The Bookwormery

Bookish bits and bookish pieces

Hello! This was meant to be a midweek offering of some bits and pieces that had caught my eye. But somehow it is Thursday morning already, which is practically the weekend and honestly, if anyone has any advice on how to keep hold of time after the age of – I don’t know, I think I was about 40 when it started behaving insanely? – then please do let me know. As long as it doesn’t involve meditation, running or eating better, obviously. Let’s call it a late-midweek offering and hope nobody sues for misrepresentation.

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First of all I of course want to say THANK YOU and SO MUCH to everyone who has become a paid subscriber or founder member since my last post. I am so grateful and eager to bring you more and different things over the coming weeks, months and – cor, who knows?! – years as we get to know each other better and my technical skills become…well, come into existence, really.

And thank you too to all the free subscribers who have stayed and the many who have joined in the last week as well. I hope you find something here that you like. I’d be delighted if you found enough to tip you into an upgrade, but I am glad to have you under any conditions!

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Could I ask founder members to make themselves known to me in the DMs, and tell me whether you’d like a book bundle or a Zoom call? I didn’t realise you wouldn’t be readily identifiable in the backstage area so that I could contact you – I’m so sorry to put the burden on you instead, but I can’t see a better or quicker way round it at the moment though I am still investigating.

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Here I am, enjoying myself at the Swindon Literary Festival earlier this week.

I’m not sure the audience is – I look to be haranguing them pretty intensely – but nobody threw any tomatoes and I met some lovely people afterwards in the signing queue for Bookish, so I count the day a success. Plus I met Alice Jolly, who wrote the astonishingly clever and moving The Matchbox Girl, AND I had a cuddle of the hugely beautiful and good-natured baby grandson of the festival organiser Matt Holland before I went on. I now must become famous enough to make the latter activity a non-negotiable clause in my rider before any event.

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Did you see this story? A 900-year-old typo may solve Chaucer mystery Ye olde father of English literature refers to the Tale of Wade (a medieval poem or tale lost to us apart from a single 12^th century fragment found in 1896) in both The Canterbury Tales and in Troilus and Criseyde and no-one has ever understood why, because the fragment refers to “elves” and seems to be out of keeping with Chaucer’s works. But! Scholars have discovered that “elves” is a miscopying by some poor, knackered scribe of “wolves” – which makes everything far more realistic and fitting and solves a question that has been niggling at people for centuries. Not many people, for sure, but that is partly what makes this kind of story my absolutely favourite kind of story. Something doesn’t have to matter to many for it to matter at all. And it also enables me to dream that somewhere in an alternative universe – maybe populated by both elves and wolves – I too spend my life sifting through scraps of manuscript found in ancient libraries and piecing together lovely bits of the past.

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My brilliant friend Sali Hughes co-founded and runs, with her equally brilliant friend Jo Jones, the charity Beauty Banks. It provides hygiene, beauty and sanitary products to people who need them and can’t afford them and has just partnered with Bio Sculpture to produce this rather lovely set of nail polishes and all profits - £15 a set – go to Beauty Banks. It’s a hard time for all charities, so if you are in the market for a beauty treat for yourself or someone else, do see if this one hits the spot. My set hasn’t arrived yet, otherwise I would show to you it up close and personal – though possibly not applied, as I have the hands of a chubby seven year old and, much as I love wearing nail varnish (so cheering to watch coloured-in fingers as I type), I do look ridiculous in it.

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My friends and I generally light upon a new, temporary hate-figure at least once a week – it’s our cardio - and our current one is the husband in this:

The kindness of strangers: ‘That quilt serves as a daily reminder of all the goodness in this world’ | Australian lifestyle | The Guardian

We’re not wrong, are we? I look forward to unpacking in the comments…

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Thank you all, once again, for being here. The ‘proper’ weekly post – preview ‘n’ paywalled bits - will be on Saturday. I hope to see you there too. Until then, happy reading!

Love,

Lucy xx