1 February
I received an email from Sam1 (Russia) in a Moscow hospital. His whole family has gone down with COVID. The others are coping with it at home, but he was rapidly losing lung capacity and had to be admitted to hospital. He has been there five days, responded well to treatment, and been told he will be able to go home soon.
What a relief. As Chekhov put it, ‘Russian life beats a man till not a damp mark remains’. Sam1 (Russia) has had such a basinful in his life, most of it lived under Communism, that it’s hardly surprising he has underlying health issues at the age of 75. They must have made him more vulnerable, as he had taken stringent precautions not to catch COVID.
Other sources tell me that most Russians are instinctively wary of their government’s vaccine ‘Sputnik’, so won’t have it, and whereas the official figure for deaths from Black Crow across the country is 57,000, unofficially it’s nearing half a million.
8 February
The first in my series of guest posts about D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love has gone out today — John Pym’s critical look at Ken Russell’s 1969 film version of the novel.
‘Excited’ is somewhat over-used these days, but it would certainly be true to say that I am ‘suspensed’. Lawrence, I hope, is still contentious, this novel particularly, and the demographic of Calderonia is such that probably half of our subscribers saw the film when it came out. I have read all three guest posts, of course, and each is very different and admirably challenging. Moreover, we have all put a lot of time into contacting people who might be aroused into Commenting.
Without Comments, is it worth carrying on with Calderonia? Every few months, I ask myself whether, after seven years, it’s time to bring it to a graceful end.
Its original purpose was to raise awareness of George Calderon and the fact that I was writing the first full-length biography of him. That phase lasted nearly four years till the biography came out in 2018, but thank goodness I took Andrew Tatham‘s passionate advice to continue the blog as a marketing tool. In the first week after publication we sold 50 copies to subscribers to the blog, and we have now shifted 65% of the imprint. Next April, all being well, we shall at last be able to have our Sam&Sam stall at the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies international conference in Cambridge, after which I expect to have more or less sold out. I have decided, then, to continue with Calderonia until at least this time next year.
— As long as I can still find things to blog about and people still leave Comments!
14 February
I’ve just received this photo from Sam1 (Russia), proving that he is alive and back home (in the country outside Moscow). He looks groggy, but is evidently well protected:
He tells me that for the first few days he was so tired he could hardly walk. When he finally went just outside the back door he looked at the thermometer and it showed -30 C. This is unusual in a Russian winter these days, as is the amount of snow they have had. Even the starlings, I am told, no longer fly south for the winter, as they can survive on the heat and food generated by city rubbish tips.
Sam1 (Russia) has completed two books during self-imposed lockdown. I think the first will be a Sam&Sam production, the second published by a Russian firm. It delights me that we — Sam1 (UK) and Sam2 (UK) — have now been able to assemble in Cambridge copies of all Russian and English Sam&Sam titles still available, provide them with summaries, and offer them at https://www.samandsam.co.uk/
March
Our guest posts on Women in Love have had very good viewing figures and a spinoff for me has been re-reading Lawrence’s stories ‘The Ladybird’, ‘The Fox’ and ‘The Captain’s Doll’, as well as reading ‘The Man Who Died’ and a fair chunk of Blake. The clash, interplay, modulation, call it what you will, of Comments, has been magnificent.
But my main activity this month has been typing up, editing and re-editing a selection of entries from the diary my mother (1920-2009) wrote after recovering from a stroke in 2002. It left her with only 20% of her language faculty, but after two years of NHS therapy that had increased to 89%. Part of the therapy was to write a diary — which she had never done in her life before (she had found the whole idea boring). To begin with she needed more than an hour to write a few lines, but gradually the diary took off and she wrote 335,000 words over five years!
The idea of Edna’s Diary: Writing again after Stroke (a pocket-sized book of 40-odd pages and costing no more than £4) grew out of an invitation I had from Harvey Pitcher to give a talk to Cromer Stroke Club in 2013. I spoke about, and read from, the memoirs that my mother had written in her seventies, and just touched on her post-stroke diary. In next to no time, I was invited to give the talk to five other stroke clubs in East Anglia. Realising that it was precisely the diary that was of most interest to stroke-survivors, I got up a talk devoted to it, and set off around the stroke clubs again.
Finally, the penny dropped that not only was my mother’s diary entertaining, but a little book of selections from it, with an introduction, could encourage aphasia sufferers to have a go and improve their communication skills this way. The obvious people to print such a book are Amazon. Sam2 (UK) suggested that we donate our income from the book to the Stroke Association, which was a very good idea, and we were off. The official publication day is 10 June 2021.
In January I started working on the selection from those 335,000 words; this has been the most difficult bit. It has gone through countless variations. There were other issues too, such as changing the names of most people mentioned in my mother’s diary, but getting permission from the descendants of her closest friends to leave their names untouched. By the middle of March I was able to hand the book over to Sam2 (UK) for typesetting.
To my mind, there is everything in these diaries from pathos and politics to flowers and farce, and the shortness of the extracts is a strength. My mother could also be wry and very frank, but it does no harm to shake readers up occasionally. Here are four examples of the extracts (spelling and punctuation unchanged):
10th June 2006. My eighty-sixth birthday. Patrick did the shopping and met Muriel at the Co-op, so they came home together in her car. She is the same age as me. In the window of her car she has a sticker that says: ‘Better an old fart than a young dickhead!’
1st March 2005. At 12.15 I went to Age Concern for lunch. Geoffrey and Mary were there, and Richard. Richard doesn’t usually sit with us. He is a small man with a humpback. He lives on his own. He has epilepsy. During lunch he had two small spasms, and fell, dropping his lunch over the table. He said he would clear it up, but Geoffrey knew that Richard would find it very difficult. I used to think Geoffrey a bit stuck up. But I must say I admired how quickly quietly he managed the situation.
26th December 2004. Everyone enjoyed the Boxing Day meal. N.B. I was quite surprised about Roderick. He has expanded so much. He eats more than his wife and brother and is rather round. He says he does not drink alacocohol, but he made a hole in the brandy butter and trifle.
8th November 2006. The doctor came to see me about 4 p.m. He had a red face. I suspect he has High Blood Pressure.
5th November 2008. Today History was made because the first black man was elected President of the United States. His name is Barack Obama.
20 April
People are understandably divided about Amazon (see 22 May 2020: James Bloodworth), and I keep a weather eye on its practices and ethics. I even wonder whether it will eventually collapse under the weight of its own expansion into so many areas of our lives, including publishing. In the meantime, however, I really have nothing but praise for how Amazon facilitates indie publishing (so far only in paperback).
You bear the cost of typesetting the book, but thereafter the Amazon deal is excellent, in my experience. You can order from them as many proofs as you like (at a nominal price plus postage) until you have got it as you want and give them the green light for actual publication. Then you get all the benefits of their marketing and sales, whilst reaping around 25% of the sale price of your book.
This was our very first go at the back cover. The somewhat strange-looking space in the bottom right is where Amazon puts on the barcode, so it needs to be kept clear of anything ‘important’! — Sam2
As Sam2 (UK) has explained, the above was our first attempt at the back cover. Amazon then put in their rather large barcode panel and we discovered we would have to cut down the text on the back cover as well as enlarge the font. We did that, tweaked the colour and background, as well as certain things on the front cover, ten days ago, but are still waiting for the second proof. That’s the only downside: you can’t predict how quickly such a huge organisation will respond. But they do communicate: we heard two days ago that the second proof will be with us by the end of this week. That will be fine, as the plan is to get copies out to the Stroke Association in May ready for Aphasia Awareness Month, June.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
I’m certainly going to buy & read Edna’s Diary! Thanks for writing the blog.
Wonderful to hear from you again, Jenny. Thank you so much!
A rather more youthful book on the recovery from stroke was written by a school contemporary of mine, Robert McCrum, My Year Off: Recovering Life After a Stroke, published in 1998.
Thank you very much for telling me this, Philip (and greetings!). I met McCrum in Cambridge a long time ago (he is the originator of the phrase ‘muesli belt’ to describe a quartier of the city) and I did not know that he had since had a stroke and written this book. I intend to read it. There is quite a history of stroke in my family, and I have been closely involved in the care of two members, so I am very interested in the subject (and avoiding it). I assume that Robert, like Monty Don and others who suffered stroke whilst relatively young, made a complete recovery. My mother was fortunate that at the time the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate had the best-rated Stroke Unit in the country. She got there within half an hour of having the stroke, and suffered very little permanent physical disability. The response from the stroke clubs I spoke to, in the wake of my mother’s death seven years later from unrelated causes, was incredibly therapeutic.