@BudleighLitFest
On the last day of the Festival I went to two talks. The first was by Helen Pearson who has written a book called The Life Project – The Extraordinary Story of our Ordinary Lives. Pearson is a scientist/journalist who edits the magazine Nature. She found the research work based on following the lives of a cohort of babies born in one particular week fascinating and it forms the basis of the book. The first group was the babies born in one week in March 1946 and their lives have been documented over the last seventy years. Further cohorts have been recruited roughly every fifteen years. She looked at a number of conclusions that have been drawn from this research – she described it as the jewel in the research crown. One area is pregnancy where the link with smoking and infant mortality. On education, another book Born to Fail showed how hard it was for those from poorer neighbourhoods to improve their incomes and status. It was this research which gave the impetus to the introduction of comprehensive schools in the 1960’s. It was a fascinating account of important research which unfortunately will not be continued – the last cohort recruited in 2015 has already been abandoned.
We had coffee in the beach hut before the talk by A C Grayling drawing on his book Progress in Troubled Times. He believes the 17th Century was a turning point in the way humanity thought about itself as religious philosophy changed to the scientific one. He argued it came about when the Protestant religion introduced liberty of conscious – ‘you are your own priest before God.’ This liberated many to think for themselves about the world in which they lived. Whilst they tried to make base metal into gold, searched for the elixir of youth, and read the future in the stars, alchemy became chemistry, magic medicine and astrology astronomy.
It has been a brilliant four days. Looking forward to next year.
@BudleighLitFest
On the second day of the Festival, I began the morning in Rome with Virginia Bailey, author of Early One Morning. I have to confess I had already read the novel which I bought at the book launch in London. Just saying.Virginia Bailey talks like and Italian, with her hands. The novel is set in 1943 and 1970’s and unusually those parts in the 40’s are in the present tense and those in the 70’s in the past tense. Bailey’s explanation was of giving an immediacy to the earlier events.
Virginia Bailey talks like and Italian, with her hands. The novel is set in 1943 and 1970’s and unusually those parts in the 40’s are in the present tense and those in the 70’s in the past tense. Bailey’s explanation was of giving an immediacy to the earlier events.
Although she thought there were similarities with the modern crisis in the Middle East she said she found it difficult to process current events and preferred to look for parallels.
She liked to move between locations because she likes to step into a different world and also it enables her to make the familiar exotic.
I enjoyed the novel and would recommend as well as her debut book African Junction.
The weather was not so warm so I gave up any idea of a swim and headed to the Festival Marquee for a cup of coffee and a browse at the book stall.
Then into the Public Hall to see Alexandra Harris being interviewed by Rachel Cooke about her book ‘WeatherLand.’ Harris is such an exuberant personality, confessing she came to Budleigh as a child for holidays and how she would lie on the beach looking at the pines against a blue sky and imagining she was in the Med where most of her friends were. She said the idea for the book came when she was working on her biography of Virginia Woolf, particularly Orlando and how Woolf uses shifts in the air as a way of being. In literature, the weather is a powerful indicator of mood. She gave examples such as it is always winter in Anglo Saxon poetry and how Shakespeare changes the idea of weather away from the Gods to the emotions of the characters. I can’t do justice to the range of authors she cited who use weather to indicate mood. Perhaps just one more – Wuthering Heights is a one great meteorological disturbance. I had to buy the book and will look forward to reading it.
Finally Juliet Nicolson in conversation with Carol Ackroyd about her book A House Full of Daughters. She is the granddaughter of Vita Sackville West and she has used family archives to tell the story of her mother, grandmother and great grandmother as well as her own. It is a family with all the glitter of the wealthy and the important but there are hidden secrets of illicit relationships.