My Lock & Key

Majella Kelly "The Speculations of Country People" (Penguin)




Majella Kelly's debut collection of poems deals with various aspects of life in contemporary Ireland — the shifting roles of women, changing relationships with the land and with myth, the island's flora and fauna. Many of these poems reckon with the sordid history of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home and the women and children incarcerated there in the mid-20th century—particularly moving and saddening to read in the week when the excavations at the Home's mass grave begins.

Kelly's imagery is lucid and beautiful, and I found myself unexpectedly entranced by the poems where she shows us her young self, trailing her grandfather and his High Nelly around his farm. There were a handful of places where she fell into the easy cliché — the matriarchal pagan power of pre-Christian Ireland and Brigit the Goddess being displaced by Patrick and yadda yadda; I know these are still ideas with a lot of popular sway but on the whole I really enjoyed this. I will keep an eye out for more of Kelly's work in future.

Bill Bryson "A Walk in the Woods" (Black Swan)





A Walk in the Woods opens with the author and his family moved back to the US, settling in New Hampshire. The author, never having attempted true, rugged hiking, becomes enamored with the idea of taking on the Appalachian Trail. This famous trail begins at Springer Mountain, Georgia and extends an astonishingly 2,000 (arguably more) miles to end in Maine at Mount Katahdin. Bryson’s journey actually begins when he finds himself and his credit card gearing up for the endeavour while also trying to lure friends from far and wide to join him on the excursion.

Katz, a former friend from childhood days in Iowa, answers the call for companionship. The reader is shocked when he appears out of shape and overweight with a dubious past – one cannot help but marvel (and giggle) at the contrast between the two men as they struggle with themselves, each other, and the famous hiking trail. Along the way, the reader meets other characters who become memorable despite their short stays; such as Chicken John the habitually lost hiker and Mary Ellen with the musical eustachian tubes. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

Bryson has an uncanny knack for mixing humour with sobering facts. A Walk in the Woods finds the author blatantly honest about his own foibles, and those of others while attempting to hike the legendary Appalachian Trail. All the while he continues his commentary on deforestation, the US Parks & Wildlife service, and human ineptness in general. At 397 pages the book is more than a weekend read and may require some patience when reading through the author’s many elaborations on the danger we, as clumsy humans, pose to nature. Though the work was published in 2006 it is more relevant than ever both in consideration of climate change, as well as man’s desire to conquer even a small span of wilderness.

Maggie Harris is a poet, prose writer, and visual artist. Originally from Guyana, South America, she recently re-located to Kent after 10 years in Wales. She attended Kent University as a mature student, achieving a BA and MA, and started her career performing, running workshops and teaching creative writing. She has worked for Kent Arts & Libraries, represented Kent in Europe and was International Teaching Fellow at Southampton University. I met her doing a talk and book signing at last years Faversham Literary Festival.



Maggie Harris pays homeage to the inspirational power of the poetry art form with this track titled, Not A Gospel Song. The sound fuses elements of Afrobeats, the Cumfa beat and the tabla strains of a Bhajan with the unmistakable Reggae vibe.



ENJOY.

Curiosity is one of my most defining attributes in the musicological diaspora of curating and the immersive enjoyment that it provides.

Connecting with likeminded people via a forum or website adds to the enhancementt of one's musical journey.

Such a website is Now Spinning Magazine, which is an online forum and site dedicated to the physical product. No streaming or downloading is include, since these aren't tangable. You don't own the music there, you rent it.

This morning, whilst doing the chores of hoovering and son on, I blasted oot some deep slow heavy doom metal by Sunn 0))) - a perfect antidote to the tedium of chores.

I had an Angus beef and caramalised onion sarnie for lunch with a Scotch egg on the side. I listened to the dulcit tones of Sarah Vaughan from one of the Brazilian albums she made late in her career.

I followed this with three Cds from the recent Ian Dury box set and then towards the evening I dug out four albums from my Bill Fay collection. Bill Fay (9 September 1943 – 22 February 2025) was an English singer-songwriter. His early recordings were released by Deram, but following the release of his second album in 1971, Fay was dropped by the label. His work enjoyed a growing cult status in the 1990s, and his older works were re-issued in 1998 and 2004–2005. Fay's 2012 album Life Is People was his first album of all-new material since 1971.
Bill said, learning of his cult status, "Up until 1998, when some people reissued my albums, as far as I was concerned, I was gone, deleted. No one was listening. But then I got the shock that people remembered my music. I was doing some gardening, and listening to some of my songs on cassette, and a part of me thought they were quite good. I thought, "Maybe somebody will hear them someday." That same evening, 14 years ago, I got a call from a music writer telling me that my two albums were being reissued. A shock is not gonna get much bigger than that. It was astonishing to me. I won't ever really be able to believe that it happened. That's how I feel about it. I had come to terms with the fact that I was deleted, but that I had always kept writing songs anyway and that was good enough".
"Who Is the Sender?" was a new album by Bill Fay and released in April 2015. The second album track, "War Machine", came out as a single in February 2015. It nudged the charts but the album did well.
I just need to obtain two more of his albums to complete the section, his second album and the one before Who Is The Sender. Both should be able to find without difficulty, and like the others I have by Bill will be on CD.

Josephine Tey "The Man in the Queue" (Pushkin Vertigo)




On the plus side, the writing is descriptive and sometimes lovely, both of which are surprising in a detective story. For instance, Inspector Grant sees laundry hanging to dry in a poor neighborhood: “Here and there a line of gay, motley child’s clothes danced and ballooned with the breeze in a necklace of coloured laughter.”

The book gets off to a slightly sluggish start, ameliorated by atmospheric descriptions of the rituals and entertainments associated with the process of patiently queuing in the rain in hope of gaining a theatre seat.

On the minus side, it’s rather dated in its social attitudes. Just by seeing the murder weapon, Inspector Grant draws this conclusion: “This was a crime that had been planned with an ingenuity and executed with a subtlety that was foreign to an Englishman’s habit of thought. The very femininity of it proclaimed the Levant, or at the very least one used to Levantine habits of life.”

On the plus side again, it’s a clever and engaging story, if one makes allowances for the ways it’s dated, and it is a colourful depiction of a time and place. Looking up some of the obsolete colloquialisms was part of the fun.