The Great War in Portraits

This morning I took myself off to see this exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. 

It sets out to tell the story of the Great War using the portraits of those who endured it. As someone who enjoys the tiny detail of history and is fascinated by how the great events impacted on the small lives of ordinary people, I found the exhibition deeply moving. Like many of my generation I find the scale of the sacrifice difficult to fathom, and the nitty gritty of the politics that led the world to war even more so. But here in the faces of the sitters is a story of bravado and pathos, triumph and despair, sacrifice and suffering that anyone can read. 

Of course the Great War shouldn't just be remembered from the Allies' perspective, which is something that the exhibition recognises. They have also included material that speaks of the experience of some of those on the other side as well. We see German soldiers, maimed and wounded by the British artillery, struggling with improvised gas masks and broken by the shackles of a truly devastating war. It reminds us that the suffering was universal, and the pain felt pretty much the same whichever uniform you happened to be wearing at the time.

 They have also included portraits of some of the women such as Mata Hari and Edith Cavel whose extraordinary stories live on in the popular imagination. And for my money Mata Hari looks every bit as exotic and mysterious as you'd expect her to.

Technologically, socially and politically we've come a long way in the intervening century, but here and there you catch a glimpse of something that looks disturbingly contemporary. Sometimes it's in the brush strokes of a painter whose style feels thoroughly modern, or it's in the expression of a young man whose reaction is one with which we can empathise immediately. This isn't just some dry treatise on a long-forgotten saga; it's populated by real people, who have only just slipped outside the hand-chain of first-hand living memory, and with whom I could identify at once

On one wall there is a huge montage of individual photographs, where celebrated flying aces, famous war poets, nurses, spies, prisoners of war, men shot for supposed cowardice and men celebrated for their undoubted bravery stand shoulder to shoulder. Clearly it is a modern construction, but it allows each one the dignity of his or her own space on the wall with a short bio to tell his or her story. I found this wall mesmerising, and I could have spent hours looking into the faces of the people shown there and reflecting on their stories.

This photo (below) was one of many that touched me. The happy-looking, handsome, young man is Private William Cecil Tickle, who volunteered for service despite being underage. He was killed in action on the third day of the Battle of the Somme, and his remains were never recovered. The hand-written inscription shown on the photograph is by his mother.  Almost a century later I could still feel her grief when I read how she'd described him as 'Mother's Billie Boy ... age 18 years ... one of the very best'. What an ocean of sadness must lie behind that simple epitaph.

And here's another handsome young man with an incredible life story. This is Lt. Walter Tull, the 'first person of Afro-Caribbean heritage' to become an officer in the British Army. Walter was born in Folkstone in 1888. His grandfather had been a slave. He joined up when war broke out in 1914, served in the Somme and was promoted to lieutenant in 1917, despite military law proscribing anyone 'of colour' from becoming a commissioned officer. He must have been a truly amazing soldier, who had to fight a whole other battle against the prejudice of the day to win his promotion. Walter was killed in action on 25th March 1918, and his remains were never recovered either. 

Entrance to the exhibition is free, and it runs until 15th June, 2014. Do go if you get a chance. It's well worth the effort.

Bonny x

The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared

by Jonas Jonasson is a very funny book: a laugh-out-loud-in-the-crowd sort of very funny book.

I bought it yesterday on a whim in the Oxfam second-hand bookshop on Ealing Green, and as I was sitting poolside "watching" Emi go through his repertoire of strokes at swim club it made me chortle so much that the other parents started to give me funny looks. 'What's up with her?' I heard someone whisper to their neighbour. And what was up with me was a ripping good read!

It's about a little one hundred year-old man who makes a run for it instead of going to his one hundredth birthday party, to which all the local bigwigs have been invited. He makes it to the bus station, where he decides to make off with a large, grey suitcase that a charmless, ill-mannered youth asks him to keep an eye on whilst he goes to the loo. Unbeknown to the little old man the suitcase is full of dirty money, which gets him started on an unlikely journey on which he is pursued by criminals who want their loot back, and an incompetent police force trying to find a missing pensioner. It's just the ticket for a wet February afternoon when good humour is in short supply.

As the adventure unfolds we learn more about the life of the little, old man, who as an explosives expert has played a critical role in some of the momentous events of the twentieth century. He's an unlikely, heart-warming hero, and, on the basis of what I've read, I recommend the book to you without reservation.

Enjoy!

Bonny x

How to grow potatoes on your patio

Being Irish I have something of a potato obsession. I remember they were one of the first things that my mother taught me how to grow. She plants them in all sorts of old junk. She delights in using worn-out buckets with holes in, rusty 5 gallon oil drums, treadless tires, which she piles up on top of one another and then fills with soil and cow manure from the farm next door. It all lends a very quirky element to her garden design that may not win her many plaudits from the style police, but what the heck! It's fun! It's great to see life sprouting out of stuff that other people throw away.

And once you've harvested your first crop you'll understand what's so infectious about the whole potato-growing business.

Anyway, back to the project in hand, I bought these potatoes a while ago ...

... and left them to bud on an indoor window ledge. Old egg boxes make great holders for your seed potatoes whilst you're waiting for the buds to develop. Just take them out of the bag they've come in and place them in a dry sunny spot. Always position the eyes - the bits from which the shoots will grow - facing upwards.

After a couple of weeks they'll look a bit like this:

Now you need to choose the container that's going to be your potato plot. Choose a big one that allows enough space for your tubers to grow. The one pictured below is an old campaigner that's seen lots of action in a more prominent position on my patio. It has a 16"/ 40 cm diameter and stands 12'/ 30 cm tall, and I'm only going to plant one tuber in it. That way the potatoes will grow larger. As a rule each plant will need about 2.5 gallons/10 litres of soil. If you scrimp on your potato/ soil ratio you'll just end up with smaller potatoes.

The next thing to do is place some little stones and broken crocks in the bottom for drainage. I save broken crockery from the kitchen and broken terracotta from the garden to mix with small stones that I dig up from time to time. If you want to go spending money you can buy some vermiculite or gravel at the garden centre, but I'm all in favour or re-using broken stuff, conserving finances and saving the countryside from landfill! This is the mixture at the bottom of one of my potato pots:

Now put a layer of 3"/ 7.5 cm of organic composted manure on top of the stones, and then cover that with a couple of inches/ 5 cm of organic compost. On top of this place a seed potato with the shoot facing skywards.

Then cover it over with compost, being careful not to damage the shoot. On top pile on another 5"/ 13 cm of compost, and then water your soon-to-be bountiful potato garden.

All you have to do now is leave Mother Nature to work her magic, and come June/ July the container will be full of delicious potatoes. Watch over it carefully between now and then, watering it if it's in danger of drying out, and abracadabra - that's just about all there is to it! Some people add fertiliser, but I find that the composted manure is rich enough to keep the tubers growing. You can also top up with more soil as the plant grows to encourage it to grow tubers all the way to the top.

These potatoes will be ready to harvest early in the summer. As a result there's no need to worry about the dreaded potato blight, which tends to arrive later in the season.

It's a great project to get your little people involved in. My son, Emi, gets really excited about growing potatoes. He really, genuinely believes that old Mother Nature is magic. And you know what? The kid's not wrong!

Bonny x

Insomnia

I am an insomniac. It drives my husband mad. He could win a gold medal for Spain if they ever made sleeping a sport at the Olympics. But not me: I'd flunk right out of there.

Last night was a bad one. I just couldn't get to sleep. I tossed. I turned. I managed to wake everyone else up by tripping over on my way downstairs to raid the fridge. Even the dog was fed up with me in the end. He went out for a comfort break somewhere after 3:00 a.m., and decided that he wasn't in any hurry to come back inside.  Of course it was blowing a gale, raining, pitch black with the moon hidden behind heavy clouds, but I had to go chasing after him in my pyjamas which did very little to help my going-to-sleep issue.

Anyway, after I dragged him back inside, I settled down to burn the midnight oil reading The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul. It's not normally the sort of thing I'd pick up, but I'd bought it because I'd enjoyed The Kite Runner, and this was described 'as if Maeve Binchy had written the Kite Runner'. As it turns out it's a lot more Maeve Binchy than Kite Runner.

It's a well-paced tale about Sunny from Arkansas who runs a coffee shop in Kabul. She's a feisty, likeable character, who meets up with a cast of other extraordinary women in the course of running her business. There's Yasmina, whom Sunny rescues, a young Afghan girl, who is destitute, pregnant and abandoned to her fate on the streets of the city after her husband dies. Then there's Halajan, a 67 year-old Afghan lady who remembers happier days when things were more relaxed, and who yearns to follow her heart and be with the man she would have married half a lifetime ago if she'd been given the choice as a young girl. Candace, a wealthy American divorcee, and Isabel, a British journalist, complete the group.

I must say that I found it hard to believe in either Candace or Isabel. Somehow the characterisation didn't quite work, and Candace especially didn't ring true as a real character. But, that aside in the small hours of the morning, when my grey cells were addled through lack of sleep,  I enjoyed the pace of the narrative, and the beautiful way in which the writer dealt with the setting. I felt that I was in the hands of a storyteller, who knew the country well. 

And it turns out that she does indeed know her stuff. Deborah Rodriquez arrived in Afghanistan in 2002, as a volunteer aid-worker. With her background in hairdressing she was enlisted to help setting up a beauty school for women amidst all the rubble and destruction. You can read about her here:

 Deborah Rodriquez

One of the things that surprised me about her account of life in Kabul was how people there were said to dislike dogs. I am very much of the 'man's best friend' school of thought on this point, but the Afghans are said to regard our canine friends with something bordering on disgust. Sandy, the lead character, is given the present of a retired drug dog to guard her car whilst she is out and about in the city. Tellingly Rodrigquez betrays her own sympathies on the issue by making Poppy, the drug dog, the only character in the book who is an infallible judge of people.

Anyway it's a good, light read if you're suffering the can't-go-to-sleep blues in the middle of the night.

All the best,

Bonny x

The Exeter to Topsham canal path

Today we went for a walk along the historic Exeter to Topsham canal.

Way back when they had tall masted sailing ships and the woollen industry was the backbone of the West Country economy, Topsham, further down the Exe estuary, was the deep water port for Exeter. But slowly, slowly the upper reaches of the river, between the port and the city, silted over and became too shallow to allow the cargo to move through.

As a result they hit upon the brilliant idea of building their own canal. 'Big deal!' I hear you say, but, bear with me, this was back in 1500's. It first opened for shipping in 1566. Can you imagine what an effort of human sweat and tears and blood must have gone into building it? Can you picture the gangs of men, many of them no doubt Irish navvies, my countrymen, with picks and spades labouring in the sandy, red soil with teams of oxen and mules carrying away the earth that they had dug up? I wonder which songs they sang as they worked. I'll bet in winter it was too cold and miserable to do anything other than knuckle down and wish the job done.

We started off at the Exeter quay, and followed the signs for the canal basin. It was a glorious morning with a huge blue sky and loads of sunshine.

We saw lots of swans. These chaps were breakfasting on some scraps that another walker had brought along for them.

I don't know whether you've noticed or not, but there's a beer can floating just beside the bird on the left. I didn't notice it until I down-loaded the photo to my computer. Isn't it depressing how people throw their rubbish around?

And, at the risk of going into full rant, look what I saw floating by the bank ten paces further down river:

Someone's discarded Christmas tree!

How can they possibly have thought that it was ok to just chuck that into the River Exe?

Anyway, we carried on, and took the path along the canal.

We walked on to the double lock...

... where we stopped for coffee and bacon sandwiches at one of the loveliest pubs in Devon, the aptly named Double Locks Pub. Inside was warm and cosy with open fires burning in the grates, and riverside views that made me think of Ratty's riverbank home in AA Milne's Toad of Toad Hall. The coffees were fabulous, and the bacon sandwiches were delicious. There's a deck outside, where some braver souls were enjoying the weak rays of the winter sun. On a balmy summer day this place must really rock for a lazy Sunday lunch by the water.

We carried on downriver to the Exminster Marshes, before turning back. My husband had a work commitment that we had to get back for.

We decided to return via the flood plain of the River Exe. It wasn't flooded, and Maxi had great fun racing around and playing with the other dogs.

And we had some lovely views of Exeter Cathedral in the distance. Looks very regal, doesn't it?

By now the rain was catching up with us, and before very much longer it overtook us. When we finally arrived back at our car we were all a bit tired, slightly soggy and moderately muddy. We were pleased that we'd been able to make the most of the lovely, bright morning. After all that's what its' been all about recently: making the best of the breaks between the showers, and not minding too much when the clouds open.

If you fancy exploring the Exeter canal basin you can download a map showing the walking path here:

 Exeter Ship Canal Walks leaflet [805kb] 

Have a great weekend!

Bonny x