She adorned the day with ordinariness;
she is blessed to have brought the extraordinary home.
It’s been quite an apprenticeship, the indenture satisfied, the continuation of the family firm secure for another generation. The pomp and circumstance may not be for all, but a point of reference to help understand who and what we are is no bad thing, and there is much to be celebrated and appreciated in consistency and regularity. The choppy waters of life need to be calmed and countered from time to time, and the family firm can do that. Good luck to the former apprentice – you’re hired!
An Unexpected Guest by Simon Armitage
featuring Samuel Pepys
She’s treated herself to new shoes, a window seat
on the fast train, a hotel for a night.
She’s been to the capital twice before,
once to see Tutankhamun when she was nine
and once when it rained. Crossing The Mall
she’s just a person like everyone else
but her hand keeps checking the invitation,
her thumb strumming the gilded edge of the card,
her finger tracing the thread of embossed leaves.
In sight of the great porch she can’t believe
the police just step aside, that doors shaped
for God and giants should open to let her in.
She’s taken her place with ambulance drivers
and nurses and carers and charity workers,
a man who alchemised hand sanitiser
from gin, a woman who walked for sponsored miles,
the boy in the tent. The heads of heads of state
float down the aisle, she knows the names
of seven or eight. But the music’s the thing:
a choir transmuting psalms into sonorous light,
the cavernous sleepwalking dreams
of the organ making the air vibrate,
chords coming up through the soles of her feet.
Somewhere further along and deeper in
there are golden and sacred things going on:
glimpses of crimson, flashes of jewels
like flames, high priests in their best bling,
the solemn wording of incantations and spells,
till the part where promise and prayer become fused:
the moment is struck, a pact is sworn.
And got to the abby … raised in the middle …
Bishops in cloth-of-gold Copes …
nobility all in their parliament-robes …
The Crowne being put on his head
a great shout begun. And he came forth …
taking the oath … And Bishops … kneeled
… and proclaimed … if any could show
any reason why Ch. … should not be the King …
that now he should come and speak …
The ground covered with blue cloth …
And the King came in with his Crowne …
and mond … and his sceptre in hand …
She’ll watch it again on the ten o’clock news
from the armchair throne in her living room:
did the cameras notice her coral pink hat
or her best coat pinned with the hero’s medal she got
for being herself? The invitation is propped
on the mantelpiece by the carriage clock.
She adorned the day with ordinariness;
she is blessed to have brought the extraordinary home.
And now she’ll remember the house sparrow
she thought she’d seen in the abbey roof
arcing from eave to eave, beyond and above.
This week I’ve started reading our next Book Club choice, Endless Forms by Seirian Sumner. I never thought I would be so interested in a book about wasps, but somehow I’m hooked on every word. This book is easy to read, with a chatty tone throughout, and often, at times, with quite disgusting and horrifying detail. Seirian is coming to the shop on the evening of 18th May to tell us more about these fascinating insects. Why not join us? Just buy a copy of the book on the link below and that’s your ticket to even more waspish discovery on the evening.
Our top fiction pick of the week is Whether Violent or Natural by Natasha Calder. This is a dark and twisted dystopian debut from Calder. Years after complete antibiotic resistance has resulted in the loss of most human life on earth, Kit and Crevan eke out an existence on a remote island. Under a collapsing castle, they spend their days in an underground bunker packed with emergency stores. One evening a woman washes ashore, nearly drowned. Crevan wants to keep her alive, but Kit isn’t so sure. The new arrival will implode Kit and Crevan’s world with dire and fatal consequences.
Who is really in control – and what are they both capable of doing to protect their haven?
We have two amazing paperbacks to usher in the summer – Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson will immerse you in the dazzling lights of the roaring twenties; and Watching Women and Girls by Danielle Pender is a collection of short stories exploring female relationships in all of their beautiful and ugly forms.
We have an unprecedented amount of non-fiction this week, and it was really hard to choose just a small handful. In honour of the local election, I’ve chosen Tory Nation by Samuel Earle, which looks into how the Conservatives have managed to stay in power for so long. In a similar vein, China Mieville’s A Spectre, Haunting, takes a deep dive into Marx’s Communist Manifesto and how this is still altering our political sphere even today, over 100 years after it was published. The Wager reads like a novel, and conjures movie-esque scenes in your imagination, it tells the true-story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder. And The Experience Machine by Andy Clark tells us how we’re not perceiving the world as it truly is; how our cognition is making prediction and false perceptions of the reality around us.
Lastly, in children’s fiction we have two very lovely animal-themed books. Helen Ward has retold the Fables in An Anthology of Aesop’s Animal Fables, this book is brimming with gorgeous illustrations and lovely tales. This is truly a book that a child is bound to keep for a long time. We also have Emily Gravett’s 10 Dogs, which is filled with Emily’s usual wit and silly humour.
As always, if there’s a book you can’t find, call us and we will try our best to source a copy for you.
The full newsletter with links to books can be found HERE
