Category: Peak District

Fictional teenagers going missing in the Peak District: Reservoir 13 & Whistle in the Dark

3/5/2018

Oh dear! As a Ranger in the Peak District, albeit only as a volunteer on alternate Sundays, I carry a sense of responsibility for the safety of visitors to the National Park. So it’s rather disconcerting to read about two teenage girls, on holiday from London, going missing there in a matter of weeks. Fortunately, both were characters in novels, and both providing the foundation for an engrossing story about the repercussions: the first for the residents of a fictional Derbyshire village; the second for the family of the girl who is found after four agonising days.

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On the Edges

28/1/2018

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The Peak District National Park comprises the limestone territory of the White Peak bracketed to the north and west by the gritstone based Dark Peak. Towards the south of the Dark Peak area, moorland gives way to rocky escarpments known as The Edges. A haven for walkers and climbers, as well as a nesting place for the rare ring ouzels, they’ve been shaped by both the millstone industry and centuries of erosion.

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LGBT history: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

12/2/2017

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Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, which won the 2016 Costa Book of the Year Award announced last month, is a story of migration and massacre; of bravery and brutality; of family, friendship and gender fluidity told in the unique voice of an Irishman in 1850s America.

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On Writing, Rocks and Milestones

6/2/2017

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The average person walks at a rate of three miles an hour. But none of us is the average person. The time we take to walk from A to B varies with our general fitness, the length of our stride and our eagerness to reach our destination. The contours of the land, the smoothness of the path and even the weather also impact on our journey times. Diligent planners will take these factors into account when embarking on a country walk, but even pantsers can make judicious use of the three-miles-an-hour rule in knowing we can’t cover in a day a distance that would take the average person a week.

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Weaving stories and rattling words

9/1/2017

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Two novels I read recently – The Underground Railroad and Homegoing – touched on how, historically, the production of cotton depended on slave labour. A lot of that cotton came to Britain and helped transform weaving from a cottage industry to, with the invention of Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny and Arkwright’s water frame, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the bedrock of the industrial revolution. The legacy of this rich industrial history can be explored within about an hour’s drive from where I live; unfortunately, while I’m interested in how past generations earned their livings, I haven’t yet prioritised visiting the museums.

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Beyond the sum of their parts?

26/12/2016

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Every novel is comprised of different parts that writers, readers and reviewers hope will combine into a satisfying whole. My last two reviews of 2016 – before I reveal my favourites of the year – are of novels for which finding that coherence is a particular challenge, but extremely worthwhile if achieved. Both published this summer, neither seems to have attracted many reviews on Goodreads, but I’m impressed with both (albeit one more than the other) so I hope you’ll at least give my reviews a chance.

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Sounding out the body in fiction

7/8/2016

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I spent what seemed to me a considerable amount of time flushing out what I thought was a bit of leek stuck between my upper right incisor and its neighbouring canine – first with my fingernail, then with the corner of a business card, and finally with a sharpened matchstick. But there was no piece of leek. It was an erroneous message that my gums were sending me, themselves misled by some previous irritation.

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In Brontë Country: Howarth vs Stanage-NorthLees

20/4/2016

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We British are proud of the Brontës, especially in cinematic form played out by attractive actors. But the Japanese are the real fans, apparently, making pilgrimages to the village on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales where the sisters penned their novels. One such tour is the launch point for Mick Jackson’s fourth novel for adults in which the eponymous “heroine”, after a few days drinking with her sister in London, travels north with a coachload of older women. But Yukiko is no Brontë aficionado. Instead, armed with a handful of photographs taken in the area, she considers herself a psychic detective, intent on discovering the secret of her mother’s visit ten years before, which she believes precipitated her suicide back home in the snow.

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Rebellion crushed: Human Acts by Han Kang

8/1/2016

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How does one organise the logistics of identification and disposal of bodies following a massacre? Does the soul exist independent of the body and, if so, at what point might they go their separate ways? How can theatre survive in a climate of censorship? What right has an academic to push a survivor to revisit traumatic memories in the interests of research? What role do women take in agitating for change?

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For Whose Benefit? A Sideways Look at the Creative Writing Industry

3/1/2016

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Over half a century ago, the social scientist and psychoanalyst, Isabel Menzies Lyth was commissioned to carry out an investigation into why so many promising nursing students were dropping out of training. What she discovered makes edifying reading for anyone using, or employed within, the human services or, indeed, any organisation at all. Despite the best intentions of all the staff, the social systems that had evolved within the hospital were like a spanner in the works, functioning against the primary task of healing the sick. Many highly motivated students, despairing at the impossibility of delivering compassionate care, simply left. Yet this human wastage was built into a system that relied on a high volume of low-paid students to deliver patient care, without having sufficient posts for them to move on to on qualification. Although the work is radically different, I’ve wondered for some time whether there’s a similar redundancy built into the creative writing industry, encouraging the dreams of far more budding writers than there are slots in the publishers’ lists.

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Fictional teenagers going missing in the Peak District: Reservoir 13 & Whistle in the Dark

On the Edges

LGBT history: Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

On Writing, Rocks and Milestones

Weaving stories and rattling words

Beyond the sum of their parts?

Sounding out the body in fiction

In Brontë Country: Howarth vs Stanage-NorthLees

Rebellion crushed: Human Acts by Han Kang

For Whose Benefit? A Sideways Look at the Creative Writing Industry

2018 Reading Challenge

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