Island

I volunteer for the Buckinghamshire Home Library Service, visiting two older women who are unable to get to their local library and taking them a choice of books and recordings to select from. They've each filled out a form indicating their tastes in literature. One of them, whilst always glad to see me each month, is never very forthcoming with feedback on the books she has had from me. Ordinarily these are very much in the Catherine Cookson/Maeve Binchy line - 'family sagas', sometimes contemporary, sometimes historical.

This month I decided to try and widen the scope, so I took out Selina Scott's A Long Walk In The High Hills, her account of time spent renovating a house in the Tramuntana hills of Mallorca.

Having left this with her, I went on to visit my other customer, who returned a number of books she had finished with. Whilst waiting at the library to hand these back in, I idly flicked through the pages of one of them, where I found this bookmark, left there by a previous borrower:

and here is the reverse:

The following day I took part in the Ride & Stride event, raising money for the Buckinghamshire Historic Churches Trust and my local parish church, St Lawrence, West Wycombe. This year I was joined by my father-in-law. On his bike, I noticed he was carrying two water bottles. One of these, well used and slightly battered, bore the name of a place he'd visited in Mallorca.
I rather wish I'd taken a photograph.

Sunken Cathedrals

On honeymoon in May, I read Philip K. Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer - not one of his best, but that still leaves it head & shoulders above a lot of other authors' work. A central motif in the story, indeed it might even be called a character, is the sunken cathedral of Heldscalla, which the pot-healer (ceramicist) of the title is sent to try and raise.

This year* marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the French composer Claude Debussy, and to celebrate this the BBC Proms season features a number of his works, including a prelude he wrote in 1910 called La cathédrale engloutie - The Sunken Cathedral**.

I am currently reading Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson, the story of his adventures in a small boat around the western coast of the British Isles. In chapter three, entitled 'Islands', Nicolson describes his visit to The Skelligs, off the Irish mainland. He describes them thus:

"... they seemed to be a pair of cathedrals, a black double Chartres ... with their naves and chancels sunk beneath the sea ..."

*I find I am writing this on the exact day of his birth, August 22.

**just before writing this, I went downstairs where my wife was listening to Joanna Newsom's album Ys; Debussy's work is based on an ancient Breton myth in which a cathedral, submerged underwater off the coast of the island of Ys, rises up from the sea on clear mornings when the water is transparent.