Today, I am 45. Sharing my special day with the eggs.
We’re up in Edinburgh for a few days to celebrate. A favourite place to visit. We know and love the lie of the land (dark grey, steep and littered with fudge shops).
The plan is fancy breakfast and a trip to Modern One. I have special birthday dispensation to choose the day’s activity, and persuasively underlined the invariably high quality of café and gift shop attached to an art gallery.
Tomorrow there will be pandas. Back to the zoo. Likely our farewell to Tian Tian and Yang Guang as they head back to China in October.
But before Edinburgh and the excitement of art and pandas, there was me on the sofa enjoying books and films and TV shows. Here’s what I was watching and reading this week, before we headed North.
Watching:
Magpie Murders (BBC iPlayer)—This adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s 2017 mind-bending mystery within a mystery was originally a Britbox exclusive, but it looks like things are shifting with that streaming platform (much of its content is being subsumed within ITVX premium), and Magpie Murders has now happily turned up on the BBC. I thoroughly enjoyed this six-part series. A famous whodunnit writer is bumped off, and the final chapter of the unpublished final book in his detective series goes missing. We, in the always capable hands of Lesley Manville (playing the author’s editor, Susan Ryeland), are left to solve both real and fictional murders. The crossover between stories is cleverly handled. Actors appear in equivalent roles, key plot points are mirrored. I’d figured out one killer, but not the other. I thought it worked really well, and as there’s a second book, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for another series. (Side note: a real joy to see Lesley Manville and Claire Rushbrook reunited as sisters here—one of the stand-out scenes in last year’s exceptional Sherwood (BBC iPlayer) involved the two of them and a brick wall.)
The Booksellers (NOW/sky arts)—I finally got round to watching this brilliant 2019 documentary about New York’s antiquarian and independent bookstores and their invariably warm and eccentric owners. I love the connection that Parker Posey is executive producer and narrator, having starred in adorable NY bookstore romcom You’ve Got Mail back in the ‘90s. The documentary is brimming with interesting characters, and the bookselling (and buying) process is fascinating (I also love the Shaun Bythell books for this insight). While the older booksellers are fearful of the future and the internet has undoubtedly negatively impacted on the rare book trade, I loved that the younger generation are hopeful and full of fresh ideas, and noticing an upswing in physical book reading by younger readers. Watching this added further fuel to my dream of one day perusing the stacks at the Strand. To top it all off, Fran Lebowitz is a talking head—among other joys, she offers a book-based David Bowie anecdote and this excellent quote:
I always say to people, you know what they used to call independent bookstores? Bookstores. All bookstores were independent.
Honourable mention this week for some pitch-perfect Easter holiday comfort viewing with my daughter, in the form of Sense and Sensibility (Netflix) and The Sound of Music (Disney+). Eating buttery hot-cross buns and booing at the manipulative passive-aggressive tactics of the Baroness and queen of the side-eye, Miss Lucy Steele. Swooning over damp Willoughby (just don’t soak my chaise, see Not This Week for details), and Captains Brandon (the ultimate poetry reader) and Von Trapp (in soft focus in the conservatory, which I realise sounds like the big reveal in a ‘hopeless romantics edition’ of Cluedo). Laughing at Mrs Jennings shamelessly trying to discover the name of Elinor’s Mr ‘F’ and Maria clean forgetting Kurt’s, “God bless what’s-his-name”. And sobbing along with Elinor when Edward finally comes calling—my heart! (I should perhaps confess that the sobbing and swooning fall to me alone. My daughter is more concerned with the booing, laughing and hot-cross-bun eating—and the delivering of eye rolls in the direction of my sobbing and swooning, naturally.) Absolute classics. Ever a joy to share.
Reading:
Earthed by Rebecca Schiller had been on my radar for a while. I follow her lovely indie publishers, Elliott & Thompson, over on Instagram, and have read and enjoyed a number of their nature-based memoirs (most recently, Lev Parikian’s Light Rains Sometimes Fall). Luisa (writer of the brilliant, Salted) mentioned Earthed in response to my nature writing newsletter a few months ago, and I finally got round to adding it to my library list. The book tells of Schiller’s experience moving her young family out of the city to live on and work a smallholding. It is also a vulnerable and raw exploration of a woman’s mental health breakdown, eventually resulting in a diagnosis of severe ADHD. Nature helps Schiller immeasurably, but she doesn’t shy away from the truth that life on the smallholding hinders her as well. This is a hard read in places, she talks openly about self-harm and life-ending thoughts. But it feels an incredibly valuable and important read. I would definitely recommend Earthed for fans of Katherine May’s Wintering.
Share your whats of the week in the comments below—I’ll consider them a birthday gift!
Extra credit
Fran Lebowitz doing her brilliant thing in The Booksellers:
This made me laugh out loud (mild language warning): https://floodmagazine.com/75065/in-praise-of-baroness-schraeder-the-subversive-bitch-from-the-sound-of-music/
Rebecca Schiller writing about Earthed for the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/may/09/earthed-rebecca-schiller-and-family-left-the-city-to-live-in-rural-kent-five-years-ago
(Includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, an excellent bookselling website supporting indie bookshops)
Happy birthday, lovely Claire! As ever, a joy to read your words....now I need to go and click some links and root around the library website for copies of books....xoxoxo
Emma Thompson deserved an Oscar just for that one sobbing scene in S&S. Not a crier but gets me every time