Juliet says:

Saturday 23rd January 2010:
“A somewhat belated first blog for the New Year – mainly because there has been nothing to say. I’ve been working steadily on my revision of The Brontës and, until last Monday, I was completely housebound: the huge snowfalls we’ve had on a regular basis since before Christmas have just kept on coming. Christmas Day with snow-covered hills and trees was wonderful: New Year, when no one could get to us because the roads were impassable, was not so wonderful: and after two weeks of being literally frozen in (ice on the insides of the windows as well as outside) we were all heartily sick and tired of the snow. The thaw began last weekend and, though there are snow-filled hollows on the moors and it’s still ‘ligging under t’walls’ as they say here in Yorkshire, (which means there’s more to come to take it away), last Monday I was finally able to get out of the village. Which was fortunate as I had to be in London on Wednesday night and in Norwich on Friday morning.

I loathe London – I can’t bear the noise, the crush of people, the traffic – but this was an occasion I would have bitterly regretted missing: dinner in the House of Lords with General The Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, who was Chief of the Defence Staff 1997-2001, and his wife. It was a fascinating evening which, I’m ashamed to say, also included my first visit to Westminster Hall (it smelt just like Duke Humphrey’s Library in the Bodleian). What a privilege to dine in such company and surroundings – and raise money for a good charitable cause in the process.

I didn’t feel very privileged on Friday when I had to give a talk in Norwich. I’m always consumed by nerves beforehand – I’m terrified of letting people down by not living up to expectations – and as the last speaker of five I had plenty of time to worry, especially as the other talks were so interesting that they were going to be a hard act to follow. The symposium was in the beautiful medieval church of St Peter Hungate, which was largely rebuilt in 1460 by Sir John Paston, of Paston letters fame. As you can probably tell from the photographs, however, it was also bitterly cold. I don’t often lecture wearing my coat and scarf but this was one occasion when it was absolutely necessary! The symposium had been arranged by Richard and Nina Kendrick for the thirteen-year-old pupils of Town Close House School who were an absolute pleasure to address: bright, interested and – despite the cold – full of enthusiasm for their subject. And some of their questions were more intelligent than those I get from adult audiences. The very first one floored me: ‘Did the English win Agincourt or did the French lose it?’ That’s one young man who will go far!

I left Norwich with two regrets: that we’d run out of time to answer all the questions the children wanted to ask and that I had to dash off to catch my train so missed a guided tour of the medieval Great Hospital. Which means I’ll just have to go back again!

The pictures, taken by Paul King, show me with some of the other speakers: Dale Copley, manager of St Peter Hungate Medieval Art Centre, Carole Rawcliffe, Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, and Ian Pycroft, a medievalist and re-enactor, whose authentic medieval garb, as I pointed out to the children, meant that he was the only one who didn’t feel the appropriately sepulchral cold of the church.”

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Thursday 31st December 2009:
“It appears to be obligatory for most newspapers at the end of the year to look back and pick out the outstanding books published in the previous twelve months. I can’t imagine who bothers to plough through all the recommendations – other than authors desperately hoping that their own books have been selected (thank you Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times!) – but I thought I’d add my own two penn ‘orth in my final blog for 2009.

My favourite history book of the year was Ian Mortimer’s 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory (Bodley Head), a clever reworking of the period sources presented in a roughly day-by-day fashion to create a diary or calendar of the year. Like the best diaries it is full of real insights: the sort of minutiae I love drawn from royal financial accounts but also an acute awareness of the impact on daily life of the social and especially religious rites of the church festivals. The format doesn’t always work and I disagree profoundly with Mortimer’s assessment of Henry’s character but it’s a fascinating and illuminating study of an extremely important year in European history.

For me, however, the truly outstanding book of the year was a novel. This is surprising in itself, given that, although I enjoy fiction, I rarely get time to read it. What is even more surprising is that it is a novel about the Brontës. As a biographer I am usually hugely irritated by attempts to tell the Brontë story infictionalised form: I’m annoyed by the author’s lack of knowledge or understanding of the people and period and infuriated by the lurid sexing-up the Brontës’ lives in a misguided attempt to explain the power and passion of their fiction. (Whatever happened to imagination!!)

I confess when I first saw Jude Morgan’s The Taste of Sorrow (Headline) my heart sank: the title itself suggested yet another Mills and Boon treatment and after reading the first page (sex on the first page must be a record even for a novel about the Brontës!) I gave up in disgust. But then I was stuck on a train with nothing else to read and so I picked it up again and was forced to change my view completely. This is quite simply the most wonderful fictional evocation of the family, especially Charlotte, I have ever read. Morgan avoids both the pitfall of using sub-Hollywood dialogue of the ‘Good morning Miss Brontë! Good morning Mr Dickens!’ variety and the straitjacket imposed by relying too heavily on the Brontës’ own autobiographical writings. Indeed, he has no need to, for he has a wonderfully poetic command of language himself – and the ability to empathise so closely with his subjects that he brings them convincingly and vividly to life. The Taste of Sorrow is a brilliant book and one that should have been chosen by every single reviewer as one of the highlights of the publishing year. Make it your New Year’s Resolution to buy, beg or borrow a copy.”

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Saturday 12th December 2009:
“For the last couple of weeks I have been immersed in preparing a new edition of The Brontës and it has been a rather strange experience. It’s not just that it’s now fifteen years since the book was first published and that for more than half that time I have been researching and writing about the medieval period: it’s that it has meant returning to work in the Brontë Parsonage Museum library – something I last did in 1989 when I left my post there after six years as curator and librarian. Much as I enjoyed my job, however, it is infinitely preferable to be on the other side! And exciting though it was to see the latest acquisitions, especially Charlotte’s exquisitely detailed miniature pencil drawing of the Wellington monument (a mere 74mm by 54mm in size) and a page which was not much larger from the manuscript of her little book Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington, it was also gratifying to discover how little new material has emerged since my biography was published.

One new discovery which has recently received much media attention is a Bible which was featured on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow on 27 September. The owners believe that it once belonged to the Brontë family and that Charlotte was responsible for numerous hand-written annotations on its pages. The show’s experts apparently agreed with them and, as a consequence, valued it as being worth £10,000 or more. I didn’t see the programme but many of you who did have contacted me to ask if it really is a genuine item. What I have seen is copies of the annotated pages and I can categorically state that the hand-writing is definitely not Charlotte’s, nor indeed any other member of the Brontë family’s: other Brontë scholars such as Margaret Smith and Christine Alexander, who were also consulted, are of the same opinion. Even if it were a genuine item, the valuation is way too high.

Today I was back in Haworth again, this time to film an interview. I arrived to find the Parsonage shrouded in bitterly cold, dank fog. A typical Brontë day, some might think, though the subject we were discussing was not. How did the Brontës celebrate Christmas? The simple answer is we do not know: apart from a poem by Anne celebrating music on Christmas morning and Mrs Gaskell’s passing reference to the recently married Charlotte and her husband taking a spice-cake as a gift to an elderly parishioner on Christmas Day, the biographical record is remarkably blank. Attending church would have been obligatory for the parson’s children but their novels suggest that the usual festivities were not neglected. There is goose with apple sauce for Christmas dinner at Wuthering Heights, not to mention dancing and carol-singing when the Gimmerton band arrives. And Jane Eyre’s preparations for her cousins’ return to Moor-House suggest first-hand experience: the ‘cleaning down’ of the house from top to bottom, laying fires in every room and the ‘solemnizing of … culinary rites’ including making Christmas cakes and mince-pies. It’s surely significant, though, as I pointed out to Mike Harding (pictured above) who interviewed me (in the Parsonage Dining Room of course!), that as children both Heathcliff and Jane Eyre are excluded from the family Christmas celebrations in their respective households. The interview, which is for a dvd on Christmas in Yorkshire, will be available next year.”

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Saturday 28th November 2009: 8am.
“It was bitterly cold this morning when I got up at first light to let out and feed the hens: my hands were so cold I could barely unlatch their pen. Now, as I sit at my desk looking out of the window, it is just starting to snow. Not the huge feathery white flakes which signal the sort of snowfall which, at least once a year, cuts off our Pennine village by blocking its steep and narrow roads, but a grey sludgy sleet. At least it makes a change from the rain which has poured relentlessly for the last couple of weeks, saturating the ground and causing new springs and waterfalls to burst out from the hillsides in unexpected places.

It was also raining two weeks ago when I was in Southwold for the Ways With Words Literary Festival. So much so that I had to run between the Swan Hotel and St Edmund Hall dodging the puddles and with my coat over my head as it was far too windy for an umbrella. Expecting to find that most people had taken the sensible option and stayed at home I was therefore amazed to find a packed hall and a hugely appreciative audience whose questions I might still be answering even now had we not been forced to bring the event to an end so that Michael Buerk could take to the stage. And what a performance he gave! He had the audience in stitches with his ‘grumpy old man’s rant’ - but it was also a depressingly accurate summation of the state of society today. And, as my husband and I discovered in conversation with him in the bar afterwards, despite his remarkable career he remains an utterly charming and unpretentious man.

One of the great pleasures of attending a Ways With Words festival is that you get to meet both other authors and the literary aficionados whose stamina in attending event after event never fails to astonish me (You have to be prepared for an inquisition at breakfast from those who have attended your talk!) It was a particular thrill for me to meet Jane Gardam, (pictured left) the novelist who was one of the first reviewers of The Brontes: I knew that her son is the principal of my old college at Oxford, but we discovered a further mutual connection in Kirkby Stephen, the Westmorland town where she had a holiday home for many years and where my mother’s family came from. We continued chatting together as I signed books after my session. And as I did so one of the audience, Mark Fairweather, told me something I didn’t know (how typical of Southwold!) I’d told the story of a Norman gentleman who was saved from execution by a young girl offering to marry him: Mark told me that this French tradition was still in practice in eighteenth century Quebec and referred me to a Margaret Atwood poem called ‘Marrying the Hangman’.

Next morning there was just time between the gathering rain clouds to grab a brisk walk along the promenade before we had to set off home: actually, as you can see from the photo, it was more of a battle with the elements. We keep promising ourselves that one day, other responsibilities permitting, we’ll join the audience and spend a whole week at the Southwold Literary Festival – though I confess that I’ll probably have to sneak away to explore all those exquisite Suffolk churches glimpsed as we passed through villages which exert an equally powerful siren call."

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Thursday 12th November 2009:

“I have to confess that most of my heroes since childhood have been historical ones. On Tuesday, however, I met a man who has a better claim than most to be a living hero: the soldier, explorer and adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes (pictured far left), whose many achievements include being the first man to have crossed both poles by land and climb the world’s highest mountain Everest: in the process he has raised over £14 million for charity. Sir Ranulph can trace his family back forty-one generations and has discovered that he had ancestors on both sides of the Hundred Years War. He was the guest on BBC Radio 4’s new series of Great Lives and he had chosen one of them, Henry V, as his inspirational hero: I was invited on the programme as an expert on the king. We talked about why Henry was – and still is - regarded as one of the greatest kings ever to have ruled England and in the impassioned discussion that followed it emerged that for Sir Ranulph it is Henry’s military leadership that makes him a hero, whereas I probably value at least as highly his administrative abilities and determination to do justice to all. Sir Ranulph spoke movingly about how the men who had served under his father, who was killed in action before he was born, revered his memory because, like Henry V, he had led from the front and endured the same privations as them. You can hear the programme on Radio 4 on 8 December at 4.30pm: it’s repeated on 11 December at 11pm and will be available to listen to again on the BBC website. The photo shows Sir Ranulph and I standing either side of the programme’s presenter, Matthew Parris, in the recording studio at Broadcasting House in London

The BBC – and indeed Radio 4 – also played a pivotal role in my life in the late 1980s when I was one of a very closely knit team of people who recorded two series of a programme called ‘Take a Place Like …’. We would visit towns throughout the UK to discover what made each one special and different: I was the historian, John Grundy the architectural historian and Stanley Ellis (pictured left) the dialect expert. Together with the producer, Geoff Sargieson, and sound recordist, Graeme Aldous, we had an absolute ball visiting places as diverse as Beccles and Goole, Peel and Leith. It was fascinating to discover all the eccentricities of each place and to learn so much about not just the past but also the present. It was also the most enormous fun, not least because as a team we shared the same sense of humour: I don’t think I have ever laughed so much in all my life as during the two years we recorded the programme. We’ve all remained friends and stayed in touch but today we marked the breaking of the circle. Our dear old friend (we always called him ‘the old man’) Stanley Ellis died, aged 83, on 31st October and we met again at his funeral in Harrogate. Stanley had a genius for friendship with old and young but he was also the leading authority on dialect who, as a young man, had toured England recording elderly people talking about their way of life for what has now become the internationally renowned archive The Survey of English Dialect at the University of Leeds. In the process he acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of not just dialect but the derivation of names and development of language: he could place an accent to within a few streets of a town – as he did most successfully in the case of the hoax Yorkshire Ripper tapes – and was an expert forensic witness in many trials. He was often asked ‘where do I come from?’ by people wanting to test his skill as if it were a party trick: to which, with his usual dry wit, he would reply, ‘Why, don’t you know?’ We teased him mercilessly: setting him up after a well lubricated dinner to record ‘The Leith police dismisseth us’ outside the Leith police station and we were wonderfully rewarded on one glorious occasion when he asked a waiter ‘What part of Germany are you from?’ only to be told ‘Portugal’. We all loved him dearly and he will be sadly missed.”

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Friday 23^rd October 2009:

“10.30 am. William Wordsworth certainly knew how to choose the perfect site for a house. This morning I’m sitting for the last time in the bow-window of the old library at Lancrigg, the charming farmhouse in Easedale that his friend, Elizabeth Fletcher, bought and refurbished on Wordsworth’s advice. Framed by autumnal trees the view across the valley could almost be a picture-postcard: in the middle distance a stone bridge straddles the beck which runs through the green fields where sheep as grey as the rocks are grazing; beyond them, rising from a sea of rusty-brown bracken, soar the craggy stone outcrops which give the Lakeland fells their distinctive horizons.

My husband and I have been staying here for a few days while both our children are away: it’s an opportunity to go walking and revisit the places we grew to love when I was writing my biography of Wordsworth. For the final year of my research I spent two days every week in the archives of the Wordsworth Trust at Grasmere. I’d drive up from the South Pennines early on Monday morning so that I could be on the doorstep when the library opened at 9.30am, work through till it shut in the evening, stay overnight at How Foot, get up early the next morning to go walking before breakfast, then spend all Tuesday working in the library again, driving home again when it shut. For five weeks during the summer, (when it rained virtually every day as my children never cease to remind me), the family stayed with me in the Lakes while I worked every hour the library was open. Exhausting – but worth it for the vast amount of unpublished material I was able to incorporate into my biography and for the opportunity to get to know intimately Wordsworth’s beloved Lakes which shaped and informed his poetry.

Charlotte Brontë said that her sisters’ poetry always came line by line into her head whenever she walked the moors round Haworth: the same is true for me of Wordsworth and the Lakes. The day we arrived we took one of Dorothy’s favourite walks up Easedale, her ‘dark quarter’, past the heart-shaped sheep-fold at the foot of the wonderfully and perfectly named waterfalls of Sour Milk Ghyll to the tarn in the hollow of the hills at the head of the dale. Naturally it rained most of the way. It’s a curious thing about Lake District rain: in my part of Yorkshire the wind drives the rain so hard and at such an angle that it is like being on the receiving end of a volley of arrows at Agincourt. Here it has an insidious quality: it appears to be soft and mist-like (mizzling we call it in Yorkshire), but almost without you knowing it, it permeates everything you’re wearing till you are soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone.

Fortunately, the next two days were dry. On Wednesday, after buying and posting emergency rations of Sarah Nelson’s inimitable Grasmere gingerbread to our children (and keeping some for ourselves!), we walked the circuit of Grasmere Lake and Rydal Water, with a small detour to John’s Wood where William and Dorothy’s brother, captain of an East Indiaman, used to pace up and down, the wind in the trees reminding him of being at sea. Taking the so-called ‘coffin route’ from Grasmere, we climbed over White Moss Common, where I always like to imagine Wordsworth’s Leech-gatherer at work, to *Rydal Mount, the Wordsworth family home for 46 years, which lives and breathes the poet, who created the house and gardens there, in a way that makes his better-known and much briefer home at Dove Cottage seem sterile. After a quick coffee in the excellent new garden tearoom and a visit, at the insistence of my friends Peter and Marian, the custodians there, to see the newly acquired paperknife which, uniquely, incorporates in the handle locks of hair belonging to William, his wife Mary and their daughter Dora, we followed in the footsteps of one of the Wordsworths’ favourite walks round Rydal Water, where there are still swans as there were in their day, and over Loughrigg Terraces back to Grasmere and Easedale.
*Link to Rydal Mount http://www.rydalmount.co.uk

Yesterday, our last full day in the Lakes, we dedicated to perhaps the most evocative of all the walks associated with Wordsworth: Grisedale Tarn. It was at this remote spot on the flanks of Helvellyn, some 1800 feet above sea-level, at the foot of the still black waters cupped in the bowl where Fairfield, Dollywagon Pike and Seat Sandal meet, that William and Dorothy parted with their brother John, who was returning to sea to win them all the fortune that would enable him to retire to Grasmere and relieve his brother of the financial worries that threatened his future as a poet. John would never return, going down with his ship when it sank in storms off the Isle of Portland on 5 February 1805. On the rock where they parted are carved some of Wordsworth’s wonderful lines from ‘Elegiac Verses in Memory of my Brother’, composed several months later at this very spot. The lettering has been virtually obliterated by wind and rain and the rock itself defaced by a crude metal sign stuck on a post rammed into the top with all the subtlety of a cocktail sausage on a stick. Even so, knowing the poem and standing where they once stood, looking out over the dolls-house scenery of Patterdale far below, with the dull gleam of Ullswater in the distance, I find it impossible not to feel the emotion that haunts the place. I love the Lakes for their exquisite beauty in all seasons but Wordsworth’s poetry adds a dimension which touches the very soul.

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Monday 12^th October 2009:

“There are times when my life seems utterly bizarre and this last week has been one of them. Last Monday I found myself being waited on hand and foot at a small dinner party in an exquisite medieval castle which had once belonged to a veteran of Agincourt; what made this wonderful experience utterly surreal was that a fellow guest was the Princess Royal. Three days later there I was doing what has become my usual shift working as a volunteer waitress at the Granary Café, run by Caring For Life (www.caringforlife.co.uk ), a charity which cares for vulnerable and homeless people. Lots of people – some of them from many miles away – were bringing their harvest offerings to the farm, helping to provide literally thousands of meals for those whom the charity supports on a daily basis. Since many of the harvest-bringers chose to have breakfast, lunch or afternoon tea in the café before they returned home we were run off our feet all day. I couldn’t help wondering what some of those I had served would have felt if they had known what I had been doing just a few days earlier! Or if they had known that just a few days later I’d be dining with Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB chief who became a double agent and made a dramatic escape to the West in 1985. Anonymity is a wonderful and precious thing!
Gordievsky was, like me, appearing at the Cheltenham Literature Festival which grows bigger and better every time I visit. Unfortunately, our events on the Sunday evening clashed so, while he was regaling a large audience with his exploits in the main hall, I was sitting on a stage in a tent with Erica Wagner, the literary editor of The Times, and William Dalrymple, the flamboyant author of White Mughals and The Last Moghal. A small but select group had gathered to hear us discuss The NovelList, the 60 favourite novels of Times readers published since 1949. Both of my fellow panellists were far more erudite than me and familiar with most of the books on the list. I’m ashamed to say I had read just 7 out of the top 20 – but then as it was favourite novels, rather than best novels, it was rather an eclectic list. Top of the poll was To Kill a Mocking Bird, which was fair enough I suppose, but second was Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. Surely not a book you’d really choose over Catch-22, Lord of the Rings or The French Lieutenant’s Woman? And why was there no Daphne du Maurier or Laurie Lee (if they could include Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes why not A Moment of War my favourite work by Laurie Lee?) I was even more disappointed that my own choice, T H White’s The Once and Future King, which I’d championed in The Times http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6825116.ece didn’t even make it on to the long list. You can see what you think about the choice of books by looking on the same link at article6866488.
Thanks to the Summerfield Trust, a sponsor of the Festival which is celebrating its 20th anniversary of grant-giving in Gloucestershire, I didn’t have to spend my evening in my hotel room staring at the wallpaper and dining on room-service. Instead, I had a most enjoyable evening in the convivial company of, amongst others, Lavinia Sidgwick, the lovely lady who was to chair my event the next day, Martin Davis, one of the first trustees, and Henry Porter, the novelist and political commentator. I didn’t dare speak to Oleg Gordievsky, the guest of honour, any more than I had summoned up the courage to talk to the Princess Royal. But at least I was there!

Next morning was The Big Event: my first talk about Conquest. I was up at 6 am revising my speech, having just learned via a text message that the cd-rom with the illustrations had not arrived. By 9 am I was sat in the Writers’ Room, trying to keep my nerves at bay by writing my notes out yet again. (I couldn’t help noticing as I sat there that the first thing every writer does on arrival is scan the room for someone famous – I’m guilty of it myself – but it’s usually disappointing. The only person I recognised was Sandy Toksvig, whom I passed in the corridor.) By 9.30am it had become plain something was wrong as no one had turned up to meet me. Than I discovered that I was in the wrong writers’ room: I should have been at the Everyman Theatre where an increasingly worried Lavinia was wondering what had happened to me. A quick scuttle across town to the Everyman left me with time barely to catch my breath before it was on stage and launching into my talk.
Fortunately it all went incredibly well. The Cheltenham audiences are always appreciative and quick to respond. They also ask lots of interesting questions – though I was floored by one lady who asked (apropos of the similarities I had pointed out between the conduct of the war in France and the current war in Afghanistan) why we never learn from our mistakes. It was especially gratifying to talk to so many people who bought books afterwards – most of all the two stagehands who had listened from the wings and were so taken by the subject that they decided to buy the book!
The question I was asked most often by those buying the book was ‘what are you going to write next?’ The new edition of The Brontës is my next project but then what? I’m not sure, though I had a fruitful discussion back in the Writers’ Room with my editor, Tim Whiting, of Little, Brown, who’d travelled up from London to come to my event. Certainly something medieval. Possibly the Wars of the Roses? Or possibly a more general book on knighthood? We shall see.”

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Sunday 27^th September 2009:

“A very busy week, top and tailed by my first literary events in the build-up to the publication of mynew book Conquest. Last Sunday it was the Independent Booksellers’ Forum Annual Dinner at Warwick University.It’s always a terrifying prospect speaking to a vast room full of people you don’t know – and special thanks are due to Helen from Bewdley Books who very kindly took pity on me as I stood forlornly wondering where to start as the crowds gathered before the dinner. Commiserations are also due to the poor man who had to sit next to me at dinner as my moment in the spotlight approached and was stricken with nerves.There were seven authors speaking, two between drinks and starters, three (of which I had been allocated the middle slot) between starters and mains, and two between main course and dessert. We had all been told in no uncertain terms that we had 3 minutes to speak – so after the first speaker spoke for 20 minutes and the next for almost as long I started to panic. Three minutes was what I had prepared and 3 minutes was what they were going to get! But as everyone else before me went well over the time-limit, my 3 minutes began to look like short-change. And having wound myself up for my slot, I couldn’t believe it when the speaker after me was introduced first and I had to sit there for another grim 10 minutes or so, thinking I might have been left out altogether, before it was finally my turn. I hope my contribution was interesting and entertaining – it was certainly the shortest by a long margin!The highlight of the evening for me was the after-dinner speaker, Gyles Brandreth, a natural performer if ever there was one, with a host of very funny quick-fire one-liners at his finger-tips: the jokes came so fast and furious that it was almost impossible to catch them all. Last night I swapped my medieval hat for my Brontë one and went to Dewsbury to celebrate the bi-centennial of the arrival in Yorkshire of the Reverend Patrick Brontë. There was a special resonance to the occasion in that the event was held in Dewsbury Minster, the very church where Patrick himself had served for 16 months as curate to the Reverend John Buckworth – the rest, as they say, is history. I always think Patrick is one of the most unjustly maligned people in the history of English literature so it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to sing the praises of this remarkable man before a packed audience. The best part of such events for me is always the question and answer session at the end – at least I know I’m telling the audience what they really want to know! – and this was no exception. We had lots of interesting questions from a clearly knowledgeable audience and I hope a good time was had by all. Afterwards I had an all too brief tour of the splendid exhibition on the life and times of Patrick Brontë in Dewsbury which is on display in the Minster until 17 October. I hope it finds a permanent home in the town: it deserves one." (Photos by Joanne Catlow)

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Saturday 12^th September 2009:

Today was an extraordinary day. Not just because for the fourth day in a row we woke up to cloudless blue skies and glorious sunshine – a brief taste of the summer we’ve never had this year – but because it was a highlight in the calendar for one of my favourite causes: Harvest Thanksgiving and Supporters’ Day at Caring For Life.

I became involved in this wonderful charity over five years ago and was so impressed that I wrote a book about them (The Deafening Sound of Silent Tears). Once you’ve actually been there and seen the work they do with people who have been rejected by everyone else in society – including government agencies supposedly there to help – it’s impossible not to be drawn in. The people who are cared for come from all sorts of backgrounds: many have been severely abused, have learning difficulties and/or mental or physical health problems. As a result many have fallen into crime or homelessness. CFL – uniquely – promises to look after them for life and its network of dedicated staff, volunteers and supporters provide the family that most of them have never had. Despite their tragic backgrounds, visiting CFL is always an uplifting experience: it feels wonderful to me to belong to such a tightly knit and caring community. How much more so for those poor souls who are cared for, I cannot begin to imagine.

It was my privilege to hand out the certificates of achievement to the ‘young’ people. (They’re still affectionately called ‘young’ from force of habit though most are now well into middle age.) To see the pleasure that these awards give to the recipients is overwhelming: some of the achievements might seem minor but each individual who has taken a small step on the literacy or arts programmes, or taken responsibility for looking after some of the animals on the farm, has made an enormous stride on the path towards self-respect and becoming integrated into a community that really cares.

What I really love about doing this is when some of the young people are so thrilled by the award and the applause from supporters that they grin from ear to ear, proudly display their certificates to the crowd and (if I’m lucky) give me a great big hug. I’m always careful with new people I don’t yet know just to shake their hand, in case they have Asperger’s or autism and dislike physical contact, so the real highlight for me was when one young man, at least six foot tall, seized me in a bear hug, enthusiastically clapping his hands behind my back, and wouldn’t let me go! It’s moments like these that are both humbling and precious: such a little thing can mean so much.

In the evening we celebrated achievement of a very different kind. I’ve long been a fan of the redoubtable Dame Fanny Waterman, the founder and mainstay of the Leeds International Piano Competition. Apart from the fact that she is one of the very few people who actually makes me feel tall, I admire her enthusiasm, her indefatigable energy (at 89 she has far more than I do) and her perfectionism. My husband had been to many of the early rounds of the competition over the last three weeks: I only got to a few sessions but it was good to see some of the people I’d seen going through to become one of the six finalists, each of whom played a concerto in Leeds Town Hall with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder.

Tonight was the last evening of the competition when the results would be announced. How the judges decide I do not know. I always find it especially difficult to distinguish between my appreciation for the pianist’s talent and my preference for the actual music they play: if it’s a piece I love then I’m instinctively drawn to the player. There always seem to be two or three who deserve to win – but how to rank them when their ages can range from 14 to 29 and they are all playing different pieces? At least this time three of the six had chosen to play the Beethoven Emperor concerto – it never having featured in a final before! Even I could tell which were the better performances when comparing like with like, but the audience jury was certainly out over who would be the eventual winner. It was a close-run thing but in the end the first prize went to the 29-year-old Russian Sofya Gulyak– the first female winner in the twenty-year history of the competition – vindicating the comments made to me earlier by one of judges that technical brilliance (which even the youngest competitors have in abundance) is not enough: the music has to be felt from the soul. You have to know and understand what the composer himself was feeling when he wrote it – and that is a quality which only age and experience can bring. Or a good biography, as I was tempted to correct him!

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Tuesday 1^st September 2009:

9pm - "We’ve been home for a week, it’s poured with rain every day and I haven’t been able to get warm at all. Arrived to find Urgeon the Sturgeon had died and Buffy had lost her tail feathers. There was a mountain of post and e-mails, including the proofs for my article on the medieval laws of war for the October issue of the BBC History Magazine and a request for 300 words on my favourite novel of the last 60 years for The Times (see articles). The choice for the latter is easy – it’s always T. H. White’s brilliant The Once and Future King but the deadline was 36 hours away, there was no food in the house and, crucially, daughter’s exam results due on d-day itself. Fortunately they extended the deadline and I delivered the article by e-mail this morning (how different from the days when I had to slog two miles to the nearest post-box!), so it should be published on 7th September."

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Tuesday 25^th August 2009:

"Today the Venice idyll ends as we reluctantly return home to reality.  People often ask us why we keep coming back here – and I can’t count the number of times I’ve met visitors sitting by the pool because, they say, they’ve been to Venice before and they’ve ‘seen everything’ so there’s nothing else to do. ‘A couple of days is enough’.  I never tire of the place and I can always find something to do. I love to go walking in the cool of the early morning, before the sun gets too hot and the crowds of day-trippers start pouring in. (It’s a surreal sight to watch the cruise ships sailing up the Guidecca Canal: they are so vast that Venice seems Lilliputian by comparison and the biggest ones obliterate all but the campanile in San Marco as they pass.)

Even when San Marco is heaving with tourists, however, it only takes a few minutes to leave the hordes behind and you can wander through the narrow streets and along the picturesque canals for hours without encountering more than a handful of people, most of them the diminishing number of Venetians who still actually live in these quieter regions. The architecture might not be as grand as the civic buildings of the San Marco district but you still come across Gothic palaces in deserted piazzas, charming walled gardens beside quiet canals, wall-panels carved out of stone or marble advertising the business of a long-forgotten medieval proprietor and red-brick churches spared the vulgar baroque facades and interiors of more fashionable areas.

Each of the six sestieri or districts of Venice has its own character – and its own house-numbering system which applies to the whole district rather than each street – and we particularly like to explore the Cannaregio, the Castello and the Dorsoduro. Every time we do we find something we haven’t seen before. (Last year my husband stumbled across the BBC filming Little Dorrit.)  This year, in addition to the Arsenal, it was the delightful piazza next to the unspoilt medieval church of San Giacomo del Orio in Santa Croce and a row of classical-style busts of Africans, their heads carved out of black marble, perched on top of a high wall behind the Dogana.

Every year, too, one of the great treasures of Venice re-emerges triumphantly from behind hoardings and scaffolding while another is shrouded up in preparation for restoration. We always used to admire the way the hoardings depicted the building behind them; it seemed a civilised way of allowing the work to go ahead as unobtrusively as possible. Not any more. The new mayor has decreed that they should be sold off for advertising so last summer, just as we were leaving, we saw the incongruous sight of vast adverts for cars (of all things! in a city of canals!) being plastered round the Bridge of Sighs. We had hoped this was a temporary desecration but this year they’ve given way to adverts for Coin supermarkets and Swatch watches, and the pernicious trend looks as though it is spreading to other sites too. The only appropriate response to such desecration is to boycott the advertisers and shame them into removing them. My campaign starts here!"   

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Sunday 16^th August 2009:

11.30pm - "A perfect day.  We all got up early and took the boat to the Piazetta. From there we walked through the deserted backstreets of San Marco and Castello, where a kindly Venetian, seeing us map in hand, assumed we must be lost if we were wandering through Castello and insisted on directing us to the Arsenal. As it happens, that was our destination, but not, as he thought, because we wanted to see the Biennale exhibitions of modern art, but because we wanted to see the Arsenal itself. In all our years of coming to Venice we’ve never got beyond the twin brick towers guarding its entrance as it is a restricted military zone. The Arsenal was the powerhouse of the Venetian republic: it was where the great ships carrying merchandise to and from every corner of the world were built and repaired. Its size and technology were the wonder of medieval times. So, charming though it was to see the towers and walls from the outside, just as Canaletto had painted them, it was very frustrating never to get beyond them.

Today was our opportunity – and how exciting it was, not least because it felt as though we were doing something illicit just being there. Ignoring the exhibits (difficult to tell sometimes whether they were meant to be art or just the detritus left behind by workmen – though there was one clever piece depicting sunbeams made out of long thin cages of golden filigree) we marvelled at the sheer length of the old rope factory, with its balconied walkways up above, the marble arches of the ancient docks which looked more like elegant porticos than a working site and the huge waterways enclosed within the Arsenal walls. It is astonishing that such an evocative place is left deserted and semi-derelict: industrial architecture it might be (and I was proud to see an innovative 19^th century crane built by the Armstrongs of Newcastle at the waterside) but it is still fascinating and has charms of its own. Unlike the modern art displayed within its precincts.

After several hours of exploration we were so exhausted that we had to return to the hotel for showers and a rest, then back into Venice for an early dinner at one of our favourite restaurants, Ai Barbacani, on the appropriately named Calle del Paradiso in the Castello district. Tucked away in a backstreet, with a single balcony opening on to a side-canal, it’s been family-run for over thirty years, serves traditional Venetian food and wine and is (unusually for Venice) always friendly and welcoming. And even more unusually for Venice, it’s also good value, which is always a plus for a Yorkshire woman like me.

By 8.30pm we were sitting in the Palazzo Barbarigo-Minotto on the Grand Canal, one of our discoveries a couple of years ago. This is a private palazzo but it hosts several nights of opera a week. Tonight we’ve chosen La Traviata (again): just the three principals, Violetta, Alfredo and Germont, with an orchestra of five, but each of the three scenes played out in a different candle-lit room: a grand hallway, a salon and a bedroom.  La Traviata was premiered in Venice in 1853 and there’s something absolutely magical about sitting in the intimate surroundings of the decaying splendour of a palazzo listening to glorious music beautifully sung by professional opera singers. (The intimacy can be a disadvantage when they hit the high notes at full pelt when they are literally just a couple of feet away from you!)  

To end a perfect day we wander out into the warm night air and head for San Marco for a night-cap at one of the cafés. What could be better than sitting in the piazza, with your back to the Napoleonic intrusions, looking up at a flood-lit basilica and Doge’s Palace, drinking a glass of Bianco di Custoza, listening to the orchestras and imagining the crusaders in exactly this same spot in 1204?"

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Wednesday 12^th August 2009:


7am -"Just a few days later and here I am again, sat on a terrace in the warm sunshine enjoying the peace and quiet before the bustle of the day begins. This time, however, I’m over a thousand miles away, on the small terrazzo of our hotel: on one side of me is the white marbled facade of the church which once served the community on this little island; on the other is the wooden jetty, bobbing up and down between its distinctive red and gold striped mooring-posts. From here I have a perfect view of the panorama of Venice unfurled like a painted backdrop from some fairytale theatrical production across the calm green waters of the lagoon. There is always a sense of unreality in Venice and never more so than seeing it like this – through a trick of perspective it seems so close as to be almost within arm’s reach and all the most famous buildings are lined up in a neat row as if there were no canals between them. Looking from left to right I can see the massive red bulk of the Redentore church with its white-capped dome and towers on the Guidecca, the upper storeys of the square facade and the red roof of the Ca Grande on the Grand Canal, the leaning tower of Santo Stefano, the high green pyramid that is the roof of the newly rebuilt Fenice theatre; then, in solitary splendour with a ruff of trees hiding its lower reaches, the perfectly aligned and symmetrical Palladian domes and towers of the Salute church; the campanile in San Marco, surmounted by its golden angel, soars above the  centre, dwarfing the domes of the basilica which, even at this distance, strike an exotically eastern and foreign note in this extraordinary cityscape; finally, rising as if out of the trees that fill the abandoned island of La Grazia, I can see the dome and campanile of San Georgio and the pinnacle of the campanile of San Francesco della Vigne.

At this hour the water-taxis and Venetian boy-racers are not yet tearing across the lagoon, sending plumes of water and the booming reverberations of engines in their wake. The only sounds – for the moment – are the bells calling people to mass, the piping of oyster-catchers and the occasional smack of a leaping fish returning to the water. It is, I now realise, low tide and an elderly fisherman who has been toiling continuously out in the middle of the lagoon has rowed over to within just a few feet of where I am sitting. Like all Venetians, he rows his wooden boat standing upright, with his hands crossed and pushing the oars forwards, a method which seems bizarre to English eyes but is efficiently fast and has the advantage of allowing him to see where he is going. He is so intent on his task that he completely ignores my presence, putting down his oars to drift with the tide and pulling out his net, which he carries carefully folded into a bucket, he drops it length by length into the water. When he reaches the end, some twenty or thirty yards away, he rows back to the beginning and then, to my surprise, allows the boat to drift back again while he uses the flat of his oar to strike the water, splashing noisily to drive the fish into his net. He’s successful too. Though I don’t like to stare (and am assiduously doing my counted-cross-stitch as a cover for my snooping) I can see that he has pulled in at least eight decent sized fish just in the short stretch of water in front of me. As I watch him take up his oars once more and row off into another part of the lagoon to begin his task again – never once having acknowledged my presence any more than I have his – I feel as though I have witnessed a ritual which has likewise refused to acknowledge the advances of modern technology. My fisherman is a timeless figure. Had it not been for his clothes, his plastic bucket and nylon net, I might easily have mistaken him for a figure from a Canaletto or a Carpaccio. It is this blurring of past and present which makes Venice such an evocative place for me. I first came here as a student on a gap year over twenty years ago. I fell under its spell then and I remain in its thrall today."

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Saturday 8^th August 2009:

" I have always been an early riser but for the last few months I’ve been getting up between 4 and 5am to work a fifteen to twenty hour day in order to hit the deadline for delivering the manuscript of the American edition of my latest book Conquest. I succeeded with a week or so to spare but since then I’ve been busy with the copy edit and proofs of the UK edition, so I’ve been finding it hard to break the habit of getting up early. Seven am therefore found me sitting on the terrace in front of our house being reminded why this is usually my favourite part of the day. I’ve already done all the household tasks – let out and fed the four chickens (named by my daughter Artemis Fowl, Buffy the Worm Slayer, Princess Leia and Peccadillo), made bread, put a wash on and all the other boring but necessary chores – and now I’m enjoying the luxury of drinking coffee and eating incomparable English plums in the pleasant warmth of a perfect summer day. Above the trees I can see the heather just beginning to turn purple on the hills and a great arc of cloudless blue sky. I can hear the beck running in the valley bottom, the clock on the church tower striking the hour and the bees humming among the flowers in the borders. Already I can catch the scent of roses: by mid morning, when the sun will be too strong for me and I will have retreated into the shadows, the air will be heavy with their perfume. For the first time in over a year I have no pressing deadline to meet and no books I have to read for my work so I intend to enjoy the rare treat of reading a novel."