Susan Green

…Flora’s panniers opened in readiness for the haul of pollen and nectar she would surely be able to take back to the hive from this marvellous place. She climbed up and positioned herself over one of the creamy white florets, and the contact of the feet on the flower’s virginal petal made them both tremble. Flora held it softly then sank her tongue into its depths. The exquisite taste sparkled through her mind and body like sun on water, and she drank until each floret was empty.
Behind her, the green-fleshed flowers waited their turn. As Flora combed the minute gold pollen beads of the neroli into her panniers, she felt their patient desire. When she looked again, their green lips had parted to show a glimpse of inner red, and their white fringing had a more festive look…
Despite herself, Flora’s own scent pulsed more strongly from her body. So strong was their desire for her that they actually moved towards her, their inner petals moistening under her gaze, She hovered, mesmerised by their lust.
‘Come to me instead,’ crooned a high voice. Flora turned to see a big black Minerva spider sitting in her hazy cobweb. ‘What a sweet servant. Come, let me hold you.’

Who knew that the life of a forager bee could be so sexy, and so dramatic? As soon as she emerges into the hive, it’s clear that Flora 717 is a mutant bee. She’s oversized, strong, dark, hairy and ugly –  and would have been instantly destroyed if not for the intervention of one of the Queen’s inner circle, the powerful Sister Sage. Initially,  Flora works as a sanitation bee, the lowest of the low, cleansing the hive and obeying the precepts ‘accept, obey and serve’. But before long, she’s promoted to nursery attendant, feeding the newborn bees – and it’s there that she encounters an irresistible temptation. She is moved on to foraging outside the hive (usually an end-of-life role for worker bees), and there faces terrible dangers. There are wasps, spiders, pesticides, sterile monocultures, winter cold and of course, beekeepers. I don’t want to give anything away, so I won’t. But it’s enough to say that her courage and rebellious nature enable her to change the future of her hive forever.

Laline Paull’s The Bees was a book group selection, and for once it was that rarity, a novel we all enjoyed. Really, it had everything. Suspense, danger, mystery, sex and violence plus a feisty heroine in Flora 717. Our group picked up echoes of any number of dystopian novels (but with honey), as well as Cinderella, Watership Down and Game of Thrones. There are evil lady bees, madly entitled drones, plots and jealousies, friendships and even love. Utterly engaging, exciting and unexpectedly moving, it’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read so far this year.

And I will never look at a little forager bee in the same way. 

STILL had taught me that it was possible to make something every day, and if every day was not necessarily artful, nevertheless art of some kind would eventually arise out of that dailiness.

Mary-Jo Hoffman was an aerospace engineer. After she left her work to raise her young children near St Paul, Minnesota, she became an artist too; she began a daily practice of photographing a natural object on a white background (she tried black, briefly, but it didn’t work for her). She usually found her subjects on her daily walks in the woods near her home.  A leaf, a stone, a feather, a twig. As time went on, and her walks produced the same material, year upon year, season after season, she began to elaborate, making patterns and designs. She put light pebbles on top of dark stones, arranged twigs and sprigs into shapes, seeds into repeating patterns. They are amazing! She called her project STILL, and uploaded her photographs to a blog. Eventually Hoffman published this book, STILL: The Art of Noticing, which contains only a fraction of her 4,000+ images.

The first found object images are, indeed, ‘still’ in the simplicity and it-ness of each thing. The thing with placing something – be it a dead bird or a handful of acorn caps –  ‘naturally’ (oh, using that word I am wading into contested waters!) on a neutral background is that it seems kind of scientific, detached, spot-lit. It says, here I am, unadorned. It’s artful, in the way a botanical illustration is artful. It seems to be about the plant, but it’s about the observer, too.

The further she strayed from that initial simplicity, the less satisfying I found the images. I don’t mean I didn’t enjoy looking at them; I did. They were ingenious and clever, sometimes  funny, always lovely. It’s just personal taste. Another person might have the opposite reaction.

One more thing about this beautiful, beautiful book. I hate being such a downer, such a doom-laded misery-guts, but – though I look at these works of observation and art, and genuinely feel the uplift, joy and loveliness of the natural world, that world right now is changing.  Into a different world, with less diversity, with fewer plants and animals and birds and insects (I guess the stones and rocks and pebbles will endure). The artist is of course under no obligation to make any explicit point about this. She doesn’t have to ‘address’ climate change.

Or…new thought! Perhaps she is, because here I am, thinking about this.

(Writer and designer Kenya Hara)… described the intricate awareness people had of nature’s subtle changes during the aristocratic Heian period, the golden age of Japanese culture from 794 to 1185 CE.
Japan had adopted, then modified, the Chinese calendar, which divided the year not into four seasons but into twenty-four, which were further subdivided inot seventy-two characteristic annual patterns, or microseasons. “A Japanese person was considered cultivated,” explained Hara, “when he or she gained a deep awareness of the beauty…found in these seasonal changes, which were divided into five-day cycles.”
Reading this was like finding out I had a secret sibling living some parallel life and another country. It redefined everything. I wanted to fly somewhere and be reunited with this beloved, long-lost, completely familiar idea.

There are several essays in STILL, where Hoffman explains her process. There’s also a fascinating discussion of the concept of seasons tied to particular ecosystems, habitats and human home-places – as in Native American seasons, and the astonishing 72 Japanese seasons, some of which last only a few days.  Sadly, her house and studio burned down last year, and so her project is on hold for now.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…so this is my attempt at STILL.

I’ve always been a noticer. I look down when I walk and often return with some little memento in my pocket. As part of my current decluttering project, I’ve put a few shoeboxes of shells, pebbles, stones, feathers, seed pods, animal skulls and bones and a even a clutch of dried-up dead skinks out into the garden. Natural objects, all. I do notice other things on my walks, too. Cigarette butts from the high-school smokers who take the shortcut through the wildflower reserve. Bottle caps, ring-pulls, chip wrappers, Chupa-Chup sticks, drink cans, bottles, tissues, full dog-poo bags (yuk)… Most of us call this stuff litter, rubbish, and think it’s ugly. Usually I do too.

However there was one time when, severely insomniac, I was in a calm, exhausted but half-mad state. I had needed to go to Melbourne, and found myself, waiting for the train home, standing on the platform at Footscray looking down at the rails. Don’t worry! No thoughts of jumping. I was simply entranced by the shapes and colours and textures on the track. Rainbow shards of glass and plastic and paper, shiny metal, glittering foil… So beautiful! Dazzling! Amazing! I couldn’t have been more enraptured even if I was stoned, and I remained in a trance until my train arrived and broke the spell. Stand behind the yellow line!
Melatonin turned out to be the answer.

It’s so tempting to leave this out; it would be much easier to skip it over as a repetitious, almost boring part of the story. For the love of god, what now, I can almost hear you say. But I have to include this part, just as I did all the other parts. Without it, it might seem that recovery from a mental illness is a straight line from unwell to well, as long as you do all the things you’re supposed to. And that just isn’t necessarily true. I was doing all the things. All of them. I was attending AA daily. I was exercising…taking medication, doing meditation, getting therapy. And to top it all off, I had a granddaughter… It still seems inconceivable to me that I could have been hit by this bus once again, with all the good things that were happening in my life.

Like a lot of the Australian public, my family got hooked on the TV juggernaut that was Masterchef – but we came to the party one year late, and never saw the first season.
We enjoyed the show for a few years, and then we didn’t. This year was the first full season we’ve watched for more than a decade.
We became hooked again this year. Probably me more than my husband, but then I am the greedier of the two. I can watch cooking shows with the sound off; just to see all that chopping and mixing is indescribably soothing.  And I have only just had an aha! moment, where the beauty and efficacy of actually following recipes has been revealed to me.
So, this year, when Masterchef 17 finished, we watched Masterchef 1.

It was very different to the 2025 version. More basic dishes. And very basic kit – domestic ovens, few appliances, no blast chiller until near the end. Silly rules, like having to pick 20 ingredients from the pantry in 2 minutes. Ridiculous and stressful team challenges, like having to race around Hong Kong trying to buy a suckling pig, or catch your own fish to cook a seafood lunch. It was horrible watching the losing team voting out the worst-performing member.  Imagine the slew of law suits if they tried that one now.

Julie Goodwin, the eventual winner, was a 38-year-old IT consultant. She came across as down-to-earth, honest and forthright. She loved to cook for her family – ‘her boys’ – and her dream was to start a little restaurant that served homely food that made people feel loved. She could get flustered and nervous and burst into tears; she was a supremely messy cook, and at times her lack of organisation did her in. But she cooked good, tasty, delicious food. I think some of the other contestants, particularly the men, tended to write her off as a just a mum and essentially a home cook –  but she was a sponge, soaking up experiences and learning all the time.

I probably wouldn’t have borrowed Your Time Starts Now if I we hadn’t spent those nights on the couch watching invention tests and team challenges and the contestants manically trying to reproduce, for example, a towering croquembouche. The book wasn’t quite what I was expecting. And that’s good, isn’t it? I quite like to be wrong. Perhaps I had also expected her to be the generous, happy person she appeared to be on the show. Perhaps I was hoping for a bit of tell-all about the other contestants, especially the ones I didn’t like. Instead, the story threading through Your Time Starts Now is about mental illness. Sexual abuse, and years of unrelenting perfectionism and positivity led to overwhelm, anxiety, depression, addiction. The demons that had stalked Julie for much of her life finally landed her in a suicidal state. It was only the kindness of two strangers (and a dog) who noticed a woman standing near a cliff, obviously in some kind of trouble, that saved her. They stayed with her, talking, until she was able to phone her husband. Shortly after, she was admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. It was the first of several admissions.

That she chose this way to open up about her mental health struggles is, I think, admirable. Because it’s easy to think that with success, money, a rewarding career, public recognition, a happy marriage, three healthy children, a person will automatically be happy. Hell, they just should be happy. And if not, why not?

If you’re always comparing down – there are people who are so much worse off than me, financially, health-wise, in terms of their human rights – you can feel you have no right to complain about anything at all. This leads to an inability to ask for help without feeling enormous guilt. And that’s where I found myself. Comparing down, and feeling ashamed of feeling anything other than tickety-boo 100 percent of the time.

We’re still so stupidly prejudiced about mental illness! And I find it even more admirable that she resisted writing an ‘inspirational’ upward trajectory to triumph, and detailed the ups and downs, the struggles, the tedium, the frustration, the hard work and the eternal vigilance of her recovery.

Ah! Monty Don…
There’s the lanky frame, the floppy linen shirts, the straw hats. The long and slightly melancholy face, which is transfigured at times with a gentle toothy smile and unforced enthusiasm when he loves something. There’s an often bewildered  politeness when he doesn’t. His cultivated (joke!) English voice is gentle and not too poncy as he talks us through the gardens of the world. Then there’s Longmeadow, his gorgeous garden in Hereford, and the long marriage to his lovely Sarah, and the beautiful dogs…

I bagged The Road to Le Thonolet at the Library book sale. No coloured pictures, just a few grainy black-and-whites in a little paperback. A garden journey, yes, which was wonderful. Grand chateau gardens and even grander palace gardens; artists’ gardens; potagers and monastery vegetable gardens; a cubist garden, a vertical garden, lush gardens and dry ones. Perhaps the most illuminating thing about the book is his explanation of the difference between the French and English approaches. First, there is in France an ‘inherent and learnt respect for, and adherence to, prescribed form… The essentials of rhythm, balance, geometric symmetry and harmony are still seen as the starting points for any garden design and not just because they make for beautiful gardens but also because they are in harmony with the essential ingredients of an ordered, harmonious culture and society.’ And second, the French love of intellectual concepts.

I learned a lot, but perhaps what I enjoyed even more was the personal aspect of this book, the memoir within a garden tour. It was good to get to know the very young Monty, let loose in France, living on the cheap, walking and hitching, looking, learning and experiencing. There’s a drift of images and memories, often little inconsequential things that have remained in his mind – like a perfect omelette, a swim in an icy pool ‘whose black depths suddenly seemed fathomless, the thigh-burning steepness of a walk, a bottle of Orangina (would that be Fanta?) after he slid down a snowy mountainside, the taste of  mineral water from a hillside spring. He writes:

There is an innocence in this, a sense of a pure past that is now unreclaimable and I suspect, increasingly hunts you down with the ache of loss as the years pass…

Gurus differ widely from each other in a variety of ways, but most claim the possession of special spiritual insight  based on personal revelation. Gurus promise their followers new ways of self-development, new ways to salvation. Since there are no schools for gurus, and no recognised qualifications for becoming one, they are, like politicians, originally self-selected. Anyone can become a guru if he or she has the hubris to claim special spiritual gifts. Both recent and earlier history demonstrate that many gurus are, or become, unscrupulous wielders of power who exploit their followers in a variety of ways. Yet there are also gurus whose holiness, lack of personal ambition, and integrity are beyond question. Jesus, Muhammad and the Buddha were gurus who are still venerated and whose teachings have changed the lives of millions of people.

I have a guru story.
It was more than 30 years ago. A group of friends and acquaintances was suddenly entranced by a spiritual teacher who ran immersive three-day seminars. It was like a fast-spreading virus; first this one, and then a couple more, and soon it seemed as if a whole circle of friends were raving about this person and their work. So much so that it seemed to them urgent and essential that the people they cared about should sign up as well.  So under intense pressure I went along to several introductory sessions.
My memory is that this teacher spoke well and persuasively and at length, assuring listeners that they held the secret to a better, happier, more fulfilled life. They answered questions, they spoke passionately, they shared their own personal story and foretold  growth and spiritual development for participants.
I didn’t sign up.

Was this person charismatic? Were they a guru?
They must have been, with so many men and women willing to surrender themselves, to accept unquestioningly another person’s ideas, rules and instructions – and to pay a lot of money. My friends and acquaintances went on to form small groups and workshops where they compulsively discussed their progress. No outsiders allowed. The dynamics of the work was secret. I felt excluded and found myself perplexed and unhappy; obviously, I was totally screwed up and needed to engage in this kind of drastic self-repair…but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was something in me that mistrusted that certainty. Perhaps it was my dear old Dad’s maxim, that you should never trust anyone who believes their own PR.

It was an intense, strange few months. But the fever passed, and eventually the whole thing petered out. Luckily it was all quite harmless, and might even have helped some of the believers. Reading Anthony Storr’s book brought that episode quite vividly back to me.

Storr starts with Jim Jones and David Koresh. A refresher: Jim Jones was the cult leader who ordered the 1978 suicide and/or murder – via poisoned Kool-Aid –  of over 900 people including 260 children in Jonestown, Guyana. And in 1993, at Koresh’s order, 86 people, including 22 children, were either shot or burned to death at Ranch Apocalypse, in Waco, Texas. It’s with these two monsters that Storr starts his book.

Both men inspired fanatical worship, yet they were physically cruel, imposing vicious punishments on cult members who displeased them. They were sexually exploitative of men, women and (in Koresh’s case) children. They undermined their disciples’ family bonds, imposed seemingly arbitrary rules and orders and sought to control every aspect of their follower’s lives. As Storr shows, they were paranoid, obsessional, ‘hovered on the brink of insanity for a considerable part of their lives, and…ended up as demonstrably psychotic’.

Storr’s next two guru stories are less dramatic, less tragic, but still dark.  Gurdjieff and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, both self-proclaimed gurus, had – at least in the beginning – something of value to teach to some of their adherents, but their absolute certainty that they ‘knew’ led to grossly inflated egos. They controlled and exploited their adherents, demanding what amounted to worship and unquestioning obedience to even the most ludicrous demands or instructions. Gurdjieff’s elaborate bogus cosmology and techniques for ‘awakening’ seem devised by an accomplished con man; Rajneesh became authoritarian, greedy and corrupt, and the unravelling of his organization was spectacular and bizarre.

I was surprised at the next group of gurus. They’re not confidence tricksters, not mad or cruel. Rudolf Steiner was a humble-seeming man whose ‘idiosyncratic and incredible’ theory of spiritual science is still influential today (at least in education and farming). Yet, as Storr writes, this ‘mild, gentle, good, kindly man had, at some level of his personality, an unshakeable conviction that he ‘knew’. It was this utter certainty, so characteristic of gurus, which brought him followers, and made it possible for his disciples to…embrace his teaching as a philosophy of life.’

Certainty is hugely seductive, and certainty is offered by all successful leaders: it is an important part of their charisma.

Other figures discussed in the book include Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits) and Jesus. Storr, as a distinguished psychiatrist, writes of gurus in terms of mental illnesses such a schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and personality disorders like narcissism. As for the disciples and followers? He theorizes that our human ability to ‘go on learning is adaptive, but remaining teachable into adult life demands the retention of some characteristics of childhood, amongst which is a tendency to overestimate the teacher.’  He also refers to the psychoanalytic explanation, that the person who submits to a guru is searching for a father, a figure who will protect and guide. A figure who has the answers.

I could write on and on, but it’s enough to say that this is a fascinating, absorbing book, well worth searching out, and its usefulness and interest not confined to spiritual con artists, cranks and madmen. Watching the parade of political strong-men on the daily news, I’m wishing Storr was still alive. There’s another book there.

This is wot it is like when we go back on the school trane. There are lots of new bugs and all there maters blub they hav every reason if they know what they were going to. For us old lags however it is just another stretch same as any other and no remision for good conduc. We kno what it with be like at the other end Headmaster beaming skool bus ratle off leaving trail of tuck boxes peason smugling in a box of flat 50 cigs fotherington-tomas left in the lugage rack and new bugs stand as if amazed…
Who knows what adventures in work and pla the next term will bring forth? And who cares, eh?

And now for something completely different, as the Pythons used to say. After finishing a couple of Ann Lamott books, and in the middle of reading Antony Storr’s Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus which is both fascinating and very disturbing, I needed some cheering bedtime reading.

How To Be Topp had me still reading after midnight, and laughing out loud. As it always has. I picked up this 1954 hardback first edition for $1 at the library book sale, but I’ve had my older brother’s paperback in my bookshelf since I was a kid. In the 1960’s, jokes and lines from How To Be Topp entered the Green family private language. I haven’t read it for years; I’d forgotten how familiar and how funny it is.

Nigel Molesworth, the narrator of this guide, is a boarder at St Custard’s, a minor English prep school. In his introduction, written whilst in hiding (‘all the headmasters in britain are after me with their GATS and COSHES etc’), he explains that he wants ‘to give my felow suferers the fruits of my xperience.’

As you would expect, there are chapters on How to be Topp in Latin, English, French, Spanish, Rusian, Advanced Maths, Music and Games, including the Molesworth Self-Educator and Molesworth Bogus Report. He also includes advice on How to Cope with Grown-Ups, as well as a description of the standard public school types; Cads, Oiks, Goody-Goodies, Bullies and Snekes. To finish, there’s an essential guide to Christmas with bonus Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-You Letter

The illustrations by Ronald Searle (of St Trinian’s fame) are perfect. Nostalgic bliss.

I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen. The news of late has captured the fever dream of modern life: everything exploding, burning, being shot, or crashing to the ground all around us, while growing older has provided me with a measure of perspective and equilibrium, and a lovely long-term romance. Towns and cities, ice fields, democracy, people – all disappear, while we rejoice and thrive in the spring and the sweetness of old friendships. Families are tricky. There is so much going on that flattens us, that is huge, scary or simply appalling. We’re doomed, stunned, exhausted, and overcaffeinated.
And yet, outside my window, yellow roses bloom, and little kids horse around, making a joyous racket.

Last time we visited Beechworth, we went to the honey shop and browsed the jars of single varietal honey. I chose Snow Gum (delicious; I’d had it before), and as an experiment, Buckwheat, which sounded kind of toasty and wholesome.
I asked the woman at the counter what it tasted like. A slight hesitation.
‘Great with blue cheese,’ she said, and then another woman chimed in with,
‘Divisive.’ When we got home and tried it, it tasted very  much like horse manure smells. Which brings me around neatly to Ann Lamott and Almost Everything.

I’m not suggesting this book is horseshit. Just divisive. I know for a certainty that some of my friends and family would find her mixture of memoir, platitudes, parables, anecdotes and God-and-Jesus intolerably middle-brow. Or simply intolerable.

So, yes, there is God, and Jesus in both of these books, but it’s pretty restrained. Not fundamentalist, not dogmatic, preachy or churchy. Not even especially Christian. You could substitute Buddha for much of what she’s saying, and it wouldn’t change the essential meaning. We all need to give and receive kindness and forgiveness. A little humility goes a long way. Listening is good, as is not  leaping quickly to judge others.
You can find this stuff served up on the spirituality and/or self-help shelves of bookshops everywhere, but there are two things that make Lamott different. One is the humour – she’s smart, funny, snarky and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny – and the other is the ruthless self-exposure, also known as ‘honesty’.

Now…honesty. Along with its twin, ‘authenticity’, it’s a much used and abused term. Is the real Ann Lamott on the page? How could I know? But her willingness to roll over and expose her ugly, broken, petty, vain, despairing, craving and pitiful underside in her books seems pretty honest to me. At her lowest, she was famous, celebrated, successful, the author of the beloved writing classic Bird by Bird, broke, cripplingly anxious,  drunk every day and had developed an eating disorder. Not pretty. But, she says, ‘Almost every facet of my meager maturation and spiritual understanding has sprung from hurt, loss and disaster’. She got sober and found faith, in tandem.

Lamott turned 70 last year, and published her 20th book. I’ve read maybe 5 or 6 of them, and when I try to think about them, they all blend together. I wonder if her lifetime ‘theme and variations’ – as in a piece of music –  is simply ‘living with paradox’. You know – we’re ugly and beautiful; life is meaningless and meaningful; other people are both intolerable and wonderful. I can write, right this minute, echoing Lamott, that the news is dire with Neo-Nazis, cop-killing pseudo-legal nutjobs, children and babies starving in Gaza. I’ve hurt my neck, one of our friends is dying of cancer  – actually, we’re all going to die. And outside my window, the japonica is in flower and little birds are building nests.

Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared and yet designed for joy.

Numbers are my friends, and they are always around me. Each one is unique and has its own personality. The number 11 is friendly and 5 is loud, whereas 4 is both shy and quiet – it’s my favourite number, perhaps because it reminds me of myself. Some are big – 23, 667, 1, 179 – while others are small: 6, 13, 581. Some are beautiful, like 333 and some are ugly, like 289. To me, every number is special.

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant, which means very, very, very clever. He can calculate, memorize and manipulate numbers in utterly amazing ways, and because he has synesthesia –  which he describes as a ‘rare neurological mixing of the senses’ –  neurological ‘crossed wires’ – he experiences them as colours, shapes, textures, contours, motions and moods. For instance, 1 is ‘a brilliant and bright white, like someone shining a flashlight into my eyes’. 37 is like porridge. 89 is falling snow.

Books on autism and neurodivergence are ‘in’ at present, and since imprints don’t publish what they can’t sell, this indicates an appetite among readers for updated information and more first-person accounts which talk of difference rather than disability. I had wanted to read Tammet’s Nine Minds, which came out last year to good reviews, but the library hasn’t got it (yet?). But I was surprised to find an earlier book, Born on a Blue Day, in the catalogue. It was published in 2006 when he was 27, and went on to become a best-seller and prize-winner. When I looked him up on the net, I discovered that he’s famous, subject of a couple of documentaries, a TED talker and has written lots of other books. There’s so much I don’t know about…well, everything!

Born on a Blue Day is written in clear and straightforward prose, very readable except when he gets onto numbers. I’m not like Tammet; numbers are not my friends. Instead, they’re old enemies. They inflicted horrible mental strain and confusion and despair in school. Even now, just looking at a Sudoku makes my brain scramble – but when the numbers are attached to something tangible, like a bank balance or tax or a budget, I can happily sit down with a calculator.

Tammet describes his childhood and adolescence as a time of not fitting in, out of step with his peers, struggling and at times suffering. One of the most poignant and moving episodes was Daniel’s first experience of falling in love. He had figured out that he was gay – he became attracted to another young man – he tried to ‘court’ him by doing his schoolwork for him – and finally wrote him a letter telling him how he felt. I think my heart rate must have gone sky-high at this point, because I was expecting a hideous exposure and subsequent outing/humiliation/ostracism/bullying…but the young man wrote back sensitively, telling Daniel that he couldn’t be the person he wanted him to be. So he was let down gently, thank goodness.

Tammet comes across as likeable and genuine; a good, kind man who happens to be born with a profoundly different brain to most of us. He’s used his superpowers for good – making himself available to scientists as a subject, communicating about autism in his books, even at one point reciting the number pi to the 22,514th digit to raise money for an epilepsy charity. It was heartwarming to discover that he was, at the time of writing Born on a Blue Day, in a long-term relationship and had found in Christian faith a sustaining force in his life.

She…quite liked to talk to her mother, but somehow her mother was always about to go out, or into another room, and by the time Maria had got to the point of the conversation, she had gone. Her father when she talked to him would listen with distant kindness, but not as though what she said was of any great importance. Which, of course, it might not be. Except, she thought, to me. And so, for real conversations, Maria considered, things were infinitely preferable. Animals, frequently. Trees and plants, from time to time. What they said was consoling, and sometimes it was uncomfortable, but at least you were having a conversation.

During one of my ill-advised purges, I got rid of all my Penelope Lively children’s books. Now, I am gradually gathering them again. I found A Stitch in Time at the library book sale, and it is one that I never had in the first place, so what a win!

Maria, the 11-year-old heroine, is a quiet and imaginative girl, small for her age, hesitant and introverted. As the book begins, she is arriving at a holiday cottage in Lyme with her parents. They are quiet people, too – though not imaginative enough to relate to their daughter. They don’t seem to know what to do with a child, so Maria bottles up her spark and intelligence, and holds long conversations with inanimate objects. She wanders about in the house and garden, poking around, talking to the resident cat (a critical, rather ill-natured creature), discovering a fossil collection and an irrestistible-to-climb ilex tree with a view into the hotel next door…

So, all set for the kind of book I love. It’s beautifully written, very descriptive and in comparison to current kid’s lit, slow. The old house is full of its original furniture, books, objects and family memorabilia. The elderly landlady, Mrs Shand, lives just over the road. There’s a possible tragic mystery involving a young girl, one of Mrs Shand’s aunts, who sewed a sampler but didn’t finish it. And the sounds of an invisible swing and barking dog… Lively’s familiar themes are time, memory and the sense that past events can leave an imprint on the places where they happened.

But as well, there is present-day growth and change for Maria. A large family – aunts and uncles and cousins – is staying in the hotel, and gradually Maria is drawn to the liveliness of the children. She makes friends with 11-year-old Martin. He’s very different to her – outgoing and confident, expert at wrangling younger children and managing adults. But like her, he has serious thoughts and an inquiring mind. They bond over a shared fascination with fossils, and soon Maria finds herself joining Martin in noisy, shambolic family outings. Maria’s self-contained, reserved parents are taken aback by her new friends – I found the section where they are nudged into taking the kids for a rainy day in their cottage quietly hilarious.

The ‘mystery’ is not exactly a ghost story – more a fleeting suggestion of the past leaking into the present – and not quite the tragedy that Maria had imagined. The subtle time-slips are beautifully realised; the ending is gentle. Penelope Lively won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award in 1976 for A Stitch in Time.

While twelve readings of Pride and Prejudice give you twelve periods of pleasure repeated, as many readings of Emma give you that pleasure, not repeated only, but squared and squared again with each perusal, till at every fresh reading you feel anew that you never understood anything like the widening sum of its delights.
Reginald Farrer

I found the sentence above in an essay by Lionel Trilling, included in A Truth Universally Acknowledged edited by Susannah Carson, which I’d had on my shelf for years, and forgotten about until my recent Jane Austen binge. And I thought, yes! Though in my latest Japanese reading of P&P, I found more detail, more complexity, it was essentially the same book, only more so. But Emma seemed like a different novel altogether.

So I’ve also been reading books like Susannah Carson’s, and typing things like ‘Jane Austen’s Moral Vision’ into a search engine. Discovering what critics and academics and writers have to say – even watching filmed lectures! –  is so very interesting and enlightening.

I’m no critic, however, so I’ll just note the things that struck me this time around.

1. Emma is stuck with Mr Woodhouse.
Poor Emma! Gentle and sweet-natured he may be, but Mr Woodhouse is also selfish, demanding and irrational. It’s the tyranny of the weak. I had thought he was a comic figure, but no. He’s a man whose concerns have narrowed to fire-screens and gruel, and Emma, as his carer, has to baby him, placate him, coddle and coax and calm him. Though to all intents and purposes she is the self-satisfied mistress of Hartfield, she is trapped. No wonder she is so sad when her governess, Miss Taylor, marries. No wonder she pounces in Harriet Smith! Just to have a third person there with her, and not be always left alone with him.

2. Highbury is an ecosystem.
And how complex it is. Everybody, all together, no matter what their place is in the class system, makes it tick. The characters are constantly passing along news, gossip, favours, kindnesses, patronage, advice, opinions. The action ebbs and flows around the streets of the village to the vicarage, the school, Ford’s haberdashery, the Crown Inn, Donwell Abbey, Randalls, Hartfield and the Cole’s nouveau riche establishment.

3. Society is in transition
Emma’s snobbishness is challenged and overcome in some instances, and justified in others. Sometimes she works it out for herself; the social climbing of kind, neighbourly Mr Coles is acceptable, but that of pretentious Mrs Elton is not. But Mr Knightley has to help her to understand that the prosperous, sensible Martin family are worthy of her attention, too.

4. There are lessons on how to be good that are relevant today.
Be kind. Be accepting. Don’t interfere, or make mischief, or lie and deceive. People are not playthings.
And as far as you possibly can, know yourself.

“O God! that I had never seen her!”
The rest of the day, the following night, were hardly enough for her thoughts. She was bewildered by all that had rushed on her within the last few hours. Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be a matter of humiliation to her. How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under! The blunders, the blindness of her own head, and heart! She sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery – in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly; that she had been imposed on by others to a most mortifying degree; that she had been imposing upon herself in a degree yet more mortifying; that she was wretched, and should probably find this day but the beginning of wretchedness.
To understand, thoroughly understand her own heart, was the first endeavour.