Susan Green

Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured , optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognise that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.

From the introduction to How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell.

My phone is on silent most of the time. I leave it in the house when I’m gardening. It’s off when I’m writing. I use only a few apps. I’m not on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. I know I annoy my friends by not being connected – and I have compromised by using Facebook Messenger – but after a brief flirtation I realised social media is addictive. And it’s not what I want to do with my time.

So in a way, Jenny Odell in How To Do Nothing is preaching to a convert. However I enjoyed having my distaste for social media and 24/7 “connectedness” clarified and explained. And it’s as simple as this: I hate knowing that my attention is being manipulated, gamed, algorithmed, stolen, bought and sold by big tech companies for money. And I try, wherever practical, to refuse to let them do it.

But this isn’t a rant, and though it’s dense, it isn’t dry reading. Odell is great company as she explores the ways individuals and communities have tried to refuse to participate in their own exploitation. She talks about the “dropping out” hippie culture of the 1960s and ’70s, sit-ins and protests and strikes, individual and collective action, parks and libraries and other kinds of non-productive public spaces. She explores hiking and bird-watching and learning about and simply being in your local environment. And above all, she talks about paying attention.

Odell’s antidote is looking and really seeing the place where you are. Being there with your mind, body and all your senses. Learning about your local environment – the geography and geology, the history, the flora and fauna. The birds – she’s big on birds. She talks about paying attention, and then deepening that attention.
Which I think equates to love, doesn’t it?

The natural world is not, to me, a fabric of stuff that gleams with revelation of a singular creator god. Those moments in nature that provoke in me a sense of the divine are those in which my attention is unaccountably snagged on something small and transitory…things whose fugitive instances give me an overwhelming sense of how unlikely it is that in the days of my brief life I should be in the right place at the right time and possess sufficient quality of attention to see them at all…

I have just finished Vesper Flights, and as with the best writing, how I see the world has changed, just a little. Helen McDonald writes with such beautiful clarity, and it feels as if she’s made sense of and put into words some of my own half-realised thoughts and feelings about my encounters with the natural world. Even though she is a British writer and so the creatures she describes are not ours, it seems the intensity and fascination of our human encounters with nature are the same the world over. Though obviously I would rather encounter a kangaroo than a grizzly bear…

I suppose you could say that birds are McDonald’s major subject (though here she does touch on pigs, deer, hares, squirrels and university students) –  but that’s putting her into too small a box. Spirituality; grief and loss; science and research and the climate emergency; philosophy, history and literature – all these and more are interwoven with her own complex personal history in this series of essays. Above all, she illuminates what she calls ‘the numinous ordinary’, those moments that ‘open up a giddying glimpse into the inhuman systems of the world that operate on scales too small and too large and too complex for us to apprehend’.

Part of the numinousness in these encounters with nature is how unpredictable they are. There is no point in searching for them. In my experience if you go out hoping for revelation you will merely get rained upon.

And oddly enough, the day after I finished Vesper Flights, we had a bird encounter of our own. I don’t know that I would call it numinous, but it was intense. A bronzewing flew straight at our window. It’s happened before. The last time, the bird died and the replacement glass cost nearly $700. This time, there was a mighty bang, but no smash. When we ran into the room, we saw a smear of oily brown on the glass and a motionless bird lying on the path below. We watched anxiously. Was it dead? Was it terribly injured? Did it have a broken wing, and would one of us have to go down and wring its neck so the neighbourhood cats didn’t get at it? Little by little it began to move. Eventually it stood up. It was just stunned. I felt like cheering.
We tried to imagine what the bird must be thinking, or feeling. Do bronzewings think? Why do they keep doing this? Why can’t they see it’s a living room, not a flight path? What does it think happened to it? Will it remember, and stay away?
But not being inside a bird brain, we can never know.

The title, Vesper Flights, refers to swifts:

On warm summer evenings swifts that aren’t sitting on eggs or tending their chicks fly low and fast, screaming in speeding packs around rooftops and spires. Later, they gather higher in the sky, their calls now so attenuated by air and distance that to the ear they corrode into something that seems less than sound, to suspicions of dust and glass. And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vespers flights, or vesper flights, after the Latin vesper for evening. Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and most solemn of the day, and I have always thought ‘vesper flights’ the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue.

Leaving Brian Talbot to his lunch in the common room, Leith loped across the spongy upward ground into which the weightless house seemed, that day, to be scarcely set. When he came in shrugging the storm from his shoulders like any Westerner and slapping his cap against his leg, his coat was at once removed by light hands: a gesture seeming to relieve coat as much as owner. But the house itself would not enclose him or identify. Translucent structures are not welcoming in cold rain.
The day had been unfortunate, all omens adverse; and the man himself at odds with the eagerness that quickened his step.
It was now, however, that his luck – if that’s what is was – turned.

Last week, my new book group had its first proper meeting. Our book was The Great Fire (2003) by Shirley Hazzard.
Very briefly: 32-year-old Aldred Leith, a decorated English war hero, is in Japan to report on the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Staying with a repellent Australian couple, he befriends their two children. Benedict is dying of a rare disease and his younger sister Helen has become his comforter and carer. Aldred falls in love with Helen – they are separated by her parents and his work – they reunite in the end. There are many other minor characters, backstory showing Aldred’s troubled relationship with his father, his love affair with the mother of a dead friend and his failed marriage. A sub-plot features Peter Exley, Aldred’s Australian friend, trying to investigate war crimes and negotiate post-war life in Hong Kong.

I’d read Hazzard’s 1980 The Transit of Venus when I was a young woman and remembered enjoying it, so I thought this novel would be a safe bet.

Well, no, not really. I didn’t like it. I finished it because I felt I had to. And it turned out that some members felt the same. A couple gave up on it. Only two felt they’d read it with genuine pleasure, and interestingly they were ex-English teachers who were armed with all sorts of analytical skills that I lack. Both of these members actually read it twice. That’s dedication!

So, do I mark it down as a book group fail?

Not at all. I’d come prepared with all sorts of generic book group discussion questions, but the session just ran itself. The book elicited so much discussion, so many differing opinions and from some of the readers, such strong feelings that I’d have to count it as a success. One reader loved all the detail and description; another felt it dragged the story down. One person found the writing style brilliant; another kept having to find words in the dictionary. Two readers just hated it! As for me, I could admire much of the writing and the skill with which Hazzard manipulated the intertwined strands, but the effect was detached, even cold. And a bit too Henry James at times. One of the group described Hazzard as ‘a writer’s writer’, and I did think that if perhaps I read more carefully, my appreciation would grow. And at some future date, I will give The Transit of Venus a whirl.

We all agreed, however, that the central love story between 32-year-old English officer Aldred Leith and the 17-year-old innocent Helen Driscoll was problematic. Poor Helen, sensitive, intelligent and so totally innocent. She talked like a book and seemed like someone for Aldred to project his dreams onto rather than a real person. Aldred himself was a wooden hero; the flawed Peter Exley was much more interesting.

And times have changed. Aldred was an experienced man in his 30s; Helen had only just turned 17. The scenes where they skulked around in the gardens of her parents house, lying on his coat fondling and caressing gave me the creeps. Ugh.

I’m looking forward to our next book group meeting. It will be much less interesting if we all agree!

A rhetorical question. No, of course not. I have plenty, including quite a few I haven’t started yet. But I went to the legendary (in Castlemaine they are!) Friends of Castlemaine Library book sale. Not only went to it – I am on the committee so I was there the afternoon before to set up and to assist with sales on the big day.
So I got to inspect thousands of books before the hordes of frenzied bibliophile locals even set eyes on them.
And almost against my will ended up taking a few home with me. Even after I’d done a big cull and donated around 50 unwanted books to the sale…

Did I need more books? Emphatically, no. But I am weak-willed. And they were cheap! Only $1 for fiction, $2 for non-fiction and a few special volumes a bit dearer.
Plus, I got to choose some for free as a gift for volunteering. Surely this makes it OK.

I had proper reasons for my choices, too.

I’d watched the SBS documentary on the Cambridge spies only a few days earlier, so A Spy Among Friends leapt out at me. I have had (past tense, hopefully) some long and intense bouts of insomnia, and the topic interests me. English writer Diana Athill (1917-2019) had a long and distinguished career in publishing – she worked with Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul among others – before she became an award-winning writer herself, with a series of memoirs. This is the last, so perhaps not the best place to start, but I never mind  knowing the end of a story. It will be a good introduction. And I remember meaning to read The Life of I when it first came out, and never did.

I’ve already skimmed through the book on novel writing. It is, as Lynne Truss says on the cover, extremely funny. Laugh-out-loud and tears-running-down-my-face funny. The authors parody bad prose with excruciating accuracy. I’ve read most of Penelope Lively’s novels for adults and children; I admire her writing and look forward to this memoir. Storr’s Solitude is something I re-read every few years, yet I’ve never read anything else by him. And now I can. And Out of the Woods is nature, walking and thinking. Right up my alley.

Oh, and so are the 35 copies of a beautifully produced English magazine called Hortus, which should keep me in armchair gardening all winter. Aren’t the covers lovely? Worth the 20c per copy they cost me.
This catalogue of utter gorgeousness was $4! How could I resist?

This is why I have book culls. Because I really do need more books.

I discovered the pleasure of wandering through the garden with a free-floating attention, registering how the plants were changing, growing, ailing, fruiting. Gradually I thought about mundane tasks such as weeding, hoeing, and watering changed; I came to see that it is important not so much to get them done, but to let oneself be fully involved in the doing of them.

What a gem this book is.  A wise and gentle guide, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith walks the reader through the ways in which a garden – being in it, working in it, looking at it, even just thinking about it – can bring healing and solace. Whether people are struggling with trauma, addiction, incarceration, ill health and hospitalisation,  stress, mental illness or grief, there are multiple reasons why a garden can be therapy, medicine and a life-enhancing and life-affirming joy.

Stuart-Smith combines research in neuroscience and psychology, personal anecdotes and stories, literature, history and anthropology with lyrical description to prove her point. Garden schemes in prisons, institutions, hospitals and with veterans, refugees, the aged and at-risk young people came as no surprise, but I had no idea that soldiers, chaplains, doctors and nurses on both sides on the Western Front in WWI created ‘dugout gardens’.

They grew vegetables – enough to make some areas self-sufficient in fresh produce. But they also grew flowers. Families sent seeds; one British officer sowed nasturtiums, marigolds, poppies and stocks under cover of darkness.

What feels homely, what gives hope, what strikes the eye as beautiful, are all dependent on the surroundings in which we find ourselves. Cultivating the earth in the context of a battlefield throws the power of the garden into sharp relief and when so much is beyond repair, to be able to change something for the better is extremely important.

I don’t need convincing. The garden is my ‘happy place’. We don’t live in a battlefield, but at times it feels like it. The constant barrage of bad news and the low-level sadness and anxiety it engenders needs some kind of balance. For me it’s found in planting, pottering, weeding; in planning and dreaming; in standing still to look at new growth or emerging blooms or the birds enticed to the shrubs and trees by berries, fruit or nectar. The seasonal cycles – even the pesky weed oxalis that blankets everything in winter – remind me that ‘this too shall pass’. If I could live in the garden, I wouldn’t have to take medication for high blood pressure! And if I feel that my garden helps me to escape from reality, it also brings me back.

In this era of virtual worlds and fake facts, the garden brings us back to reality. Not the kind of reality that is known and predictable, for the garden always surprises us and in it we can experience a different kind of knowing – one that is sensory and  physical, and stimulates the emotional, spiritual and cognitive  aspects of our being. Gardening is, in this sense, simultaneously ancient and modern. Ancient because of the evolutionary fit between brain and nature, and also ancient as a way of life between foraging and farming, that expresses our deeply inscribed need to attach to place. Modern, because the garden is intrinsically forward looking and the gardener is always aiming for a better future.

I like a bit of popular science, and find recent books dealing with the emerging and amazing research on the brain are especially fascinating. This one, by science journalist Caroline Williams, has a practical element too, which makes it fascinating and useful.

Her basic point it that the relationship between brain and body is not best likened to a super-computer running a machine. It’s deeper, more complex and more intertwined. In fact, she says that a better analogy is the brain as chat room, where all sorts of different messages from all over our bodies – internal organs, skin, muscles, joints and the rest –  are humming and buzzing and pinging all the time. And that’s the way it’s meant to be, because as human animals, hunting and gathering in forest or savannah, we evolved from creatures for whom movement was survival.

The brain evolved not for us to think, but to allow us to move – away from danger and towards rewards. Everything else, from our senses to our memories, emotions and ability to plan ahead, was bolted on later to make these movements better informed. Moving is at the heart of the way we think and feel. If we stay still, our cognitive and emotional abilities become seriously compromised.

What happens if we stop moving? I guess we all know – we can put on weight, lose fitness, damage our cardiac and respiratory health, possibly become anxious or depressed or even lower our IQ.
Williams has talked with scientists and researchers all over the world to come up with a lucid and illuminating explanation of why we need not just to move, but to incorporate different kinds of movement into our lives for our mental, emotional and physical well-being.
Walking, developing muscular strength, dancing, strengthening our cores, stretching, paying attention to breathing and finally, resting are all covered in short and readable chapters with a little action plan at the end. She stresses that you don’t need to go to the gym. All of these movement types are possible within our daily lives without special equipment or the ‘weekend warrior’ mindset.

And Williams solved a little puzzle of mine. I am (or used to be) extremely flexible; as a kid I was what we called ‘double jointed’, and could do all sorts of contortions and body tricks. I used to think that being flexible is good, but I now know that it’s actually a case of lax ligaments.
And lax ligaments don’t ‘talk’ as well or as quickly to the joints, bones, muscles and tendons. Which seems to explain why I am a tad clumsy – the toll on our glassware will attest to that – and why I am wearing out my hands and wrists. I exert more pressure than I need to when I use my hands or when I walk. That’s why I have deformed the nib of my fountain pen and wear out my shoes so fast. And why I need to go to a hand surgeon to see if anything can be done about my wear and tear and damage.

Most of us know we need to move, or move more and I found Move! a motivating and encouraging ‘movement manifesto’.

I borrowed A Dream in the House from the Bendigo Library one sweltering summer in the early 1980s.  I thought it was very weird. Possibly the weirdest children’s book I’d ever read.
Or was it just the heat, and fever dreams?
Whatever it was, its strangeness and unique poetic intensity haunted me (like another book – Moon Eyes –  by the same author) and after searching for  years, I finally managed to get hold of a copy a month ago.

It begins:
Here is a large green garden, and you are in it.

Poole describes the trees and flowerbeds and the river nearby, and the house, two-hundred and fifty years old, “solid, comfortable and matter-of-fact”.

But look again at the house, now that the sun has set and only gilds the rims of the chimney pots and the highest copper beech trees. Aren’t the straight windows staring very like eyes? And the straggle of wistaria over the porch gives the place an untidy, almost hairy look. Now, would you dare to go up to that green front door and pull the old-fashioned bell? And if you did, would anybody answer it? And if they did, who?
You are standing on the lawn in front of the neat West Country residence called Colt Lunges. What will happen next?

I will tell  you – not the ghost story or supernatural mystery you might expect (think the Green Knowe books, or Tom’s Midnight Garden) from this fairly standard beginning.

Our thirteen-year-old heroine, Jane, arrives at Colt Lunges with her parents. Jane is a twin, but her sister Ann was lost in a storm at sea when she was a baby.  She explores the house and garden, makes a friend of the motherly housekeeper, avoids her overwrought mother, meets the vicar and his daughter, finds an old diary, learns a little of local and family history. Her ancestor, a judge, had a group of teenagers transported to Australia for stealing the church treasure. The boys were shipwrecked, and drowned. And then his daughter, another Ann, was kidnapped and never seen again.

Dream-like events (some magical, some terrifying) multiply. Plants sing and dance. The river tries to drown her. A ghost gardener, Tom, who speaks in rhyme, joins her in dreams. They search for Ann. For the two Anns; Ann, who disappeared over a century ago, and Jane’s drowned twin.
Tom and Jane find themselves on an island located through a crack in the wall, hidden behind a turtle shell, in the attic. On the beach, Jane is menaced by an army of crabs – “as big as dinner plates, they crouched like armoured spiders among the rocks, blue-black, bow-legged and malevolent”. Up on the land, plants and flowers seethe with vicious insects and snakes. Guided by Tom, she crawls through tunnels and caves, a stifling slimy maze under the sea, until she finds herself in a huge cavern, “a chapel shaped cavern, whose walls were a mosaic of rubies and pearls”.

It was indescribably splendid, immeasurably rich, and should have been infinitely beautiful but it was not. The rubies that studded the walls and hung from the ceiling glowered crimson, as if they would burn at a touch, and the pearls that should have been as pure as lilies were cold and hard and it was from them that the foul smell came.

It gets more bizarre. They find Ann, mute and cold as a statue, guarded by a mythical, magical serpent.

In its eyes was the solution to all mysteries: if you looked into them you understood the  language of birds and animals, you saw into the depths of the sea, you heard what was spoken under the earth and the music of stars. Those eyes stared at Jane and willed her to stare back into them and lose herself in their magic.

After a battle to the death (both Tom and the serpent) the girls struggle back through the caves and tunnels into the attic, and down into the house.
Where their parents seem to placidly accept Ann’s reappearance. And life goes on at Colt Lunges…
Jane has gained Ann, but lost something of herself. Is it her imagination, or in fact the gift of seeing the unseen?

It is odd, Jane thought, that I had to sacrifice for Ann that bit of myself that I valued the most, and yet instead of holding it against her I love her the more for it. It has made her even more precious. Perhaps that part of me went with Tom. That part of me with wings that could fly through time, and the eyes that saw roses dancing, is waiting now with him. I must always remember that the magic has not gone out of the world, just because it has gone out of me…

Yes, I was right. It wasn’t the heat, all those years ago: A Dream in the House is a seriously weird book. Unsettling, intense. Magical, and macabre. Nightmarish. I can’t imagine it getting published today. I can’t actually imagine the child who would really enjoy it, either. But I may be underestimating children.

Book groups. I’ve been in a couple, and they’re fun. Held after dinner, with wine (always with wine!) and something (from basic cheese-and-biscuits to lavish platters) to nibble. There is always a lot of talk, and only some of it about books. But a growing dislike of going out at night and a disinclination to drive out into the back-blocks (my night sight is awful, and there are always kangaroos leaping out in front of the car) has seen me take a break from my evening group this year.
At a recent meeting, the library manager told the Friends of the Library members that the staff are often asked about whether the library could run a book group. Could the Friends help?

Was she looking straight at me? Maybe, maybe not, but I put my hand up and this week we’ve just had our first meeting. A do-able time of 5 till 6, no wine but tea/coffee and TimTams on hand. A lovely bunch of people, and even a waiting list. Our local library system has over 300 sets of 10; I’ve asked the members to select something from the list but in the meantime I chose, more or less at random, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. I had a memory of enjoying The Transit of Venus in my twenties. I kind of assumed this was about the Great Fire of London. One of the book group members put me right.
“The Great Fire,” he said, “is the atomic bomb. It’s about World War II.”

Which seemed like a fitting coincidence, because the book I’ve just finished was also about the war. The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food is a fascinating popular history that provides an unfamiliar slant on the causes and conduct of the wars in Europe and the Pacific. Cycling through the different phases of the war, Lizzie Collingham first examines the situations in 1930s Germany and Japan. In both countries, the vulnerability of their own food supplies and reliance on imports hampered their potential as world powers.
The solution? Create an Empire. Germany and Japan both looked enviously at Britain, with its colonies and dominions supplying the nation’s needs for food and raw materials and acting as a market for British manufactures. How did they go about empire building? Invading neighbouring countries, for a start. Germany saw Eastern Europe as a massive farm and the Soviet inhabitants expendable. Japan had a similar plan when it invaded Manchuria.

From this beginning, Collingham takes in the logistics of supply and distribution, agricultural and nutritional science, politics and military strategy, and national and class differences. It is at times difficult reading. Over 20 million people starved to death or died of the diseases of malnutrition in WWII. Sometimes the deaths were incidental to the prosecution of the war; sometimes they were part of a deliberate policy of withholding sustenance. The Nazis “Hunger Plan” was basically the intention to starve whole populations to death by requisitioning all supplies. When, later in the war, this plan proved too slow (the Soviets, used to food shortages, were particularly resilient) the murder of so-called “useless eaters” was stepped up in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Both Germany and Japan exported hunger, but the Japanese government and military did not spare their own people. Soldiers and citizens alike were expendable; fighting spirit and national pride was supposed to sustain them. I was astonished to read that Japanese fighting men had to fend for themselves. Initially when there were still supplies, they cooked their own meals. Later, malnourished soldiers foraged for whatever they could find, existing on boiled grass and leaves, frogs, snakes and insects and eventually resorting to cannibalism in some cases.

The Allies don’t come out of this book as angels, either. Churchill attributed the millions of deaths from the 1943 famine in Bengal to “too many people” rather than bad policy on the part of the British. His refusal to lift the blockade resulted in the deaths of thousands of Greeks. And the American insistence on a virtually non-negotiable content of around 4,000 calories per day for its soldiers led to the situation of Allied civilians and military on an austere diet while the GIs in their midst were gorging.

Finally, Collingham’s look at global farming and agricultural networks through the lens of WWII history makes for sobering reflections about the future of food in the ever-warming climate of the 21st century…

I promised myself to read more new books this year (new to me, I mean), and so I have been trawling through the library catalogue and earmarking any titles that take my fancy. I have 21 books on reserve at present! My fancies seem to coincide with lots of other borrowers, so that there’ll be a week or two with no books and then three or four come in all at once. Feast or famine.

It was famine last week. Since we were heading off to the Grampians/Gariwerd for a holiday, I needed something riveting to read in case it rained all the time. So I took with me a couple of James Lees-Milne’s wartime diaries,  Ancestral Voices (1942-3) and Prophesying Peace. (1944-5). James Lees-Milne? Who? He’s sometimes called ‘the man who saved England’. But we’re talking architecture, not military strategy – he was employed from 1942 to 1947 to inspect and assess historic buildings offered to the National Trust.
At that time, the National Trust was mainly concerned with preserving notable landscapes; it owned 75,000 acres but had less than ten historic houses open to the public. These houses weren’t seen as a vital part of the country’s heritage; consequently if the owners didn’t have the funds for upkeep, they were demolished or left to decay. Requisitioned for wartime use, some of them were being severely damaged. Into the breach leaped a small, amateurish but committed band of National Trust employees. Lees-Milne had an insatiable passion for architecture and the old and often dilapidated great country houses of England. It sounds as if, with his love and enthusiasm and tact, he often charmed the owners (who were often old and dilapidated, too) into passing their precious family seats into the care of the Trust. But not always.

I had a horrible day with Colonel Pemberton at Pyrland Hall near Taunton. He is a fiendish old imbecile with a grotesque white moustache. When I first saw him he was pirouetting on his toes in the road. He has an inordinate opinion of himself and his own judgement…  Having hated me like poison he was nevertheless furious when I left at 4pm. I conclude he has to have a victim on whom to vent his spleen.

The last time I read these diaries must have been pre-Internet. With a a few clicks now I can bring up an image and see for myself what Lees-Milne is talking about. This is Kelmscott, the home of Arts and Crafts artist and designer William Morris.

The old, grey stone, pointed gables are first seen through the trees. The house is surrounded by a dovecote and farm buildings which are still used by a farmer. The romantic group must look exactly as it did when William Morris found it lying in the low water meadows, quiet and dreaming… The garden is divine, crammed with flowers wild and tangled, an enchanted orchard garden for there are fruit trees and a mulberry planted by Morris. All the flowers are as Pre-Raphaelite as the house, being rosemary, orange-smelling lilies,, lemon-smelling verbena. The windows outside have small pediments over them. Inside are Charles II chimneypieces, countrified by rude Renaissance scrolls at the base of the jambs.

Pediments? Jambs? Rude scrolls? Now it’s easy to find out what they are.
The diaries aren’t just about driving in unreliable cars to visit eccentric aristocrats in remote mansions.  These first volumes take in the worst days of the Blitz and he often found himself cleaning up bomb damage, watching for fires or sitting all night in a shelter. In one entry, he helped a crowd of people to make a chain of hands in order to rescue rare books from a bombed-out library. And he always found time to socialise. He was friends with all sorts of artists, writers, historians and cultured celebrities –  with literati like Nancy Mitford, Vita Sackville-West and Ivy Compton-Burnett – and a crew of glittering but now-forgotten socialites such as Emerald Cunard and Daisy Fellowes. They all seemed to manage to wine and dine and spout witticisms amongst the death and destruction.

These diaries wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste – he’s a snob, and his comments about ‘the lower orders’ are a bit hard to take – especially since I would have been one of them! But for all that, Lees-Milne’s mixture of people and places, historical and architectural knowledge, description, philosophy, religion, anecdotes, gossip, opinions, complaints, doubts and fears and failings is addictive reading. He was candid about his personal life and curious about other people’s. Often malicious or waspish, but at times surprisingly compassionate. In one entry, he’s conscience-stricken that he unintentionally “cut” a working-class fire-watching colleague, and berates himself for hurting the man’s feelings. All in all, a good companion to take on a holiday.

Ten years ago, when I met my friends, we talked about our teenage children and our ageing parents. Now we talk about our own health. Most of us have something to whinge about and it seems we all have our pet theories. It’s the gut or the adrenals or the immune system. Maybe hormones. Diet –  take your pick from sugar, dairy, wheat, gluten, animal protein. Pesticides. Pollution. Plastics.

As for me, I suppose there could be an element of all these things, but I’ve always been puzzled by the way some people get sick and others don’t. There are our genes, of course, but what about attitudes, personalities, temperaments? How we learn, think and feel. Our childhood experiences. They make us who we are, and influence how we respond to life’s challenges. In his 2003 book, When the Body Says No, Dr Gabor Mate explored the body/mind connection and the role of our emotional lives in the development of a range of diseases such as cancer, arthritis, diabetes and auto-immune diseases. In The Myth of Normal (written with his son Daniel Mate and published last year), Gabor Mate goes further and sets his sights on the tsunami of chronic disease and mental illness engulfing the Western (and Westernised) world. The subtitle is Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. It’s so obvious, it’s scary; the way we live now is making human flourishing increasingly difficult. Addictions and mental illnesses are the ways in which we adapt to our crazy culture; diseases and disorders are the ways our bodies say “no” to the perpetual cycle of stress, hurry and worry. The authors emphasise that although the suffering is personal, the causes are culture-wide. At 500 pages, it’s a bit of an epic, but wide-ranging, ambitious and illuminating.