Author: Susan Brice

  • Greetings

    At the end of the Radio 3 breakfast show, the presenter Petroc Trelawny finishes by saying Good Morning. It occurred to me that using those words to say goodbye rather than hello has become very unusual, some would say quite dated and old fashioned. I then thought about how various greetings have changed over time. […]

  • Have you noticed?

    Have you noticed that if the stress is on the first syllable then the word is usually a noun. If the emphasis comes on the second syllable then it is usually a verb. object record present content

  • Rebecca / Frenchman’s Creek – Daphne du Maurier

    This is a minor Daphne du Maurier fest about 2 of her novels: Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek. I will leave Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel for another time. (There are of course many others but those are the four famous stories.) Looking along my bookshelves I found I had all 4 stories in a […]

  • Treacle Walker – Alan Garner

    And now for something totally different. You may know the author Alan Garner from his children’s book ‘The Owl Service’ which was important to several generations and subsequently became a television series. However, there have been very many books since then and Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, written as Alan Garner […]

  • Saplings – Noel Streatfeild

    Along with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women books and the Heidi stories, Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild looms large in my childhood reading. Goodness knows how many times I read it. I still have the rather battered paperback; my original copy. Reading it again a few years ago, two thoughts came to mind. Firstly, what […]

  • February 2nd

    The date of the birth of James Joyce, strangely and nicely noted and commemorated this morning on the Radio 3 breakfast programme. They then played ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ which runs through the narrative and is used to signify Molly Bloom. Joyce had to wait until he was 40 before Ulysses was eventually published in […]

  • The Tap Dancer – Andrew Barrow

    This was a strange read but one that I am still thinking about sometime after finishing it. If I hadn’t been told otherwise I could have believed that this was autobiographical but apparently not: fiction, all fiction. Although of course one can hardly avoid putting something of oneself into any piece of writing. A weird […]

  • January 2024

    I’m not altogether keen on hardback books: very expensive, very heavy and somehow they feel very self important. They are certainly not books that I can read in the bath! The problem is that I have to wait usually at least 6 months for a new book to appear in paperback. Normally I can be […]

  • The Woods in Winter – Stella Gibbons

    If you know anything about Stella Gibbons, then it is probably her first novel: Cold Comfort Farm. In this book Aunt Ada Doom famously saw ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ and this experience, never explained or clarified, scarred her for life. There was indeed something ‘nasty in the woodshed’ in the early life of the […]

  • The Wisdom of Sheep and Other Animals – Rosamund Young

    This book is apparently a follow up to a first publication venture called ‘The Secret Life of Cows’ which I have not read. I might though, because I did enjoy these gentle pages telling of life on a family farm, handed down through generations. The farm is in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds and has been run […]