Adèle Geras
Showing posts with label Adèle Geras. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adèle Geras. Show all posts

How to Look at Stained Glass by Jane Brocket. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

Below is a photograph of the book I'm reviewing today.  It's not in the same class as all the other pictures on this post, which were taken by Jane Brocket, the author of How to look at stained glass. However, it has the advantage of showing a glimpse  of the back cover.

Jane Brocket knows a great deal about a great many things. I came to her blog (link in the author biog below) because it was beautiful. She posted photos of flowers, cakes, knitted socks, and the creative nail polish choices of  her teenage daughter. She travelled and noticed things as she went and drew them to her readers' attention. She is someone who's endlessly curious about  many things and who moreover makes a point of becoming enormously well-informed about everything  she intends to write about. 

She's originally from Stockport and the first time I met her was in a café in Didsbury, Manchester. Now she's moved to Cambridge, I have met her all over again. My attention was drawn to this book when I read an wonderfully-illustrated article in the Daily Telegraph.  It was only at the end of the piece that I noticed that the book in question was by Jane Brocket. I was amazed  and delighted but not in the least surprised. 







Stained glass interests me. I love it, of course. Most people do. But I lived for a very long time in a house in Manchester which had 1910 stained glass  panels in every window and even in the glass on  the doors inside. If Jane had lived in my house she'd have found out the name of the firm that installed it and probably also the name of the person who designed it...she's that sort of person. I just stared at it over years and wrote the odd poem about it. 

When I moved to Cambridge, I went to visit Ely Cathedral and there's a brilliant stained-glass museum there. And just recently, I had two stained glass experiences. The first was a visit to the Sainte Chapelle in Paris where the windows are miraculously beautiful and glorious in every way, and the second was an Imagine programme on the BBC which was about the dazzling window David Hockney designed for Westminster Abbey, at the Queen's invitation.


By the brilliant Irish designer Harry Clarke. In St Mary, Sturminster Newton, 1921

You're actually going to need two copies of this book. The first can sit on a convenient table where people can pick it up and look at it carefully, reading some of the witty, entertaining and hugely informative text. The second has to be kept in the car if you're travelling round the country, so that you can look up your county in the index and check to see if there's a convenient church you can pop into, in order to admire the stained glass.



The only windows by Marc Chagall in England are in All Saints, Tudeley, Kent. Amazing set of windows - this is a detail (1985).



This book is very well-organised. There's a list detailing what's in the illustrations, a list of 50 churches to visit, an index of churches arranged in counties, and so on. Best of all, the book is divided into short chapters (you don't want to be reading endless screeds when you're looking round a church on a day out) under headings such as Angels, Grisaille, zzzz (for people sleeping) and so on. Dogs and cats, flowers, fire, insects, lead, textiles, saints, restoration, science, feet, crowns, etc. Brocket has encompassed almost everything a person can imagine being depicted in glass. This method of classification things makes it easy for anyone to look out for what particularly interests them. Also, it encourages a search for specific things when you're standing in front of a huge window whose details may at first seem too much to take in.

Lovely semi-abstract glass in Manchester Cathedral by Anthony Hollaway, 1980.

The friendly and approachable tone can't hide the enormous knowledge of the subject that's on display. Brocket explains a great deal about the processes, history and present-day state of stained-glass. She knows the artists. She knows the glass makers. She knows how all the varied strands of stained glass history come together.
In Christ Church in Southwark, which was flattened by bombs in WW2 and rebuilt in late 1950s. By FW Cole, 1961.


It strikes me that this book is a kind of literary stained-glass window. The separate elements are bound together into a satisfying
whole, and you can look at bits of it, one at a time, as you're looking at the actual glass. Or you can do what I did for the purposes of writing this post...start at the beginning and read all the 
way through to the end. 



Detail of vast scheme of windows by Heaton, Butler & Bayne (1860s and 1870s) in St Mary, Banbury.

I'm now fired up to go and explore the Cambridge churches that are mentioned in the book. And I will henceforth know what I'mlooking for when I go anywhere where stained glass is part of the building.




By Joan Howson and Caroline Townshend (1940). In St Credan, Sancreed. (Cornwall, hence Cornish tin miner.)

Three of my favourite books are The Gentle Art of Domesticity and The Gentle Art of Knitting and Vintage Cakes.  Brocket has written lots of others, too, but this one will take its place on the shelf and give me pleasure for years to come.

I'm going to end with a quotation from the book, taken from the section on Beards, to give you a flavour of Brocket's tone and style. I am certain there are many, many people out there who would love to find it under the tree. Merry Christmas!

"Young, virile, heroic saints such as St George and St Michael are usually clean-shaven, the better to show off their remarkably strong jawlines, but older saints, such as St James the Greater and St Peter, who have come through a long life or martyrdom, are often depicted with unruly, unkempt beards, in keeping with a long pilgrimage or an earlier life as a fisherman."




Jane Brocket is an author, blogger and Master of Wine. In 2005, after an MA in Victorian Art & Literature at Royal Holloway, she created her well-known blog, yarnstorm https://www.yarnstormpress.co.uk/in order to write about knitting. Discovering very quickly that she couldn’t knit fast enough to produce enough material for frequent posts, she widened her subject matter to include all things domestic, plus plenty of buns, bulbs and books. She has subsequently written eighteen books on a variety of creative and cultural themes, the latest of which is How to Look at Stained Glass. Jane is married to Simon; they live in Cambridge and have three grown-up children.
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THE OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE OF ABEL MORGAN by Cynthia Jefferies. Review by Adèle Geras


Cynthia Jefferies is a friend of mine. My name appears in the acknowledgements of this novel. I always begin reviews of books by friends with a declaration like this because I don't want to end up on the back pages of Private Eye accused of logrolling.  I hope readers of this blog will believe me when I say I would not recommend a book  I didn't enjoy. If I'm not liking a book, I stop reading it.  Pleasure is what I'm after.






And pleasure is what The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan provides. Not just a general pleasure either, but several different kinds of pleasure at the same time.






First, there's the narrative, which follows two people: Christopher Morgan and his son, Abel. Chapters from each point of view alternate for most of the novel and Jefferies has Christopher's account unfold in the third person while his son gives a first person account of events. By doing this, she varies the tone and style, and  makes things much more interesting. 




Left: Cornelius Claesz van Wieringen    Right: Willem-Alexander van de Velde ll

Secondly, readers of this book won't be bored. I'm going to use a reviewer's cliché and call it a 'roller-coaster ride.' It's a very exciting story, full of adventures, secrets, mistakes that seem uncorrectable, wicked men, a woman who's far from angelic, pirates, slaves, and traffickers, smugglers and even a walk on appearance from King Charles II and Samuel Pepys. I'm going to give away nothing about the plot, except to say that the widowed Christopher is left with a baby to care for. He loses the child, then finds him, then loses him again. He spends the best part of the novel on a quest to find him. And while he does this, Abel is having adventures of his own.



Thirdly, the characters (and we meet many) are brought to life very well. We can see them and hear them and several of them (especially the villain with the false arm and hand) stay in your mind long after you've closed the book. We care about Abel and his father because Jeffries has involved us so closely in their thoughts and feelings.




Fourthly, every place we visit as we're reading is vividly there. We move from the West Country to Constantinople, to London, to the Caribbean, to Jamaica and the Netherlands and it's wonderful to be able to travel so far while sitting snugly by the fire. I did actually read some of this book in front of my gas fire while my central heating was briefly on the blink, and it's the perfect way to enjoy this story.  Because my main feeling as I  read was that this is an old-fashioned novel in the very best sense of the term: happy to tell a thrilling and moving story in elegant and evocative prose and above all, one that everyone in the family can share.  I really hope there's an audio version on the way. Listening to that would be a splendid way to pass a long car journey. Meanwhile, I can heartily recommend the book. 

Photo of Cynthia Jefferies by Tammy Lyn Photography


All other photos provided by Cynthia Jefferies.

Today is the last day to enter our competition to win a copy of The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan! See the post for 31st October for details.


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A visit to Gladstone's Library.....by Adèle Geras


Early in June, right at the beginning of one of the hottest and sunniest summers on record, I went to spend a couple of days at Gladstone's Library in Hawarden, North Wales with a group of writer friends.  William Ewart Gladstone, as every schoolchild used to know, (though may not know now) was Liberal Prime Minister for four terms during the years 1868 and 1894. Below is a picture of him taking tea with his wife and his Library is now a beautiful place where groups and individuals can go for intellectual stimulation at events put on by many organisations related to the arts and humanities, or at away days or gatherings like ours. We met to discuss our work and enjoy the surroundings and (let's be honest) to spend time with friends over good food and wine.  





The building as you approach it looks like this.


I felt at home immediately for the very good reason that I'd spent eight years of my childhood at a very similar building: Roedean School, Brighton.

The actual library is most beautiful and this is where famous thinkers and writers give talks and where you can study the whole day long if you are a guest. 




But what really made me feel as if I were back at school again was the windows. They are exactly like the windows I remember so well from my childhood....





even down to a strong resemblance in the soft furnishings and the catches on the windows.



There is a wonderful restaurant for the use of  guests and you can take your food outside if the weather is good. We did this several times and I can remember hunting out my sunscreen and hat to  sit outside on a couple of occasions. The food is excellent and if you fancy something even more splendid in the food department, there's a superb restaurant called THE OLD GROCERY  just up the road. I do recommend that most strongly.  We had a very wonderful meal there on our last night in Hawarden.


If you can tear yourself away from the delights of the Library, there's a wonderful castle, just opposite where you can walk and explore. Above is a picture of the ancient Keep. And below, is a photo of the brochure produced by Gladstone's Library which advertises what's going on there all the time. Together with the lovely Bernard Johnson slate paperweight which was a 70th birthday present from one of the friends who came to Gladstone's Library with me. It was a very enjoyable and stimulating few days and as good a mini-break as any I've been on. If this post reads like an advertisement, it's really meant to. I can't recommend it enough to any small group of people who want to get together for a couple of days. All details about booking etc from www.gladstoneslibrary.org
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THE SKYLARKS' WAR by Hilary McKay....a review by Adèle Geras and interview with the author.

When the proof of The Skylarks' War arrived in my house, I did what I always do with books: opened it at the first page and began to read. I was so overwhelmed that I photographed the page, put it up on Twitter and declared it to be an example of the perfect opening of a novel.  I'm still of that opinion, so I'm reproducing it here.



I hope very much that you can read it because it sets the tone for the rest of the book. To my mind, this is elegant and  succinct and also, most importantly, an invitation to turn the page.

Too often, a beautiful writing style can hide a dearth of plot, or a paucity of interesting and well-developed characters. Not so here. The Clarry whom we meet as she's being born on the first page carries the story through twenty years and more and so does her brother, Peter. We follow their lives, but just saying that is not enough. We see, through the prism of their stories, a whole social landscape which is changing almost before our eyes. Education is important in this book and its effect on both Clarry and Peter, in different ways, absolutely crucial.

We have small town suburban life complete with delicious domestic detail of the kind that I love finding in a book. We have school, both boarding and grammar. And we have a kind of paradise in Cornwall, where Clarry and Peter's grandparents live. It's here they meet the third main character in the book: the charismatic, gorgeous and delightful Rupert, who is, to anyone familiar with the literature of the Great War, the very embodiment of the young men, the flower of Europe, mown down in those years. He's the sort of person everyone falls in love with. This includes the reader, and also a fascinating and loveable  character called Simon, whose devotion to Rupert will be seen for the homosexual longing it is, at a time when being gay was punishable by imprisonment and a social disgrace. 

The War, when it comes, is treated in a slightly different way from what I've seen other writers do. Through Clarry, the Home Front is most important. Letters are important. What's happening in France and Belgium is only shown briefly, but Mckay has one chapter (Chapter 27) which tells us  about the War in three and a half pages...again, a model of economy and elegance. Anyone teaching this period would do well to read this chapter and use it with their classes. 

The other thing I love about this book is this: it's a family book, like  those of Noel Streatfeild or R F Delderfield. It's a book that you can all read: you, your mother, your children, your granny, your uncle, your brother...you can give to to a whole family for Christmas. Buy multiple copies and just distribute them. I find it hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it. You will smile, and you will cry. You will rejoice and mourn with Clarry. You will recognise yourself and your friends. I hope you don't recognise your own father because Clarry and Peter's surviving parent is a monster of a very particular kind. 

I'm going to finish with a passage which can stand, I think, for the whole book. 

"Simon thought that if the only way of being in contact with someone was by words written on paper, then those words must be both worth reading and true."

The words in The Skylarks' War are exactly that. 

Below, I've asked Hilary Mckay a few questions and I'm grateful to her for answering. The photos used in this piece are all from her and I thank her for letting me use them.

-------------------------------------------------------


1) You've written many books and different kinds of books too. This is a new departure it seems to me. Can you tell us a bit of how the idea first came to you.

The idea has been with me for a long time, five years at least, when I began to write a book called Binny in Secret (later reissued as Binny Keeps a Secret.) It was a story with a present-day plot - the Binny story - and a subplot which eventually enlightened the present-day plot...(gosh this is complicated. It was a much too complicated book) set one hundred years before. The characters in the sub-plot were the three main characters in The Skylarks' War. As soon as I began writing about Clarry, Peter and Rupert (after Rupert Brooke, who captured my fourteen-year-old heart by way of a book of poems from my mother and never quite let go of it, whatever I learned about him after that.) I knew that there was much more to them than the few thousand words I gave them. They were so alive to me. I wrote another book or two after Binny in Secret, but always the Skylarks were there, and gradually on my desk I acquired a 1911 sovereign, a book about stars and constellations, and an old Victorian key. (the photos, shown together below are Hilary's own.)


2) Did you have a certain kind of reader in mind when you began? Were you aiming it at children? It seems to me to be the epitome of a Family Book: one that all generations can read together

I wrote it for myself. Sometimes writers are advised to write for themselves, but as a children's writer, this is rarely completely possible. This was one for me, though, entirely, and for the generation who were lost and hurt a hundred years ago. The only thing childish about it is the length. Of course an intelligent child could read it but so I hope could an intelligent adult. [A bit of Hilary's text here is complimentary to me, but I'm afraid I'm including it. Adèle] You know what I mean, because your own young adult novels are just the same. I read Troy and Happy Ever After at the same time as my fourteen-year- old daughter and we both loved them equally.










3) Many books about the Great War deal either with actual fighting or the home front. You do both. Was there any editorial pressure on you to beef up the fighting in any way? If there was, how did you resist it.
There was no editorial pressure on me at all, not for any part of the book. The editing was so light. It was mostly to do with chronology actually, because it covered such a long time span. I had a huge spread sheet with everyone's ages, historical events, etc running through the twenty odd years that the story covers.

4) The emotional battlefields are as devastating in their way as the real ones. In particular the father of the Penrose family is....I have no words for him....and I'm struck by how little he is condemned in the novel either by his children or by you? Do you have a particular reason to let him off the hook a bit?

Did I let him off the hook? I didn't mean to. He was an awful man. My characters knew that and so did I. I found him frightening: the thought of Clarry living with him, his utter coldness. They diminished him in the end with pity and laughter, but he was never redeemed. He remained what he was from the start. Devoid of love. Not off the hook at all!

5) 1918 was a moment when women were more and more coming to the fore in education and suffrage and so forth. Your novel seems to be a clarion call ( Clarry-on!) for education, kindness and understanding. Would you be upset or pleased if your readers took it as an 'issue' novel?

I would be delighted if readers took it as a Clarion Call...I like Clarry-on call! I am all for the girls. I found such a brilliant second-hand book when I was researching the novel, called "Somerville for Women." When I looked inside, I found it had been signed by a group of Somerville friends. One of them, Jill Brook (Lewis) says: "It can't be 40 years!" There are eight or nine signatures. So moving. We had a similar 'Eight' at St Andrew's and now at our own nearly forty years later, we say to each other: "Are you coming? I've got five of the eight...." etc.

6) Is there going to be a sequel? I feel there could be a few...a series!

I don't know. I wish I did. Maybe I could follow one of the next generation into WW2.



A brief autobiography:


I grew up in Boston, Lincolnshire, the eldest of four sisters in a very small house. My entire family read books like starving wolves eat their dinners, reading was my first great escape. The second was St Andrew's University. After a variety of jobs I settled down in Derbyshire to write books, which has just about kept the show on the bumpy road these last twenty five years or so.
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The American Museum in Bath by Adèle Geras






It's been three days since the 4th of July and it's only a few weeks till POTUS arrives in the UK, so I felt it was appropriate to put a USA - themed post up today. First things first and I'm writing it in BOLD type because it's the main thing I want to say: I love America. I've loved America since I was a very small child, going with my aunt to the main post office in Jerusalem to pick up parcels her sisters had sent from New York. These were full of treasures and ever since, I've thought of America as a cross between a cornucopia and a paradise. This love continued as I grew up, fuelled by Hollywood, which was a dominant influence on me in my childhood and which furnished my imagination in ways I can't even begin to describe. I love the landscapes and cityscapes (as shown in thousands of movies) I love the music, particularly Country and Western, and rock 'n roll but more than anything else,  musicals, which have been  the soundtrack of my life.   I became enchanted with the literature, from my first reading of Little Women. It was my favourite book in 1952 and it still is in many ways. Since then, there have been passions for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and more modern US writers than you can shake a stick at: Anne Tyler,  Philip Roth, Elizabeth Strout, Nora Ephron....the shining names go on and on.  The USA is also a vibrant democracy,  and has an admirable press.  I won't even begin to write about the Golden Age of the Box Set. American television is now the home of some of the very best drama ever.  Readers will no doubt be able to add much else. 



So it was quite appropriate that on a recent visit to Bath, the first place I wanted to see was the American Museum. This is the only museum outside the USA to be dedicated to the decorative arts. It overlooks the Limply Stoke Valley and above you can see the terrace of the café which shows the magnificent view.


Helen Craig and I were very lucky on the day we visited because, (see above) the oldest known patchwork quilt made in England was still on display. It's going to be put away soon to preserve it, and won't be seen again till 2028 so I was thrilled to see it. My photo is most inadequate but you can read about it  and see a better image if you follow the link on the website. 




My main reason for wanting to visit the Museum, I have to confess, is my passion for patchwork. My book, Apricots at Midnight: stories from the quilt  (1977) was about a woman who had a patchwork coverlet on her spare bed and told stories inspired by different patches that she'd used to make it. I'm fascinated by this art: domestic, practical and capable of such beauty and of being so different when different people make it. Patchwork is often [sewn communally, with a group of women sitting together, and that's one of the reasons I like it so much. 


One of the things that struck me as we looked at the many quilts   (brilliantly displayed) 


 was the enormous variety of patterns, materials, and imaginations of the people who made them.  In the quilt shown above the photo of the room, the pattern is very reminiscent of Matisse's paper cut-outs. There were Matisse - like patterns in quite a few of the quilts.


Above is a detail from a quilt made from silk ties.  There are quilts from the Thirties, instantly identifiable as being of their time. Kaffe Fassett has a quilt here,  made up of images of hatboxes, in vibrant, light colours. 




The effect of the whole collection is overwhelming and I do recommend a visit if patchwork is your thing. 

There is much more here than the patchworks, however. Furniture, Native American Art, silver, crockery and cutlery, rooms set up as they would have been during certain historical periods, and many, many beautiful works of naive art. Below is a portrait of a nineteenth century girl called Emma Thompson, and it's one of the few portraits signed by the gorgeously-named Sturtevant J. Hamblen. The Hamblens were sign painters.  I love this portrait. 




 There is one room set up as if in a Shaker house, complete with chairs hanging up on the walls to save space. My favourite objects were the ones shown below: a sewing box, and a truly lovely bonnet. The Shaker style has been influential on modern furnishings and I find it most beautiful: simple and elegant and using natural materials. 







So that's the American Museum....a terrific place to go to if you're in Bath. It has, appropriately enough, (see upcoming Presidential visit)  not forgotten MONSTERS and FOOLS. Below are two photos. The top one depicts many different monsters, and is full of wonders. Below that is the World, depicted as a Fool's Head.  Some of the Latin words on the Map have been translated and read:  




The number of fools is infinite.  That's about right, but I'm more interested in beauty and the best of humanity and there's still plenty of that both in the USA and in this Museum. 
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The Queen and I by Adèle Geras



The recent wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle has prompted me to write this post: a frank confession of my practically life-long interest in, and admiration for the Royal Family. I speak not as a Monarchist, but rather as a FAN. And when I say 'fan' I mean someone who has followed the dramas that have gone on in the House of Windsor since before the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953.

I began to be interested in the fortunes of the Princesses,  Lillibet and Margaret Rose, as I thought of them, in about 1952. I was living in Jesselton, North Borneo at the time and in that year I was 8 years old. My enduring love of newsprint and magazines dates from those days too: happy hours turning the pages of the Illustrated London News, which took some time to get to us, 'somewhere East of Suez' but which was a huge treat whenever I looked at it. My father used to get tissue-paper-thin air-mail copies of the New Statesman and Nation, as the Staggers was called back then, so we were very well-informed. We also had the Pathé News before each film was shown at the cinema. No television, of course...



In 1989, I wrote a book called The Coronation Picnic about this time and here is a quotation from it, which perfectly describes me: "The scrapbooks lived in the bottom drawer of the chest-of-drawers ...they were Amy's most precious possession. They were filled with photographs  cut from newspapers and magazines, which together recorded the life of the Royal Family. Now, as well as pictures of a smiling Princess Elizabeth on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and a smart young lady in uniform, as well as wedding photographs and portraits of the new baby prince, there were sad pictures of King George VI's funeral, with his mother and his wife and his daughters, all dressed in black."

In Jesselton, we celebrated the Coronation with a Launch Picnic. This meant going to an offshore island called Gaya where we swam and ate and what I remember of it most vividly was that the sea bed was completely visible through fathoms of totally translucent turquoise water, for the whole length of a twenty-minute trip in a motor launch. We went on such a picnic almost  every weekend, but I used the one just before the Coronation  as the background for my ghost story. In real life, there was a party for the children at the Club, featuring lots of cake and lemonade and small sandwiches. A brass band performed on the Padang, or field, which was part of the Club's grounds. The photos and film of the actual Coronation reached us some time later. I was very impressed with the pomp and the ceremony...the music thrilled me, too, and since that day, I've taken a strong interest in every doing of the Royals. It's the Soap Opera to end all soap operas and I regard every 'episode' as doing what the best soaps do: building up layers and layers of knowledge about the main characters and taking in life-changing events and dramas....the death of Diana, Princess of Wales was one such moment, and the most obvious, but every little scandal or tragedy or piece of celebration is grist to my mill. 



My opinion of individual members of the Royal Family changes over the years, according to how they're behaving, but certain things remain forever as they were. I fell in love with Prince Philip when I was 8 and none of his very obvious character flaws, and not even his rather disastrous decisions when it came to educating his eldest son, let alone his 'gaffes' have done anything to put me off him. I think he's very, very handsome and gallant and very good to the Queen. They are still, after more than 70 years of marriage, happy together. The compromises each has had to make along the way is their business, but there can be no doubt of their mutual devotion. 

The Queen is admirable. My friends and I knew, back when we were very young, that Margaret was the naughty one and Elizabeth the dutiful, good one. I was at boarding school during the Peter Townsend affair and we thought the whole thing terribly romantic and sad too.  We've learned a lot lately about what Margaret was really like but she was always touched with a kind of glamour for me because of her love of the arts, especially ballet.

One thing, though, has changed completely. I look at photographs from the 50s and see how lovely the young Elizabeth was. She had been a kind of frumpish figure in my eyes but now I can see that I was quite wrong and she was always the prettier of the sisters and even though not as outwardly glamorous as Margaret, beautiful and serene and yes, well-dressed for most occasions.




And so to weddings. On the day that Prince Charles married Diana Spencer, my daughters had the day off school and we watched the whole event on TV.   My elder daughter was 10 and the younger was 4 or so and I can report that this wedding did not turn either of them into followers of the Royal Soap Opera, though Younger Daughter did enjoy watching the latest Royal Wedding.  Everyone was  given mugs, or coins (I can no longer remember which!)  and the whole day had the feel of a holiday. I was 37. I can remember cringing at the awful interview when the couple became engaged,  with Prince Charles looking most uncomfortable and saying memorably, horribly: "Whatever love means". I could see that this marriage was not going to be plain sailing. I had mixed feelings about Diana Spencer. I felt sorry for her. I hoped she'd be okay,  but as the years went on (with happy interludes for the births of the two princes, William and Harry) the whole world, thanks to television and the  Press, watched as the Soap Opera went into a kind of hideous spiral culminating in the tragic death of a very pretty, glamorous,  kind but deeply troubled woman. The funeral was terribly sad, and no one who saw it can forget those two young boys walking behind the coffin. The designers of Soap Operas could hardly have hoped for a Narrative Arc more perfect than both Diana's sons finding what seems to be genuine happiness in their own marriages.   I also like the Lesser Narrative Arc which seems to have ensured the closeness of the brothers. 




Above is the Royal Wedding that's closest to my heart. Charles and Camilla are the least loved, I think, in the family, but I have a lot of time for the Duchess of Cornwall. When she and Charles were married I heaved a sigh of relief. They were meant for one another, and ought to have got together decades earlier. (See Duke of Edinburgh's mistakes.) They love one another. They've loved one another since they were very young indeed.  Also, I like Camilla for a silly reason: of all the members of the Royal Family, she's the one who reads. I sent her a copy of my novel 'Made in Heaven'  which has a whole section in it about her wedding to Charles, and her secretary wrote  me a lovely letter back saying thank you. Ask any writer: a thank you letter, especially one on headed notepaper, is a very rare thing indeed.  When this happened, I suggested in an email to Susan Hill that Camilla was just being polite and would never read it and Susan assured me she would. "She's a real reader," Susan said and they know one another, so I believe her.  I also admire the fact that she seems a good step-mother. It can't have been easy to make up for a loss like that suffered by William and Harry but they and Camilla get on well now, I believe and that's to the  credit of everyone.

I'm a bit ambivalent about Prince Charles but he's made a beautiful garden at Highgrove and his Duchy brand makes very nice lemon shortbread biscuits. His sons seem to love him and to love Camilla as well.  This, in Soap Terms, counts as a very happy Narrative Arc.


The media, I feel, might try and get us to take sides in the matter of which Duchess we like the best. Will we be Team Kate or Team Meghan? The Duchess of Cambridge is my local duchess, so to speak, and I really enjoyed her wedding to Prince William, with highlights such as Pippa Middleton's derriere, and so on. 



I continue to think she's lovely and I'm not among the detractors who mock her as 'norm core'. She always looks elegant and pretty and seems to be managing her life in the public eye with admirable reticence. I also like the look of her daughter, Charlotte, who is going to be, I predict, a Handful in the nicest possible way. She's already a Star Waver and seeker of the camera lens...that's going to be fun to follow as she grows up. Her parents have kept her away from the Press's attentions most effectively so far, but the decades will roll on and little princesses grow up...so do little princes. That's going to be very interesting to watch.



And so to Meghan Markle, who has brought something new and wonderful to the story. She's from Showbiz Royalty which has arguably more clout than our own variety. She's beautiful, talented and seems intelligent too. She's brilliant at interviews and knows how to present herself to the media in ways that our own un-show-biz Royals can only envy. I loved her in Suits and see no reason why she won't be just as good in this new part. She's taken it on for life, but I think she'll enjoy it and what the Wedding on May 19th showed an audience of billions round the world is this: Charles may not know what love means, but his son has no doubts whatsoever. He's madly in love and so is Meghan and that feeling between them made May 19th an occasion for the whole nation to rejoice. The Soap Opera Gods outdid themselves on that day. Everything looked wonderful, everything went exactly as it ought to have done. The whole congregation loved the service and so did we. Beautiful music, beautiful flowers, beautiful guests of both sexes, wonderful exchanges between members of the family and above all, Charles being kind and courteous to Meghan's mother who was there by herself. She was there alone because Meghan's family.....but that's a whole other soap opera, which may or may not become featured in the Windsor story.

Also, the press will watch every outfit the Duchess of Sussex wears and the eagle eyes of the gossip columnists will be fixed on her waistline...watch this space for news of another pregnancy. The story goes on and on...
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