There is just so much wrongness in this, I hardly know where to start ... but I'd personally like to live in a world where we can all enjoy the benefits of well-lit car parking facilities in a wide range of pleasing colours, and with spaces wide enough to park in because, so far as I'm aware, the ability to park properly is not genetically determined, but it is affected by the size of one's car and the amount of room available for manoeuvre.

I'm currently reading Toby Lester's The Fourth Part of the World (London: Profile Books, 2009), which PK gave me for Christmas. As long-time readers will perhaps recall, I have an ongoing interest in the history of exploration and of cartography. Toby Lester's book focuses on a huge map printed by Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. 'For millennia, humans believed that the world consisted of three parts – Europe, Africa and Asia – but occasionally they talked about the existence of a "fourth part of the world", a mysterious place, separated from the rest by a vast expanse of ocean.' Ringmann and Waldseemüller came to the conclusion that Amerigo Vespucci had travelled to the fourth part of the world, and they celebrated this by making a map that showed the New World separated from Asia by water, and naming the new part of the world 'America', after Vespucci.

I'll doubtless talk about the book in more detail at some point in the future, not least because it is very meaty and enjoyable, but I am currently mesmerised by something I've just read on p. 167.

Estimates of the size of the Council of Constance vary dramatically, but all sources agree that it was huge. Between 40,000 and 150,000 people are thought to have converged on the city for the event, which dragged on for more than three years. Some seven hundred high-ranking Church officials from all over Europe and Byzantium attended the council, among them one pope, three patriarchs, twenty-nine cardinals, and an extended assortment of important archbishops, bishops, and abbots. Accompanying them came a sprawling retinue of close to eighteen thousand personal assistants, secretaries, copyists, scholars, legal advisers, servants, and others. The archbishop of Mainz alone arrived with an escort of five hundred people. Almost every city and feudal state in Europe was represented at the council, either by its ruler or by a high-level delegation. Eighteen dukes and archdukes, eighty-three counts, seventy-one barons, and 1,500 knights turned up for the event, and they, too, brought thousands along with them. Europe's major universities and schools sent representatives, and poets, artisans, laborers, and merchants all poured into the city to serve the needs of the gathering – as did Florentine bankers' Cosimo de' Medici himself set up shop in Constance. The town had to absorb more than just people, or [sic] course. By one estimate, some thirty thousand horses had to be fed and stabled during the council.

My immediate response was, 'where the hell did they put everyone and everything, and how on earth did they manage to set up and maintain a viable infrastructure?' Because I always wonder about things like that. There are some particularly grim accounts of what happened when King Charles and his supporters decamped to Oxford and established court there, that I try not to think about, but I'm also curious about how the hinterland of Constance would have maintained so many people for so long. They must have been trucking stuff in from hundreds of miles around, and what happened in the winter ... did everyone go home for extended periods, or what? I'm fascinated, but have no time to stop and read around (not my period anyway).

The Game – Diana Wynne Jones
(London: Puffin/Firebird, 2007, 176 pp, hb)

A reread but I never wrote it up at the time, so it is as new. Hayley's parents disappeared when she was very small, and she has been raised by her grandparents. Grandad's work remains mysterious, although at times he shows Hayley astonishing things derived from his work, much to the disapproval of Grandma, who has extraordinarily strict ideas about the behaviour and education of children. Inevitably this situation cannot persist, but Hayley is unprepared when it seems she has done something so appalling she must be banished from her grandparents' house and despatched to her aunts in Ireland. Here she suddenly finds herself part of an enormous family, the children of whom play a mysterious 'Game', requiring them to visit something called 'the mythosphere', from which they bring back pieces of story.

I hesitate to discuss this story too much because I think it's worth encountering it unprepared, but I don't think it would hurt to note that it's another of DWJ's ingenious explorations of the power of myth and of storytelling. I was delighted with it.

Out of 5

****½

67 / 50 books. 134% done!

Leviathan or, The Whale – Philip Hoare
(London: Fourth Estate, 2009, 4543 pp, pb)

"From his childhood fascination with the gigantic models of London's Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales."(back cover)

( Commentary behind the cut )

It was a book I was sorry to finish.

Out of 5:
***¾

Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education – Jane Robinson
(London: Penguin/Viking, 2009, 261, hb)

"In 1869 Emily Davies signed the lease on a house in the small market town of Hitchin, and made history. In years to come, she would be joined by others and would move to larger accommodation in Girton, nearer to the town of Cambridge. But at first there were only five young women in her care: the first women ever to study a degree course at an English university." (jacket flap)

( Commentary behind cut )

Enjoyable, but I think I'd like a follow-up in-depth volume.

Out of 5
***

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India – William Dalrymple
(London: Bloomsbury, 2009, 284 pp, hb)

"Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. [...] Wiliam Dalyrymple's first travel book for over a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the vortex of the region's rapid change." (Dust jacket copy)

( Commentary behind cut )

Out of 5
****

66 / 50 books. 132% done!

I have got out of the habit of sending physical Christmas cards, but I like to put together a Christmas LJ post. Normally I do it for Christmas Eve, but everyone already seems to be on holiday and vanishing from internet sight, so I'd better get on with this today ...

This year, my links seem to be about Christmas customs and history, so let's begin with a tour of Christmas customs, courtesy of the Geffrye Museum in London (which I really am going to visit in 2010).

Last year I got utterly hooked on the BBC series, The Victorian Farm (currently being repeated on the BBC, and yes, I'm watching the repeats, even though I have the DVD), and was pleased and delighted when the team returned with The Victorian Farm Christmas for 2009. This link leads to a plethora of links and activities for the complete Victorian Christmas experience, many of them related to the tv series. (I'm also planning to visit Acton Scott working farm in 2010, money permitting).

Last week, trying to find out what the weather was doing in Kent, I stumbled across a website article on the lost Kentish village of Dode. The village disappeared when its population was wiped out by the Black Death, and only the parish church remains. It was bought and restored by Doug Chapman nearly twenty years ago, and seems to be pretty much as it was when the village disappeared (give or take some decorative effects). Click on the slide show, which is quite breathtakingly beautiful.

As for me, I'm about to venture out into the distinctly unfestive rain in Folkestone, grateful for the fact that while we had snow earlier in the week, I can at least get around the town easily when I need to. For those celebrating, PK, Minnow, the Krumpies and myself wish you a splendid Christmas. And even if you aren't celebrating Christmas, as the days grow slowly longer again, we wish you a happy return to the light. I am now going to the supermarket. Wish me luck.

I know ... you've been wondering ...

We put up the tree about a week and a half ago, with nothing on it, and they ignored it. Suddenly, at the end of the week, it became the most fascinating toy ever and the day was punctuated by the soft thud of Nicodemus falling out of the tree again. (Rosa climbs the tree but being an exceedingly good climber climbs down again. Nicodemus, as we may recall, tends to leap first and sod the consequences.) We decided to raise it onto the blanket box as Nicodemus was also skidding into the tree head first. This proved not to be a great move as it now became A Challenge, and had to be climbed every available waking moment. While it is a fairly robust tree, even a robust tree eventually begins to sag under the attentions of a substantial cat, and Nicodemus is a substantial cat, although he is not yet a year old. Hence my need to repair the tree this morning with some well-aimed blows of a rubber mallet, bending things back into place, after Nicodemus perched on them for longer than was sensible. (He does look quite good in the tree, but don't tell him I said that.)

The Krumps are now banned from the bedroom except under severe supervision, as PK has decorated the tree (though we have not used our favourite crystal icicles and drops for fear of damage) and we would like it to stay upright and relatively unscathed. In honour of his banishment, Nicodemus went and experimentally cleared the mantelpiece downstairs, sending ornaments and candlesticks flying, after which he and Rosa retired to the book room to sulk.

We have had insufficient snow to keep the Krumps more than marginally amused, but they seem to like what they've seen of this snow stuff so far, to judge from the interesting tracks in the garden, and brought in a reasonable amount of it on their floofs.

Biography: A Very Short Introduction – Hermione Lee
(Oxford: OUP, 2009)

There is, I think, an idea that biography is an impartial, objective presentation of facts about a person, as though the writer has had full access to everything about a person that has ever existed. This is far from any kind of reality so far as biographical or life writing is concerned. As the dust flap on this VSI points out, biography 'is by no means a fixed or stable form of literature. Biography has gone through many centuries of change and exists in many different versions.' Having said that, when I was young I never really gave it a thought, happily devouring biographies and assuming I had some grip on the person as a result. I continued in this vein until Iain Hamilton wrote about the difficulties of trying to write a biography of J.D. Salinger, famously private, who refused Hamilton access and cooperation, and most importantly, the right to quote from his works. Peter Ackroyd suffered similarly in trying to write a biography of T.S. Eliot, but managed to circumvent the quotation restrictions imposed by the Eliot estate through some ingenious and very stylish paraphrasing. Instances like this remind us that writing a biography is not a right; by the same token, writing an authorised biography is not the easy ride it might seem to be. Beyond that, authors write biographies because they want to explore a theory, because they have an axe to grind, because they think a previous biographer got it wrong, or because new information has come to light, or because a new generation may see a person's actions in an entirely different light. And so it goes on.

Lee's Biography raises these and other issues involved in the writing of biography in what is, in my view, an extremely neat and informative introduction to the study and writing of biography.

Out of 5

****

63/50 bookss. 126% done!

So today was my last day in the office this year. Or at least it was supposed to be. Instead the snow intervened.

I went for the 7.02 train as usual, but after we'd been sitting in the station for 20 minutes the driver announced that the guard was still stuck in the London area, so the train was going to go empty to Ashford and we all had to get off.

The next London train arrived a few minutes later, we got on board, started off, and went slower and slower.

We came upon the snow a little before Ashford, a light dusting at first but soon a uniform blanket. By the time we pulled out of Ashford (already running nearly half an hour late) we were travelling through a winter wonderland, a perfect picture postcard scene. Every bare branch was outlined with a couple of inches of snow, every field was unbroken white with just odd animal tracks to mar the white. The train got slower, and instead of getting more crowded as we went along it seemed to get emptier. As we approached Tonbridge I counted about half a dozen people in the carriage, usually at this stage in the journey you'd be lucky to find half a dozen empty seats in the carriage. By now it was nearly 9, the journey had already taken a full hour longer than it should and the train was only getting slower. As we reached Tonbridge, I decided to bale out. I stepped off the train into four inches of pristine snow.

Now I faced the adventure of getting home. There was a train to Folkestone advertised for 9.07, which meant it was already 40 minutes late and as I watched the display board over the next minute I saw the display change to 9.08, 9.09, 9.10, 9.11. Then the tannoy crackled and the announcer declared that at the moment there were no trains running towards Ashford and the coast. Then the train pulled in. I wasn't the only regular from my morning commute that I saw getting on that train heading home.

From then on the train actually made good progress, but there was obvious confusion at every station we passed. At Ashford, where the train divided (my portion to Dover, the rear portion to Canterbury) a man jumped on and settled down opposite me with his mug of coffee and a pile of papers. As the train announcer said that we were now separated and this was the portion for Dover my new companion looked up. "This is going ...?" he jerked his thumb towards the coast. I nodded. "Not ...?" he pointed in the general direction of London. I shook my head. He jumped up, stuffed papers into his bag, reached for his coat, picked up then put down the coffee, but the train was already moving. I don't think he was the only one confused, at a couple of stations I noticed displays on London-bound platforms announcing coast-bound trains.

I got home around 10.30, over three and a half hours after setting out, and in that time got only as far as Tonbridge which we would normally expect to reach in about 40 minutes. And that was my last day in the office. On the whole I'm glad I didn't get in. There's been more snow since I got home, so I'd hate to think what the trains are like now.

Obligatory post about snow.

We have none in Folkestone, just an icing-sugar dusting on the hills. We do have very strong winds, bitingly cold, and brilliant winter sunshine.

peake attempted to get into London this morning, but turned round at Tonbridge after a 40-minute train journey took an hour and a half, and he was still only halfway to work, with the worst of it still to come and the train getting slower and slower. He is now on an imaginary train home and I anticipate seeing him in the next hour and a half. (The train is imaginary because the station announcements at Tonbridge were claiming there were no trains to Ashford just before he caught his train. He is good at catching imaginary trains.)

As more snow is forecast, I'm glad he is now on this side of the dreaded Mid Kent Triangle, not least because his Christmas holiday starts today, and I would prefer not to spend the entire day worrying about where he's got to and whether I should take the car out to find him.

peake and I went to London, to Hampstead, for Rob Holdstock's funeral yesterday, on a bitterly cold day, bright but with dark clouds looming in the background, threatening snow. We looked like two storm-tossed crows as we battled our way to the station through strong winds. It seemed right for the day.

The ceremony, and it was a ceremony, not a service, was held at the Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, a building that, to all intents and purposes, looks like a very small English parish church somewhere out in the wilds of Kent. In fact, as I suspected, it is a Victorian Gothic building, right down to some Burne Jones stained-glass windows. It was only at the end of a ceremony for a man who had written his way so deeply under the skin of the English mythos that I noticed, high up on the chancel arch, a small but unmistakeable foliate head staring down at us. It seemed very fitting.

Paul Kincaid has written most eloquently about the ceremony here, but I 'd like to add a few thoughts.

PK notes that Rob's coffin was made of wickerwork; the first we knew of this was a curious creaking sound as something began to move somewhere behind us, and the pall-bearers suddenly appeared in my line of vision with this amazing artefact, decorated with greenery and flowers. After the first startled moment, then the thought of 'yes, of course, what else could it be', I found myself thinking about the funeral of William Morris, whose coffin was taken to Kelmscott church on a farm waggon decorated with flowers, like a Harvest Home. I've read about wickerwork coffins and seen photographs, but nothing prepares one for the extraordinary 'aliveness' of them when they're being moved. Not so much a coffin as a cradle, and the person inside stirring slightly in their sleep as they're carried along. Which perhaps sounds macabre but I found something very comforting about it. And really, that was what the ceremony was all about, about lulling someone into a last sleep and soothing those of us who remain awake. His friends played Rob's favourite music and we sang to him, they read to him and us, his own work, poetry by others, their own thoughts at his passing, told funny stories about him, and it seemed very much as though Rob was still among us all.

The ceremony began with a violin and piano version of Ralph Vaughan Williams' 'The Lark Ascending'. It's hard not to feel a little better about things after listening to Vaughan Williams. However, Rob's coffin left the building to a blaze of trumpet and organ, a celebration of a life truly well lived if finished far too soon.

Just back from the funeral service for Rob Holdstock. No, 'funeral service' is the wrong term; it was a memorial ceremony, a celebration. It was moving and hard to take and joyous all at the same time. It took place in a Unitarian Chapel, but it was the most unreligious ceremony you could imagine: the only 'hymn' we sang, right at the end, was Woody Guthrie's 'So Long, It's Been Good To Know You'.

It was bitterly cold, we struggled down Hampstead High Street thinking it might be quite nice if we came on a warmer day, and we'd have walked straight past the chapel if we hadn't run into Steve Jones, who led us to the secret entrance round the side. I had no idea what to expect of a Unitarian Chapel, but it looked like an Anglican Church with stained glass in the windows (and what looked disturbingly like angels in alien space ships high above the altar), but it felt far more relaxed. And in it was a confusion of sf people, several of whom I'd not seen in 20 years or more (Kevin Smith, Andrew Stephenson). At one point I caught sight of Rob's younger brother, Chris, whom I've never laid eyes on before, and thought, 'Oh, that's nice, Rob's turned up', before I did a double take.

We began with a few words from the Minister, and stood as the wickerwork coffin was brought in and laid on tressels at the front of the chapel. Then Malcolm Edwards, who had orchestrated the event, took over, and for the next hour and a quarter we had a succession of family and friends sharing their memories of Rob, starting with Chris who recalled their childhood. I was honoured to be asked to read a message from the French writer, Christian Lehman, who was unable to attend; after the ceremony I spoke to Sarah and I think they might put all the messages up on the web site, I hope so because it was a wonderful piece and I just hope I did it justice. Other contributions came from Roy Kettle, Chris Evans, Jim Burns, Wendy Froud, Malcolm, Chris Priest (who spoke very simply about how Rob had died, without pain or any awareness of what was happening, which somehow allowed us all to relax after that), Lisa Tuttle, Garry Kilworth, and Matilda Verrells (Rob's god-child and niece, who spoke very eloquently about what Rob meant to his extended family). Everyone spoke well, and there were, inevitably, a lot of comic memories, though it was obvious that several people were really struggling not to break down.

After the ceremony, while a very small group accompanied the coffin to the crematorium, the rest of us found food and wine laid on at the chapel (you've got to love a chapel that serves wine). An army of young family members did a steriling job of pushing sandwiches and pieces of cake on the assembly. Meanwhile the rest of us formed groups and chatted, and it was impossible, as such things always are, to exchange words with more than a very small percentage of the people there. We spent most of our time with Lizzie Priest while Chris and Leigh went to the crematorium, but I also managed to speak with Farah, Garry, Chris Evans, Malcolm, Roy Kettle, Kev Smith, Dave Langford, Andrew Stephenson, Judith Clute, and, in passing, Al Reynolds and Kim Newman, and, of course, with Sarah.

Rob, I think, would have loved it - good people, good food and drink, good conversation, what is there not to like? - except, as Garry remarked, for the black ties.

Wanting – Richard Flanagan
(New York: Atlantic Books, 2009)

Years ago, my attention was caught by a book review on the radio, mostly by the book's title – Gould's Book of Fish. What a great title: how could it not be wonderful? Surprisingly, I remembered nothing about the book's content, nor the name of its author, but a couple of years ago I ran across a beautiful hardback copy of it in a US bookshop, which I bought. Because, it's a great title: how could it not be wonderful?

As it turned out, it was a splendid novel, as was Death of a River Guide, also by Richard Flanagan, which I read almost immediately afterwards. It turns out that somewhere along the way I managed to miss two other novels by Richard Flanagan, but Wanting is the latest, and again, I knew when I heard about it that it would be my kind of book. Anything that brings together Charles Dickens, Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin and Tasmanian indigenous people is going to tick all the boxes for me. And indeed it did.

However, before I talk about the novel, I should say it is a slow burner. Initially, it seems to read very quickly, and I arrived at the end in a bit of a disappointed heap, thinking 'is that it?' I read it again, to make notes for the review I was writing, at which point the subtlety of the novel's construction began to unfold, and I liked it a lot more as a result. So, read slowly.

( Commentary )

Out of 5

****

62/50 books. 124% done!