Fairytale Garden? Wealden Hall house for sale

These are just a few of  the plants through the seasons in this, to us at least, lovely garden.

I thought I’d share, with these links to slide shows, a view through the seasons.

We hope you all like our house and garden.
It was featured last week in Sunday Times ‘Houses of the Week’and this weekend in the Telegraph ‘Charming Country cottages under £500,000’

Here are the links.

House blog page 1 - house

page 2 - history

page 3 - garden May

page 4 - surroundings

page 5 - garden extra June

House slide show

General Garden slide show

Colours through the seasons

Garden slide show May

Garden Slide show June

Surroundings slide show landscapes

“Voici la Plume de ma Tante...”

   In that curious state of wakeful sleep as images of dream are replaced by mundane consciousness, this phrase from my early childhood surfaced, together with images of a letter written by my favourite aunt, Dora (and we all did, as children, adore her), when she was a child, in the days when the art of letter-writing existed, even to be enjoyed by children.
   This much derided title quote, exemplar of rote, finds another meaning in the care and loving attention given here to a simple letter written to her older sister who had just left home for an hotel in London.

   So, in homage to her and that art, I present in full that letter (and some examples of her character, below):

Transcription of the text, below (or click to blow up pictures)

   If you have read this letter in full, you may see, even then, the infectious wit and sparkle that she carried with her, like a fairy godmother, all her days.
   As an old lady, she had only to enter a room full of random children and, despite her decrepitude and deformities, the patterns of attraction were as palpable as the re-reordering of iron filings in the presence of a magnet.
   Within minutes of sitting down she would be surrounded by eager children, listening to her hundred tales and witticisms, oblivious to to any physical fault by which an adult might judge her, fascinated by her laughing eyes and infectious chuckle.
   When the three sisters, Ruth (to whom this letter was addressed and who treasured it enough that I have it today), Dora and Mary (my mother, one of the small nonsenses of this letter) were together, hysteria swept through the house, bowling over any pretence of decorum such that even my father had to put away seriousness and the morning’s paper-reading (a sacrosanct hour that brooked no interruption).
   Two instances of that character spring immediately to mind, both shocking and a little comic.
   When her husband, Malcolm, an accountant with a kleptomania for documents to the point where their dining room could no longer be used, being piled with old newspapers, files and papers of no longer determinate provenance, on the bureau, under the table, on top of the table, seated on the chairs and lining the walls to the ceiling, died, we attended his funeral, staying at their house the night before.
   That morning, after stoking the old coal-fired boiler, preparing the breakfast and ourselves to receive the pall-bearers, come to collect the coffin, we filled in the time with Dora recounting stories of their lives together such that, when these drab top-hatted gentlemen came soberly knocking, the door was opened to the scene of a family in hysterics, to which the look on their faces merely added another fit.
   Later, after the funeral in a church packed with what appeared to be half the town’s population (he was a man of good works), we repaired to an hotel nearby for the wake.
   A suitably sad-looking lady of her acquaintance appeared, to offer her deepest condolences and sympathy, to which my dear old aunty retorted, “ Nonsense! I’m glad he’s dead.” Observing the shock on the faces of that lady and all around, she added, in her inimitable fashion: “You see, when you have loved someone as deeply and as long as I have, you cannot bear to them suffer so. His passing was a mercy.”
   Again, after continuing to manage for years alone in their house, she had a serious fall, cracking her hip and was hospitalized. On discovering her age, condition and circumstance, her doctors decided that she must, on leaving, repair to an old people’s home where she could be properly ‘taken care of.’
  On hearing this,old auntie was heard to say, “No one is going to put me in kennels,” and she, returning as we do to our origins, promptly set about dying, ‘toute suite!’

Transcript.
P1.
Dear Ruth,
   How are you getting on hope you are enjoying yourself  I am having a rotten time or am about to.
   The “Chinley Brigade” are going to swoop down on us on Thursday.
   On Monday I was going to have had Iris to-tea and play tennis she is (was) otherwise engaged worse luck and Mary is having two small nonsenses to tea.
   On Thursday as you know was the eventful day of the drawing exams.
   As soon as I got (to) school I was called for Division V and I was
P2.
drawing all morning till quarter past twelve and I mist an hours Arithmetic with MIss Glover.
   As soon as I got to school in the afternoon all the kids in the West-room and Hall started shouting “many happy returns of the day” at my bewildered self  then Marjorie Sibald and another kid told me Miss Norbury wanted me and after trying to find Miss Norbury in vain I went upstairs the the classroom just as the second bell went.
   There sat Miss Glover’s green eyes staring at me. just as she was about give me lectures for being late for a Arith lesson someone dragged me out into the landing where stood Mis Lockyear and “Daubs” beaming and smiling all over and praising my Division V Paper which they had handed
P3.
nearly all over the school.
   The “Daubs” spotted me and told me run and get my Bonny Prince Charlie for her to see, and after showing me a few faults which I corrected she told me to get my pencils and “Glovey” glared and asked me if I was going to exam  I said yes and she flew into a passion and shouted Git-tart,! Git-tart! Git-tart.! So I flew.
   Well Division VI came off spiffingly “I was pleased with myself”
   When all the girls had finished except Jean Trenfield and I they all crowded round my desk with Ohs! and Ahs!  that Miss Levy had to shout before they would clear off
P4.
even “Daubs” praised it
   And ‘Locky’ said I was sure of honnours in both V and VI.
   “And as Fate will have it” being dead against the Millers I went and did the same Memory and the work there.drawing in both my papers which is not allowed (unknown to me) and this means that I am disqualified from both Divisions and so I have failed. “I could just weep”
   How did you like the “Lilac Time.” I suppose you’ll come home, talking à Londre, dressing à Londre, and behaving absolutely in an à Londrerish fashion.
   Donald’s bringing a sort of foreign apparatus from the Office to have tea with us on Sunday and is taking it out in the car  Molly Costines coming as well  Mercy! but Auntie’s the limit  she is forever shouting about the work here
P5.
and the work there.
   I walked to school with Pat and Marjorie on Friday morning and Marjorie told me to tell you she had actually got one sum right whilst you are away {“getting quite clever is she not”?) I may as well tell I am in the soup about Extra Arith myself and my French! Well its quite a nice little language all by itself. He! He! He! You should seen it.
   It was supposed to be about a day on the river and I spent my time getting there really only got on the river in the last sentence.
   Last night I had a dream and it was most extraordinary Stewart Rome, Ivo Novello, Rudolph Valentino, Owen Nare(s) and Herbert or Dick Kay you know the one with the brown suit well all these persons were seated at tables each posing
P6.
and trying to look sad and I think the brown suited Kay boy was easily the best He! He! if you had only seen him.
   Our room is finished at last. I also dreamt that Steve Linch gave me a fright with his horse and came and talked to me  he is awfully mice if he is the same in real live (a double meaning.)
   Well I shall have to stop as Auntie is getting beyond endurance  with love from
   ‘Wee Leon’.

P.S. We’ve got to go to Miss Rider’s house for our lessons on Saturdays to get used to a strang(e) Piano  She did snap at me when I told her you had gone away and asked me if I was going too.

Let us celebrate Old Christmas Day!

Why?
Because,
– whether it is the deemed the 6th or 7th of January,
– whether it because we in Britain lost the 11 days in 1752 with the calendar change from Julian to Gregorian (hence the ‘Old Christmas Day’ of 25th December fell on January 6th for those who refused to accept the lost days)
– or whether it is because the Orthodox and Coptic Churches, still using the Julian calendar, celebrate Christmas Day on the 6th January and Armenian Church on the 7th January...

This is my Epiphany:
Both are My Birthday!
Though my official birthday falls on the 7th January, as one born equatorially early on the 7th*, I moved GeoMeTrically to UKGMT where my birth actually falls late on the 6th.
Thus may I, CAPRICIously, if CORNily, lay claim to be the ONE, born on that auspicious day in the East and come to the West...

...a  MOMENT-TOus SAViOUR!!

*2.35am, Bungsar Hospital, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Waffle and waving in Waterstones

Discovered today meandering through the Images for Curd the Lion on Google:
from the website http://www.26.org.uk (way back in 2008)


THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF CURD THE LION (AND US!) IN THE LAND AT THE BACK OF BEYOND

Alan Gilliland
Raven’s Quill, £14.99 or £10.72 on Amazon


Strolling through Waterstone’s on a recent Saturday afternoon, we were virtually accosted by a man waving this book at us. Listening to him, it turned out he was in fact the author of this children’s book. I asked a few questions that revealed he was once graphics editor of The Telegraph. He waffled on a bit about four soft toy animals in search of a stolen brooch and then showed us some quite superb black and white illustrations. We were quite taken by the old fashioned storytelling and the nod towards Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. He signed a copy and I merrily trotted towards the checkout with book under my arm. My daughter Martha (9) has not stopped reading or talking about this book ever since.   John Fountain

What a nice young lady she is, and her father too.

A story of self-publishing – the hard way!

About The Author

A Potted History:
Born in Malaya in 1949 and brought up on a garrisoned rubber plantation during the ‘Emergency’, Alan Gilliland’s first, mountaintop, boarding school was reached by means of a 1930’s American armour-plated car, WWII Dakota aeroplane and Saracen armoured personnel carrier. A year later, aged six, he was transferred to a new school, memories of whose white hot sandy beaches were to remain ingrained upon his psyche long after leaving for this drizzly island we call home.
With his departure, Malaysia became independent and its anti-colonialist insurgency lost its rationale. Alan quickly learned the uses of the cricket bat, macintosh and other essentials of integration into English society. Performing passably well throughout his boarding-school years, he fell at the final hurdle, being expelled for revising for his art A-level exam.
Undeterred by this setback, he did not go to art college, preferring devious paths to the realisation of his creative ambitions via film-making, architecture, photo-journalism, newspaper cartooning and news information graphics – with 18 years and 19 awards as graphics editor of The Daily Telegraph – before finally arriving at the decision to write and illustrate fictions less ordinary than his own life.
Casting himself adrift with his long-suffering wife upon a tiny barque of of talent with its pencil-mast, he draws from the very winds the inspiration to fill the sheets and carry them across the ocean of scepticism that lies between hope and fulfillment.  On the shoreline, his six children and three grandchildren, wave their little hankies, litorally wondering if ever he will make it.

Now what happened next?
First he exhibited on a tiny stand at the back of the London Book Fair, to both promote his graphics to publishers and to promote his own work. He found some admirers, including the founder of Alibris, a website for books in the US, and a young lady, daughter of a US publisher.
She was so enamoured of his first book ‘The Amazing Adventures of Curd the Lion (and us!) in the Land at the Back of Beyond’ that she recommended he take the Ms to Cornerstone’s Literary Consultancy to get an in-depth report on it and ever-so-kindly offered to pay for that report.
The report, critical but also very enthusiastic about it, was carried out by a fine author of children’s fantasy. It advised changes which he mostly carried out (saddest of which was the ‘murder’ of one of the characters – in real life, not in the story).

Buoyed by her enthusiasm, and because his financial situation was becoming critical (the consequence of a near-fatal spinal infection that destroyed a disc at the base of his spine and his ‘seed-fund’ by the time he recovered) he decided to throw aside caution and take the plunge, completing the text and illustrations, designing the book with its 80+ pencil illustrations as a hardback and finding a Chinese printer  for the first print run of 1,000 copies, to be sold at £14.99.

Next he persuaded nearly 60 independent booksellers to order a copy in advance of publication, and following that, Gardners wholesalers to order 400 copies.

He went, as a visitor, to the Frankfurt Book Fair and traipsed the stands, trying to sell his graphics to UK publishers (with some success) and his book to foreign publishers (without).
On the Saturday after his return, he did an inaugural book-signing at the Guildford High Street branch of Waterstones and sold, he was told later, more books than many of the authors invited to the Guildford Book Fest that week.
This mild success gained him access to that chain at which he has been assiduously signing ever since.

His micro-publishing company, Raven’s Quill Ltd., joined the IPG and PA and then exhibited under their aegis at the Frankfurt and Bologna (children’s) Book Fairs, receiving UKTI grants. Through these he acquired a South Korean agent, Amo, who immediately sold Curd to a publisher there, a Spanish/Portuguese agency, Ilustrata, and a Far East agency, Big Apple, who have just sold translation rights to a mainland Chinese publisher. At Bologna his exhibit was seen by an Israeli publisher who subsequently bought rights to Curd, and by Kassie Evashevki of United Talent Agency in Hollywood, who subsequently acquired the rights to Eat, Pray Love, the Twilight Saga last film and Stieg Larsson with the result that Curd was relegated to the twilight zone.

Meanwhile, back home in its first year, Lovereading4kids (the children’s bookselling website) discovered Curd and made it first a ‘Book and Debut of the Month’ then ‘of the Year.’ This drew the attention of a Fox Films executive who asked for it – but this was stymied by Disney announcing Toy Story Three the week it arrived there.

I had forgotten to mention Curd’s first positive reviewer was the political philosopher, John Gray (Emeritus Professor of European Thought in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics) who wrote an incredibly kind appreciation (link at bottom of article).

He made mistakes. The first print run of Curd the Lion had the two characters, Sweeney the Heenie (a hyena) and O’Flattery the Snake talking phonetic Oirish, which he had probably been advised against and which annoyed the pants off certain adults, though it seemed to affect children, with their more malleable English, not at all. Secondly, he enthusiastically put that first version of Curd up on an Amazon Vine program (whose reviewers receive free copies of any book they choose to review) and discovered exactly those people intolerant of phonetic Oirish. (For my own thaumaturgically therapeutic response to such rude reviews, see link at very bottom of this piece)

So he changed that and has received no negative reviews since then (touch wood) but has slowly acquired appreciative comments from book bloggers, academics and media people (see bottom link) along with a host of fantastically enthusiastic reviews from kids themselves, including some which can be read on this Lovereading4kids page, http://www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/book/3991/
and this lovely response to my half-term signings:

"Dear Alan,

I was thrilled with meeting you today in Bishops Stortford. 

My teacher, Miss Jones, really enjoys reading 'Curd the Lion and Us' to my class. All my friends love to listen.  

I wish I could be you. I can't wait to tell them I've met you.  

When Mummy finishes reading the book to us I'll e-mail again and let you know what we all thought.

Thank-you,

William Shields (6 years old)"

(and mum's follow-up after I sent a pdf of a drawing)

"Dear Alan,

Thank-you for the picture that you drew for William. 

He was absolutely thrilled and we'll get it printed professionally and put it on his wall.

Thanks again for making a little boy very happy and for helping him develop a love for stories and reading.

Lesley Shields"

Curd has been through five print runs (up to 3,000 at a time) and has now sold 9,000 plus copies at £14.99, with 42.5% - 57.5% (through Gardners – self-supplied at signings) return to the publisher.

In publishing his second book, ‘The Flight of Birds’ – a Gothic ghost tale – for which he confidently ordered 3,000 copies as a paperback with French flaps to be sold at £9.99, he made a second slip. The copy editor he thought had done the final edit before going to print left before doing so and that print run had its fair share of typos. He failed to double-check and the book went to print. He only discovered this mistake when a very literate teenager pointed it out, adding the rider that though she abhorred any typos in books, she adored the story.

This has now sold out of its first run and the author has introduced a ‘White Edition’ – which version has a different beginning and (happier) ending and was written at the same time as the original dark version – after receiving many reports from ladies who loved the story but were serious upset by the tragic ending. This version – and the Black – is being printed in digital short runs that are relatively unprofitable in response to an edict by James Daunt, head of Waterstones, that threatens the very continuance of his book-signings and the introduction of his books to new readers. See his BookBrunch article on that draconian edict here: http://alangilliland.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/my-book-brunch-piece-on-drastic.html

Until it becomes clear whether or not Alan may continue his business conducted through Waterstones so successfully to date, a decision to print the more profitable litho runs of thousands cannot be made.

This is a shame, since the author (of both) has personally put £140,000-worth of books (10,200+) through the tills of Waterstones and yet still finds himself under threat under this new regime.

For reviews of both books and a more factual analysis of Alan’s progress, see this earlier blog post:
http://alangilliland.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/updated-promotional-material-for-my.html

My own therapy, fresh from the South of Ireland: http://alangilliland.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/limericked-look-at-rude-reviewers-and.html

Oh, and a piece pertinent to the pervasive uninhibited vitriolic outpourings of some internet reviewers: http://alangilliland.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/on-unrestrained-nature-of-vitriol-on.html

Could this be why book stores support introducing unknown authors to new readers?

I thought you might like to see this lovely response from a boy I met at one of my signings in Waterstones at half-term.

“Dear Alan,
 I was thrilled with meeting you today in Bishops Stortford.  My teacher, Miss Jones, really enjoys reading ‘Curd the Lion and Us’ to my class.  All my friends love to listen.  I wish I could be you.  I can’t wait to tell them I’ve met you.  When Mummy finishes reading the book to us I’ll e-mail again and let you know what we all thought.
 Thank-you,
 William Shields (6 years old)”

And Mum’s follow-up after I sent him an email pdf of one of my drawings.

“Dear Alan,
 Thank-you for the picture that you drew for William.  He was absolutely thrilled and we'll get it printed professionally and put it on his wall.
Thanks again for making a little boy very happy and for helping him develop a love for stories and reading.
Lesley Shields”

To the managers of Waterstones’ branches: Without your continued support, store by store, such responses would not be possible and I thank you all.

To any who read this: feel free to pass my thanks on to your colleagues in other branches, especially all those who supported me through the summer holidays and indeed, for the past three and a half years, resulting in roughly £140,000-worth of my books through Waterstones tills at signings (total sales £165,000).
I hope stores will continue to support my work and enable me to have a successful pre-Christmas (see 2011 autumn to Christmas results below).

On querying James Daunt on the purpose of the summer signings policy recommendations, I received the following assurance:
"Persistent, intrusive pitching to customers of books that often did not meet any reasonable standard which, as booksellers, we should have been maintaining, was unacceptable."
"If your books, and the manner with which you engage with our customers, is acceptable, the new policy on events will not hinder you."

I hope you share the view that the quality of my books and my manner of approaching customers are both sufficient to permit me to continue with my business conducted so far successfully through Waterstones.

Folio Society’s facsimile edition: David Attenborough’s Edward Lear Bird illustrations

The Folio Society are bringing out the most amazing edition of David Attenborough’s bird illustrations. At £895 a snip!
The Folio Society ‏@foliosociety

Delighted to announce a new limited edition: David Attenborough's bird prints by Edward Lear, published in facsimile http://bit.ly/XZ5JEd

My dear friend Shabby Tattler (Right) insists I blog his (hah, hah) own watercolour set of birds painted for The Daily Tussock-grass (the UK’s leading ornithological ragwort).

He apologizes for the quality of reproduction here, but reminds me he kindly donated the originals to “cheer up” the gloomy cancer ward where my daughter was treated (successfully).

This cormorant he feels closest to in spirit, he says.

Personally I prefer the subtle monchromatic hues of his arctic tern

He counters with the gaudy oriole...

And parry with a holy roller!

Lost for birds, he fishes about for a reply...

Wild brown trout makes better eating – farmed rainbow, boxed ready for supermarket shelves

“Nuts!” I say, that’s no watercolour, that’s just crayon

Check this link to a recent illustrated proposal in my blog, aimed at the Folio Society – or some illustration-loving publisher! LINK