Catching Up with My Blog

(Please note: This post replaces an earlier version that was somehow jumbled in the transmission – I’m hoping it will read in the right order this time!)

After emerging from a frantic period of activity, I’m just trying to catch up with myself, and have realized to my horror that I haven’t posted on my blog here since 8th April. So today I’ve decided to do a bit of catching up before it all gets completely out of hand.

First off, as a matter of record, I need to share the article I wrote for last month’s Tetbury Advertiser. As regular readers will know, each month I write two columns for local magazines, the Tetbury Advertiser and the Hawkesbury Parish News. This is something I’ve been doing since January 2010, when I first gave up my day job to focus on my writing. Then, every five years, I gather them all together and turn them into books, to save them for posterity. (Not that posterity will necessarily be interested, but rather that than treat them like tomorrow’s fish-and-chip papers!)

Watercolour paintings on the covers are by my father

So far, there have been four volumes, each with five years’ worth of columns. “Young by Name” is the name of column in the Tetbury Advertiser, hence the name of the two books on the left. There’s no particular name for my slot in the Hawkesbury Parish News, but as you will have guessed, the two on the right gatther together those columns. Also, All Part of the Charm is prefaced by a collection of essays I wrote about village life, when I first moved to the Cotswold village of Hawkesbury Upton in 1991.

At the end of 2025, it’ll be time for me to round up the last five years’ worth of columns and create a third volume in each series. I’ve been talking recently to the students on the course I teach for Jericho Writers about the challenges of “naming conventions” for series of books. Once you start down a particular theme, you really have to stick with it to make it clear to the reader that the books are part of a set. If you have any brainwaves about what the titles should be for each of the new books, please let me know!

Which titles should I use for Round 3? Not As Young As I Used To Be? Can’t argue with that! Forever Charmed? Or is that just because the Alphaville song, “Forever Young”, is currently going round in my head?

These diverting additions to your bedside table, guest room or even your smallest room are all available to buy as . (They’re also in Kindle Unlimited, so if you are a subscriber already, you can effectively read them free of charge.)Anyway, as you were… what I really came here for was to add last month’s column from the Tetbury Advertiser, written during a cold snap which seems like ancient history now that we’re blessed with a bit of May sunshine.

I hope to get back on track with my weekly posts very soon…

A Chilly Perspective

(first published in the April 2025 edition of the Tetbury Advertiser )

An informal survey about seasonal reading told me that not everyone reads festive stories at Christmas. Some people read them to cool down on hot days. Conversely, they use tropical stories to warm them up midwinter.

There again, I’m currently reading books set in places so cold they make our chilly spring days seem balmy. The Conquest of Everest is by John Hunt, leader of the 1953 expedition in which Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Sherpa were the first people to reach its summit.

Cool reading

Coronation Everest is by Times journalist Jan Morris (then James Morris), the expedition’s official reporter.

A double celebration

‘Climbing Everest was largely a matter of logistics,’ writes Morris in Coronation Everest, with classic British understatement.

What logistics they were! Local porters carried huge loads as the party ascended from camp to camp. Hunt’s mountaineers also bore packs of as much as 60lbs each. Hardy Sherpas, acclimatized to physical exercise in the thin mountain air, carried even greater weights.

Hunt’s team took not only mountaineering equipment and camping gear for sub-zero high altitudes, but also photographic and scientific equipment for studies along the way.

James Morris carried the tools of his trade: typewriter, paper, and carbon paper.

To maintain their energy, they also had to carry vast amounts of food and drink. With scrambled eggs their breakfast staple, I was impressed that they seemed not to break their many dozens of eggs along the way.

Then I realised that in 1953, fresh eggs were still on ration. Powdered egg must have been a more easily portable alternative.

These days, as we go about our normal lives, we rarely need to carry very much very far. The heaviest loads I ever shift are bags of groceries, and then only from supermarket trolley to car boot, and from car boot to kitchen.

I’m embarrassed to remember feeling aggrieved as a child when my car-less mum expected my brother, my sister, and me to help carry the shopping bags home from the supermarket. Our arduous journey? A mere half mile from Blackfen’s Safeway supermarket. Knowing what I know now, if I’d been my mum, I’d have used the Everest team’s experience to put my complaints into perspective.

‘Be grateful,’ I’d say, ‘that you’re doing this on flat pavement at sea level, rather than across precarious ladders bridging crevasses above Everest’s “Death Zone”, which lacks sufficient oxygen to sustain human life for long.’

Reading books like this, the chilly English spring seems a feeble reason to replace my own supermarket missions with home deliveries.

But I draw the line at eating powdered egg.