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Londoning

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I spent Friday evening and Saturday in London, which was not quite the original plan. I was intending to go on Saturday and spend the day there, culminating with my theatre ticket to All My Sons and then hopping on a late train home – but it turned out, when I checked my ticket, that I’d bought one for the Friday evening performance by mistake. Oops! Thank goodness I checked, because it was a sold out run and I don’t know if they’d have let me in. So I made hasty arrangements for someone to feed Hargreaves, asked if I could stay with my good friend Lorna, and went off after work.

Image result for all my sons the old vic

The best play I’ve ever seen was a production of All My Sons, starring David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker, among other luminaries. For those who don’t know Arthur Miller’s play, it’s an American family drama set in the wake of the Second World War, and that’s all I’ll say, because I don’t want to give anything away. It was a bit of a gamble, going to see another version of a production I loved so much – but Sally Field was playing one of the leads, so I couldn’t resist.

Was it as good? Perhaps not, but it was pretty darn close. The play is brilliant, and it was wonderfully brought to life by this exceptional cast and by Max Jones’s excellent set design – that feels lived in, even while it is disconcerting. Interestingly, where the other production I saw had felt very much about Suchet’s Joe Keller, this one was all about Field’s Kate Keller. For me, it was an object lesson in how a director can change the message of a play. Anyway, it’s all very good, and do see it if you have a chance.

Image result for fashion and textile museum swinging 60s

The next morning I had a delicious homemade brunch with Lorna and Will, and then went off to meet my friend Lucy at the Fashion and Textile Museum near London Bridge. My first visit there was for their 1930s exhibition last year, and they currently have one on the 1960s. There were far fewer outfits involved in this one, but it was very interesting nonetheless – and a museum that will always be worth going to. Prepare yourself for a lot of Mary Quant!

Also worth going to is Comptoir Gourmand – a bakery just opposite, which sold me the most delicious white chocolate cookie I’ve ever had. And the most enormous! We sat in a park round the corner and ate our goodies, having a good old natter. Lucy was a library trainee with me at the Bodleian back in 2007/08 and, unlike me, has stayed in the profession. She’s an old and dear friend and it’s always lovely to catch up.

We share a weakness for bookshops, and I’ve decided that my book buying ban has essentially gone out of the window altogether now. Plus it feels wrong to go into an indie bookshop and not buy a book. Of course, one doesn’t have to go into a bookshop, but I hadn’t visited The Riverside Bookshop in Hay’s Galleria before, and it was an 8 minute walk away. What are two book nerds to do?

I went with purpose: I wanted to buy The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. Well, there was a gap on the shelves where it had apparently been – but, as stated, I like to support independent bookshops, so took a mosey around seeing what else might appeal. In the end, I landed on Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which looks to be a book-length essay on loss and getting lost. The lady behind the counter told me it was very good, when I was buying it, which is always a good sign! Has anybody read it?

Book in hand, I headed back to Paddington, and am now at home with a cat on my lap.

My A to Z of Books

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On Twitter this week, I decided it would be fun to pick 26 great books – an author for every letter of the alphabet. And it WAS fun. You can see what I chose here – do let me know if you have a go at your own, either on Twitter or blog or wherever!

 

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

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‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

That quote often appears on lists of best opening lines, but it might be as far as most people get into The Towers of Trebizond (1956) by Rose Macaulay. She hasn’t exactly fallen out of fashion completely, as a handful of her novels remain in print, but it’s fair to say that the average person in the street won’t be able to tell you a lot about her. She’s an author I love, but I’ve had very mixed success with her novels. At the top of the tree are Keeping Up Appearances and Crewe Train, which are very funny while also being incisively insightful about mid-century society. At the bottom is the turgid Staying With Relations. The much-feted The World My Wilderness fell in the middle for me, being very well observed but lacking the humour she does so well.

Where would The Towers of Trebizond fall on my list? It’s among her best known, but various red flags worried me – since I don’t particularly enjoy books set in countries that the author isn’t from, and I particularly don’t get on with travel books. I wasn’t sure how I’d get on with this one… but I made my book group read it, so that I’d find out!

Laurie is the narrator and, for much of the book, she details the journey she takes from Istanbul to Trebizond, along with Aunt Dot (Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett) and her friend Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Dot is there to improve the lot of women, while Father Hugh is hoping to convert the masses to his particular brand of High Anglicanism. Somewhere along the way, Dot and Hugh go missing – possibly to Jerusalem, possibly to Russia – and rumour spreads that they are spies.

Macaulay apparently referred to the writing as a ‘rather goofy, rambling prose style’, and I can see why. The tone is often a little detached, curious, and wry – with the same sort of lengthy, relatively unpunctuated sentences that make Barbara Comyns’ style so quirky. Here’s an example:

But aunt Dot could only think how Priam and Hecuba would have been vexed to see the state it had all got into and no one seeming to care any more. She thought the nations ought to go on working at it and dig it all up again, and perhaps do some reconstruction, for she belonged to the reconstruction school, and would have liked to see Troy’s walls and towers rising once more against the sky like a Hollywood Troy, and the wooden horse standing beside them, opening mechanically every little while to show that it was full of armed Greeks.

But I thought there were enough cities standing about the world already, and that those which had disappeared had better be left alone, lying under the grass and asphodel and brambles, with the wind sighing over them and in the distance the sea where the Greek ships had lain waiting ten years for Trojam incensam, and behind them Mount Ida, from which the unfair and partial gods had watched the whole affair.

The main topics she addresses are faith (and distinctions between different denominations), history, and travel. Much of the book is her musings on these, with plenty of contributions for her companions while they’re about. I think it’s largely commendable for how impressively of-a-piece it is. She does not let up this style – it is consistently well done and totally all-encompassing. I guess it’s then just a question of whether or not you like this style.

While they were travelling around, I found it all a bit muddy. I couldn’t really distinguish the different places they were going, and I certainly found the interpersonal bits much more interesting than her reflections on the places she was seeing. Without anything concrete to hang onto, it was all a bit – well, the most fitting word I can think of is, again, muddy.

I could still definitely appreciate the skill that went into the creation of this portrait, and I did find a lot of it funny. Being a Christian and having been brought up in an Anglican church, I did enjoy some of the discussions of faith – though I always find that it’s non-Christians who find denominations so fascinating, and we’re happy just to do our best to follow Jesus. Macaulay has a wonderfully arch tone, and the faux matter-of-fact style did work – I just wish she’d set it in England. (The section I found funniest was when she was reflecting on having often used a line from her phrasebook about not speaking Turkish, only to discover later that she’d mixed up lines and was actually asking to speak to a Mr. Prorum, or something like that – who did turn up at one point, nonplussed.)

And, indeed, the sections of the novel I liked best were at the end, when she has turned to the UK. There is a very odd sidestep into her trying to raise a chimp – complete with driving lessons – that I thought was marvellous. In fact, having now been to book group, it was one of those times when discussing it made me like it more – reflecting on all the funny scenes and the unusual way Macaulay presents them. It’s all an impressive achievement, for the way in which it is sustained, if nothing else – and, while it doesn’t quite rival my favourite Macaulays for me, I can see why other readers would consider this her masterpiece.

The Progress of Julius by Daphne du Maurier

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I’m sneaking into the final hours of Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week to write about her third novel – The Progress of Julius (1933). My edition is simply called Julius – I don’t know when or why this change was made (unless perhaps it was to capitalise on the single-name success of Rebecca), but I prefer to go by the original title.

I picked this one up from my pile of unread DdMs because it had a name in the title, and thus qualified for my #ProjectNames informal reading challenge – it wasn’t one of her novels that I had heard discussed very often. Having read it, I can sort of see why…

It traces the life of Julius Levy from his birth right to the end – and his earliest days are spent in poverty in France. He has a loud and passionate mother and matching grandfather. Rather more negligible is Paul, his father, who is disparaged by everybody else in the household. He is an almost cartoonishly weak figure, good only for sitting in the corner and observing.

But Paul has a moment where he is not weak, or at least shows strength in the eyes of the world, and it leads to he and his young son escaping France – sneaking onto a train and travelling to Algeria. Here, as Julius grows, he begins to lift himself out of poverty through some legitimate projects – and lots of illegitimate ones. From stealing horses and selling them to tricking a tutor into educating him, du Maurier shows us a portrait of immoral ambition – and constant disguise. Julius only ever shows the face that is likely to win him the most reward.

Next stop – London. He has heard that this is the place to make his fortune – and make it he does, though he has been followed by the teenage prostitute whose room he frequented in Algiers. Elsa has disguised herself as a boy to sneak onto the boat with him, apparently unable to be without him. (One of the less successful plot elements, particularly towards the beginning, is how Julius is apparently an irresistible personality to all – when, to the reader’s eye, he seems to have very little to recommend him.)

With Elsa, Julius’s selfishness tips over into a sort of sadism:

The shoulders of Elsa began to shake, and her head bent lower and lower. Julius had to cover his mouth with his hand to prevent himself from laughing. He had discovered a new thing, of hurting the people he liked. It gave him an extraordinary sensation to see Elsa cry after she had been smiling, and to know that he had caused her tears. He was aware of power, strange and exciting.

And so it continues throughout his life. At each stage, he is ruthless and selfish – he’s what we would now call a sociopath. His financial success is the only thing that motivates him (at least until another figure comes into his life, in the final third of the book). He is, frankly, vile.

Du Maurier tells her narrative well and engagingly, but it is very straightforward. There is nothing like the twists in Rebecca or the moral ambiguity in My Cousin Rachel. And it was a bit conflicting – the novel is well written, but it is deeply uncomfortable to read.

On the one hand, plenty of the characters are anti-Semitic – initially to Paul and, later, to Julius. Despite having a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, and thus technically not be ethnically Jewish himself, it is taken for granted by all characters and the narrator that Julius is Jewish. And though the narrative does not endorse these insults, you have to ask yourself what Daphne du Maurier was doing in writing this novel.

Nowhere does it suggest that Julius’s behaviour is technical of all Jewish people, or that he is intended to represent anything more than a single character – but it certainly didn’t sit well to have a Jewish character whose life is motivated solely by financial greed. This was, of course, a stereotype around in the 1930s – one being used, even as this novel was published, to stir up hatred against Jewish people in Germany. It is hard not to feel disgusted at the portrait du Maurier has painted, and at the author for painting it.

I don’t need characters to be likeable – but, even if he hadn’t been Jewish, with everything that suggests about du Maurier’s intention, he is so relentlessly terrible that it isn’t all that interesting. He has no nuanced character, nor does he especially develop. We just see him being appalling to person after person, never learning from his actions, or reflecting on his behaviour. It is a uniform and stylistically well written novel, but – as well as being almost certainly anti-Semitic – it feels perhaps a pointless novel too.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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I hope you have good weekend plans – I’m seeing various friends, including a picnic, so fingers crossed for nice weather. I’ll also be making a baked cheesecake, so it’s ALL GO chez Simon. Anyway, whatever you have planed, here’s a book, a blog post, and a link to take you into it.

1.) The book – you KNOW I’m always happy to read books about reading, and Tim Parks’ Pen in Hand is right up my street. In fact, I’ve already read a few of the essays, and they’re really interesting – a little more academic than other titles in this sphere, but certainly not in a way to alienate the ‘common reader’, to sue Johnson’s/Woolf’s phrase.

2.) The link – I often enjoy the Guardian‘s ‘Experience’ column, and this one about managing the world’s last Blockbuster store is good fun.

3.) The blog post – is more of an entire blog, I think: ‘Reading Africa‘ is a project where Muthoni is trying to read at least one book from every country in Africa. There are loads of great suggestions in there, and it’s a very interesting challenge.

 

An article by Daphne du Maurier’s editor

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I’m trying to finish a novel by du Maurier for Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, though not sure I’m going to be done in time – but I thought I’d share a really interesting article I came across instead. It’s written by Sheila Hodges, who was du Maurier’s editor for decades (from the publication of Hungry Hill until the end of her career). Slightly oddly, it’s in Women’s History Review – but gives a good insight into how du Maurier wrote – you can read it online. Enjoy!

You should be watching Mum

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I don’t watch a lot of British television. I know we’re supposedly living in a Golden Age, and things like Bodyguard, Line of Duty, and Killing Eve are popular around the world. British TV seems to be getting darker and darker, with everything being about torture or kidnap or lengthy police procedurals. Frankly, I get all the drama I can cope with from Neighbours, and so most of the rest of my watching is sitcoms – and the UK hasn’t been very good at sitcoms for quite a while. The US knocks it out the park. There are always loads being piloted, and a substantial number of them are very good.

Over the past few years, I’ve been obsessed with Superstore, New Girl, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Happy Endings, Parks and Recreation, The Mindy Project, Community, Great News. They’re all amazing, and I’m sure I’m missing more. Pop up to Canada to add the brilliant Schitt’s Creek to the list. But in the UK? Miranda was great fun, but I can’t think of any other sitcoms I’ve enjoyed for ages – and there are so few being commissioned now. In the 70s and 80s, even with a tiny number of channels, there were loads. Where are the days of The Good Life, To The Manor Born, Fawlty Towers, and more?

Well, it’s not quite like those sitcoms – but the best British sitcom in decades (in my opinion) is about to start its third and final series on Wednesday: Mum. Please don’t confuse it with the terrible US sitcom Mom (seriously, Alison Janney, what are you thinking?). This one has been quietly growing an audience, and a lot of critical respect, in showing the years after Cathy’s husband David dies.

Cathy is played by the sublime Lesley Manville, who has a long and illustrious career as an actor – notably in Mike Leigh’s films – and whom I first saw a handful of years ago in the excellent Another Year (which I wrote about at the time). As she grieves, she is also Mum to Jason – an adult (just), but very dependent, and endearingly and lovingly stupid. His girlfriend Kelly lives with them, and she is equally dim but endlessly enthusiastic and longing to be part of the family life. Lisa McGrillis’s performance is extraordinary – she is bubbly and slightly annoying, and over the course of the first series you gradually discover how she has been damaged in the past and what lies beneath this chatty exterior. The other main cast are Peter Mullan’s Michael, a diffident Scotsman who was David’s closest friend; Derek, Cathy’s hapless brother, and his snobby wife Pauline; and David’s parents Reg and Maureen.

Like all the best sitcoms, this is equally moving and hilarious. Cathy is an ironic observer of the absurdities around her – whether that’s Pauline’s insistence that she feel the superior texture of her non-NHS arm cast, or Reg’s horror at the idea of eating dips. We see everything she is not saying, and how she takes pleasure in the ridiculousness around her – while at the same time watching her grief for David evolve over the years (each episode is set several months apart). Some of the characters may be heightened, but there is a very real heart to everything that is happening, and a closeness that a witty, quip-laden sitcom wouldn’t get close to.

If Lesley Manville’s performance is the linchpin of Mum, then Stefan Golaszewski’s writing is the underlying genius. Like many British sitcoms, it’s written by one person rather than a writer’s room – substantially easier when there are six episodes in each series, rather than 24. His observations about the ways families work are marvellous, and his ability to draw comedy out of subtle interactions is astonishing. Highlights that spring to mind from episodes I’ve recently been re-watching include giving directions to a carvery, shallots, whether or not it’s possible to hate Holly Willoughby, and the Easter story. And then you can be hit by an extremely emotional moment – for example, Reg saying to his wife “They’re talking about David.” Nothing is added – we just see the reactions of two old people thinking about their dead son, and proud that he is being discussed.

This sort of writing doesn’t come along very often, and this sort of ensemble cast is rare as well. In a British televisual world where tense showdowns and assassins seem the flavour of the day, do seek out the quiet brilliance of Mum – previous two series available on iPlayer, and the third series starting tomorrow.

The Overhaul #2

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Thanks for the positive response to my first Overhaul, where I look back at previous book hauls and see how many I’ve read and how many I’ve kept. It’s a great way to see how things progress on my shelves AND to make me feel bad about myself. What’s not to like?

This time I’m going even further back – nearly a whole decade – and to one of my favourite bookshops for cheap finds, the Amnesty charity shop in Bristol. Plus a few books from Oxford that I piled into the same post.

The Overhaul #2

The original haul post is here.

Date of haul: August 2009

Location: Bristol

Number of books bought: 12

  • Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

I read this in 2016 and I thought it was pretty good, but quite confusing and not at all the ‘haunting novel of a summer of terror and wonder’ that the cover alleged it to be.

  • English Short Stories of Today ed. by E.J. O’Brien

This is the sort of collection I buy and put on my shelves and know I will never read. I have not read it

  • The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch

This one I have read! In 2010, in fact, though sadly I didn’t much like it. Good set pieces but I found some of it quite dull – and a later attempt with The Sea, The Sea has confirmed that I am not a Murdoch fan. It’s not on my shelves anymore.

  • Summer at the Haven by Katharine Moore

Guys, I’m killing it, because I’ve read this one too – in 2009, no less. I didn’t write a review of it, but I remember enjoying this tale of an old people’s home. Not the finest writing in the world, but very enjoyable.

  • Howards End by E.M. Forster

And I’ve read this one! It was the third Forster I’d read, and third time lucky – because I thought it was brilliant, having not really liked the others. You probably know all about it, but here’s my review from 2011.

  • Family Money by Nina Bawden

Ah, this one I haven’t read. After reading A Woman of My Age in 2013, I decided that maybe Bawden wasn’t for me. This is still on my shelves, but it’s a borderline case.

  • Family History by Vita Sackville-West

I’ve read a few more VSWs since 2009, but this is not one of them. One day!

  • The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman

I read this account of madness in 2009, and didn’t get on with it. Very experimental in form, which I found distracting and annoying rather than transformative. I decided not to keep it.

  • Clash by Ellen Wilkinson

I decided to give this to a more receptive home! I might well have enjoyed it, but I felt like it would never quite be the time to find out.

  • Writing Lives: Conversations Between Women Writers

Still waiting! Have I dipped into it? Maybe? Probably not.

  • Among You Taking Notes: the Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison

I read this, and found it a bit disappointing. Sometimes diaries really click and sometimes they’re just a bit dull. It went to a charity shop.

  • Behindlings by Nicola Barker

I never got around to this, and it got culled at some point because it’s an enormous copy, and I didn’t think it was justifying all the space it was taking up. Sorry Nicola B!

Total bought: 12

Total still unread on my shelves: 4

Total no longer owned: 5

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

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I loved To The River, which I read in 2016, and have been meaning to read more by Olivia Laing ever since. Mum and Dad got me The Lonely City (2016) for Christmas, and I was really intrigued by the premise: Laing looked back at living alone in New York and feeling desperately lonely, linking this to the lives of other people who have experienced or depicted the same thing.

If I sound adamant it is because I am speaking from personal experience. When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean that one has failed, but simply that one is alive.

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

At its best, The Lonely City is philosophically interesting and personally engaging. I’m not sure I agree with everything she says above (well, mostly the idea that depression is not related to chemistry) but she has a novel and well-constructed way of looking at complex issues like loneliness. Having never experienced loneliness for any length of time – I live alone and love it – I find it a fascinating topic.

The people Laing considers here are chosen from the arts, and have very different experiences They are Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Klaus Nomi, Josh Harris, and Zoe Leonard. Some of these are household names, while quite a few were new to me. In each case, she looks at how their work and their personal lives reflect a sense of isolation – from society, from acceptability, from human contact. Some of these require more of an imaginative leap than others, and it is a very intriguing combination of subjects. They are too disparate for me to go into too much depth here, but Laing writes vividly and sympathetically about each of them – this is not just biography, but a psychological exploration done with a kind eye.

What I thought was so good about To The River was how Laing managed to weave together her own life and her journey with many other elements – Virginia Woolf’s life, the discovery of fossils, and everything in between. It was seamless and beautiful, bringing it all into an evocative and cleverly constructed tapestry.

Sadly that isn’t really true of The Lonely City. If I hadn’t read To The River before, I probably wouldn’t have noticed – but this feels like an early prototype for that sort of book, even though it came later. (It also reads a lot like a doctoral thesis turned into a memoir, but I don’t think that is what it actually was.) Laing compartmentalises her life and the lives of her subjects, often giving her experiences for a handful of pages at the beginning of a chapter before moving on to the subject. It means that the book is rather disjointed and episodic.

Each chapter is fascinating in its own right – the life of Andy Warhol is extraordinary, for instance, while Laing’s discussions of Hopper’s paintings are engaging, original, and often quite moving (even if I had to google each of the paintings she was talking about, as there aren’t any pictures in this book – in the paperback, at least). But I do wish that she had found a way to incorporate her own experiences more organically, and to create a book that flowed as smoothly as To The River.

There is a lot to love in The Lonely City, and some impressive insights. I’m not sure she succeeds in combining the personal, the biographical, and the general – though the final few pages (from which I drew the quotation above) are so well done that you’ll almost believe that she does.

The Making of Us by Sheridan Voysey

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A couple of years ago I read Resurrection Year by Sheridan Voysey – a very moving and thoughtful account of the ten years he and his wife spent from first trying to have a child to recognising that it would probably not happen, biologically or otherwise. It is about their faith in God, and what He taught them through this time – though without sugarcoating anything. Well, now I’ve read the sort-of-sequel, The Making of Us (2019), that Sheridan kindly gave me.

As I mentioned last time, Sheridan and I go to the same church, and know each other a little. We know each other rather better now than we did in 2017, when I read his first book, and so it is correspondingly stranger to write a review of a book he has written – particularly a memoir. But let’s plough on! (Btw, he also challenged people at church to wear yellow in a photo with the book – hence the picture.)

If Resurrection Year took a broad focus, The Making of Us looks at a much shorter time frame: a handful of days. It looks at the time that Sheridan and his friend DJ spend walking along the northeast coast of England, following the path that the monk Cuthbert had trod hundreds of years earlier. It was a hundred-mile pilgrimage. It starts on Lindisfarne, and they timed their conclusion in Durham to coincide with a display of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Along the way, Sheridan and DJ discuss all manner of things about how to cope when life doesn’t go as planned. It follows on from the themes of Resurrection Year, but also looks at how Sheridan has had to rebuild a career on the other side of the world, after being successful in radio in Australia. They discuss where God is in these moments, and the enormity of His love.

The finest of earthly love we’ve felt is but a twig next to his Jupiter-size affection. A single leaf to a rustling forest. A mere microbe to a mountain. A faint candle to a galaxy’s worth of suns. And until I dwell in this – dwell in a love that reaches beyond all measure, stretching higher and deeper and wider than I can imagine – until I rest in this reality and let this love define me, I will forever seek my worth in lesser things.

What Sheridan is so good at is using the specifics of his life to guide anybody reading the book, drawing general lessons from individual events. The conversations he includes with DJ are doubtless highly edited for the structure of The Making of Us, though they feel their most authentic when discussing the trials of the walk itself – the blisters, the map-reading, the accommodation. I love the idea of putting this pilgrimage alongside the metaphorical journey towards understanding an identity in Christ, particularly when this identity isn’t playing out as hoped or expected.

There’s a lot in here for the practising Christian, including useful Bible references to support what Sheridan says, but I think anybody would find this memoir moving and of value – and I’m not just saying that because I know I’ll be seeing Sheridan soon!