to be on watch during Magpie, listening for Mum coming down the hall, at which point one of us would lunge for the tv and change the channel to virtuous BBC 1.

This left me with two things: a soft spot for the Magpie presenter Mick Robertson; tall; lean and curly haired, and a tendency to never read the tv listings for ITV because they don't count. Possibly spurred on by my infant passion, I went on to marry someone tall, lean and curly haired, and that wasn't the wisest decision of my life. Maybe my mother's anti-Magpie feeling was a presentiment of the doom that her daughter would embrace, and the first move in a decade long (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to get her daughter to see sense. As for ITV, I occasionally regret my automatic passing over of its listings, but technology has moved to accommodate me there.

All this anti-commercial television sentiment in our household is possibly why I don't remember the Follyfoot television series with quite the same passion that many still do. I certainly had (and still have) the books, written by Monica Dickens - the series was based on her book Cobbler's Dream, and she wrote the books that then accompanied the television series. I can't remember my mother having a particular down on Follyfoot - she certainly didn't for ITV's Black Beauty as I watched that, presumably its status as a classic meaning Mum was able to overcome the commercialism that studded the breaks.

I can't remember the tune that introduced Follyfoot, either. Well, to be more accurate, I couldn't. It is now my resident earworm, having heard it on this snippet from Yorkshire Regional News. Follyfoot is now 40, and to celebrate there was a day of events, with visits to the locations, and star turns from the hero and heroine of the series, actors Steven Hodson and Gillian Blake. If you haven't clicked on the link in the rush to get on to the Youtube clip you have spied, here it is again. It's fascinating viewing.

If you want more of The Lightning Tree, (sung by The Settlers, I see) here it is:

I think I might, just might, have to buy the full set of DVDs.

And for those who are curious, there is apparently a phenomenon known as as the Fechner colour effect which gives the impression of rapidly moving black and white images being in colour.

What would they be doing now?

2011-07-12T09:23:00.000+01:00

The thing with reading classic literature, particularly if you've seen a lot of BBC adaptations (and I have), is that the characters become wedded to their period dress and their distant period world. Wuthering Heights I had to read for A level, and I can't even write the words without dark, lowering moors and a lot of swishing, probably sodden and muddy, fabric, coming to mind. Some of that might be an over-familiarity with Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, mind.

I didn't have a huge amount of sympathy for Heathcliff and Cathy even in my surly teenage years, thinking whatever the 1970s equivalent of "What are they ON?" would have been. I know we were supposed to find Nellie Dean the housekeeper narrator the dull antithesis of all that wild and romantic emotion but I had a sneaking sympathy for her. What I liked about the book was the moors: if you regard Cathy and Heathcliff as an extension of the moors, they're just about bearable, but as human beings they're really tedious. Cathy I see as the sort who would drive you completely mental these days, needing lots of long and invariably booze-filled sessions with girlfriends binding on and on and on about Edgar. And Heathcliff. And she would be one of those "friends" who is so self-obsessed they never, not once, ask you about what you're doing, and who never take your advice either, though they are constantly asking you for it.

Becky Sharp, on the other hand....

Amazon from the other side of the fence

2011-07-11T14:00:00.003+01:00

Amazon is phenomenally successful, which begs the question - why?

From the consumer's point of view, Amazon is a good thing. Prices are (generally) low, choice is phenomenal, you can return anything for any reason. With Amazon's feedback system the buyer is in control: the buyer can say pretty much what they want, and if an Amazon seller isn't any good, this should emerge soon in the feedback. Amazon feedback and the seller rating is a fine method of keeping sellers up to scratch. If a seller's feedback is bad, sales will slip.

Amazon's business practice is pretty much like that of the British supermarket. It provides what the customer wants, and the customer keeps coming back.

"Customer service from Amazon is always pretty good as a buyer. I buy non-book items there. When [my husbsand] first got his ipod he was having problems with the download software for buying MP3s from Amazon and the help page asked if he would like a phone call to help him. He clicked yes and the phone went straight away. All sorted out with speed."

"I buy paperbacks from Amazon when I can't find them in local shops or I am in a real hurry. I find the service by Amazon itself to be very good, books do arrive on time and when there are problems they have a helpful and no quibble return/replacement service, including the time a neighbour signed for my parcel but forgot to pass it to me. Only problem - their packers seem to think any new book will do and sometimes send pbs which are less than perfect, but if you complain another copy is sent, the indication being that the books themselves are so cheap for them it just doesn't matter."

Matters are not quite so good in the Amazon Marketplace, which is its platform for sellers with secondhand or rare books to sell. As I wrote in previous blogs, many booksellers have to sell on Amazon in order to survive, but they share a pond with poor practice and inaccuray.

"Marketplace, which I only use if nothing else is available, is a right lottery and you have to read feedback carefully. Books can be terrible 2^nd hand on there."

And again:

"My experience buying from re-sellers has been much more mixed and I usually try to avoid it, partly because the description is often generic and the packing unbelievable, (single layer plastic bags, tight string marking boards etc); slow too. This means I do take notice of feedback in my decision making ......"

Does Amazon really care about the secondhand book side of its business? It is very difficult to compare like with like. I tried looking for a first edition of Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming. What I wanted was the first edition hardback, which is a very, very expensive book indeed. This is what came up:

I tried hitting the hardback tab. It didn't help.

I gave up, and decided to try a children's book, Enid Blyton's first Famous Five title, Five Go on a Treasure Hunt. Amazon had several copies of the hardback reprint available (though no first editions as far as I could see). Amazon has a great many sellers who sell enormous amounts of books through them, providing not one whit of a description. Take this example, with sellers with similar feedback ratings:

In the first example, you don't know for sure whether you're even getting a hardback, let alone whether it has a dustjacket, is ex library, or has names and addresses all over the first blank page. There are many large sellers on Amazon who use this sort of generic description. Sellers get no credit from Amazon for providing the sort of informative and concise description the second seller uses. I know which I'd rather buy.

Inaccuracy is rife on Amazon. I tried looking up a book I know well in all its editions, Ruby Ferguson's Jill's Gymkhana. Amazon have, according to it, over 30 copies of this book in the paperback edition published by Knight in 1977. The picture shown in the example below is, however, the paperback edition published in 1968. Amazon's insistence on each book being entered under its actual year of publication leads to multiple listings (3 pages of them in the case of Jill's Gymkhana). If you were to enter your book under the correct heading, it would not appear at the top of the listings, which is where most people will look. So sellers don't enter their listings where they should be: fine if you're not bothered about what edition you read, but very irritating if you are.

When I wrote last about Amazon and its service to the buyer, I said that what Amazon did not provide was personal service and depth of knowledge. Author information and bibliographies were short on the ground. Since I wrote that, Amazon has made an attempt to plug that gap. Here's Amazon's page on Ruby Ferguson:

Here's mine:

So what is a bookseller to do? Take a leaf out of the small food suppliers' book, I think. One bookseller said to me:

"The plus for both ebay and Amazon is the feedback system for all its faults. I think this is why, along with choice and price, we struggle with our own sites. People are so wary of buying from someone they don’t know. I think social networking helps to a balance that out a bit. If you tweet or blog you become a person out in the internet."

I think that seller is right: booksellers have to make strenuous efforts (and it is hard work) to appear as an individual, and not hide behind piles of cataloguing.

Bits and pieces

2011-07-08T07:30:00.000+01:00

You will never, not ever, get the same thrill from an e-reader as you will looking at this lot. Not if you're me, at any rate.

Thanks to the Mumsnet blogging network, of which I am a member - see smart new badge thing at the side of the blog - I found this excellent blog about the trials and tribulations (plenty of both) on a Perthshire farm.

The Olympic Test event happened this week at Greenwich Park. Here's the best report I've read of it, by Fran Jurga.

I loved this story of the author's introduction to The Elliott Bay Book Company: a timely reminder in these corporate times, of the power of the independent.

There's an online children's literature festival at the Awfully Big Blogging Adventure on July 9th and 10th. The ABBA is written by UK children's book authors, and the programme for the weekend is after the jump.

Saturday 9th July

9.30am Anne Cassidy Post: To Blog or Not To Blog?
10.00am Jo Cotterill
10.30am Anne Rooney & Mary Hoffman Video: Italian Inspiration
11.00am Celia Rees Post: Scattered Authors, the Beginning
11.30am Elen Caldecott Competition: Win 'Operation Eiffel
12.00pm Sally Nicholls Post: History
12.30pm Gillian Philip Competition: Win 'Bloodstone' and 'Firebrand'
1.00pm Liz Kessler Competition: Win 'A Year Without Autumn'
1.30pm Sam Mills Video: Interview with Tyger Drew-Honey
2.00pm Adele Geras
2.30pm Jane Eagland Post: The Ups and Downs of Research
3.00pm Enid Richemont
3.30pm Malcolm Rose Post: Reader Gregor Kelly questions Malcolm Rose over Forbidden Island
4.00pm Lucy Coats Video and Competition: Going to the Dogs--Tackling a Tricky Audience
4.30pm Susan Price & Katherine Roberts Post: Kindles and Kids Books
5.00pm Wendy Meddour Post: On Not Being a Famous Actress
5.30pm Miriam Halahmy & Savita Kalhan Video drama and discussion about Edgy Fiction
6.00pm Catherine Johnson Post: Rastamouse, the Moomins and Me
6.30pm Penny Dolan
7.00pm Linda Newbery & Julia Jarman

Sunday 10th July

10.30am Emma Barnes
11.00 am Dianne Hofmeyr & Miriam Moss On Picture Books
11.30am Kath Langrish Post: Secret Rooms in Children's Fiction
12 NOON Nicola Morgan Competition: Win 'Write to be Published' and a crabbit bag.
12.30pm Julie Sykes Post and Competition: My Favourite Bears
1.00pm Leila Rasheed Competition: Win a critique
1.30pm Joan Lennon Post: The Flamingo and the Writer
2.00pm Hilary McKay Competition: Win 'Caddy's World'
2.30pm Fiona Dunbar & Keren David Video: In Conversation
3.00pm Josh Lacey Competition: Win 'Island of Thieves'
3.30pm Marie-Louise Jensen & David Calcutt
4.00pm Candy Gourlay Video: Creating a Legend
4.30pm Karen Ball Competition: An Inspiring Giveaway
5.00pm Linda Strachan & Cathy MacPhail Video: In Conversation
5.30pm Malachy Doyle Post: The Happy Book
6.00pm Michelle Lovric Competition: Win 'The Undrowned Child'
6.30pm Sue Purkiss Post: What the Dickens?
7.00pm John Dougherty Competition and Composition
7.30pm Lynne Garner
8.00pm Nicky Browne Video: Finding history and herstory

This schedule may be subject to change as a result of circumstances beyond the organisers' control. Though we'll do our best to be control freaks and not let that happen.

A detour

2011-07-07T14:22:00.001+01:00

around natural history, while I plan my next Amazon post. A few people have said to me recently that they don't have much in the way of ladybirds, and where have they all gone? To the neglected tangle that is Badger Towers, is the answer. For once my many gardening fails have worked in my favour, and the nettles I made only half hearted efforts to get rid of are covered with ladybirds in varying stages of development (was going to say gestation, but I don't suppose they do gestate, do they?)

Life as a bookdealer with Amazon

2011-07-06T14:08:00.002+01:00

Whilst it's good news that Amazon's acquisition of the Book Depository has come to the notice of the Office of Fair Trading, who have started the merger enquiry process by inviting comments, none of that will make one iota of difference to the situation that the vast majority of bookdealers in this country have to deal with.

Last year I posted about the almost complete impossibility of running an online secondhand book business without having to use Amazon in some way. I thought it would be interesting to look again at what life is like as a bookdealer all too aware of how much their livelihood depends on Amazon. What follows is the body of my previous post, with updates as relevant.

In the early days of internet bookselling, there was AbeBooks, a Canadian company launched in 1996 whose mission was to provide a platform for booksellers to reach a wider audience, whilst maintaining their individuality. You paid Abe a monthly fee for listing your books, and another fee when a book sold. AbeBooks was a success: after all, it made sense to join together with other booksellers who had different inventories to yours. You reached customers you could never reach on your own, and life looked good.

Abe launched the British version of the site in 2002, and I joined in 2003. As the years went by, ABE, ever mindful I suppose of the need to satisfy shareholders, changed. Listers with enormous numbers of books, many of them print on demand, started to appear on listings. Often you would have to wade through page after page of these "books" to reach a physical copy. Abe dropped its belief that booksellers should be able to promote themselves, forcing them to become more and more anonymous. It now takes a determined buyer to winkle contact details for an individual seller out of Abe. Abe stopped allowing booksellers to process credit card payments themselves. Abe sellers have to have sales processed via Abe, which is far more expensive. The sellers absorb the extra costs, not Abe.

With the constant whittling away of bookseller individuality, many booksellers decided that a website of their own was the way to go. A company called Chrislands provided websites specially set up for booksellers; easy to operate and set up - a tad samey in look, but efficient and bug free. I have one myself, and it's one of the best business decisions I ever took.

Abe then bought Chrislands in April 2008. In December 2008, Amazon bought Abe. It therefore owned Abe, the next largest bookselling site to itself, Chrislands, the major provider of websites to independent booksellers, as well as other companies Abe had already aquired: Fillz, Bookfinder and 40% of Librarything. Abe, and therefore Amazon, have now bought the antiquarian site ZVAB.

So what is the problem with selling via Amazon? Amazon's attitude to its sellers has always been more draconian than Abe: it had no history of having started as a service to booksellers, and it behaved like what it was, a large corporation with a very firm eye on the bottom line.

Over the years I sold on Amazon, the contact the seller was allowed with the buyer was cut, cut, and cut. Originally when you made a sale, you would be sent an email from Amazon including the buyer's email so you could contact them. Of course, if you did this, you were free to mention your own website on your email. Amazon then stopped sending sellers buyer's email information. Over the next few months, there was an entertaining dance by booksellers finding ways round this, and Amazon then plugging each new route. Amazon have succeeded in locking everything down now. All communication has to take place within a service monitored by Amazon. If you promote your own website via those messages, you are in trouble. If you send any promotional material out with the book, you are in trouble. There have been successive user agreements tightening up regulations yet further, and threatening suspension from Amazon if you transgress. These are not empty threats. I know booksellers who have been suspended, or threatened with suspension.

Amazon have also been obdurate about raising their postage charge, which has now lurched up a massive 5p to £2.80 for a UK book. Royal Mail charges have gone up each and every year, but the seller simply has to absorb that. The bookdealer doesn't actually get £2.80, mind you: out of this postage charge, Amazon take their "associated administration fee", which is £0.49. You would think that there would be no difference in administering different postage charges: once you have the system in place it would cost the same to administer any postage charge. Not so. Amazon charge US buyers £6.94. The administration charge for this is not £0.49, but £1.08. Is this an administration charge, or just a cut of the sale?

I mentioned price parity, in which Amazon forbids the seller from charging less for their products elsewhere than Amazon. I wasn't prepared to do this, so left Amazon last year, somewhat in fear and trepidation. Fortunately for me, although sales have been down, they are not catastrophically so. I am fortunate in being a niche retailer, selling horse and pony fiction. I have a large and well-visited information website supporting my sales site. Other booksellers are not necessarily so fortunate.

So what's changed since I wrote last year? I thought that Amazon would raise their 1p minimum price. They haven't, as yet. ABE have taken steps to clean up their offerings, trying to get rid of the megalisters by stating that a seller may list only two of a particular title. This seems to have had a beneficial effect. Chrislands have raised their monthly fee, but have at the same time increased what they offer.

None of this, however, has done anything to dispel the climate of fear that exists in the bookselling community. I admit to waking much earlier than I'd like in the morning, fretting, myself. I sell principally through ABE and Chrislands. Virtually all of my income is, ultimately, dependent on Amazon. If Amazon get nasty with me my business will be rocked to its core.   Amazon still pursue those who sell on its site and who step out of line. None of the comments I'm about to quote on how booksellers feel about Amazon are attributed. The reason? Each and every bookseller who got in touch with me fears what will happen to their income if Amazon decides to punish them for speaking out.

[I] cannot live without amazon – so daren’t leave them – too much of our income comes through them. A very sad fact of life.

I'm still not ready to leave Amazon because I still need those sales.

My own website does not do very well and I depend enormously on Amazon. Much of our business is with libraries and professionals rather than collectors and they seem to use Amazon despite its useless search engine and poor descriptions. I have a deep loathing for Amazon having crossd swords with them a few times but cannot see how else to manage as their share of the cake seems to increase all the time. Zvab has changed its pricing structure as a result of being bought by abe. I get the feeling amazon will be a great global cloud sharing life with google and not much else.

And I'll leave you with this:

Amazon is a hybrid monster with sharp shoes and a spray tan, and a tinsy antique fine lawn handkerchief (that’s us) just peeping out of its breast pocket – used only to wipe its dribbling snout.

Amazon and the bookselling world

2011-07-04T15:03:00.005+01:00

The Book Depository weren't owned by Amazon. The Book Depository provided a viable alternative to Amazon, and I had Book Depository buttons up on my site and this blog. Amazon have just reached an agreement to buy Book Depository International. From the sound of the report, it looks as if Amazon will have The Book Depository carrying on in the same form it is now, providing the illusion of competition.

The illusion of competition is something Amazon is good at exploiting. Take the secondhand book business. Besides selling a considerable amount of books through their own site, they own ABE, the largest secondhand bookselling site (apart from Amazon). ABE own Chrislands, largest provider by a very long way of website facilities to secondhand booksellers, including me. They own Fillz, Bookfinder and 40% of Librarything. And earlier this year, ABE (and therefore Amazon) bought ZVAB, another antiquarian book selling site.

If there is competition, Amazon are not beyond attempting to control it. Amazon introduced "price parity": if you sell on their site, you have to agree that you will not sell your books elsewhere at less than you have them listed on Amazon. In other words, if you have your own site (which will cost you a lot less than selling via Amazon) you cannot undercut Amazon if you sell with them too. Although Amazon can't control what you sell at in a bricks-and-mortar store, they include the following in their selling agreement:

"We also hope that the spirit of the price parity principle will be followed with respect to other channels, and that your prices on Amazon will be competitive with your prices in physical retail stores."

This policy has been in place for a while: it was taken by booksellers to the Fair Trade Commission, who have not yet reported.

Amazon have their own print-on-demand business. They attempted to force publishers to use Amazon's print-on-demand services, threatening removal of the buy buttons on titles in reprisal if publishers didn't toe the line. Amazon were taken on by Book Locker and the Long Riders' Guild Press, and Amazon retreated.

Amazon have their own publishing imprint: AmazonEncore, which publishes already successful self-published books. Scratch Amazon's back if they ask you to review one of their books, and they will scratch yours. Give them a good review, and they'll offer to promote you. I was interested to see in this piece that it's only if you give a good review that you're going to feel any benefits. Whilst I can see that it's standard marketing practice to want to promote your products, in the overall picture of Amazon as book behemoth, it's worrying.

And there's another example of Amazon's rampaging hold: I research bibliographies on the British Library site. Click on a title to get the full bibliographical details and guess what - there's a link to Amazon.

It's as if Amazon's some great hawk hovering over the surface of a pond. Every now and then attempts to escape corporate dominance bubble up to the surface and are either gobbled up (Book Depository), or exploited (self publishing).

Thank goodness J K Rowling is only releasing the ebook versions of the Harry Potter series through her own website, Pottermore.

Bits and pieces and a parsnip forest

2011-07-04T11:32:00.000+01:00

The equestrian test event is on in Greenwich Park at the moment. There are not many moments when I regret having moved from Charlton (next door to Greenwich) but now is one of them. Here's Fran Jurga with a full report on what's happened so far.

Like Susanna Forrest, I long to have a go at side-saddle. Susanna has, and here's her lovely blog piece on it.

My idea of War Horse the movie would have been Tim Burton plus the puppets from the stage show. Failing that, it's Stephen Speilberg, who seems to have some misgivings himself on his use of real horses.

I have a vegetable patch on what was our muck heap. The theory is that I grow stuff up there that doesn't need a lot of horticultural input; potatoes, garlic, onion, and parsnips (note nod to the Oxford comma which I am experimenting with having been taught it was a Bad Thing. Now questioning this assumption). I am supposed to go up to the muck heap once a week to check on what's been happening. I haven't been for a while, and when I have gone, have not looked in the direction of the parsnips. This is what's happened to them now:

They are taller than me. Goodness knows what's going on underground.

New books for July

2011-07-01T09:45:00.002+01:00

Here's this month's horse and pony book releases.

Kate O’Hearn - Pegasus and the Fight for Olympus
I’m looking forward to the next episode in this Greek gods meet modern day America saga, having enjoyed the first book, Pegasus and the Flame, very much. At the end of the first volume, Olympus had been saved, though surely only temporarily as the Nirads were still very much alive and well.

Jenny Oldfield - Black Pearl Ponies
Jenny Oldfield’s latest series is out this month. As far as I can see,two titles are released this month: Red Star and Wildflower. It’s another series set in America, on a ranch, a formula which has been extremely successful for Jenny Oldfield before.

Tracy Dockray - Lost and Found Pony
Feiwell & Friends, £10.49. Tracy Dockray, who has illustrated books by Beverly Cleary, has her own book out at the end of July. The cover certainly looks promising.

Pippa Funnell - Tilly's Pony Tails 14: Buttons: the Naughty Pony
Out on 7 July, it’s episode 14 in Pippa’s series, which shows no sign of slowing down.

Christine Pullein-Thompson - Phantom Horse series
The Phantom Horse series has gone through a fair few printings, most recently by Award,who have commissioned another edition, with covers by Jennifer Bell, probably best known for her illustrations for Stabenefeldt, as well as her lovely book for J A Allen, The Allen Book of Drawing and Painting Horses. Two of the original titles in the Phantom Horse series have been changed: Phantom Horse Goes to Ireland and Phantom Horse Goes to Scotland are now Phantom Horse Disappears and Phantom Horse Island Mystery.

The exam season part 2

2011-06-30T07:00:00.003+01:00

If you managed to negotiate part one of the be-your-own-pony-book-hero exam, here is part 2.

Probability Paper

A. Rank the following outcomes in order of probability, showing your working:

An evil tempered stallion has entered the yard:

a. The livery yard owner warns you against going anywhere near the horse. So you don’t.

b. You creep up to the yard in the dead of night and sneak into the evil stallion’s box to lay soft hands on his neck. You know the two of you have a special connection.

c. After much struggle, you and you alone rescue the evil stallion, but it will take you at least 12 books before you have any sort of connection.

d. The evil stallion is to be put down as he is Beyond Saving. You and your friends come up with a cunning plan to save him.

B. Work out, using examples, the probability of the following appearing in a book published during the last ten years:

a. Unicorns

b. Mythical sky ponies

c. Parelli/natural horsemanship/TT/equine yoga

d. You and your very ordinary pony jumping a 3’ course as a matter of course. And winning the showing too.

C. The riding school you attend is run by a single lady of uncertain years. She is taken seriously ill and rushed off to hospital. What will happen to the riding school?

a. The owner’s daughter will turn up to run the school, delighted to have this opportunity to help her mother and turn the school into a really top-flight establishment, which she does.

b. The owner’s daughter will turn up to run the school. She is a fiend in human form, intent only on making money out of the hapless ponies, and indeed, you. You and your friends band together to get her out.

c. The owner's daughter will turn up to run the school. She is not in fact the owner's daughter, but a property developer intent on covering the lovely fields with soulless boxes. You and your friends band together to get her out.

c. Fortunately it is the start of the summer holidays, and you and your cousins are all staying at the stables anyway. Gathering together your weeks of experience at running a stable, you keep the old place going until the owner is able to return, dripping gratitude and offering years of free rides.

External examiner, Linda Newbery, adds a supplemental question:

You are at an auction when a poor, bedraggled, unloved pony looks at you with its melting brown eyes. Will it:

a. be sold to the knacker
b. nearly be sold to the knacker, but you and your friend manage just in time to scrape together a few pounds to buy it
c. turn out to be lame and decrepit
d. turn out to be a brilliant show-jumper whose talent only you have discovered?

===End of paper===

Pencils down.

War Horse - the Film

2011-06-29T09:31:00.003+01:00

I would have to be manacled to my desk to keep me from going to see this, but I wonder how Spielberg has dealt with the fact it's the horse who is the narrator, as it's not immediately apparent from the trailer. Maybe that's deliberate?

Mary Stewart giveaway

2011-06-28T13:26:00.000+01:00

Hodder and Stoughton have done a glam re-issue of Mary Stewart's books (at last). I like these. They're the right side of glamorous, without being annoyingly and self-consciously "vintage". All Stewart's heroines had those tiny waists, as well of course as oodles of inner strength and resourcefulness. And for those wondering if I can go a whole entire blog post without mentioning the horse, she did of course write the Lipizzaner adventure Airs Above the Ground.

If you fancy winning the title of your choice from the re-issues (and I do) go on over to the Brown Paper blog, where you can enter a giveaway to win the Mary Stewart of your choice. I've gone for The Crystal Cave, which I can remember getting out of the library and lugging to school.

The exam season

2011-06-28T09:41:00.005+01:00

Daughter has gone off to do her latest GCSE science module exams today, with our big question of the day being "Can you resit a resit?" Answer comes there none.

For those of us for whom the exam season is a thankfully far distant memory, but who yearn to share their offspring's pain, or revisit their revision-strewn youth, here is an entrance exam to the world of the pony book.

English

A. What part should poetry play in the fully rounded pony book hero’s life?

1. You quote poetry in a dashing way as you sweep around the countryside on your pony – you thrill to the way the cadence of the words matches the rhythm of your pony’s movement.

2. You have learned by heart John Betjeman's Hunter Trials, and that will do nicely, thank you very much.

3. What is poetry?

B. You have gone to visit a cousin. She thoughtfully puts out a selection of literature on the bedside table for you. What would your ideal selection be?

1. School stories. Not your cup of tea, but reading them would help you reach out to your cousin and understand her way of thinking. There is more to life than ponies, after all.
2. The latest copies of Horse and Hound and Horse. Dressage Weekly might not go amiss, and a Breed Society magazine is always good. You never get the chance to read any of these, and it will stop you trying to read other peoples' copies over their shoulders in the train on the way home.
3. A completely irrelevant question, as you have brought your own copy of The Horse in Sickness and in Health.

C. You are no stranger to literature. Your bookshelf is stuffed to overflowing with pony stories. Alas your local bookshop and library do not share your obsession. Do you:

1. Read your collection again. And again. And possibly again. If there's no pony, you're not interested.

2. Write your own book. Your youth is not an obstacle, and there is bound to be a publisher keen to print your story Hard Times, a Pony who Fell and Rose Again, particularly as it has been illustrated by your talented friend Mary.

3. Give up the attempt to read and spend the rest of your life regarding people who do with deep suspicion.

===End of paper===

Lavender path

2011-06-27T15:38:00.000+01:00

More on that hat

2011-06-25T12:56:00.000+01:00

The filly-in-the hat I blogged about a couple of days ago is a real life racehorse. I had wondered if she was photoshopped but due to not reading Horse and Hound closely enough last month I entirely missed the fact that Ambers is a 2 year old filly owned by Fox's Biscuits, and she is going to star in an advertising campaign for their biscuits later on this year. In fact, she might be starring in it already. I must

a. pay more attention to Horse and Hound and not just read the horses for sale ads at the back and daydream and

b. not switch off brain when the tv advertisements come on.

I had quite hoped there would be something about milliner Stephen Jones' foray into equestrian design on his website, but alas no, possibly in my opinion as a keen observer of fashion because Amber's hat doesn't fit into his Spring/Summer 2011 theme, which is drifting and dreaming. Definitely has the colour block thing covered though - the hat is the sort of technicolour dream you're not going to forget in a hurry. More pics here. I bet trainer Richard Hannon hadn't expected hat-wearing to be part of the brief when he took the filly on. He's done a good job.

Bees

2011-06-23T07:43:00.000+01:00

Last week we had a bee swarm. A few days ago my daughter came in and said that we had bees flying around the north wall of the house, which I took I must admit not a lot of notice of, as we always have a lot of bees about. Those bees have now taken advantage of our complete failure to do anything about our dodgy pointing and made themselves at home in the wall.

So far we have not much in the way of encounters with the bees, though when I went out to the bins, which are round that side of the house, a little cloud of bees flew down to have a look at me, and then swept back up again, which was momentarily disconcerting. I was glad I was not Pooh Bear and holding honey. Alas they are far too high up for me to do anything about collecting the honey, which is a shame, as I am very partial to honey If I am honest I have not the faintest clue of how to start collecting honey, though dismantling the house wall to get at it probably wouldn't be a good first step, and one tricky to explain to English Heritage. And probably not too popular with the bees either.

My husband appeared in the office a few days after the bees arrived and asked if I'd looked outside recently. The front garden was a buzzing mass of bees; the first time I'd seen a swarm starting out. I did a quick google and found out that the bees stock up on honey before they swarm, and are in holiday mood. They eventually settled in one of our yew trees, and were removed by local beekeepers. I asked what would happen to the scouts left behind, and was told they would go back to the hive they'd come from. They haven't made it yet. There's a little grapefruit sized swarm still left.

They don't show any sign of leaving Badger Towers. They are very handily placed next to my two very long lavender hedges which are just coming into flower, so it must seem like camping out next to the Ritz for them.

Bookselling bits

2011-06-22T07:42:00.001+01:00

On a listing on ABE for Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven:

"Don't forget that buying this book means my Jack Russells get their supper!"

And I have wondered over the years exactly how the industrial booksellers work. There is one similarity between us that might not occur to you straightaway: central heating obviously isn't an issue in the warehouse, and it doesn't tend to be much here either so I can sympathise with the workers in their coats.

Hats

2011-06-21T12:52:00.002+01:00

Well why not?