A.S. Byatt

[hdw]

Those Pictish Stones are beautiful! Ive seen several stones and pillars inscriped in Egypt and these are just as beautiful, its just a matter of design.

There is a Pictish stone in a field just a few hundred yards from the house I was brought up in, in my home village of Cellardyke, in the parish of Kilrenny, in Fife, eastern Scotland, formerly part of Pictland. It's called the Skeith Stone, and the land it stands on was called "the Skeith quarter" and belonged to a family called Strang, while the rest of the lands of Kilrenny belonged to a different family. When there is a crop growing in the field you can't see the stone, but when the crop is harvested, the stone is visible again. It stands beside an ancient track parallel to the modern road, leading to the church of Kilrenny, and it seems the place began as a Celtic monastery dedicated to St. Ethernan, an Irish missionary to the heathen Picts in the 600s.

http://www.brand-dd.com/stones/fife/skeith.html

A couple of years ago, a new medical practice with several doctors was built in that part of the village, and I was delighted when they decided to call it the Skeith Medical Centre.

Harry

 

[Flower]

Very nice, Harry!

I thought I should share with you the very famous Jelling Stone in Denmark: http://www.google.dk/search?hl=da&c...&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi

As I know you do read some Danish, here is a link about the stone: http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellingstenene

I don't know if you know that we have a part of the Jellinge Stone printed in our Danish passports? Talk about national identity and Viking Gods etc.
Do you use old symbols in your official papers today?

 

[hdw]

I know a bit about the Jelling Stone, Gorm the Old, Harold Bluetooth and Svein Forkbeard, but I didn't know about the stone figuring in your passports. No, there is nothing similar in British passports, apart from the picture on the front cover of the lion and the unicorn and the royal motto Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, and Dieu Et Mon Droit. Did you know that we still speak Norman French?

If I may answer the question you posed to Paul, Sutton Hoo is in Suffolk, on the east coast of England, and I believe the ship burial is supposed to have a connection with the East Anglian king Rædwald, who may have been of Swedish origin. The original excavations began in 1939, then of course WWII intervened, so it was after the war before the archaeologists could start digging again.

Harry

 

[Flower]

Oh I see. I like the fact that they have put the part of the Jellinge Stone in our passport, I dunno who came up with this great idea. When I have been abroad, the passport control staff sometimes look in the passport a second time just to check this images out. I am not sure what a Swedish or Norwegian passport looks like though.

I tried to find an image of what our passport looks like but I cant. Here is a link to the stone where you see the image clearly: http://www.kristendom.dk/artikel/40...---Danmarks-daabsattest?image=1#layout_center
Go to photo no. 2.

 

[Flower]

Yes, that's correct. The site dates from about 600 A.D. The connection with Sweden is strong, and there may be a relationship with Beowulf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Hoo. Many of the artifacts are now in the British Museum (I first saw them in 1993 when I took a course in Anglo-Saxon archaeology.).

These are wonderfull, Paul!
I love the fact that they have found so many different things there, ship, burial bounds, buckles, shields etc. I must go to the British Museum and spend days there. I have been told by an old art teacher of mine that they have an excellent department with Egyptian art as well.

By the way, I thought you were American?

 

[hdw]

My wife and I had a nice city break in London a few years ago, staying in a hotel in Bloomsbury - my favourite part of the city - and taking in the British Museum and other places of interest. I also took my wife into University College (UCL), which I had visited a few times while doing a London University external degree in Scandinavian Studies in the 70s, and introduced her to the mortal remains (+ stuffing) of philosopher Jeremy Bentham who sits in his case in the corridor watching over today's young students with a benevolent eye. An acquaintance treated us to a meal in the Senior Common Room. Just strolling through Bloomsbury's leafy squares is a civilised pleasure in itself. God bless London - it doesn't deserve the current troubles.

Harry

 

[Galatea92]

My wife and I had a nice city break in London a few years ago, staying in a hotel in Bloomsbury - my favourite part of the city

Mine too. As a student at UCL in the early 80s I had the luxury of living just across the road on Gower Street, within walking distance of both the British Museum and Soho. Ah, the memories!

UCL was a place of wonder for me as a working class kid from a northern mill town: the classical portico and dome of the entrance (where no one ever seemed to enter); all the cool art students from the Slade (which I remember as being housed in a gatehouse of the main coutryard - was that right?); the long winding corridor through the main building, with Jeremy Bentham's stuffed remains (as you say) in a glass case; the Anthropology department (where I was studying), just along from the Egyptology department, and around the corner from the college cinema, where I squandered my time watching all night films shows. Ah, the memories!

 

[hdw]

Here's a bit of that classical façade

http://www.london.ac.uk/2398.html

I went straight to Edinburgh University as a kid from school, then, 11 years after graduating, came back there to work on a research project that saw me through to retirement, so although Edinburgh is a major university I suppose I've kind of taken it for granted, and I really valued my tenuous connection with UCL and enjoyed my few trips there. I don't associate London with work and commuting, it's only ever been a place to visit for pleasure in my case. As I suppose bits of Scotland might be for Londoners!

Harry

 

[Galatea92]

Do you know, Harry, I've never been to Edinburgh. Isn't that shocking? I could drive there in about 4 hours and I've never ever been there!

I was planning to take my daughters there, these holidays, but I forgot about the festival! Maybe I'll take them in September. They want to go to Annie's Room in Mary King's Close to leave a toy. (Don't ask! They must have seen a program about it - they're always learning about gruesome historical incidents of one kind or another- I blame Terry Deary!).

 

[Liam]

That's nothing, I've never been to Staten Island and Queens, and they are part of the same city!!!

 

[hdw]

Golly gosh, how could you forget about the festival? No chance of that if you live here. And I have to say that it's not so much a festival as a festival season: the International Festival of high culture, the Fringe Festival, which has completely eclipsed the latter in most people's minds, the television festival (for media types), the beer festival, the jazz festival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival (we called in there today, but there was something wrong with the tills, causing big queues of people with armfuls of books), then there's the Tattoo for people who like to watch soldiers marching up and down and pushing gun carriages ... just don't forget to bring waterproofs, an umbrella and wellies, for August is Edinburgh's monsoon season and it's been pissing down for days now.

Harry

 

[Galatea92]

That's nothing, I've never been to Staten Island and Queens, and they are part of the same city!!!

So what's wrong with Staten Island and Queens?

 

[hdw]

So what's wrong with Staten Island and Queens?

"I'll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too,
It's lovely going to the zoo ..."

The song doesn't mention Queens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVlj0hHxmkE

Harry

 

[Eric]

I've only been once to Edinburgh, or Scotland, for that matter. That was thanks to the Estonians who sent us legal translators to Maastricht, Brussels and Edinburgh to learn things. I was bloody useless at legal / constitutional translation and left the job by mutual consent after three months, but those three trips did give me certain insights into EU and Scottish law. I remember nothing about what we did in Brussels, but the Maastricht and Edinburgh lectures were very professional.

So I have never been in Edinburgh during the festival season.

As for A.S. Byatt I have pleasant memories of her Matisse book, but have not tackled her more substantial historical novels.

 

[hdw]

It looks as if news of the Edinburgh Festival (it has only been going since 1947!) hasn't reached footballing circles in the metropolis. I suppose our footie stars aren't much into high culture. Tottenham Hotspur are playing a game against Edinburgh side Hearts tonight, and blithely thought they would just come up to Edinburgh on the shuttle and book into the nearest hotel. Imagine their chagrin on finding that Edinburgh in August is the culture-vulture capital of the world, and every hotel, hostel, B&B bed and doorway has been booked months in advance. Visitors even stay in Glasgow, Dundee, Perthshire, all over central Scotland and travel into Edinburgh during the day for shows.

So the Tottenham lads have fetched up in St. Andrews, 50 miles north-east of the capital, where there is not even a proper football pitch for them to practise on, though they can always try the West Sands (made famous in the film "Chariots of Fire").

At least they are unlikely to face riots and looting in peaceful little middle-class St. Andrews.

Harry

 

[SarahJane1701]

I love Possession. ​The main characters have my dream job and it makes me extremely jealous.

 

[Liam]

I'm in love with these new A. S. Byatt covers, but it seems they're only available in the U.K.

 

[Liam]

I am very eager for her to produce another hefty novel seeing as her last one, The Children's Book, was over twelve years ago. She has, of course, done a bit of this and a bit of that in the interim, but no major novel so far; I am wondering if she's currently working on something, ?

 

[alik-vit]

I am very eager for her to produce another hefty novel seeing as her last one, The Children's Book, was over twelve years ago. She has, of course, done a bit of this and a bit of that in the interim, but no major novel so far; I am wondering if she's currently working on something, ?

I think she said in one of recent interviews (during her Amsterdam's awarding) about big novel devoted to the young poets in Paris in the time of surrealism. But for her problems with health, maybe it's too difficult project.

P. S. I think, it's here:

A.S. Byatt: I Have Not Yet Written Enough

This interview originally appeared in Dutch, in Trouw, Dec. 3, 2016. The setting for my talk with the writer A.S. Byatt is one she could have described to perfection. Outside, on an Amsterdam canal…

lithub.com

 

[Liam]

^I loved this bit from the interview:

You collect... things and then you study them. And I collect ideas and then I study them. And I collect people’s lives and then I study them. And because I don’t write autobiographical fiction, I need more than one life, just as I need more than one glass ball, all the different patterns, in order to see what is the same, what is different. I feel that about real people and people in books, and people in biographies. It’s the human desire to know things.