Status Updates From Coots in the North & other ...

'It is the world which was about to explode with the fall of the Tsar, and then endure the horrors of civil war and forced collectivisation. It is full of the pressure of a bad time'

Ankou is a story of Death in Brittany and three old men wondering who of them will be the last to die that year, and so Death personified in their village for the next year.

The Shepherd's Pipe is very much a grown-up tale, with human cruelty and carelessness in a Russian village.

The Cloudburst is to my mind a typical Ransome tale: It is a slice of every day life, with perfectly believable, capable children dealing with a scary situation the best way they know how, helping each other.

Apparently this no-teaching-on-Wednesday-afternoon is a wider British phenomenon than I was aware of: in the little Lakeland school of "The River Comes First" it is also the rule.

Introduction to Arthur Ransome, the storyteller, though the author thinks most people picking up this book won't need it.

"That old cruiser's going to see something," said Joe. He called her old that the paint was hardly dry on her, not because he did not know she was new but because he was a Norfolk boy who would talk of "that old cake" even if it was still warm from the oven.

I'm more than a little weirded out by the casualness of the change from "Taqui Altounyan" (the real Anglo-Armenian daughter of a Syrian hospital manager) to "John Walker", her fictional counterpart (the Anglo-Australian son of a British Navy officer).