Review: Magpie's Nest by Clare Starling

Clare Starling

The first thing to say is that this is no eclectic bundle of poems about this, that or the other. The 27 poems in this hefty pamphlet could almost be presented as one epic poem in 27 numbered parts. They are all poetic emanations from the maelstrom of events and emotions surrounding family life in the light of the wonders, adventures and sometime challenges of living with an autistic child. 

You may find yourself returning to this chapbook many times, and depending on your mood, you might laugh at Pokémon in the Cemetery or sympathise with the passerby carrying a bunch of flowers.

At the Soyer Tomb
Grade II Listed by English Heritage
You evolved your Woobat
into a Swoobat

There are many humorous touches but it's never just one thing and it's never prosaic, every poem is heightened with sensual evocation, metaphor and other tricks of the poetic trade, but never losing a pleasing lightness of touch. This is poetry with a purpose but it's in no way perfunctory. Each poem seems to have blossomed up completely out of the blue. At another time, you might dip into a Hampstead pond, as in Effortful Swimming.

You dropped into the cold
eager as a dog

There are poems with a complex structure, such as the side-by-side feelings of "In the Dark" or the dense imagery and oddness of "Escape Room". There's frustration in "Waiting for CAMHS" and relief of a sort in "On the Threshold". There is strangeness in plenty throughout.

But the last of the feelings I would like to mention, from the myriad I could choose from if time allowed, is one I'm not sure how to describe. It comes in the poem that has its name in the second line of the last stanza.

you were so proud of me
you called me The Bee Saver
I think it was the honour of my life

"Magpie's Nest" (Wildfire Words, 2023) by Clare Starling is available for pre-order post-free within the U.K. and with reduced postage to addresses overseas.

Detachment

This film should be required viewing for people involved in education. (It is on Netflix.) It's about a temporary teacher in a secondary school that is in complete and utter chaos, where the students are violent, abusive or abused, the headmistress is on notice, and no parent comes to parent teacher evening. Our teacher, Adrien Brody, has family problems of his own. His kindness to an underage streetwalker results in him becoming a surrogate parent to her.

The film is generally very depressing with our teacher seemingly the only beacon of hope. However, if you can get past the horror and gloom, which at times is difficult enough, the film is rewarding in the end. You will have to decide for yourself where solutions to the problems lie. It seemed to me that there was too much focus on exam results rather than education for life, but that is only one viewpoint.

Ossian

Success stories: Emma Martin

A rave review for a short story collection "Two Girls in a Boat" by New Zealand author Emma Martin, who recently won the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story prize. We're proud around here that her story "Victor" was included in Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 5.

Notes from Small Wonder 2012

Small Wonder 2012: Perspectives on China
with Fang Fang and Hilary Spurling

Fang Fang was asked through an interpreter at Small Wonder if China had literary festivals and live literature like this. By the way, we were a few dozen people, maybe 150 or so, huddled shivering in a draughty barn, in the back of beyond***. Fang Fang pointed out that they recently had a festival of poetry, where they had invited several British poets and bedecked a vast railway station with hundreds of large posters featuring poems by their guests and Chinese poets.

When asked about the epigraph to her story - it was a quote from Baudelaire - and what her influences were, she said that most Chinese writers could list you eight or ten western writers and that people recited Shakespeare and so forth. She wondered how many westerners could name ten Chinese writers? I thought Fang Fang was a bit defensive, and her prose (perhaps too literally translated for us on a screen) seemed to me to be full of allegorical sideswipes about smug outsiders looking in on a complex family society. (However, that might have been all in my mind!)

Her narrator is revealed to be a dead child at one point, looking on at its surviving family. This might be connected to her description of the move from social realism, which had been condemned by the party many years ago, to the current fashion (or was it policy?) for neo-realism, which had to contain no trace of the author's feelings. She also described this as like glass realism or zero realism (but I am not quoting verbatim).

Despite the language barrier, Fang Fang managed to inject a few bits of humour. She is very prolific. They said 80 novels, but I think they might have meant novellas, it wasn't clear. It might have been the questionable literal translation but her story came over as somewhat chaotic.

Tess chatted with her in Mandarin afterwards and I said "ni hao" and "xie xie", which exhausted my usable Chinese vocabulary, as there was no call for me to count to five. Fang Fang's contribution was only half the event. The other half was Hilary Spurling talking about Pearl Buck, the subject of her latest biography. However by happy chance, Fang Fang came from the same place as Pearl Buck and had a great interest and knowledge about her, and so that conversation (through translator) was very good.

Fang Fang recalled that when people in China first saw the Hollywood film adaptation of The Good Earth, they began by wondering why people with long noses were playing the parts of Chinese peasant farmers; but then as they got into the film, they forgot about that and were amazed to see their own lives portrayed there realistically for the first time.

Despite the technical difficulties with the simultaneous translation, and the heroic efforts of the distinguished chair of the discussion  (? Jacobson) and the translator, it was a bold and timely attempt at promoting cultural exchange in the short story world. It's not before time we showed China and its people some empathy and respect, as I think they have cause to feel misunderstood, if not hard done by. I only mean in the cultural world, saying nothing here about politics, politicians or governance.

Steve Moran


Small Wonder short story festival

Fang Fang
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Fang.
"Author of the year 2011" (womenofchina.cn) 

Hilary Spurling
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Spurling
Guardian: "A Life in Writing", with reference to "Burying the Bones" her new biography of Pearl Buck 

Review

the short review: Willesden Herald New Short Stories 5

"Surprisingly for an anthology of stories selected from a wide variety of entrants, there does appear to be a unifying theme of interiority, meditation, threads of isolation and ways of dealing with grief running through the majority of these stories. What's remarkable too, is that many of these stories deal with tight, closed worlds, each world perfectly explored and described, and yet also, equally insular." (Arja Salafranca, The Short Review)

Amazon book link

Complex Messiah

nothing will save you by dean strom*

reviewed by Feargal Mooney

Arab singers start a song with a mawal, a prolonged melodic wail without words, and this book also eases into its song with a preliminary mawal lasting many pages, before settling into an almost conventional narrative. I say almost conventional, because there is very little that is conventional about "nothing will save you" and just when you think you are on solid ground, back comes the mawal and you are floating away again. I am reminded also of the ethereal chants that highlight some songs by The Beatles, namely Lovely Rita and A Day In The Life.

"nothing will save you" is a novella and collection of poems, prose poems and short stories. The eponymous novella, which occupies most of the book, is a road movie, love story, breakdown story, redemption and more, but with every element undermined at all times by its author. The story is full of surprises and jazzy variations on unexpected themes and events. We're never allowed to get too comfortable with characters, some of whom materialise and dissolve and might or might not be emanations of the narrator himself, from the screaming torture chamber of a mind in crisis.

There are evocative and unique scenes from strange sub-cultures, of native American knife-throwing while full of firewater, followed by a native American game of beating the stranger unconscious, robbing and leaving for dead, to some extreme sport that entails running over mountains and frequent injury, rickshaw drivers in New Orleans, police brutality there, gay cruising haunts in Hawaii, and what I suppose we now have to call "the queer eye for the straight guy."

Chi Chi, the narrator of this tale (who shares his name with a Waikiki beach cocktail) stays, on arrival in Honolulu, on a boat with his friend Dean (who shares his name with the author). Chi Chi through the eyes of the cruising gays is a beautiful boy - nobody believes he's straight. In some ways it's like Death in Venice from Tadzio's point of view, but it's Tadzio who's dying. The love story that started on the road, with Jenny, is strung through a sequence of exciting and bizarre events leading to Chi Chi's Honolulu sojourn, heartbreak, series of encounters around the beaches and bars, some sleazy and demoralising, some transcendant.

In the climax of the story, fuelled by alcohol, dope and firearms, the mawal of Chi Chi's inner torment returns as disintegrating prose, increasing entropy of typography, to the point of jumbled letters, and conflicting voices, wanting to speak without saying, through intwining, self-consuming thoughts turning on the impossibility of the genuine, or possibility, whether the art of speaking and writing is in the words, in the fingertips, in the initial, lost thought, until we reach a real and very frightening event.

Chi Chi subsequently wakes to a world of satire, in which redemption takes the form of publication and money, and back on the road, or rather in the air to the promised land, the shining city, and for a page or two you think, he's letting us off, we are heading for resolution, satisfaction, comfort. As if.

*nothing will save you by dean strom
Published by Pretend Genius Press. ISBN: 0974726117

Ossian

Notes from Small Wonder 2005

The Short Story Festival

Thursday

Rachel Seiffert and Tobias Hill are two excellent short story writers. Tobias read a story from his two years in Japan. Shades of Murakami I thought, and none the worse for that. I referred to Rachel Seiffert recently when I bought her collection "Field Studies" on the strength of a marvelous reading of her award-winning story "The Crossing" on Radio 4. She read an extract from "Second Best" the closing story in the book. I thought she would have done better to read one of the shorter stories in full. Interesting.

Friday

Zadie Smith read from Martha and Hanwell. She has a strong, sonorous voice and read without any sign of nerves or hesitancy. There is a relentlessness to her writing, which she almost acknowledged when she stopped, by saying 'It could go on for ever.'

Zadie stayed till the first interval of the short story slam. This year's theme was "Revenge". I thought the first group were the best, including Sean Lusk's piece which nearly won it for him again this year. His comical massage parlour nightmare had the audience in stitches but in the end took second place to a wicked "hell hath no fury" piece Thump Sandwich by Tessa Sheridan, which proposed new uses for kitchen utensils. It was great fun, but even though they managed to fit 18 entrants by the end, my name never came out of the hat. I think mine would've been the only political piece; you can read it below.

Saturday

William Boyd's story "Seven Lunches" was highly amusing, though his commentary put me in mind of an uncle who knows all about cars or electronics and likes to explain this to you. He expounded his thesis that the short story is a better subject for film adaptation than the novel, the length of a standard film being what it is. My companion fell asleep during his talk, but to be fair to Boyd, she fell asleep during most of the readings.

John McGahern made a great impression on people in the audience who didn't already know that he's one of the best writers around. On the question of whether people recognised themselves in his books, he said that when he had portrayed a little man who sat on the bar all day and talked about sex and football (in The Pornographer I think, not sure) six people had gone into the local solicitors to enquire about the feasibility of suing him. The solicitor told them if they were to have any chance of success they'd have to decide which one of them it was. McGahern's conclusion: there must be a lot of people in North Roscommon who sit on the bar all day talking about sex and football.

Sunday

Grace Paley was too ill to attend, had to cancel at the last minute, but had been so looking forward to the event that she took the trouble to make a video, taken by her daughter, to talk to the audience. It was the highlight of the festival, she is a life force all right.

Her recollection of segregation and relating of it to her own black grandson was wonderful. She recalled two bus trips from New York to southern states, one in which her mother had refused to move to the front when they crossed into a segregated state, where blacks had to sit in the back of the bus. In a depiction of this incident she had written that her mother argued with the driver, but her sister later informed her that her mother had merely said 'No' firmly, three times. We were reminded about the disgrace of black soldiers in the second world war being forced to sit behind German prisoners on buses.

Grace Paley's parents had fled the Russian pogroms, and the irony of this manifestation of racism in the so-called "land of the free" was brought home to her when she made her own bus trip south. As before when they crossed the state line the segregation was implemented, and she was sitting at the front of the boundary with the back of the bus. The bus was crowded and a black woman carrying a young boy, heavy and asleep hanging from her neck, wouldn't take the seat but through exhaustion agreed to let her child rest on Grace Paley's lap. At just 21 she thought ahead to when she would have a child of her own, feeling that same weight comfortably pressing her down. At the end of the journey a white man turned to Grace and said, 'I wouldn't have touched that thing with a meat hook.' Later in life, she felt that she'd already held her own black grandson sixty years earlier.

The boy appears briefly as people and dogs come and go in this home video. I hope the video will be seen more widely, it's fascinating and touching. Ali Smith and Paul Bailey talked about her and read from her stories, and she read her story "A Conversation with My Father" as well on video. Grace Paley is that rare thing, a U.S. socialist. Before saying goodbye, she referred to our shared opposition to the war in Iraq and the thousands of deaths it has caused.

The cherry on the icing of the festival was Simon Callow, who brought two of Charles Dickens' short stories ("Going into Society" and "Doctor Marigold") to life, in a tour-de-force performance. We were reminded that Dickens was not just an author but a performer, a superstar of his day. The stories amply demonstrated his mastery of an audience, by turns making them laugh and cry.

Postscript

There were other delights I hardly have time to write about, such as poets on short stories, including a surreal story by Sean O'Brien satirising the literary scene. (In spite of the title of this piece, I didn't actually take notes, only mental notes.) There were crowd pleasing pieces by Romesh Gunasekera and Sophie Hannah - hilarious story about babies writing thank you cards etc, and killingly logical poem telling men to take one of these things and do it properly: fidelity or an affair (halfway through affair, man goes on guilt trip about family... "not very good at it / but at fidelity, you are also shit. Choose one thing and do it properly..." something like that.)

In the same session, the refreshingly serious David Constantine read from his collection Under the Dam, concerning frozen bodies exposed by melting glaciers - held in youth, revisited by children now older than the dead - with all the pent-up deluge waiting in valleys to burst out and so on. Constantine talked about the supremacy of life over art, how all writing must end as pointers outwards or inwards towards reality, and never to forget that, or try to place art above life, or try "to contain" perhaps. (I can't remember his exact words.) Sean O'Brien commented afterwards that by contrast, his writing concerned people who held art to be above life and who in his surreal world prefer to live in books and libraries.

I couldn't make it to Ian Rankin's reading, unfortunately. You can see from the program that I also missed several other interesting writers.

More

Ossian

Favourite New Yorker stories etc.

My subscription ended in February after three years, but here is my list of favourite short stories from those years. I posted this message (more or less) on the New Yorker forum, but it's dead as a doornail over there.

A House on the Plains by E. L. Doctorow
A tour de force by the author of Ragtime and many more.

What is Remembered by Alice Munro
One of three in one issue by the high priestess of slow burn short fiction.

The Performance by Arthur Miller
This concerns a vaudeville tap dancer with a troupe touring Europe at the end of the 1930's, when he receives an invitation that will end up testing everything he believes in. It's fascinating how Arthur Miller, even in his fiction introduces elements of drama. Note how the narrator plays the part of somebody "in the audience" with us. Great.

The Thing in the Forest by A. S. Byatt
A massively talented writer. If only she'd use her talents for good instead of evil. Haha.

The Trouble with Mrs Blynn, The Trouble with the World by Patricia Highsmith
Great one. One of the few that are not shown online though.

My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age by Grace Paley
Funny and compelling.

Sacred Statues by William Trevor
Coarser woven but just as high quality fabric as McGahern's. McGahern is up there in the stratosphere, thirteen years for his latest novel, a book mined from living flesh. Trevor is circling with the eagles just below the cliff edge. (Where are the McGahern stories? He used to be a prolific short story writer. His Collected Stories is a huge volume. Maybe he's not writing short stories, but at least Granta had an excerpt from "That They May Face The Rising Sun.")

The Obscure Object by Jeffrey Eugenides
The best and juiciest bit from the subsequent novel Middlesex. Reviewers on BBC Newsnight Review complained the novel didn't start till chapter N (13, I think). I could've told them - this is the chapter they were referring to.

Already We Knew Nothing - by Dave Eggers
A sort of literary Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. This is youthful and vaguely infuriatingly shallow until you realise that it is really being satirical and by the end it is beginning to dawn on the guys that the world is not what they expected it to be.

Safety Procedures - Nadine Gordimer
Surprisingly ordinary but good enough story by the Nobel prize winner. Could be subtitled Fear of Flying.

The Ocean - Frederik Reiken
This is a beautiful rites-of-passage story, first love at age thirteen against a background of diving on coral reefs. One of my all-time favourites.

Baby Wilson - E. L. Doctorow
Your girlfriend has always been a little crazy. Then one day she walks in with a newborn baby. The only problem is, she wasn't pregnant. You might not decide to drive across America with them while thinking what to do, but then there would be no story.

Travis, B - Maile Meloy
Damn, who is this guy! (Actually it's a gal.) Brilliant. This is a great little love story. It's one of those bleak plains, empty roads, snowy stories.

The Bare Manuscript by Arthur Miller
A writer enjoys early success and romance, but when his marriage and his writing both dry up he finds an unusual way to revive his muse. He places an advert and finds a woman who will let him write all over her.

Summer of the Hot Tubs by Annie Proulx
I hope places like Elk Tooth really exist. (My US friends confirm they do.) Proulx country. A real rib-tickler.

The Fruit Cage by Julian Barnes
All is not as it seems in the black comedy that unfolds, in the heart of darkest England. Funny, surprising and very English.

Sitting with the Dead by William Trevor
Superb trademark rural inscapes.

Bulldog by Arthur Miller
One of the best. A kid buying a puppy from a woman gets more than he bargained for.

Touched by Hanif Kureishi
A classic of its kind by the best British short story writer around, in my opinion.

A Bit on the Side by William Trevor
London office affairs - some of you might relate to this.

Our House by Martin Roper
Dublin household cross-religion blues - wistful.

A Poor-Aunt Story by Haruki Murakami
Amusing. Everyone has a poor aunt, but not like this.

Visiting George by Nadine Gordimer
Short short & poetic. London streets.

Justina's Priest by William Trevor
Touching. Masterful. One almost to restore your faith in religion.

A Boy in the Forest by Edna O'Brien
It's the Brothers again / meets The Butcher Boy. A nightmare. Subsequently part of a novel.

An Unfair Question by Sam Shepard
Horrifically funny party nightmare.

The High Divide - by Charles D'Ambrosio.
Camping seems to play a large part in the lives of some American writers.

Red from Green - by Maile Meloy.
An interesting comparison, camping from a feminine perspective.

Both of the above are brilliant stories in the tradition of Salinger's youth versus the phoniness of the older generation.

Bohemia by V. S. Naipaul
Essential reading for London dwellers. Pity he's turned snob, and misanthropist in old age.

Harvey's Dream by Stephen King
King happens to be a very good short story writer. Also worth reading the New Yorker article On Impact, his vivid account of the day and the accident that nearly killed him, what he thought of the person responsible for it, and how he started writing again.

The Surrogate by Tessa Hadley
Tres amusant as they say, esp. reading from England.

Recuperation - by Roddy Doyle
This is interesting. The rhythm of a daily walk. Easy to read, unusual format, a little repetitive at first, but mirroring an awful emptiness that threatens to engulf us. It's not without its highlights and even a shot of redemption. Well worth a read.

I should also add:
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner by Roddy Doyle
I think I've remembered that name right - same as the film (?) Anyway it was great too. I sometimes worry that he might be exploiting Dubliners rather than representing them. Perhaps I am too close to his target. I feel I'm inside looking out, while he is outside looking in.

Another Roddy Doyle one, recent, can't remember the name of it. As good as the others, better maybe. The whole story seems to cover just the moment when a man decides to say something or not, to rise from his armchair halfway, maybe refuse his wife's request, maybe make waves, and in following his thoughts we get a picture of their entire existence, their relationships, what they've lost - all in a moment.

In The Palace of the End by Martin Amis
Brilliant and apposite account of torturers in some place like Iraq. This story is not online at the New Yorker. It subsequently appeared in Guardian Online.

Long Ago Yesterday by Hanif Kureishi
Kureishi on great form - man I just love his writing, though personally he's not at all winsome, quite the reverse - writing about a son who meets the ghost of his father when they are both middle-aged. Another great one. Look for Kureishi's book "My Head to his Heart" an excerpt from which is on Guardian Online.

I almost forgot to mention the exceptionally wonderful Gogol by Jhumpa Lahiri (later a novel) and the spectacularly great debut by Nell Freudenberger, and just as good follow-up story (collected in the Orange Award nominated, Lucky Girls).

But wait. Why no stories by David Means, Irvine Welsh, James Hamilton Paterson, Edmund White, Garrison Keillor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez ... or did I miss them?

I also miss the New Yorker's peerless non-fiction articles. I'm thinking especially of Jonathan Franzen's piece 'My Father's Brain' and many more, too many to list or ever recall, about everything from Abu Ghraib to Shad to Wodehouse. Oh and the poems, Heaney, Milosz, Kinnell (especially his epic about the twin towers) and Zagajewski - who can forget his back page poem in its context, Try to Praise the Mutilated World.

Ossian

Review of The London Silence

From: Attacking the Demi-Puppets



"We see [...] not a development into maturity, but a regression from confusion into the comforts of ignorance. This gives the collection a growing impact of depression, as if the world is so overwhelming the character wants to go backward. It's harshly realistic about the fate of young people who don't come from a glowing Cozzens or Fitzgerald background."

Ossian

Adventures in publishing

Preethi Nair is famous for a publishing coup with her first book. She told us all about it at a reading in Willesden Library Centre last week.

She had been working in the city and writing in spare time on her way to work every day. When she finished the last chapter of Gypsy Masala she couldn't wait to get away from her boring job so she told her boss she was quitting to be a writer. She couldn't tell her family because they were an old-fashioned Indian family who had all sorts of plans for her, so she put on a suit and went out every day as if going to work.

She sent copies of her manuscript out to publishers and as they bounced back or were ignored it dawned on her that she was in trouble. She decided to invest ten thousand pounds and self-publish the book, planning a complete publicity campaign, printing and launch.

She invented a publishing company, Ninefish, and started phoning newspapers as "Pru", a pushy publicist, canvassing interviews for Preethi Nair whose book "they were going to publish." Then she would talk to them in her own voice as Preethi Nair. It worked. Interest was stirred.

Preethi went to a printer and arranged for 3,000 copies to be printed and available as of a certain date. She was able to arrange a TV interview for the week of the launch. Somebody phoned from her hometown to tell her the books had been delivered. So she rushed home from London to a room full of books. When she opened the first one she found (yes, to her horror) that page 179 was blank, completely blank - and it wasn't supposed to be.

The printer said it was his fault but it would take 2 months till he would be able to reprint the books. So she told him to print three thousand copies of page 179 and send them to her right away, and she sat and glued the missing page into every one of the books.

TV interview. Great. All about the book. It was only when the interviewer asked her where viewers could obtain copies of her book that she realised she had completely overlooked the issue of distribution. She had thought that by telling distribution companies her book was available, it would find its way somehow into shops . It doesn't work like that.

You gotta love this writer. She set out to visit every bookshop in London. Every day she went out with a suitcase full of books, saying 'I'm Preethi Nair, will you take a few.' 200 bookshops. It had been over two years since she'd finished writing the book.

One day she went back to a bookshop in Finchley Road to find Gypsy Masala was on the second shelf in a top ten display, above Booker nominees etc. She thought it was some mistake, or because her book was the right size to fit there or something, but no, she had a local hit.

It was about this time that the story of her fake publishing company got out, and it was featured on page three of the London Evening Standard. "Pru" had been shortlisted for the PPC Publicist of the Year Award, but her cover was blown -- it was Preethi all along. The publicity turned a local hit into one that sold 3,000 copies each from about 40 more bookshops, which is a lot of books (as she said.)

There was a contretemps at this point. The fuel protest blockades started here, and trucks couldn't pick up her books from the printers and distribute them. The moment was lost. As she told us, once the story goes cold like that you're old news and nobody wants to know anymore.

Preethi doesn't write every day nine to five or anything like that. Somebody lent her a cottage in the country and she went away to write a new novel. By this time she had an agent who gave her helpful feedback chapter by chapter and encouragement. Preethi completed the novel in six weeks, expressing all the pent-up feelings and stories from the past two and a half years in a fictionalised version of her own publishing adventure, Beyond Indigo.

After a bidding war, the novel was sold to Harper Collins and they gave her a deal. Part of the deal was for her to rework Gypsy Masala and the result was 100 Shades of White. I have a signed copy here. There are echoes in it of Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things. For one thing they both originate from Kerala in Southern India. More good news for the author, the BBC is going to make a mini-series from it.

Ossian

Books could be written about The Key, a new 3-part serial by Donna Franceschild. Having attended a special preview at BAFTA last night, I believe it will become a classic of television drama. In her introduction the author congratulated the BBC on supporting this project. Somebody from the BBC contacted the author by phone and asked if she would like to do a young girl coming of age story. She responded by saying something to the effect of, "How about if I do a three-part series covering the social and political background and the history of the 20th century, that explains the factors leading up to the story of the girl and her situation?" The producer said, "Ok, leave it with me." (That was the author's jocular paraphrase of the conversation.) The four years consisted of one year to get the go-ahead, one year of research, one year of writing, and one year of production.



The Key is a brilliant portrayal of the effects of politics on ordinary families, and the effect that ordinary people can have on policy when they stand "the gither." That is the accompaniment, the obligado, the orchestra (and there is a beautiful score played by the BBC Concert Orchestra) but the melody is the personal journey of Jessie, one of the two granddaughters, and her sister, played by Ronni Ancona who is about to become a New Labour MP, and in the process is put under pressure to quite literally betray her own grandmother and everything she stood for. Jessie is writing a story called The Key, about her grandmother, who always wore a key as a pendant on her neck. You'll have to watch BBC2 this September to find out why.



The Key (press release - pdf)

Ossian